A tribute to a great Pashtun poet.
Born during the great war (First World War) the distinguished son of the modern Pukhtoonkhwa and of the ancient Gandhara lost his mother in the epidemic in 1918. He started his early education with the Mullah in the village mosque. It was due to his religious education that Ghani Khan was very fluent in Arabic and Persian. Ghani Khan recollected his memories by saying: “My childhood was miserable, my mother died during the influenza epidemic when I was six and Wali was about four. Baba had found a new love-his people. He opened “Azad Schools” all over the Frontier Province, in his first attempt to change the condition of his people”. The literacy rate among the Pukhtoons can be imagined from the fact that the number of matriculates in the British India NWFP was only 15 in 1891 and 71 in 1903.
During World War-l, the British government closed Azad school. All teacher and volunteers were sent to jails. During the war the All India National Congress and the League supported the British Raj but after the War the Muslims were disappointed by the attitude adopted by the Allied powers towards the Ottoman Empire.
Ghani was a devoted soldier of freedom movement. He had participated in the meetings and agitations of the Anjuman-Islahul-Afghana and Khilafat Movement since school days.
Ghani mixed mystical, mysterious mode of Malang with the Occidental philosophical verbosity with the oriental aesthetic romantic mysticism. Sufi literature was a part of his education, but he did not believe in negation and self abnegation. “I think by embracing life you can be closer to God” commented Ghani,“Allah created light and colour, poetry in nature and taught so that we can appreciate them and creator AlMusavvir”.
Ghani spent nine years in religious institutions and then he was enrolled in the Jamia Millia University. In the Jamia he got acquainted with scholarly personalities like Dr. Ansari, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad etc.. Dr. Zakir Hussain was the principal. But after spending one year, Ghani was again recalled by his father to Peshawar in 1928. There was a civil war in Afghanistan and doctors were needed, so he was given first aid training, but due to political circumstances the mission was not allowed by the British. A committee know as “as the Afghan Red Crescent Society” was formed to collect donations and medicine for Afghan government.
There insurgency against Amanullah by certain Mullahs under the pay of Raj created hatred in the minds of all nationalist progressive forces on both sides of the Durand Line. In 1929, Ghazi Amanullah Khan left his homeland and Habibullah Kalakani alias Bach Saqao became the ruler of Afghanistan. The fall of Amanullah was not a major set back to Afghanistan only but to the entire Pukhtoonkhwa. Amanullah-became the symbol of nationalism, modernism and liberalism for all nationalist progressive forces of the region.
This tragic incident changed the political axis of the Pukhtoons from Central Asia or rather from Kabul to Delhi and from radical adventurism to evolutionary change and non-violence.
Dr. Khan Sahib, Ghani’s uncle, decided to send him to England. On July 23,1929 Ghani left for England. “Baba wanted me to stay with a noble English family to study their ways of life and know the causes of their national ascendancy” said Ghani, “If this was his (Baba’s) wish he should have sent me to either the University of Oxford or Cambridge which had played a great role in raising the English nation to great heights of power and supremacy”.
In England he studied Old and New Testaments in a priest’s family. In 1931, Ghani went to US from England with the help of Sardar Shah Wali Khan, the Afghan ambassador to UK, and joined South Louisiana University to study chemical engineering.
In Europe and US, Ghani saw a new world totally different from his own so he was naturally impressed by its standard and ways of life. He was particularly impressed by the development of these nations in the field of science and technology.
The study of great oriental religions. Islam, Judaism and Christianity and western philosophy moulded his thoughts and perceptions about man and movements in his motherland. In the passage of knowledge from Orientalism, religiosity to the Western modernism and US experience of scientific knowledge changed his world outlook but not his mind, which was continuously in search of an ideal-perfect and universal in nature.
When Ghani Khan came back to his native village his father was behind the bars. In 1934, Jawahar Lal Nehru made arrangements to send Ghani Khan and Indira Gandhi to the Shanti Niketan, a university on the border of Biher and Bengal. Shanti Niketan was founded by Rabindra Nath Tagore in 1901. He wanted a revival and renaissance of Indian culture and civilization and wanted to create a love among the students irrespective of their religion, colour, creed and race. It was for this reason that the institution developed itself in the Vishwa bharati University in December 1921. In this institution there were no chairs and no benches. The used to sit on the Chabutra of mud with the students sitting around them, in semi circles on the ground.
Ghani Khan joined the department of journalism and his tutors were Nandlal Bose and Krishna Kirpalani, his subject was literature. Ram Kinkar taught sculpture. Rabindra Nath Tagore was too old but active. One day Ghani went with Bose to the Art school. The students were busy in making different things from clay. Ghani Khan also took some clay and made a frog and thin something else. His tutor saw in him the hidden man and appreciated his work and encouraged him to go to the school regularly. From that day Ghani Khan used to come regularly to the school for painting and sculpture. Nanelal Bose said: Ghani had a natural talent for sculpture.
In Ghani’s own words “shanti Niketan was a whole new experience for me. from Hashtnagar I had gone to Europe. In Shanti Niketan, I got the opportunity to assimilate Asian philosophy, literature and appreciated the performing and visual arts”. Lata Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, in three letters to her father Jawahirlal Nehru mentioned Ghani Khan and his activities in the Shanti Niketan. These letters are edited by Sonia Gandhi, the wife of Rajiv Gandhi in a book "freedom’s Daughter, letters between Indira Gandhi and Jawahirlal Nehru (1922-39) 1989.
After spending one year in Shanti Niketan, Ghani was recalled by his father. When Nandlal Bose came to know that Ghani would not return, he dashed to Wardha. He met Gandhi and told him about Ghani’s artistic talents. He predicted that, if Ghani was left in the Shanti Niketan, he would become such a great artist that India would be proud of him. Nandlal requested Ghani to persuade Bacha Khan to change his decision. But Bacha Khan did not change his decision. He asked Gandhi what would happen to the world if Ghani applied red and green colour to it. So Ghani Khan left once again his education incomplete after short stay at the Shanti Niketan. “I am great admirer of Bacha Khan” says Ghani, “was one of the finest Pukhtoons that I have known. But we differed on some things. I strongly uphold the view that you can live without art, but you cannot progress without it”.
Ghani was of the view that beauty is the essence of civilization and culture which includes almost all human creative activities like paintings, sculptures, songs and music etc.. “Without the search for beauty in though, word and deed we cannot have any kind of civilization”.
According to 'Ghani Khan human life has very lofty ideals. In a letter to Abdur Rauf Benawa, an eminent Afghan writer and poet, he writers: "Man is essentially an animal. He wants food, sex and comfort and nothing else. It is the duty of us poets to turn his face to those higher centres of his being where he might see the reflection of his own perfection and the face of his own eternal beloved beauty. I think a poet must worship beauty … in thought, word and deed force man to turn his face from the rubbish heap of his appetites to his garden of Eden ".
Ghani’s stay in the Shanti Niketan had lasting impact on his mind. He himself recollects his experience in the said University by saying: “My stay in the West left many imprints on my psyche. I was deeply impressed by their society, culture and politics. When I came back, I had an inferiority complex about the backwardness of my country and people. It was in the Shanti Niketan that I discovered myself and the past greatness of my own culture and civilization, which has produced several man of versatile genius, who have been appreciated by the historians and scholars of the West”.
Ghani was inspired by the impressionists, Monet, Manet and Van Gogh. He said: “Gaugin’s colours are brilliant. Michael Angelo’s David is superb, so is Rodin’s Cupid and Psyche”. According to Ghani “I have nurtured my senses and my perception in search for the truth. And I glorify the truth with whatever is at my disposal. Beauty is the truth harmony, proportion, equilibrium. It embodies symmetry and rhythm. I believe that beauty is from God and He is the most beautiful-Al-Jameel”.