Centenary
Faiz . . . in the light of the moon
The poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar speaks for many when he links Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry to lunar gleam. There is magic in the moon, says Akhtar. Wherever its light falls --- on ponds, on deserts, on homes, on flowers, on fallen twigs --- it envelopes the object of its brilliance in beauty. And so it is with Faiz's poetry. It acts as a transformational force on the themes it deals with. It underscores the power of poetry to create the sublime and then bring it into the lives of people. It is just as well. In this centenary year of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's birth, it becomes necessary to recall the fervour and the commitment he brought to Urdu poetry and in the process enhanced the quality of a genre that in earlier times was enriched at various points by Mirza Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Bahadur Shah Zafar and Allama Iqbal. And, of course, by so many others. The difference between Faiz and his predecessors, if one might so employ the term, was the radicalism, the political consciousness he brought into his poetry. For Faiz was a lifelong believer in socialism, in the power of Marxism to raise the quality of life. Not for nothing was he awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in the 1960s. And, in equal measure, not for nothing did successive Pakistani governments harass him, hounding him into prison (as in the aftermath of the Rawalpindi conspiracy case of 1951) or out of the country (as in the darkness of the Ziaul Haq years). Faiz constantly held out the truth that while his poetry could be reflective of the general human passions of love and romance, it was also a formidable weapon he was ready to use in defence of political causes. In his lifetime, he saw bad politics drill deep holes in his heart at frequent intervals. Observing the bloodletting which accompanied the partition of India and the creation of a country of which he would be a citizen, Faiz lamented the absence of dignity which came with that fractured freedom: Ye dagh dagh ujala ye shab guzeeda sahar / wo intezar tha jis ka ye wo sahar to nahin / ye wo sahar to nahin jis ki arzoo le kar / chale the yaar ke mil jaayegi kahin na kahin / falak ke dasht mein / taaron ka akhri manzil / kahin to ho ga shab-e sust mouj ka sahil / kahin to ja ke ruke ga safeena gham-e-dil . . . najat-e-deeda wo dil ki gharhi nahin aayi / chale chalo ke wo manzil abhi nahin aayi The stains of blood have made a violent carpet of the new dawn. It is not the dawn Faiz had waited for. That moment of freedom, carried on the wings of enlightenment, has not arrived. The cherished destination, says Faiz, has not been reached. It is the liberal individual in Faiz we recall. Born in Sialkot in a year when the British colonial power eventually bowed to public opinion to annul the partition of Bengal six years after it had knifed through the heart of the province in 1905, Faiz showed academic and intellectual promise through the mastery he attained in Urdu, Persian and Arabic at the school. He would soon obtain a bachelor's degree in Arabic, followed by a masters in English from Government College, Lahore. And then came a second masters, this time in Arabic, from Oriental College, Lahore. In an era when teaching was a noble calling, Faiz soon found himself on the faculty of M.A.O College in Amritsar and then at Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore. In 1942, even as India seethed in political agitation, Faiz joined the British Indian army and saw action on the battlefield. And then 1947 changed life, for Faiz Ahmed Faiz, for every single individual in India. On the dawn of pockmarked freedom, as he would describe it, the poet found himself editing The Pakistan Times as well as the Urdu newspaper Imroze. Those were days, despite the fratricidal communalism involved in the vivisection of India, when an avowed Marxist such as Faiz could be trusted by the Pakistani state to administer significant segments of its newspaper establishment. But that liberal climate was not to last, not after the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Implicated in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case, Faiz would be sentenced to death but would not be hanged. The four years he spent in prison were to be a time for him to refine his poetry, to reactivate the politics he believed in. Observe, in the poem 'Prison Evening': Each star a rung / night comes down the spiral / staircase of the evening / the breeze passes by so very close / as if someone just happened to speak of love / In the courtyard / the trees are absorbed refugees / embroidering maps of return on the sky. When he emerged free of prison, it was Mian Iftikharuddin the politician and Noor Jahan the melody queen who welcomed him back to light. And light was consistently at play in his love poetry. His verses would find immortality in the voices of the artistes who sent them out on the ether. Noor Jahan's memorable rendition of mujh se pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang remains a poignant reminder of the tranquil passion, of the twilight sadness which Faiz brought into his study of romantic agony. Read this English language translation of that song: Do not ask, my love, for the love we had before / You existed, I told myself, so all existence shone / Grief for me was you; the world's grief was far / Spring was ever renewed in your face / Beyond your eyes, what could the world hold? Recall that last line, teri ankhon ke siwa iss duniya mein rakkha kya hai, and feel that old tremor coursing through the crevices of the heart yet once more. And while you do, there is the certain possibility of the undying lyrics of gulon mein rang bhare / baad-e-nau bahar chale / chale bhi aao ke / gulshan ka karobar chale returning to remind you of the early 1960s when Mehdi Hasan sent them wafting into homes all over Pakistan, indeed all over the Urdu-speaking world. Faiz would sometimes note jocularly that his songs were not his any more; they now belonged to Noor Jahan and Mehdi Hasan. But who could argue that it was Faiz's energy which kept his poetry going in the hands of others? Reflect on these lines from a ghazal: I am being accused of loving you, that is all / It is not an insult but a praise, that is all / my heart is pleased at the words of the accusers / O my dearest dear, they say your name / that is all . . . Faiz Ahmed Faiz's distress at the genocide committed in occupied Bangladesh by his nation's army in 1971 exposed the horror which laid intellectual Pakistani circles low --- opening, after 1947, a second phase of terror for them. The poet would weave his dirge in terrible imagery: The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished / the sky promised a morning of blood / and the night wept only blood / the trees hardened into crimson pillars / all flowers filled their eyes with blood / and every glance was an arrow / each pierced image blood / this blood --- a river crying out for martyrs --- / flows in longing / and in sorrow, in rage, in love / let it flow. In 1974, Faiz travelled to Bangladesh with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, met old friends who were now strangers, saw a land no more his own. Back in Pakistan, sorrow dripped from his poetic sensibilities as he wrote: Hum ke thahre ajnabi itni mulaqaton ke baad / phir banenge aashna kitni mulaqaton ke baad / kab nazar mein aaye gi be-daagh sabze ki bahar / khoon ke dhabbe dhulenge kitni barsaton ke baad . . . Strangers after so many meetings? How many more meetings before we become friends again? How many monsoons before the thick stains of blood are washed away? The question was Faiz's. He did not have an answer. Every poet waits for answers . . . and then dies. Ten years after that plaintive poetry, Faiz Ahmed Faiz shut his eyes to life, to the world --- for all time. (Faiz Ahmed Faiz, born on 13 February 1911, died on 20 November 1984)
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