A COUPLET OF FIRAQ GORAKHPURI

                                           

        

A Couplet OF Firaq Gorakhpuri

"Zabt keekiye to dil hai angaara,

Aur agar roiye to paani hai." ....Firaq Gorakhpuri

(If I suppress it, 

the heart is a burning ember.

If I weep,

 it is water.)

Firaq is no ordinary poet. His knowledge of the western thought and the  ancient Indian wisdom was exceptional. It is reflected in his prose and poetry. In the above couplet,  Firaq compresses the entire paradox of human suffering into one impossible substance that is both fire and water at once.Let us analyse this couplet through the philosophical prism of Schopenhauer, Marcel Proust and Nagarjuna.

1. Schopenhauer – The Will That Burns

For Schopenhauer, the world is Will, an endless, blind, hungry striving.

When Firaq says 'Zabt', suppression, the heart does not become calm. It becomes angaara. The Will, denied its object, does not disappear. It turns inward and burns. This is what Schopenhauer calls suffering by willing. Weeping or 'Roiye', is not a solution. It is water, dissolution, the Will momentarily exhausting itself. Tears are the Will negating itself for a second. The water extinguishes the fire, but it also drowns the self.

Firaq leaves us with no exit: to contain is to burn, to release is to dissolve. This is Schopenhauer's pendulum, swinging forever between the pain of wanting and the emptiness of release.

2. Proust – Involuntary Memory in a Tear

Proust would hear this couplet differently. For him, the heart is not a metaphysical Will, it is an archive. 'Zabt', what we suppress, does not stay suppressed. It hardens into an ember, a 'mémoire involontaire' waiting in the dark. It stays hot for years. A smell, a name, a season can make that ember glow again after twenty years. That is why the past never passes. And 'roiye to paani hai'. When we finally weep, the heart becomes water. Water is fluid, it flows, it loses its shape. In Proust, tears are the moment when the hard, stored past finally liquefies and becomes present again. We do not weep for what is happening now. We weep because the ember has finally melted into time regained. The tear is time itself becoming liquid.

3. Nagarjuna  Emptiness of Both

Nagarjuna in the Mulamadhyamakakarika would smile at Firaq and say, you have seen it. Fire and water are opposites. They cannot exist together. How can the same heart be both angaara and  'Paani' ? Only if the heart has no Svabhava, no inherent self-nature. The heart is not essentially fire, nor essentially water. It is 'Shunya' , empty of a fixed essence, and therefore it can appear as fire when conditioned by 'Zabt', and as water when conditioned by 'Rona'. The suffering is not in the fire or the water. The suffering is in thinking that one of them is the true, permanent heart. Firaq's couplet is a perfect statement of Pratityasamutpada, dependent origination. The heart arises only in dependence on conditions.

To hold on to the ember as me is suffering. To cling to the water as me is also suffering. Freedom is seeing that the one who is both burning and dissolving was never a solid thing to begin with.

That is why the couplet hurts so much. It leaves no solid ground to stand on.

(Avtar Mota )

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