Faiz Ahamad Faiz

Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84)was a Pakistani leftist poet and one of the most celebrated writers of the Urdu language. He was an activist for human rights and civil liberties, journalist and editor of newspapers and literary magazines, trade unionist and film liricist. He is one of the most powerful poetic voices to have emerged from South Asia.
Faiz was born in Sialkot in 1911. In his student days he read the Communist Manifesto, banned in India. It was a turning point in his life. In his own words the first lesson “I learnt was that it was impossible to detach himself from what was happening externally…”. He helped in setting up the Lahore Progressive Writers’ Association. He organised Punjabi Progressive Writers’ conference in Amritsar in Jallianwala Bagh in 1940. Permission was not given. He wrote on events that have shaped the destiny of the Indian Subcontinent. His elegy to the partition of India is very famous. He refers to the much awaited dawn of freedom as a night-bitten dawn.
Faiz was a secularist, liberal, socialist and pacifist. His poetry was a strange intermingling of the romantic and the revolutionary. When he came in contact with Marxists he became increasingly influenced by social realism. As a poet- thinker he believed that art should not be divorced from social reality.
Faiz produced 7 volumes of verse over a period of 10 years. In the poem “Bol” he incites his people to speak up and reminds them that they are free inspite of their fetters:
“Speak, for your lips are free
Speak, for your tongue is still yours
Your supple body is still yours
Speak, for your life is still yours.”
In his prison poems (arrested in the infamous Rawalpindi case) he says “why should I mourn if my tablet and pen are forbidden
When I have dipped my fingers in my blood?”
Oppression cannot last long. Our suffering will end “where the road of longing leads us, we will see tomorrow.
This night will pass and thus too we will see tomorrow”
Faiz brought a new internationalism to Urdu poetry. Sri Sri did the same to our Telugu poetry. Faiz was saying it was as much is concern as anybody’s else when someone somewhere oppressed the weak.(Read the poem “A plea for Action”). When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair in 1953 on charges of being Soviets agents in America Faiz wrote his famous poem ” We Who were Executed in the dark lanes”. His ode to Africa “Come Africa 1955” is an ode to the oppressed people anywhere.
Faiz died in 1984. He is Pakistan’s symbol of revolution. He is the iconic voice of a generation. He was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature and won the Lenin peace prize. Even after his death his words are being used by different groups for different purposes. His humility is the secret of his charisma. This quality is to be seen very rarely in most contemporary writers.
By B.Kanakalingeswara Rao