by Khwaja Manzoor Hosain
Principal, Government, College, Lahore
FELLOW-MEMBERS OF THE COLLEGE AND FRIENDS
We meet under the shadow of a grievous national
loss. Ahmed Shah Bokhari, one of the most superbly endowed men of
his time, has suddenly ceased to exist, leaving an aching void in
the heart of every one who knew him. My own association with that
glowing spirit went back to 1929. It was his potent charm that
impelled me on my return from Oxford to take up a teaching post here
so as to be able to share with him some of our common concerns. He
had himself not very much earlier come back from Cambridge brimming
with the most infectious zest to promote literary studies here. I
still cherish undimmed remembrances of those distant days – of the
warmth of Bokhari's affection, his finely-tempered darting
intelligence, his subtle, often impish humour, his bewitching airs
and graces, his passion for the things of the mind and for those who
pursue them single-mindedly. He and I were brought together again in
1948 when I finally returned from Aligarh to this college and found
him as its Principal eagerly engaged in planning for it a role of
wider and more beneficent scope to meet the emerging needs of our
newly liberated country, and I particularly remember how close to
his heart was a central place for Urdu in a reconstituted scheme of
studies. Even after he had moved out into a different orbit – the
gain and loss involved in his giving up academic life will not
easily be determined – we never quite lost touch. I have a poignant
recollection of meeting a ghostly but still unquenched Bokhari on
his last visit to Lahore, the hallowed spot of earth in which he was
so intimately rooted and which set a tingling sap coursing through
his veins. Many of his friends urged this long-lost, sorely missed
Joseph to return to his Canaan, invoking the oblique support of a
Persian verse of his own:
But this, alas, was not to be.
No organization with which he came to be linked has a greater cause
to mourn Professor Bokhari than his old college, for he took from it
and gave back to it more liberally than any other member of our
fellowship. He spent here and at Cambridge the most joyous and
rewarding years of his life. But it was here that he first exulted
in the discovery and exercise of his dazzling gifts and cast the
spell of his many sided personality. It was from here that his
influence radiated far and wide. There was no humane pursuit on
which he did not impinge vibrantly. A discriminating scholar,
steeped in what is really nourishing in several eastern and western
literatures, a most exciting teacher, a writer and speaker of
chiseled grace and luminous clarity, a master of the most
exhilarating flashes of epigrammatic rapier-like wit, he
transfigured everything he touched and quickened every one he came
across. His questing spirit with its incessantly renewed energy
overflowed into many channels and it was memorable experience to
watch its fertilising manifestations, in literary societies and
dramatics of which he was the animating centre and in informal
tete-a-tete with likeminded people, when the mask or persona
which he had a disconcerting way of assuming was put off. His
generation owed an immense stimulus to Bokhari's ever unappeased
thirst for the fullest intellectual life.
Of his later services to his country and to the world organization
of which he was such a notable functionary I will not now speak, for
these have been fittingly acknowledged by persons and bodies most
competent to assess their worth. I will only say that he never
failed to measure up to the challenge of the most difficult
situation, and that in any illustrious gathering he always stood out
as a man among men. It is, however, by the humane relations of life
that a man must finally be valued. Bokhari was acutely prone to the
ravages of what Ghalib has called “the anguish of awareness "",
but he could also subdue the inner stresses of a highly sensitivized
introspective mind and display the riches of an antithetical out
flowing nature. No words can better indicate the essential quality
of his ardent aspiring spirit than these lines which I borrow from a
poet he greatly admired, Yeats:
"That out of life's own self-delight had sprung. The abounding
glittering jet".
They may well serve as his epitaph.
May his unquiet spirit find eternal peace!
We meet under the shadow of a grievous national
loss. Ahmed Shah Bokhari, one of the most superbly endowed men of
his time, has suddenly ceased to exist, leaving an aching void in
the heart of every one who knew him. My own association with that
glowing spirit went back to 1929. It was his potent charm that
impelled me on my return from Oxford to take up a teaching post here
so as to be able to share with him some of our common concerns. He
had himself not very much earlier come back from Cambridge brimming
with the most infectious zest to promote literary studies here. I
still cherish undimmed remembrances of those distant days – of the
warmth of Bokhari's affection, his finely-tempered darting
intelligence, his subtle, often impish humour, his bewitching airs
and graces, his passion for the things of the mind and for those who
pursue them single-mindedly. He and I were brought together again in
1948 when I finally returned from Aligarh to this college and found
him as its Principal eagerly engaged in planning for it a role of
wider and more beneficent scope to meet the emerging needs of our
newly liberated country, and I particularly remember how close to
his heart was a central place for Urdu in a reconstituted scheme of
studies. Even after he had moved out into a different orbit – the
gain and loss involved in his giving up academic life will not
easily be determined – we never quite lost touch. I have a poignant
recollection of meeting a ghostly but still unquenched Bokhari on
his last visit to Lahore, the hallowed spot of earth in which he was
so intimately rooted and which set a tingling sap coursing through
his veins. Many of his friends urged this long-lost, sorely missed
Joseph to return to his Canaan, invoking the oblique support of a
Persian verse of his own:
",
but he could also subdue the inner stresses of a highly sensitivized
introspective mind and display the riches of an antithetical out
flowing nature. No words can better indicate the essential quality
of his ardent aspiring spirit than these lines which I borrow from a
poet he greatly admired, Yeats: