Exclusion, ostracism, imprisonment and other variations of imaginable/unimaginable infliction seem to be the universal fate of great minds and souls and those who stand for truth. History has been unkind to its heroes and has chased them to death. As we trace this trajectory, we see Socrates holding his hemlock, Jesus carrying his cross, Hallaj fleshed alive, Meera tortured, Sarmad beheaded. Their truth displeased their contemporaries and upset the societies they lived in. “Truth is an explosive, in whose presence everything is in danger”, remarked Nietzsche. No wonder that power and societies have always been afraid of truth and pushed it to margins, lest it usurp the tyranny and brings down “the earthly Gods” from their raised pedestals. The phenomenon that Faiz would depict as:

“When, from the seat of the Almighty
every pedestal will lie displaced…”

— translated by Victor Kiernan

Art and truth have been eternal twins and art has been seen as the expression of truth in its most unalloyed form. That is why artists have been haunted by the power and made to suffer on one pretext or the other. Poetry, the sublime artistic expression is the most potent and radical way of articulating the truth. Poets have mostly stood on the wrong side of the power and took upon themselves the task of making the truth known. Faiz Ahmad Faiz is a poet of this family, the family of which Persian poet Nazeeri Nishapuri said, “The one who is not killed is not from our tribe”.

Poetry of passion

Faiz, born to a well-to-do and literature-loving family had a knack for poetry and had devoured a vast share of Persian, Urdu and English classics while he was still a teenager. Teachers like Moulvi Mir Hassan and Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabasum had tuned his poetic strings while he was a student at Government College Lahore. However, his revolutionary spirit was asleep and the poetry of defiance, which later characterised his style, was yet to flow from his pen. Besides his evolving poetic sensitivities, his mind and soul were open to the developments taking place at home and in the world and he was deeply disturbed by events such as the growing economic disparity among people, the rapid spread of fascism and the systemic intrusion of capitalism into the lives of masses world over.

However, this was just a feeling at this stage and had not assumed the character of a well-found ideology in Faiz’s mindscape. It was only in 1935 when he joined Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College as a lecturer that Faiz came under the influence of the couple Mahmooduzaffar (Vice Principal) and his wife Rashid Jahan – both avowed and vociferous Marxists. Under the influence of the couple, Faiz “read the works of Lenin and felt a great longing to see the land of Lenin and the October revolution”. This was the period when, Ludmila Vasilieva, tells us “a new Faiz was born…who perceived the world differently from before”. Faiz’s translator and friend, Victor Kiernan aptly remarks that “both Ghalib and Faiz heard voices calling them from the outer world; the voice heard by Faiz was that of Karl Marx.”

So much did the revolutionary spirit charge him that he gave up his lectureship, left behind his wife Alys and moved to Delhi to join the army to contribute his bit in fighting fascism and Nazism which was haunting the world and was seen as a threat to the Communist USSR and the world at large. Kiernan writes “After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Faiz like many Indians saw the war in a new light, as a contest in which the destinies of mankind were at stake”. Faiz’s first poetry collection Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1947) appeared during this time and inevitably carried hues of revolutionary spirit. Being a lifetime admirer of Ghalib, Faiz borrowed the title from the opening hemistich of Ghalib invoking multiple senses carried by the word “Naqshay Faryadi” (the lamenting image).

The ghazals and nazms included in Naqsh-e-Faryadi were set in traditional poetic motifs with themes of classical Urdu literature like love, longing, and loneliness. The book also explored themes of freedom, tyranny, and human uncertainty with equal emphasis and featured a growing consciousness of the socio-political milieu evolving around the poet. Naqsh-e-Faryadi, observed Noon Meem Rashid, “stood at the intersection of romance and revolution” and Francis Pritchett described Faiz as “a hinge between classical and modern poetry”. While the collection contained sublime poems like “Ek Manzar” (A Scene), it also contained blunt political observations like “Kuttay” (Dogs), and revolutionary slogans like “Bol” (Speak).

Faiz, reading the pulse of his era realised that “fascism was a form of capitalist oppression that denied people their right to live”. His deepening socio-political consciousness and existential commitment to the cause of the oppressed added a new dimension to his poetry. He began capturing the realistic aspects of his era in a romantic language grounded in Urdu and Persian classics. Despite commenting on issues of the day, Faiz did not let his poetry turn into commentary. He rather spoke in the spirit of a timeless poet who transformed historical oppression into a relatable universal theme.

Rashed aptly observes, “Faiz’s nature impels him towards love, but he cannot stop from asking his reader to cast a glance on the nakedness and bitterness of life through a narrow window of reality”. A prominent poem “Bol” from this period, which became the anthem of progressive writers represents a unique mélange of classical form and modern sensitivity.

“Speak out! Your lips are free.
Speak up! Your tongue is still your own.
Your body remains yours ramrod, erect.
Speak out! Your life is still your own.
Look! How in your smithy’s forge,
Flames soar; iron glows red
How the locks have opened jaws
Every chain spreads out, unlinked.
The short time left to you is still enough
Speak up! Before the body and its tongue give out.
Speak out! For truth still survives
Speak out! Say whatever you have to say!”

— translated by Victor Kiernan

Faiz had been discharging his responsibilities as the editor of Pakistan Times and was critical of anti-people government policies, particularly Pakistan’s alignment with the capitalist block of the United States. He saw the growing influence of America in the affairs of the newly founded nation as an intrusion into national sovereignty and a threat to national security. Faiz’s leftist leanings and his continuous criticism of the government finally landed him in jail under the infamous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951 and he had to spend four years in various Pakistani jails.

The political and familial repercussions that this episode had for Faiz are too nuanced and diverse to be captured in this brief space. The event, however, catalysed Faiz’s poetic process and in a letter to Alys, he mentioned, “Since my arrest, I have finished my sixth poem. That means I have written more in the last three months than in the three years before that”. Around this time, Faiz’s second poetry collection Dast-e-Sabah (1953) hit the stands. The preface of the book highlighted Faiz’s condemnation of aestheticism ie, art for arts’ sake, and described his commitment to view art/poetry as the mirror of society and artist/poet as the conscience keeper of his times. To quote Shehzad Qaisar, “Poetry is a committed passion”. It is “a nightingale fever”, says Osip Mandelstam and Faiz was deeply under the spell of this fever, he wrote in Dast-e-Sabah:

“If ink and pen are snatched from me, shall I
Who have dipped my fingers in my heart’s blood complain –
Or if they seal my tongue, when I have made,
A mouth of every round link of my chain?”

— translated by Victor Kiernan

While most of the poetry included in Dast-e-Sabah was written before Faiz was imprisoned, Zindan Nama (Prison Notebook), Faiz’s other major poetic work which appeared after his release from prison was written during his imprisonment. It is thus no wonder that as one turns its pages underneath ghazals appear such addresses as Central Jail Hyderabad, Montgomery Jail, Central Jail Baluchistan and alike. In Zindan Nama, Faiz transformed his personal grief and sufferings into universal pathos and the book, according to Ali Madeeh “uses religious and poetic imagery to create a haunting image of pain and redemption”. In his later poetic collections of Sar-e-Waadi-e-Seena (1962), Dast-Tah-e-Sang (1946) and others, Faiz continued to explore the themes of loss, suffering, exile and perpetual rebellion against the excesses of power in the symbolic language of similes, metaphors and allegories. In a quatrain titled “Tanhai”, Faiz beautifully compresses the existential pangs, the undying romantic mode of expression and the perennial suffering that surrounded him and the. Faiz writes:

“Today loneliness is life a well-tried friend
Has come to be my evening wine-pourer
We sit together waiting for the moon to rise
And set your image gleaming in every shadow”

Art and ideology

The ideological subversion of poetry became a particular feature of Urdu poetry in the wake of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. A more dangerous and damaging phenomenon occurs when an ideological nation adopts a poet and thereby does greater by reducing the poet to the mouthpiece of the state and his art into propaganda machinery. Faiz and his poetry were idolised in the USSR and the love affair between the two is an open secret – an affair with the Lenin Peace Prize for Faiz as its souvenir. Faiz was celebrated across the communist belt and had close ties with countries with Communist governments. This could have reduced Faiz to another propaganda poet and a mouthpiece of Communism. However, Faiz escaped this by virtue of his poetic merit, artistic spirit and rootedness in the human condition – a condition that is invariable and applies and appeals to all.

Faiz transformed propaganda into passion, slogans into emotions, and statements into sentiment. He saved poetry from becoming commentary and instead, elevated his ideological musings to an artistic universalism. This saved him from becoming a poet of mere historical value and bereft of any artistic merit. Faiz, by fusing such binaries as mysticism and Marxism, art and life, love and revolution, created a poetic universe without a historical parallel. Poets, no doubt, had woven their verses around these themes, but were never successful, for example, to evoke the romantic and revolutionary response alike – a unique feat Faiz’s poetry was destined for. Look at his Ghazal “Tum Aaye Ho Na Shabay Intezar Guzri Hai”:

“Neither have you come, nor has this night of waiting come to an end
in your search, the dawn has passed by again and again

All the nights spent in the madness of obsession, have been purposefully spent
although this heart has been afflicted thousands of time

The night I had to listen to the exalted preacher’s discourse
that night must have been spent in the lane of the beloved

What was not mentioned even once in the whole tale
that has turned out to be most disagreeable to her

No flowers have bloomed, couldn’t meet her, did not get to taste wine
in strange colors, has this spring passed

What grief the garden had to bear due to the flower plucker’s ravaging
the breeze passed by the prison today in disquiet”

— translated by Victor Kiernan

The ghazal, like the rest of Faiz’s poetry, carries multiple hermeneutic possibilities and applies with equal emphasis to the phenomenon of love, a spiritual yearning or a longing for social and political change. The Ghazal is not context-dependent but carries within its constitution the vital elements of “self-de-contextualisation” or deconstruction. This is what makes Faiz a master craftsman, a universal voice, and a poet without borders for he leaves open the possibility of a “hermeneutic other” in his poetry. It is difficult to read him in a closed, context-driven framework. He is a free-floating poetic flame who sets hearts ablaze and evokes sublime emotions on the move. He knows the art of merging revolution with romance and bedecking his socio-political ideal in a way that mimics the human beloved. Thus the poems that sound like love poems were actually addressed to the tyrants and corrupt politicians of his day and the beloved we confuse as a creature of blood and flesh is actually the social egalitarianism, political liberation and economic equality – Faiz’s ultimate beloved. This confusion, ambiguity, polycentricism and multi-facetedness of meaning makes Faiz's poetry self-vivifying and therefore relevant to all experiences of human existence.

A socialist Sufi

A saying attributed to Socrates “What I fail to reveal by my words, I will demonstrate by my acts”, best captures the attitude of Faiz to confessional faith, religion and pedantic piety. He seems to have deliberately wrapped his faith in ambiguity and shrouded his relationship with his creator in mystery. However, his deeds, ideals and commitments make him Moomin (believer) in the truest sense of the word. This is in continuity with a train of Indo-Persian poets like Nasir Khusrao, Hafiz, Ghalib and others who made ambiguity an intrinsic element of their lives, but shared a deep mystical bent of heart and mind. Much of the controversy that surrounds Faiz’s ambiguous attitude to faith and religion ignores the fact that Faiz’s entire life was contrapuntal to oppression, tyranny, inequality and injustice and this is the highest form of Shahadah (Testimony) – bearing witness to the supremacy of transcendent and defying all earthly gods. In this fit of defiance, Faiz yells “Hum Dekhenge”:

“Inevitably, we shall also see the day
that was promised to us, decreed
on the tablet of eternity.
When dark peaks of torment and tyranny
will be blown away like cotton fluff;
When the earth’s beating, beating heart
will pulsate beneath our broken feet;
When crackling, crashing lightning
will smite the heads of our tormentors;
When, from the seat of the Almighty
every pedestal will lie displaced;
Then, the dispossessed we; we,
who kept the faith will be installed
to our inalienable legacy.
Every crown will be flung.
Each throne brought down.
Only His name will remain; He,
who is both unseen, and ubiquitous; He,
who is both the vision and the beholder.
When the clarion call of ‘I am Truth’
(the truth that is me and the truth that is you)
will ring out, all god’s creatures will rule,
those like me and those like you.”

— translated by Victor Kiernan

An incident mentioned in his biographies was that when asked about his faith, he answered, “The same as Maulana Rumi”. The agitated questioner asked back “And what was the faith of Maulana Rumi”? Faiz said, “The same as mine”. His biographer, Ali Madeeh Hashmi writes, “Faiz always described himself as attracted to the Sufi version of Islam as preached by Muslim mystics and saints”. His support for the cause of poor helpless workers, his mystical silence even in the face of scathing criticism and personal attacks and his heart devoid of animosity, envy and feelings of revenge, make him a true mystic – and a mystic who is not lost in himself, but who actively works for the welfare of all.

Faiz’s legacy

Faiz was a litterateur, political activist, pacifist, cultural theorist and much more. He is the tallest Urdu poet the subcontinent has seen after Iqbal, and a poet of international repute with few equals. His dedication to the cause of the oppressed and unmatched literary activism bring him close to his Parisian contemporary and existential writer Jaun Paul Sartre (whom Faiz met in Russia). With proficiency in at least five languages and writing in four (Faiz wrote a lone Naat in Persian, :The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl” in English and some odes in Punjabi in addition to his Urdu corpus), Faiz influenced an entire generation of poets across borders – Rasool Ghamzatov, Agha Shahid Ali, and Iftikhar Arif – just to quote exemplars from three continents and three languages.

Faiz has been translated prolifically into English, Russian, French, Arabic, Baloch and Persian – the quality of translation however remains contested. Faiz festivals are now a regular feature of Pakistan’s culture and its popularity among youth continues to grow across the globe. At home, however, Faiz seems to be tamed by the state, his poetry deprived of revolutionary elan and his philosophy tailored to the needs of the state. It is however hoped that like the cry of Hallaj, the call of Faiz will act as a clarion call inspiring people to see the day when they are freed from the fetters of earth and joined to the heavenly joy of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Also read:

‘Hum Dekhenge’: Singer and writer Ali Sethi explains how to read (and interpret) Faiz’s poem

‘They should have thought better of messing with a poet’: Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s grandson and biographer