Faiz Ahmed Faiz gave Pakistan its Ghalib and Gandhi a bitter lesson on revolution

In the army, Faiz was awarded the rank of captain and assigned to the department of broadcasting and public information. His duties included summarizing all the news received on wireless, writing commentaries and generally helping mould public opinion in favour of the War effort.

He also monitored and reported to the English high command on the movements and activities of the Soviet Red Army on various fronts.

According to one of his closest friends, Maryam ("Mira") Salganik: "Twenty years after the war, when Faiz came to the Soviet Union for the first time, people would be amazed by his encyclopedic knowledge of the geography and military history of our country."

Once Faiz decided to join the fight against the Fascists alongside the British, he threw himself into his duties as wholeheartedly as he had elsewhere. His hard work and keen intelligence did not go unnoticed by his British superiors. In 1943 he was promoted to the rank of major and in 1944 to lieutenant colonel.

For Faiz, it was essential for all thinking people to resist the onslaught of fascism, an ideology that wore many masks and was not confined to any particular era, nation or place.

Faiz understood that the bloodthirsty invasions of the Mongols or Tatars were a thing of the past. In the modern age, fascism was one form of capitalist oppression in which the aggressor took over the lands, resources and people of another region and used them for its own benefit, frequently denying the subjugated people even the right to live their lives in their own way.

The First World War was a war between two empires that had grown over the previous 300 years and had come into conflict over their desire to devour each other’s territories and resources. As a result, the map of the world, especially Europe, Asia and Africa, was radically redrawn. In every war, Faiz felt, a philosophical, religious or political slogan is coined to justify the slaughter. These slogans hide the real face of fascism as well as its bloodthirsty intentions. Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany had reinvigorated their defeated nations after the First World War precisely by invoking the glory of their "superior" race and this race’s inevitable destiny of ruling the world.

There was no question of dialogue or accommodation with other, ‘inferior’, races. Faiz was convinced that fascism had to be crushed before it destroyed everything that human civilization had achieved after hundreds of years of struggle and sacrifice. 

This was why, when Germany and Italy were raining death and destruction on the cities of Soviet Russia, Faiz considered Gandhi-ji’s ‘Quit India’ slogan neither democratic nor patriotic.

One reason was that after the First World War, many groups in India, both Muslim and Hindu, had begun to find fascist ideology attractive since they had become convinced that the only way of ridding India of the British was by force. They were even prepared to find an accommodation with the fascists to achieve this goal.

Faiz had recognised this tendency and in response to Gandhi-ji’s slogan, he wrote his iconic "To a political leader" (included in his collection Dast-e-Saba):

• Abhorrent to you is the all-enveloping darkness, yet
• You wish these hands be cut off
• And the day pulsing in the ambush of the East
• Be buried under the iron corpse of night!

In India, the Indian National Army (INA) of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Ahrar Party and the Khaksar Tehreek all carried the germ of fascism within them, and Faiz knew that unless society was cleansed of this germ, it would forever threaten human civilisation with death and destruction.

Many of his friends enquired about the lack of any mention of fascism in his writings from this period, to which Faiz replied: "The thing is, in those days, we were struggling against Fascism in actual practice and [I] never found time to write poetry [against Fascism] nor did I feel a need for it."

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The image of one who laments

• Last night your faded memory filled my heart
• Like spring’s calm advent in the wilderness
• Like the soft desert footfalls of the breeze
• Like peace somehow coming to one in sickness.

In late 1941, Faiz and Alys returned to Lahore. Faiz was delighted to find that a copy of his first collection of poems had been delivered from his publisher. It was titled Naqsh-e Faryadi (The Image of One who Laments).The slim volume of poems became an instant hit both among ordinary poetry readers as well as critics, who singled out "Faiz’s 'creative use of words', 'energy' and 'the uniqueness and freshness of (the collection’s) imagery'."

Since its first publication in 1941, Naqsh-e Faryadi has remained a perennial favourite of poetry lovers. Many of its poems have been set to music and sung by the biggest names of the subcontinent.

Today, close to eighty years later, it is obvious that in this first collection itself, Faiz created the particular poetic style which was to become his hallmark. It was in Naqsh-e Faryadi that Faiz created the language and the diction for which he became famous and because of which he is "generally perceived as the hinge between classical and modern ghazal".

It is often said that a poet’s genius becomes evident early on in his career whereas a prose writer’s art matures with age. This is certainly true of both Faiz and the man he considered "the last and greatest of the classical poets of the Urdu language", Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869).

He once wrote that no one can claim to have read enough of Ghalib, such is the depth and intensity of his poetry. Faiz borrowed the title of his first collection of poems from the very first verse of Ghalib’s ‘diwan’, his collected works. Ghalib’s diwan begins, as tradition dictates, with a ‘hamd’, an ode to the Almighty:

• Naqsh faryadi hai kis ki shokhi-e tahrir ka
• Kaghazi hai pairhan har paikar’e tasweer ka

About whose mischievousness of writing is the image complaining [Made] of paper is the robe of every figure of the picture.

Writing in 1865, this is how Ghalib himself explained the verse: First listen to the meaning of the meaningless verses. As for naqsh faryadi: In Iran there is the custom that the seeker of justice [dad-khvah], putting on paper garments, goes before the ruler— as in the case of lighting a torch in the day, or carrying a bloodsoaked cloth on a bamboo pole [to protest an injustice].

Thus the poet reflects, of whose mischievousness of writing is the image a plaintiff? —since the aspect of a picture is that its garment is of paper. That is to say, although existence may be like that of pictures, merely notional, it is a cause of grief and sorrow and suffering.

It should be pointed out here that it is difficult, if not impossible, to adequately translate the term ‘naqsh-e faryadi’ into another language. In Russian, the title has been translated as ‘forlorn images’, and by noted Faiz translator, Victor Kiernan, as ‘remonstrance’.

Be that as it may, by choosing this title, Faiz paid tribute to his great predecessor and situated his poetry as a continuation of the same venerable tradition.

In order to understand the impact of a great poet on his era, it is necessary to also understand the age in which the poet lives.

According to Faiz’s friend and literary scholar Ludmila Vasilieva:

A truly great poet is the product of his circumstances, the need of the times. What makes a great poet is not exactly something which can be quantified or categorised. It is like Iqbal says, ‘Bari mushkil se hota hai chaman mein deedawer paida’ [With great difficulty is a discerning eye born6].

A great poet, a true seer, is a representative of his times. He is born when the time is exactly ripe for him to come forward and stand in for his era through his poetry. Faiz was a poet of few words. He has not written a lot but just the same, there is not a single chapter in the history of the subcontinent that has not been reflected in Faiz’s poetry. Before the turmoil surrounding 1947, his poetry spoke of love, of romanc.

Then came his famous "Mujh se pehli se muhabbat merey mehboob na maang" [Do not ask of me, my darling, that love of old]. After 1947, he wrote of his country, of the world and everything he wrote clicked instantly with the masses. He was sparing in his words, but how well he spoke them! The “Inqilaab” chanting, thundering firebrands departed with Josh (Malihabadi).

Faiz’s call for the truth is much more dulcet and soothing and has transcended far greater boundaries…

The appeal of Faiz’s words was such that even his staunch enemies used to recite his verses and sway to the rhythm of his words in the privacy of their own houses. I believe that is the truest test of a great poet.

All the truly great poets rise from the troubles that embroil their people and their times. Take the Soviet Union. The atrocities of the Tsarist regime produced the likes of Pushkin and Lermontov.

In Pakistan, you had Faiz. Going back further in history, even Ghalib was the product of his circumstances, since that was a time when the old world order was crumbling in on itself to usher in a new world.7

Ghalib wrote:

• Consumed by the agony of remembrance
• The remembrance of night’s festive company
• The one remaining candle flickers and dies.

"The flickering candle," wrote Faiz, "battling to the last breath [was] the poet himself [that is, Ghalib]…the last articulate spectator of the glory that has departed. [Ghalib] envisions the passing away of an age, a civilization and a way of life [and] an experience timeless and universal—the experience of the evanescence of time."

Just as Ghalib became the mirror of the tumultuous changes occurring in India with the decline and fall of the Mughal empire and the ascendancy of the British, Faiz became the voice of his era with the rise of socialism and the cataclysms of the First and Second World Wars and all they entailed.

About Ghalib, Faiz said in a speech, referring to the importance of poetry and the responsibilities of a poet: The mark of great poetry and that of a great poet is this: what is the expanse of his vision in relation to the expanse of his era and how much of the pain of the world and the pain of humanity has he included in his art. The more profound his pain, the greater will be his art. Ghalib fulfils this condition.

He is, no doubt, a great poet. Like Ghalib, Faiz does not belabour the harsh realities of life. He prefers to allude to them through the metaphors and symbols of classical Urdu poetry. The particular artistic and linguistic qualities evident in Faiz’s first collection of poetry marked him out as someone special and even today, Naqsh-e Faryadi is the benchmark against which all his later work is judged.

(Reprinted with publisher's permission.)