Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 5, No.

1 (2013)

Faiz Ahmed Faiz: The Worlding of a Lyric Poet1

By Amina Yaqin
In a recent article in the Guardian Ahdaf Souief discusses the intellectual role
and the duty of the fiction writer in times of crisis with reference to the Arab
Spring. She asks the question “Should the novel be political?” and her answer
emphasises a humanist prose style from the writer that will inspire his or her
readership, regardless of political affiliation, to participate in the retelling of
the “narrative of the great world”. At the heart of Souief’s questioning is an
affiliation to a worldly Europeanised cosmopolitan stance that recognises the
novelist as a citizen of the globalised world. However she sees a disjuncture
between this global citizenship and artistic representation in times of national
crisis and she says, “[i]n Egypt we novelists all seem to have given up - for
the moment – on fiction”. Trying to work out how a novelist remains true to
their role as a citizen of the world in such a period of trauma she finds an
answer in the figure of the major Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-
2008) as an example of someone who remained true to his art and to the
representation of truth, by moving away from his hometown of Haifa and
distancing himself from the immediate place of crisis. In his address to the
first Palestinian festival of literature in 2008 he expressed the problem of
being a writer who “has to use the word to resist the military occupation, and

1
This introduction has benefitted from a number presentations over the years,
most recently at the World Literature: networks of circulation Conference at
SOAS, as a research paper at McGill University, Punjab University, LUMS,
Government College University and Oxford University. I am grateful to both
students and faculty at all institutions who listened and made suggestions which
have been invaluable. I am particularly grateful to the contributors of this volume
for giving me a wonderful canvas to build on and indebted to the intellectual
generosity of Geeta Patel who gave advice at crucial times. Some of the ideas
expressed in this introduction have been developed from an earlier essay entitled,
“Variants of Cultural Nationalism in Pakistan: a Reading of Faiz
Ahmad Faiz, Jamil Jalibi, and Fahmida Riaz” that appeared in Shared Idioms,
Sacred Symbols: Process, Power, and the Articulation of identities in South Asia
(eds.) Kelly Pemberton and Michael Nijhawan in 2009.

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has to resist – on behalf of the word – the danger of the banal and the
repetitive”. (Souief 2012: 4).
However, unwilling to leave the site of crisis in Cairo herself Souief
opines that under such constrained circumstances the writer can’t help but
report the real world tragedies that they witness at such times and the
aesthetics of fiction are less urgent. Souief’s concerns have been a key point
of consideration in world literature, in particular by diasporic intellectuals
such as Erich Auerbach and Edward Said. She re-opens a conversation on
literature as aesthetics and literature as politics that has often divided literary
critical thinking.
The contemporary context of a revolutionary movement and the
return to the real in literary representation is an ideal beginning for looking
back to a revolutionary poet: Faiz Ahmad Faiz who also wrote during times of
crisis from the 1940s to the early 1980s in India and Pakistan. As such Faiz is
not a stranger to World literature but his poetic oeuvre is not canonical. The
poet Naomi Lazard who met him at an international literary conference in
Honolulu in 1979 first introduced him to an American readership. As a poet
she compared him to Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and Nazim Hikmet (1902-
1963). He is popular for being a people’s poet and his verse has often been
appropriated for revolutionary political activism in Pakistan. In a preface to
his second collection of poetry Dast-e Saba (The Wind’s caress) he said: “It is
incumbent upon the artist to not only observe but also to struggle. To observe
the restless drops (of life) in his surroundings is dependent upon his vision, to
show them to others, upon his artistic abilities and to enter into them, to
change the flow (of life) is dependent on the depth of his desire and the
passion in his blood”. (Hashmi 2012: 4).
There is much to be found in common between the contemplations of
Darwish and Faiz on literature, aesthetics and politics. On the question of
activism, Souief’s reflections as an Egyptian writer can be extended to the
writer of Pakistani literature living in a constant state of crisis. Does the
national writer need always to respond to political crises or can he or she
preserve an aesthetic that is untouched by the politics of the nation? Can the
aesthetic form only be retrieved through a cosmopolitan model of citizenship
and worldliness?
To answer these questions it is necessary to locate the narrative of
worldiness and cosmopolitan sensibility that contradicts the national in Faiz’s
poetry and a useful starting point is to consider the concept of world literature.
There are many competing definitions of world literature ranging from Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s coinage of the term “Weltliteratur” in 1827 as an
active universal space of interaction and transaction of literatures and cultures

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in a largely European context, to the more recent writings of Pascale

Casanova and Franco Moretti with their respective analyses of the circulation
of literary works in transnational and global contexts homing in on London
and Paris as the centres of world literature (Casanova 2005; Moretti 2003). A
key critique of world literature has been its bias toward a humanist
universalism that includes a notable neglect of the global South and a
privileging of European and North American contexts in alliance with
Renaissance and Enlightenment models of classicism. Both the fields of
World literature and Comparative literature incorporate a study of early
modernity in European languages such as French and German embracing
humanism and cosmopolitanism. Theo D’Haen points out that a noticeable
shift in Comparative literary studies toward a non-European focus was first
evident in the United States after World War II (D’Haen 2012). Out of this
shifting model of Comparative literary studies emerged a new field of
Postcolonial literary studies that offered as its point of departure a critique of
Enlightenment thought and new ways of understanding colonial rule.
The Palestinian critic Edward Said straddles the two spectrums of
Comparative and Postcolonial and his groundbreaking study Orientalism has
been recognised as a foundational text for colonial and postcolonial studies.
For this collection, his essay on “Secular Criticism” introducing his study on
The World, The text and The Critic is particularly significant with its
ruminations on the notion of culture and place where the latter is not just a
reflection of the nation but also an expression of “belonging to or in a place,
being at home in a place” (Said 1984: 8). In an article tracing the meaning of
secular criticism in the work of Edward Said, Aamir Mufti has argued that
Said’s critical position does not put forward a “contentless cosmopolitanism”
but “a secularism imbued with the experience of minority – a secularism for
which minority is simply not the name of a crisis (Mufti 1998: 96).” In
establishing this critical attitude Said turns to Auerbach’s essay “Philologie
der Weltliteratur” that underwrites the case for homelessness as a way toward
worldliness. It is important to consider some of the reasons why Said
appropriates Auerbach’s philological approach that looks toward the
authenticity of historical experience to determine meaning. On history
Auerbach is of the opinion that it is “the science of reality that affects us most
immediately, stirs us deeply and compels us most forcibly to a consciousness
of ourselves. It is the only science in which human beings step before us in
their totality” (Auerbach 1969: 4-5). Yet he is convinced modernity can only
provide a world culture in which the history of materialism is dominant and
standardised and spirituality downgraded and removed. For Auerbach a
modern alienation from premodern sensibilities has meant a rejection of those

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earlier multiple forms of social identification in favour of a universalising

common subjectivity that is hollow. He argues for a return to the method of
classical literary philology as a better way of understanding History than the
modern “scientifically ordered and conducted research of reality” (1969: 4).
As Said forcefully argues Auerbach’s methodological approach while
inclusive of earlier models of knowledge is itself borne out of a modern
intellectual western European tradition of Enlightenment. Toward the end of
the essay Auerbach makes clear that he is not after a national history but a
world history: “our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the
nation” (1969: 17). While he acknowledges that the philologist’s most
precious heritage is his national language he is quite certain that it is only
when he is separated from that home he comes to recognise that “the spirit
[Geist] is not national” (1969: 17).
Said analyses Auerbach’s essay as a cultural artefact that reaffirms
European hegemony. It nuances “belonging, association and community”
from his position of exile in Istanbul prefacing his 1946 publication of
Mimesis which is a successful venture of great cultural importance to
European selfhood. Auerbach’s cultural identification with Europe while in
Turkey represents what Said defines as an affiliation to the homeliness of a
place and the felt unhomeliness of the nation. Said identifies Islam as a key
cultural signifier of difference for Auerbach’s thesis which remains culturally
untouched by his location in Istanbul. He articulates the otherness of Turkey,
its significant link with Islam and the Orient and its “opposition to Europe” as
an absent presence in Auerbach’s study of Mimesis. Said does not reject the
cultural identification that comes from religious identity, indeed Auerbach’s
own heritage as a Jew is a source of influence to his perception of the world.
But in secular criticism Said does not overly dwell on religion and maps his
notion of the secular. Having critiqued Auerbach at length he argues instead
for a critical secular consciousness that is rooted in humanism. Aamir Mufti
suggests that Said’s usage of secular is “catachrestic, in the sense that Gayatri
Spivak has given to the term – that is, it is a meaningful and productive
misuse. It is an invitation to rethink, from within the postcolonial present, the
narrative of progress that underlies the very notion of secularization” (Mufti
1998: 107). For Mufti, Said’s inclusion of the minority question disturbs the
experience of majority culture and takes him outside an elite consciousness.
Said represents two contrasting visions of culture through Matthew Arnold’s
idea of the “best that is known and thought” and Michel Foucault’s critique of
culture as an “institutionalised process” to demonstrate the hegemonic power
of majority culture that always overcomes the minority question, in this case
Europe and Islamic cultures. A critical Saidian Postcolonial Studies approach

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offers a point of departure to think through questions of individual and social

transformation in Faiz.
This special issue thus maps a necessary dialogue between the fields
of world literature, its liberal viewpoint and postcolonial perspectives looking
retrospectively at a poet whose life and work echo those very nuances of
home (nation) and homelessness (exile) complicated by a spiritual sense of
belonging to the ideological nation of Pakistan – a separate homeland for the
Muslims of India that came into being at the time of Indian independence
from colonial rule. Decolonisation in the subcontinent is therefore marked by
the haunting and violent spectre of Partition and the unfinished project of
nationalism. Faiz’s poem “Subh-e Azadi” August 1947 (Freedom’s Dawn)
captures the desolation of independence and Partition:

Ye dagh dagh ujala, ye shab gazida sahar

Vo intizar tha jis ka, ye vo sahar to nahin
Ye vo sahar to nahin jis-ki arzu lekar
Chale the yar ke mil jae gi kahin na kahin
[…].
Jigar ki ag, nazar ki umang, dil ki jalan
Kisi pe chara-e hijran ka kuch asar hi nahin
Kahan se ai nigar-e saba, kidhar ko ga’i?
…
Najat-e-dida-o-dil ki ghari nahin a’I;
Chale-chalo ke vo manzil abhi nahin a’i.

This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn

This is not the dawn of which there was expectation;
This is not that dawn with longing for which
The friends set out, (convinced) that somewhere there would be met with,
[…]
The fire of the liver, the tumult of the eye, burning of the heart, -
There is no effect on any of them of (this) cure for separation.
Whence came that darling of a morning breeze, whither has it gone?
…
The hour of the deliverance of eye and heart has not arrived.
Come, come on, for that goal has still not arrived.
(tr. Kiernan 1971: 122,127)

It is a lyrical rendition that represents the aesthetic mood of an unrequited love

and shies away from the violence and dehumanisation of Partition. Crucially

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the journey to freedom remains unfinished. Edward Said understood Faiz as

someone whose poetry bridged the worlds of the literary elite and the
common man. He marks as his major achievement the creation of “a
contrapuntal rhetoric and rhythm” by using classical forms such as the qasida,
ghazal, masnavi, qita dramatically changing them for his readers, and
acknowledges him as “one of the greatest poets of this century” (Edward Said
quoted in Agha Shahid Ali 1991: xiii). Said who had been introduced to Faiz
by the scholar and activist Eqbal Ahmed (1934-1999) met him as a poet in
exile in Beirut. Said’s reading of Palestinian nationalism as a permanent state
of exile found a comparative counterpart in the persona of Faiz the poet living
in exile from his home country – Pakistan. Taking his cue from Said, Aamir
Mufti argues for Faiz as a representative poet of Muslim minoritization in the
Indian subcontinent and his love lyrics as an example of “a self in partition”.
Reading the subjectivity of Faiz through Theodor Adorno’s critique of lyric
poetry’s relationship to society Mufti makes the case that “the social truth
embodied in Faiz’s lyric poetry is that the emergence of the (modern) self is
also its self-division” (Mufti 2007: 212). Mufti rereads Faiz as part of his
critique on Enlightenment identifying him as a poet of “a late postcolonial
modernity” who “pushes the terms of identity and selfhood to their limits, to
the point where they turn upon themselves and reveal the partial nature of
postcolonial ‘national’ experience” (2007: 243). Mufti’s reading identifies the
Indian Muslim as a permanent minority outcaste from the majoritarian politics
of Indian nationalism. He points out that there is a double bind because
“Before ‘Muslim’ could become ‘minority’, the majority of the Muslims had
to be turned into non-Indians” or Pakistanis denying them any stake in the
nation. (2007:118)
Mufti offers a compelling reading of Faiz Ahmad Faiz as a representative
poet of an unrecognised Indian minority in an essay later developed into a
book chapter for Enlightenment in the Colony although the existence of the
state of Pakistan makes it a difficult position to sustain. An underexplored
arena in Mufti’s argument is the conflicted space occupied by Faiz’s poetry
vis-à-vis his public persona in Pakistan. He is particularly interested in a
justification of Faiz’s appropriation of the classical lyric form. Mufti sees the
ghazal as being “inextricably linked with the emergence and development of
national culture” and reads Faiz’s deployment of the form as a marker of a
passage from a specific literary history of Urdu into a “critical space” for the
discussion of “Indian literary modernity as a whole” (2007: 218). Writing in
Urdu he also inhabits the space of the post-partitioned national sphere in
Pakistan, the memory of an ethnic community’s mother tongue heritage and
the ideology of a new Muslim state. Belonging to what has been described as

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a radical cultural movement that was represented mainly by the All India
Progressive Writers Association established in 1936 Faiz was deeply invested
in the anti-colonial struggle but he also had a very humanist response to the
war in Europe and was ultimately unprepared for what Frantz Fanon has
referred to in another context as “the pitfalls of national consciousness” when
independence finally arrived in 1947 for Indians at the price of a bloody
Partition (Gopal 2005).2 In Enlightement in the Colony, Mufti analyses Faiz’s
public debates on national culture in the 1960s in Pakistan as an example of
the “impossible narratives of the nation” where the historical and geographical
come head to head and the Muslim and Pakistani narratives are the heritage of
“an arbitrary colonial decision”. His central theme of Muslim identity as a
discourse of minoritisation in an Indian secular critical consciousness is more
successfully captured in his close readings of Faiz’s lyrics than the foray into
the essays on Pakistani culture in which Mufti can only see the “illusion of a
national identity”. That national identity is an illusion is a foregone conclusion
for an ideological state but it is significant when organic intellectuals such as
Faiz begin to make that illusion a real occurrence. This is something that
Mufti leaves out of his discussion as it takes him away from his central thesis
of Muslim minoritisation. In this issue, my essay on “Cosmopolitan ventures
in the times of crisis: a postcolonial reading of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Dasht-e
tanhai” and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers” offers a point of
departure with a critical intertextual reading of a lyric poet and a diasporic
writer. I argue that cosmopolitanism is the glue that binds the writer and the
poet and is imbued with a worldliness that is borne out of times of crisis that
cripple the national. Pakistan remains a real and imagined central concern in
this identification of new value systems.
In his lectures on culture Faiz reviews the etymology of the word
culture and tries to find its equivalent in Urdu. In his opinion, at the time of
his writing, the word saqafat used in Urdu to refer to the English culture is
itself a borrowing from Arabic. Faiz defines tehzib as a new word for culture
in tandem with the modern English word. He also makes the point to
dissociate tehzib from the older word of civilisation. For him, civilisation is a
limited and closed word as it is very exclusive in its meaning whereas culture
has equitable open-ended possibilities of plural and diverse societies. Faiz
outlines three inter-dependent characteristics of culture, which he says come
into focus in every nation: namely personal character, the arts, and society. He
reasons that in Pakistan the value system is underwritten by religion and that

2
See the introduction.

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is the real foundation of Pakistani culture. But he finds it problematic to

interchange Pakistani tehzib for Islamic tehzib because Islam extends beyond
the territorial boundaries of the nation, while national culture is circumscribed
by the geopolitical nation. According to his understanding, the equation of
Pakistani qaumiat equals Islamiat and Muslimiat (Faiz 1988: 28). This
qaumiat defines the morality and etiquette of Pakistan as advocated by Islam
and is not a differential or oppositional energy. It connects Pakistan to other
Muslim nations in the Middle East and takes on aspects of Arab “wataniyya”
“which calls for political unity of all the Arab peoples.”3 His difficulty lies in
outlining a shared or common memory of the past in Pakistan. According to
him, if Islamic countries such as Iran, Turan, Sudan and Egypt can have their
indigenous culture as well as their qaumi culture of Islam then Pakistan too
needs to define its Pakistaniat. He is adamant that Islamic culture cannot be
made into national culture because the latter needs to account for everyday
life, regional geography and history. As a solution, he proposes an ambiguous
compromise which combines general Islamic religious nationalism with
specific territorial affiliations, such as the geographic rootedness of the
ancient Indus valley civilisation, as well as a materialist understanding of the
structures of society. He also wrote an English poem entitled “The Unicorn
and the Dancing Girl” which reiterates the sense of cultural identity as
primoridial and tied to the historical roots of the territorial nation:

In Pakistan as elsewhere in Asia

And Africa, Time Past is Time Present
And cities rose on the plains
Attracting an unending caravan
Of human feet marching in and out of timeless mountains
Parthians, Bactrians, Huns and Scythians
Arabs, Tatars, Turks and White Men […].
(Hashmi 2012: 61)

His vision of a cultural nationalism for Pakistan is fraught with complicated

trajectories of belonging that seek to make the secular possible for a religious
community that is continually and negatively compared to its successful
secular neighbour India. He affiliates with Jinnah’s model of secularism and
the necessity of a separate nation for Muslims in which they have the status
of first class citizens. Bringing together the Indic and the Islamic, the modern

3
Encyclopaedia of the Modern Middle East,Volume 3, MacMillan, New York,
1996, p1322.

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and the pre-modern he formulates a plural cosmopolitan subjectivity that does

not conform to the singularity of the modern nation-state. He re-opens the
debate on qaumi culture as a spokesman for the state and offers a liberal
understanding of it. Faiz’s critical secular thought appears to be informed by
Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth century idea of “sweetness and light […]. our
best self” (Arnold 1960: 72, 95).
On the theme of a cultural national language, Faiz debunks the
outlook which traces Urdu’s origins from India’s southern region of the
Deccan to its northern homeland of Delhi. He prefers to accord recognition to
Urdu in Pakistan as a reflection of an organic everyday spoken language
rather than the language of the former courts of Delhi. He aligns his
egalitarian principles to a particular pre-modern representation of a historical
harmonious Sufi Islam in the subcontinent that bridged cultures. With regards
to the conflict between East and West Pakistan over the issue of national
language he remained noncommittal and argued for a resolution devoid of
emotion and based on logic. On the question of combining Urdu and Bengali
to make a third language he opined that such projects if considered viable
should be carried out using scientific research methods (Faiz 1988: 48). His
emphasis on reason and progress echoes an Enlightenment sensibility that is
at odds with his fierce rejection of the colonial occupation of territory. For
him Urdu is an essential language for Pakistani nationalism because it offers
a canvas, independent from the emotive nature of regional languages, for the
construction of new stories of the nation. Thus, Faiz constructs a mythical
stance about the nation and its national language.
In this volume a selection of translated verses of Faiz by the Kashmiri
American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) have been reproduced on the topic
of Bangladesh and the secession of East Pakistan from West Pakistan in 1971.
Faiz in this trilogy of poems represents the separation of 1971 as a violent and
bloody parting that poisoned the soul of the nation. The sea of blood that flowed
was a permanent loss to be mourned with the recognition that no apology
however heartfelt would be enough to repair the division between friends who
turned into enemies and strangers. Agha Shahid Ali in the introduction, to his
collected translations from Faiz entitled The Rebel’s Silhouette, speaks of his
memory of Faiz being intertwined with that of the light classical singer Begum
Akhtar who sang his ghazals and in one of his poems he recalls Faiz’s lyric
response through the immortal voice of the songstress who was listened to across
the divide:

In New Delhi one night

As Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.

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It was perhaps during the Bangladesh war,

Perhaps there were sirens,
Air-raid warnings
But the audience, hushed did not stir
The microphone was dead, but she went on
Singing and her voice
Was coming from far
Away, as if she had already died.
(Lines 59-68, Nostalgist’s Map)

It is worth noting that Faiz was introduced to readers in Australia and

New Zealand by the anthropologist Estelle Dryland. She was drawn to Faiz on
a humanist basis, in particular, the universal play on human emotions in his
work. This particular quality to his writing came from a variety of influences
including the Progressive Writers Movement of the 1930s. Of his active
participation as a Progressive he lays claims to the controversies surrounding
the Association commenting that: “At the time, there were two groups among
writers: those who believed in literature for the sake of literature and those
who maintained that literature had a higher social purpose. Their debates
were fiery and I was never far from the scene of action” (Hasan 1988: xxvii).
Faiz excelled in interweaving the classical ornamental style of an aristocratic
stylised Urdu rhyme and metre with the modern functionality of social
realism. He utilised the classical imagery of the lover and the beloved, the
literal and metaphorical desolate desert of their separation, and the hopeful
metaphor of the morning breeze, to articulate a new expression. There is no
better example of this than the nazm which launched his career as a poet,
Mujh se pehli si muhabbat mere mahbub na mang (My Beloved do not ask
from me a love like before).

Do not ask from me, my beloved, love like that former one.
I had believed that you are, therefore life is shining;
There is anguish over you, so what wrangle is there over the sorrow of the
age?
[…]
There are other sufferings of the time (world) besides love,
There are other pleasures besides the pleasures of union.
The dark beastly spell of countless centuries.
Woven into silk and satin and brocade, -
Bodies sold everywhere in alley and market,
Smeared with dust, washed in blood,

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Bodies that have emerged from the ovens of diseases,

Pus flowing from rotten ulcers
[…]
Do not ask from me, my beloved, love like that former one.
(tr. Kiernan 1971: 66-7)

This poem was significant as it changed the perception and representation of

the classical beloved for twentieth-century poets. In its refrain it conveyed a
farewell to the traditional theme of unrequited love in Urdu poetry and
introduced a new self and subjectivity that was to be the driving force for
future developments in poetic thought. The real was to be the subject of
modern poetry with its dehumanisation of the body and soul.
Faiz was that rare example of a Progressive poet whose poetry was not
accused of sloganeering, a label that became attached to Progressive writers
for neglecting style over content in their writing (Alam 1983: 78). In this
volume Geeta Patel and A Sean Pue consider the divide between Progressive
realism and a modernist aesthetic sensibility in Faiz’s verse. Sean Pue’s essay
on “Modernism and Progressivism in Urdu Poetry” looks at the division of
adab bara-e adab (literature for the sake of art) and adab bara-e zindagi
(literature for the sake of life)” amongst the Urdu literati. He presents a case
study of Faiz Ahmad Faiz and N M Rashed as two poets of the same
generation who on the face of it took opposite literary directions. Pue argues
that the distinction doesn’t hold when measured against the work of either
poet but it is retained in the manner that both poets approached their writing
and the way in which they perceived each other. If Faiz was alive he may
claim “I am a poet with a particular perspective on reality” like his Palestinian
counterpart Mahmoud Darwish (Darwish quoted by Muhawi, 1995, Al Qods
Al-Arabi, 17 November 1993.)
Geeta Patel’s essay “Rumination on Chronopoetics and the Political
Subject: Miraji Reads Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Lyric” offers a compelling critique
of the division between the adab bara-e adab (aesthetes) and adab bara-e
zindagi (realist) schools of thought and an innovative theoretical
understanding of how time and space operate in Faiz’s well loved poem
“Bol”. Putting together romantic realism and what she refers to as fleshed
politics, Patel traces the poetics of Faiz’s lyrical verse as discussed in a critical
essay by Miraji arguing that his reading recognised the creation of a new
political subject. Patel builds on Miraji’s allegorical reading of Faiz’s poem
deepening the discussion on technology, labor and temporality with close
references to Heidegger and Benjamin.

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As a Progressive Faiz was inclined toward themes of realism and

modernity but he was also firmly embedded in his poetic practice as a
traditionalist often appropriating the ghazal form for his verse. His prose on
the other hand was directly implicated by his role as the Chief Editor of a
national daily. After all the print media would have a role to play in bringing
together the imagined community after the crisis of Partition. Roland Barthes’
has suggested that modern poetic language is resistant to myth in contrast to
the causality of newspaper journalism which easily lends itself to
mythmaking. He says, “Contemporary poetry is a regressive semiological
system” (Barthes 2000: 133). While myth attaches itself to a system of
signification, poetry does otherwise, it seeks to be an “anti-language” outside
the realm of reason and logic. Therefore in modern poetry meaning is not a
tangible entity which connects itself directly to the sign, the signifier or the
signified. It conveys itself as an abstraction and it is this quality which
separates it from the factual, value-based understanding that is myth. Faiz’s
style as a poet is deeply rooted in the genre of the love lyric but the themes of
his poetry are often modern. His career trajectory is that of a major poet, a left
intellectual, an activist, a nationalist and a cosmopolitan. While his poetic
voice may at times transcend the semiotic structures of language his lectures
on culture remain embedded in the myth of nationalism and can be seen as
tied to a “mythmaking” that was part of his journalistic career. In order to
understand the complexity of his individual subjectivity it is useful to briefly
summarise his career.
Born in Sialkot in 1911, Faiz received his primary education at
Murray College, Sialkot and completed his higher education at Government
College, Lahore in Arabic and English literature in pre-Partition Punjab. His
ancestory was not aristocratic but his father had served the royal family of
Afghanistan and travelled to England to study, to train as a lawyer at
Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn in London. In 1935 he joined the staff at
Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, Amritsar where he taught English. In
1940 he secured a lectureship in English at Hailey College, Lahore. His first
collection of poems entitled, Naqsh-e faryadi (The protestor’s sketch) was
published in 1941. In 1942 he joined the British Indian war publicity
department in Delhi as captain, and was made a lieutenant colonel in 1944.
“No one could have been made less for the army than Faiz, but he felt that in
the struggle against Nazism and Fascism, if a uniform had to be worn then a
uniform should be worn” (Hasan 1988: xv). He returned to Lahore in 1947
and began a career in journalism as editor of the new national daily Pakistan
Times and its sister publication in Urdu, Imroze.

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He was a trade union activist and firmly aligned to the political left.
Because of his radical politics he often found himself under constant
surveillance by different military regimes, Ayub in the 1960s and Zia in the
1980s. In this issue, the collection of letters from “Letters To Alys” edited by
Salima Hashmi give us an insight into the personal life of Faiz, his jovial
personality, easy intimacy with his family and the things that moved him and
made him laugh. The letters cover mainly the 1950s with a brief span of the
1940s in pre-Partition India, Pakistan in 1972 and his time in Beirut during the
Israeli invasion of 1982. In one of his letters he distinguishes between pain
and unhappiness as external and internal to the self. Pain has to be suffered
but unhappiness can be overcome. Written as words of advice for his daughter
these lines give an insight of the inner personal journey through which Faiz
reconciled himself to the torn halves of Partition and independence. The
letters contain a sense of a travelling body that is never at home in one place,
Faiz is often not at home with his family but is more likely to be found
visiting them or traversing different parts of the country. Some of his places of
travel and exile are not self-chosen, such as Hyderabad jail, but others are
self-selected such as the trip to Ziarat and his time in Beirut.
In Pakistan, Faiz with his leftist stance and revolutionary Progressive
poetry along with other literary and political activists of the All Pakistan
Progressive Writers Association including Sajjad Zaheer was a troublesome
figurehead for the post Partition Pakistani state. In a recent book Saadia Toor
has argued that in the immediate period after independence East Pakistan was
seen as a threat to the corporate interests of the Pakistani establishment and it
is through the exchanges between Progressive writers such as Mohammad
Hasan Askari and M.D Taseer that she interrogates the rift between the idea of
the nation (qaum) as it was being propagated by nationalists and its awam
(people) by the Progressives (Toor 2011). The Left came under increasing
surveillance and in 1951 Faiz along with army officers and Sajjad Zaheer
(founder member of the Progressive Writer’s Association) was arrested on a
conspiracy charge for his alleged involvement to overthrow the government of
Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. (Dryland 1993: 57-81). This case known as
the Rawalpindi Conspiracy led to prison sentences for Faiz and Zaheer and
marked the beginning of the end of the Progressives Writers Association
which was formally closed down in 1954 (Toor 2011: 77). Field Marshal
Ayub Khan effectively squeezed out the Communist party in Pakistan and
initiated a state project to cleanse the influence of the Progressives in
Pakistan. According to Toor this task was made easier by the cooperation of
prominent “liberal intellectuals and writers such as M D Taseer and M H
Askari [who] consciously aided and abetted this project” (Toor 2011: 78) This

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collusion of liberal Progressive intellectuals with state led intervention altered

the literary map of Urdu literature in years to come. Faiz continued to write,
publishing Dast-e Saba and Zinda nama (Prison manuscript) in 1952 and
1956, respectively. He spent four years in prison from 1951-1955 and again
after Ayub’s military coup in 1958 for six months.
Faiz’s next big moment was to come under what Hamzi Alavi has
referred to as the bureaucratic-military oligarchy of the Pakistan People’s
Party led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto openly patronised the arts, he
appointed Faiz as the founder and Director of the Pakistan National Council
of Arts in 1971 based in Islamabad. Faiz advised the Pakistani government on
cultural policy and represented Pakistan in International conferences. He also
initiated a Lok Virsa (Folk Heritage) chapter. He resumed his official position
as a well-known figure on national radio and television influencing a new
generation of broadcasters, writers, intellectuals and artists. He now had an
opportunity to consolidate the conversations he had begun on Pakistani
culture in the 1950s. In 1977 General Zia-ul Haq came into power and
Pakistan reverted to military rule. Faiz resigned from his position, and exiled
himself to Beirut in 1978. He chose to live there because he had been offered
the role of editor-in-chief of Lotus, an Afro-Asian Writers’ journal. Whilst in
Beirut he became passionately involved in the Palestinian struggle for
freedom. After the Israeli attack on Beirut in 1982 Faiz departed a war
ravaged Beirut amid fears for his safety and died in 1984 in Lahore. (Dryland
1993; Hasan 1988). Whilst based in Beirut Faiz travelled frequently to
London and Moscow. In this volume, Iftikhar Arif’s panoramic essay in Urdu
highlights some of the major poems of Faiz’s poetic career and particularly
ones that were written in London such as “Koi ‘ashiq apni mahbuba se” (A
lover to his beloved) and “wa yaqba wajuh rabbika” more popularly
recognised from its first line “Ham dekhen gai”. The title comes from Sura-e
Rahman (Quran 55:26,27). This poem was written in the wake of the Iranian
revolution and adopted a people’s voice. Arif argues that Faiz’s poetry has
elements of the egalitarian tradition of French republicanism. It can be further
suggested that the borrowing of the Arabic in “wa yaqba wajuh rabbika” is not
just a linguistic device in his poetry but that it conveys an attachment to the
sacred and firmly ties it to the political. Faiz’s ways of loving as a poet are
constantly evolving and are also reflective of absorbed influences from the
places he inhabited in exile. His poem “A Song for the Warriors of Palestine”
is a tribute to his affiliation with the cause of Palestinian independence and his
personal friendship with a fellow poet in exile, Mahmoud Darwish:

We will win

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 Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 5, No. 1 (2013)

One day, in truth, we will win

At last, one day we will win
What do we fear the onslaught of enemies
Every warrior stands straight and tall
(tr. Hashmi 2012: 73)

Faiz who was equally at home in Punjabi embraced Urdu as a global language
reflective of multilingual cultures and in his practice imbued it with the spirit
of a cosmopolitan world literature, a quality that had defined the work of his
predecessors. He was also a translator forming international allegiances with
the Left beyond his immediate national location of Pakistan looking toward
the Soviet Union. In 1962 he was awarded the Lenin Peace prize. As such
Faiz is not a stranger to the World literature stage but his presence has not
been as widely felt as those with whom he has been compared, Pablo Neruda
and Nazim Hikmet.
In this volume Christina Oesterheld’s essay on “Faiz’s internationalist
poetics: selected translations and free verses” explores his trajectory of travel
and contact with English poetry as a common feature shared with late
nineteenth century poets as well as contemporaries such as N. M. Rashed,
Saqi Faruqi and others. Oesterheld turns her focus to that part of Faiz’s travels
which brought him into contact with delegations from the Soviet Union and
came out of his connection with the Progressive Writers Association of the
1930s. She discusses his affiliation with internationalism as a premise of
communist ideology and the co-option of literature for the purposes of
political mobilisation of the masses. A point of departure suggested by
Oesterheld is the close bond that developed as a result of this internationalism
between established and well-received poets such as Nazim Hikmet and Pablo
Neruda. Her paper explores the aesthetic implications of Faiz’s exposure to
fellow writers in the Soviet Union as well as in the wider world that he
travelled. She traces a fascinating journey in his Mah-o sal-i asnai (Months
and years of acquaintance) from Moscow to Turkey drawing out the regard
that Faiz held for Nazim Hikmet. She offers close readings of his translations
of Russian poems and confirms that although there is no known method
behind his translations he often relied on interpreters or the authors to convey
a sense of the original to him in Urdu or English before he embarked on his
own translation. Referring to the modern poetic forms of free verse and the
paband nazm deployed by Faiz she offers a different and unique
understanding of his poetic style. Her identification of the period of the 1960s
and 1970s as key for Faiz links his later writing to a very purposeful nature.
Her close readings of the free verse poems’ present a view of Faiz that is

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collective, political and reformist in contrast to the nebulous quality of his

ghazals. She also traces a reverse Pan-Islamism in Faiz’s work as he dedicated
himself to the Palestinian cause particularly during his period of exile in
Beirut and his editorship of Lotus. Her paper argues that the poet of a late
modernity is unable to preserve the aesthetic qualities of his verse in the face
of a brutal postcolonial condition of an ongoing violent struggle for freedom
from colonial heritage.
In contrast to Oesterheld’s look toward the East, Laurel Steele’s essay
on “Finding Faiz at Berkeley: Room for a celebration” evocatively details
how the study of Faiz has travelled institutionally in the West. Her essay gives
a rich intertextual reading of Faiz offering a critique of a centenary celebration
at Berkeley and a reflective contemplation of the deeper resonances that mark
such big occasions. The Faiz celebration at Berkeley launched both an Urdu
and Pakistan studies initiative, something that is lauded by the author but is
also a cause for concern with regards to long term viability for students
because of the politically fraught history between the two nations and the
bugbear that is Homeland Security controlled by the US Department of State
which circumscribes the way we live modern lives in a global world. Steele
usefully compares the output of Urdu scholars and the study of Pakistan at
Berkeley with that done at Wisconsin, Chicago, Texas and confirms that there
are fewer graduate dissertations on the region coming out of Berkeley posing
a key question of relevance for the new initiative. She finds that the library in
Berkeley is well resourced for scholars who wish to undertake new initiatives
in the field of Urdu studies and Faiz has a formidable reputation amongst
Urdu intellectuals. What we miss, notes Steele, is a biography that captures
the heart and soul of Faiz in English making him accessible to a world
readership. Appreciating the worldliness of Faiz as a writer she traces
references to his work in the writings of acclaimed English and Urdu writers
such as Salman Rushdie, Qurratul Ain Hyder and Ammer Hussein.
Aamer Hussein’s essay “The Colour of My Heart: on Reading Faiz”
gives a rich autobiographical account of how he lost and found the verse of
Faiz in his intellectual and territorial journey from Pakistan to England, and
from adolescence to adult life. Hussein’s essay begins with memories of an
array of well-known verses that have been immortalised in sung renditions by
singers of trained gharanas as well as modern appropriations. Over time he
develops a fondness for and a closeness to the verses that he grew up with.
The essay ends on the memory of an encounter with the poet in London.
Hussein’s account gives witness to the significant role music and classically
trained singers in Pakistan have given to Faiz, including verses sung by the
Queen of ghazal Farida Khanum (b.1935) and Malika-e tarannum (The Queen

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 Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 5, No. 1 (2013)

of Melody) late Madame Noorjehan (1926-2000). Noorjehan had a high

regard for Faiz and in an interview commented that she would have given up
singing if he had asked her to, so moved was she by his verse.4 Faiz’s poems,
lovingly sung by iconic songstresses of his time continue to inspire a new
generation of singers. As an unofficial poet laureate of Pakistan Faiz won the
heart of millions with his deeply popular lyrical verse, and remains a
figurehead for the present generation of Urdu poets (Coppola 1975; Kiernan
1971: 21-44; Sadiq 1995: 548-50; Zaidi 1993: 362-55). Hussein’s essay
registers this key detail about the attraction of Faiz for the global and the local
listener and captures the alienation of the strange and the comfort of the
familiar in Faiz’s poetry. As an English writer he finds himself growing closer
to Faiz’s verse as he grows older.
Hussein’s essay is about the rediscovery of Faiz in a metropolitan
location. The worlding of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry has taken many forms
beyond its original composition and classical renditions in music. For instance
the 1994 filmic adaptation of Anita Desai’s In Custody, directed by Ismail
Merchant, narrates the story of Urdu as a dying language in India. Retold in
Urdu it draws on the stereotype of an Urdu poet marked by brilliance and with
a taste for excess. Building on the novel’s minor mention of Faiz the film
deploys selected verses by Faiz Ahmad Faiz to enhance the lyrical theme of
nostalgia and loss for a filmic audience. In this special issue Shahrukh Husain
shares a personal view on translating Faiz’s verse for the Merchant-Ivory film
Muhafiz based on the novel In Custody by Anita Desai. She highlights the
highs and lows of the translator’s task from the mundane to the sublime.
Husain conveys the universal appeal of Faiz beyond that of a national icon, a
poet whose verse represents the many possibilities of linguistic and cultural
interpretation on a world stage.
The SOAS student Forum on Faiz edited by Samreen Kazmi brings
together a diverse set of student responses on Faiz ranging from; the
revolutionary appeal of Faiz for those who were actively involved in the
lawyers movement in Pakistan; a personal aesthetic connectivity with the
theme of love in his verse; a historical return to the creation of Bangladesh in
1971 and the cultural heritage of Faiz in India. It shows the depth of student
engagement with the legacy of Faiz and the desire to understand the specific
contexts that make him a national icon and a popular cross-border poet.
In seeking to remember and honour the work of Faiz Ahmad Faiz this special
issue has tried to convey the depth and variety of Faiz’s intellectual

4
http://www.madamnoorjehan.com/her-life-and-art/interviews-58/62-bbc-
interview.html. Accessed 13 December 2012.

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engagement with poetry, politics, culture, the national and the worldly. His
death in 1984 left a void in the Urdu literary landscape. His legacy as an
unofficial poet laureatue for Pakistan has been lovingly recreated by his
family in the Lahore museum dedicated to his memory, Faiz ghar (The house
of Faiz). The main consumers of the cultural events held at the Centre are the
urban elite although it hosts a variety of performers and artists from different
class backgrounds. His poetry is a testimony to his humanist ideals and his
poetic aesthetic was often guided by the theme of exile and separation. As a
cultural commentator he had a vision to offer for the future of Pakistani
culture and society, one that tried to blend the secular with the religious and
not to see them as two separate entities. He was committed to the national
project as an essential route to the recovery of human dignity lost during the
colonial period but his left politics meant that he would remain on the fringes
of the cultural life of the nation. Toward the latter part of his career he seemed
to shift his poetic ideals from a revolutionary national politics to an aesthetic
of Worldiness that rejuvenated his faith in human life.

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