Zafar Gorakhpuri

Gorakhpur's teacher in Bombay — look closely, and the city still looks good; one small effort, the whole world's problem. Zafar Gorakhpuri (1935–2017), born Zafaruddin on 5 May 1935 at Bedouli Babu, a village in Gorakhpur district, was a Progressive Urdu poet whose ghazal found a new, plain language for the pains of the city and the exile. He came to Mumbai with his father in 1944, still a child, and stayed there all his life. He chose teaching as his calling — a primary school teacher in the city's municipal schools, retiring as headmaster on 1 July 1993 after three decades — and remained close to the literary and cultural societies of Bombay from the first. His first collection appeared in 1949, and he joined the Progressive movement in the early 1950s, standing with the progressives and the modernists both, and holding that literature should serve no single doctrine and no single community. He began with the nazm, writing nazms for more than two decades, and then turned to the ghazal, recovering its soft, delicate tone for a new age. The Partition had left a deep mark on him, and his verse carries it — a city in which not one good man can be found, an exile who sells himself in a foreign land to buy his wife a bangle. His collections run from Tesha (1962) through Gokhru ke Phool and Wadi-e-Sang to Zameen ke Qareeb (2001) and Halki Thandi Taza Hawa (2009), eight in all across half a century; he also wrote children's verse, among it Nach Ri Gudiya, and practised the doha and the geet. He wrote songs for a few films without success and left the field, but qawwals and ghazal singers carried his ghazals far, and his work is taught in Maharashtra from primary school to university. He received the state award of the Maharashtra Urdu Academy and the Firaq Samman. After Firaq Gorakhpuri and Majnoon Gorakhpuri, Gorakhpur's name in poetry was carried by Zafar. He died in Mumbai on 30 July 2017, aged eighty-two. His son Ayaz Gorakhpuri is a lyricist.