Remembering my teacher
By Mohindar Pal Kohli

PROFESSOR Ish Kumar departed for his heavenly abode on February 8, 1999 — thus read the obituary. The distinguished teacher, scholar and critic died at the ripe old age of 90 plus.

I believe Professor Ish Kumar belonged to that fast vanishing tribe of teachers who adopted the profession by choice and embraced the best principles of guru-shishya parampara.

"This Cambridge scholar taught English literature to generations of students at the Government Colleges of Lahore and Ludhiana and the universities of Chandigarh and Patiala.

My memory pushes me back to the fifties. Immaculately dressed, with the bottom lines of his trousers tucked in clips, and smarting a sola hat, the handsome IK cycled all the way from the Benjamin Road to the college, four miles away from his residence. Donning flowing black gown and carrying a load of books, he walked into the classroom with a professional limp. Before starting the day’s topic he would recite a couplet or two in Urdu which he had read in the morning. He continued the practice even at Chandigarh after his retirement while joining his morning walk friends. He termed the couplets ‘thought for the day’.

IK’s first initiation into poetry, as he wrote much later in his book on Mirza Ghalib — The Melody of an Angel — took place when his teacher Munshi Wisakhi Ram taught in his class Ghalib’s poem Mere age. During one of his evening walks on the banks of the Chenab near his village, he stopped to look at the waves. They came incessantly to touch his feet and then receded. A whole world of imagery opened out to the school student, though he had no idea what imagery or personification meant. His book on Ghalib (1982) was the result of a long cherished desire of paying off a personal debt of gratitude he owed to the great poet for more than half a century.

Iqbal replaced stiff and difficult Ghalib in his youth and teaching period. He illustrated his English lessons in poetry by quotations from Iqbal. Iqbal was in his blood, so to say, along with Keats and Browning, Ibsen and Eliot, Plato and Aristotle, Kabir and Tagore, Vidyapati and Waris.

Besides his scheduled topics, IK introduced to the students the great minds of the West and of the Orient. He laid stress on the original text, not on theories, not on assumptions. Translations were betrayals. He challenged us to translate Doli chardyan mariyan Heer cheekan. He felt inspired, as if in trance, when he talked about poetic beauty and poetic truth. He quoted invariably Iqbal’s poem ‘Shakespeare’ — Husan aina haq aur dil aina husan (Beauty is the reflection of truth, and heart is the reflection of beauty). He created in us love for literature in general and for our own languages in particular. After his retirement in 1967, he published books on Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, the comparative studies of Ghalib and Iqbal, and Iqbal and Browning.

Strict in his tutorials and the editorship of the magazine, IK loved his students. He dedicated his classic book on Ghalib to "my students (1927-68), from whom I have learnt more than I have taught them". When I mentioned him in one of my books, he wrote back." "I have always felt that my students are more fond of me than I deserve. That has been my greatest reward as a teacher".

Pakistani’s Nobel Laureate physicist, while thanking Guru Nanak Dev University for honouring him, acknowledged that professor Ish Kumar was one of the major influences in his life. He wrote hundreds of literary and philosophical letters to his students highly placed in administration and in academics and obstinately refused to feel old, always pleasant with his wit and humour. "Don’t call me old. I feel insulted. After all what is the difference 82 and 28" when once I had the temerity to call him an old man. I wish teachers were made of such stuff.