Contents · 5 sections · 5 min
Faiz in Four Ideas
the essentialsLove and revolution
The ghazal’s beloved becomes the people, the homeland, the revolution — and the lover a prisoner of conscience.
Not the old love
“Do not ask me, my love, for that love of before” — the poet cannot forget the sorrows of the world for the beloved alone.
Speak, for your lips are free
“Bol ki lab āzād haĩ tere” — the call to speak while there is still time.
The dawn that was not
“Ye dāgh dāgh ujālā” — the stained light of 1947, not the dawn that was longed for.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz is the most celebrated Urdu poet since Muhammad Iqbal and one of the great poets of the twentieth century in any language. A Marxist, a member of the Progressive Writers' Movement, a journalist, a soldier, a prisoner and an exile, he transformed the classical Urdu Ghazal — with its lover, cruel beloved, rival, tavern, cage and garden — into a language for political struggle, without losing its music or its tenderness: in Faiz, the beloved may be a woman, the homeland, the people or the revolution, and the lover’s suffering is that of the prisoner and the oppressed. His poems — “Mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat merī mahbūb na mā̃g”, “Bol”, “Subh-e-Āzādī”, “Ham dekhẽge” — are sung by the great singers of the subcontinent and chanted at protests from Lahore to Delhi.
Life
Faiz was born on 13 February 1911 in Sialkot, Punjab, into a prosperous family; his father, Sultan Muhammad Khan, a lawyer who had worked for the Emir of Afghanistan, died when Faiz was a student, leaving debts. He studied Arabic and Persian with Mir Hasan, Iqbal’s old teacher, and took MAs in English and Arabic at Government College and Oriental College, Lahore. He became a lecturer in English at the M.A.O. College in Amritsar (1935), where he came under the influence of the Marxist doctor Rashid Jahan and her husband Mahmuduzzafar, of the Angārē group, and joined the Progressive Writers’ Movement at its founding (1936). His first collection, Naqsh-e-Faryādī (1941), contained the poem that announced his turn from romantic love to the world:
Mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat merī mahbūb na mā̃g… Aur bhī dukh haĩ zamāne mẽ mohabbat ke sivā Rāhatẽ aur bhī haĩ vasl kī rāhat ke sivā
Do not ask me, my love, for that love of before… There are other sorrows in the world besides love, Other comforts besides the comfort of union.
He describes how he once thought the beloved’s eyes were the whole world, and then saw “the dark and brutal spells woven through countless centuries, bodies sold in markets, wrapped in silk and satin, smeared with dust and blood” — and turns away, still loving, toward the suffering of the world.
In 1941 he married Alys George, an Englishwoman and communist who converted to Islam and became Kulsoom; she was later a well-known journalist in Pakistan. During the Second World War, believing fascism the greatest danger, he joined the British Indian Army as a public relations officer and rose to lieutenant colonel. After the war he became the editor of the Pakistan Times in Lahore and a leader of trade unions.
Partition and independence in 1947 brought not joy but grief at the violence; his “Subh-e-Āzādī” (“The Dawn of Freedom”, August 1947) is one of the great poems of disillusion:
Ye dāgh dāgh ujālā, ye shab-gazīda sahar Vo intizār thā jiskā, ye vo sahar to nahīṃ
This stained, spotted light, this night-bitten dawn — This is not the dawn we waited for.
In 1951 he was arrested with other leftists and army officers in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, accused of plotting a coup against the Liaquat Ali Khan government, sentenced, and imprisoned for four years, partly in solitary confinement, in Hyderabad (Sindh), Lahore, Montgomery and Rawalpindi. Prison produced two of his finest books, Dast-e-Sabā (“The Hand of the Breeze”, 1952) and Zindān Nāma (“The Prison Book”, 1956), where the ghazal’s cage and beloved became prison and freedom:
Matā-e-loh-o-qalam chhin gaī to kyā gham hai Ki khūn-e-dil mẽ ḍubo lī haĩ ũgliyā̃ maĩne
If they have taken away my pen and paper, what does it matter? I have dipped my fingers in the blood of my heart.
Released in 1955, he travelled widely, won the Lenin Peace Prize (1962), and under the regime of Ayub Khan was arrested again. After the military coup of Zia-ul-Haq (1977), he went into exile in Beirut, where he edited Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, and wrote poems for Palestine. He returned to Lahore shortly before his death on 20 November 1984.
Poetry
Faiz’s art is a fusion of the classical and the modern. He used the traditional diction, imagery and forms of Persian and Urdu poetry — the ghazal, the qit’a, the nazm — with their beloved, rival, preacher, tavern, garden and cage, but gave them a new, political range of meaning, so that every love poem could be read as a political poem and every political poem retained the intimacy and music of a love poem. His verse is melodious, restrained, compassionate and never merely propagandistic. Censors could not easily object to a poem about longing for the beloved.
“Bol” (“Speak”):
Bol ki lab āzād haĩ tere Bol zabā̃ ab tak terī hai… Bol ye thoṛā vaqt bahut hai Jism-o-zabā̃ kī maut se pahle Bol ki sach zinda hai ab tak Bol jo kuchh kahnā hai kah le
Speak, for your lips are free; Speak, your tongue is still your own… Speak — this little time is enough Before the death of body and tongue; Speak, for truth is still alive; Speak — say whatever you have to say.
“Gulõ mẽ rang bhare”, a ghazal sung by Mehdi Hassan, opens “Gulõ mẽ rang bhare bād-e-naubahār chale / Chale bhī āo ki gulshan kā kārobār chale” (“Let the spring breeze fill the flowers with colour; come, so that the garden’s business may go on”) — a love poem and a call for freedom.
“Ham dekhẽge” (“We Shall See”, 1979), written under Zia’s Islamising dictatorship, uses the Qur’anic imagery of the Day of Judgement to prophesy the fall of tyrants: “Jab arz-e-Khudā ke kaabe se / Sab but uṭhvāe jāẽge… Sab tāj uchhāle jāẽge / Sab takht girāe jāẽge” (“When from the Kaaba of God’s earth all the idols are removed… all crowns will be tossed, all thrones brought down”). In 1986 the singer Iqbal Bano sang it at a concert in Lahore, defying a ban, to a crowd of thousands who shouted “Inqilāb zindabād”. In 2019–20 it became an anthem of student protests in India.
Legacy
Faiz is the most loved Urdu poet of modern times in both Pakistan and India; his poems are sung by Noor Jehan (“Mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat”), Mehdi Hassan, Iqbal Bano, Nayyara Noor, Abida Parveen and Jagjit Singh, and translated into many languages (by V. G. Kiernan, Agha Shahid Ali, Naomi Lazard). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize. His values — internationalism, humanism, solidarity with the oppressed, faith in human dignity — are embodied in a poetry of rare beauty.
In conversation
- “Aur bhī dukh haĩ zamāne mẽ mohabbat ke sivā” — there are other sorrows in the world besides love.
- “Bol ki lab āzād haĩ tere” — speak while you still can.
- “Ye dāgh dāgh ujālā” — the stained dawn; a freedom that did not fulfil its promise.
- “Ham dekhẽge” — we shall see the tyrants fall.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz in two minutes
The greatest Urdu poet of the twentieth century — a Marxist and lover whose ghazals and nazms fused the classical language of love with revolution, prison and protest; jailed in Pakistan, exiled in Beirut, sung across the subcontinent: >- “Mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat”, “Bol”, “Ham dekhẽge”.
- Love and revolution. The ghazal’s beloved becomes the people, the homeland, the revolution — and the lover a prisoner of conscience.
- Not the old love. “Do not ask me, my love, for that love of before” — the poet cannot forget the sorrows of the world for the beloved alone.
- Speak, for your lips are free. “Bol ki lab āzād haĩ tere” — the call to speak while there is still time.
- The dawn that was not. “Ye dāgh dāgh ujālā” — the stained light of 1947, not the dawn that was longed for.
Curiosities
did you know?- He was imprisoned for four years (1951–55) in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, and wrote two of his finest books in jail.
- He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 and was nominated for the Nobel Prize.
- ‘Ham dekhẽge’, written in 1979 under Zia’s dictatorship, was sung by Iqbal Bano in Lahore in 1986, in a black sari, to a huge crowd that shouted ‘Inqilab zindabad’.
- He worked as an army officer in the Second World War, rising to lieutenant colonel, fighting fascism.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can a love poem be a political act?
- Must the poet choose between the beloved and the world’s suffering?
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