Rediscovering the nonconformist
Urdu poetry graduated from matters of the heart, or rather unrequited love, to contemporary social and political issues with Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911 to 1984). Poets before him seldom found the inspiration to write on people and society. Ghalib (1797 to 1869), the greatest of all poets, lived during gardi ka waqt when the India of old lost ground to the British, yet in his couplets the turbulence of the times seldom comes across, though he wrote long letters on it to his favourite shagird, Hargopal Tafta. The sheer despair in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s (1775 to 1862) couplets may move you to tears, but it was personal agony and loss he wrote about, not the pain and suffering of his people, though he wasn’t the only dispossessed soul of that time. Wajid Ali Shah (1822 to 1887) composed soul-stirring stuff when he was bundled out of Lucknow in 1856 by East India Company. Again, it was his own anguish that the debauched last Nawab of Awadh chose to express, not the agony of his people.
Faiz, unlike his predecessors, wrote about ordinary people — the mill hand, the farmer, the clerk and the postman. This had made Faiz so popular amongst postmen in Pakistan that he once told a friend abroad that a letter to him required no address on the envelope! With Faiz, Urdu poetry got a social context, its agenda for change. In the year of his birth centenary, people the world over have rediscovered him. That’s because Faiz’s vision for Pakistan fits in with the current neo-liberal view of the country. He fought the theocratic state Pakistan had become in a few short years after birth. He spoke out against religious hardliners, the abandonment of socialist policies, and military rule. Never the one to mince words, and always a friend of the poor, Faiz was a pain as well as a security nightmare for many a Pakistani ruler and hence spent long years in jail and in exile.
This biography of Faiz has been written by his grandson, Ali Madeeh Hashmi, with a collection of his poems which have been translated by his son-in-law, Shoaib Hashmi. Though short, it offers valuable insights into the life of a man who has always been popular in India. So much so, Faiz, during one of his exiles when he was short of money, was offered a teaching job in Kolkata (then Calcutta). But the Pakistani establishment thought it would be an embarrassment, and hence advised him to quietly turn down the offer. Faiz was a member of the Left-leaning Progressive Writers’ Association, and spent a lifetime as a nonconformist — he enjoyed a drink or two in the evening. This added to his appeal in India.
Contrary to popular belief, Faiz was not agnostic or an atheist, this biography shows. Some events point to his attachment to Islam, the faith of his forefathers. Thus, Faiz’s marriage to Alys, a feisty Englishwoman he first met in Amritsar, was an Islamic marriage. Faiz had built a mosque in his village in Punjab, and days before his death in 1984 had expressed the desire, to a friend, to say his prayers there. All this while he was deeply influenced by communist thought, and looked with suspicion at the hand of friendship offered by the United States to Pakistan. Faiz was a regular visitor to Moscow where he hobnobbed with other writers from the Soviet bloc as well as “non-aligned” countries like India. (The book, much like the Soviet propaganda material of the 1960s and 1970s, has several pictures of Faiz with Afro-Asian writers in Tashkent, peasant women in scarves from Kyrgyzstan et al.) He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in the Kremlin. Had he lived a few more years, Faiz would have seen the demise of the Soviet Union. It would have been interesting to note his reaction. Faiz supported the cause of the Palestinian Liberation Army and was close to its leader, Yasser Arafat. A poem he composed almost became the Palestinian national song.
But a bigot Faiz was not. He joined issues with official Pakistani historians who linked the country’s past to West Asia rather than India. Since Islam came to the Indian subcontinent only in the seventh century, this amounted to breaking links with the earlier ages — not just the civilisations of Harappa and Mohenjodaro but also the Hindu, Greek and Buddhist influences. The inconvenient facts were brushed under the carpet by the official historians. To drive home this point, Faiz once wrote a poem in English, “The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl”. The symbolism was hard to miss. The Unicorn was a symbol straight out of not just Mohenjodaro but also the Hindu scriptures. And the poem was written in English so that it could appeal to the sensibilities of the Pakistani elite.
Yet, there was national pride in Faiz. In 1974, when Faiz was cultural advisor to the ministry of education, he was part of an official delegation led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to Dhaka. At Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s request, Faiz composed a poem for the occasion. It remains one of his saddest works: Hum kay thehre ajnabi,
Kitnee madaraton kay baad
(We who became strangers, After so many festivities.)
I read the book in one go on a two-hour flight.
THE WAY IT WAS ONCE
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: His Life, His Poems
Ali Madeeh Hashmi
Poems translated by Shoaib Hashmi
HarperCollins India; 237 pages; Rs 499