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The poet who lived in politics
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
Mah-e-Nau
Bayyad-e-Faiz
Idara-e-Matbouat-e-Pakistan
Chairperson: Sajida Iqbal Syed
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The story, as it has regularly been in the subcontinent, is once more about Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Twenty years after his death, the poet remains a formidable presence, a point of reference for everyone who has felt drawn to the finer elements of Urdu poetry. And poetry for Faiz was, naturally, a life-long vocation. And yet he was not merely a master of the poetic craft but also a thoroughly political being. That part of his personality came with abundance to the fore through his imprisonment and conviction in what came to be known as the Rawalpindi conspiracy of the early 1950s. What surely must have added to the discomfort of the Pakistani authorities, in those early years of the Muslim country, were Faiz’s bona fides as a committed communist. And as is common with such men, secularism was an underlying principle on which they carried themselves. But more ominous for the authorities was that Faiz’s poetry combined with his leftist politics to permeate large sections of Pakistan’s fledgling cultured class and perhaps egg them on towards a new understanding of the purpose of literature in politics.
This work is a needed tribute to the poet on the part of those who have recalled Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his robust handling of poetry. Much of the robustness of course began to demonstrate itself in the pre-partition days, when Faiz took the decision to join the army. From that point on, it was a career that was to run a long and variegated course. He began, as so many have begun in this part of the world, through religion. At age four, he began studies of the Quran and within a year, in 1916, he was on his way to becoming a Hafiz-e-Quran at a local maktab. In the course of the next few years, Faiz displayed his abilities as a serious student through doing well at matriculation. He then moved to Murray College of Sialkot, from where he finished his intermediate in 1929. Two years later, he sailed through his bachelor’s from Government College, Lahore, and at the same time did his BA honours in Arabic from the same institution. In 1933, Faiz went through another phase, doing his masters, this time in English, from the same college. In 1934, he did a second masters, this one in Arabic, from Oriental College, Lahore. The path then led to employment, which of course began with teaching before branching out into a wider sphere.
The Faiz personality was a rounded affair. His involvement with politics was fundamentally a consistent linking up with progressive ideas, a process of intellectual inquiry which led him to identify with the series of liberation struggles defining politics in 1950s and 1960s Africa, Asia and Latin America. Faiz made it unambiguously clear as to where he stood when the choice was one of adapting to either the status quo or setting out on the road to change. For him, change was what mattered. And yet there are those who have steadfastly believed that Faiz did not appear as eloquent as he should have in areas where his voice would have mattered. He had critics aplenty; and yet few of them were willing to underrate his larger than life presence on the literary canvas of his country. It was, ironically, around the concept of country that something of ambivalence remained a factor with Faiz. He was uncomfortable with the reality of partition and yet was realistic enough (without choking the historical memory into suffocation) to understand the compulsions in which he, and others like him, needed to dedicate themselves to the Pakistan cause after August 1947. But patriotism for him was a lot more diverse and wider in circumference than what successive ruling classes made it out to be. The result was the emergence of a certain layer of loftiness in the poet. The result, again, was the ever-deepening respect with which the authorities looked upon him.
Just how great a measure of respect, indeed adulation, Faiz Ahmed Faiz holds in his country comes through in this work, truly a collector’s item. There are the tributes paid by such shining symbols of what can truly be referred to as a Pakistani cultural ethos —- Shamim Jahan, Iftekhar Arif, Qudratullah Shahab, I.A. Rehman, Shabnam Shakeel, Qamar Yorish, Akhtar Hussein Jaffrey, Parveen Shakir, et al.
For Urdu literary enthusiasts, it should be sheer joy going through the volume of Faiz literature in this compilation. Note such essays as Begum Taseer’s Pakistani Aurat Ki Haiseeat, Qudratullah Shahab’s Bayyad-e-Faiz, Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi’s Aisa Kahan Se Laoon Ke Tujh-sa Kahen Jise and Yusuf Baloch’s Faiz Aur Mazdoor.
Reading about Faiz Ahmed Faiz all over again is essentially a going back to the old debate on the power of poetry to give the chase to politics, of the worm-infested kind, and replace it with a necessary nobility of idealism.
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