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Date of Birth:
Place:
Faiz's mother was Sultan
College Education: Passed his B.A. (Honours) in Arabic from the
Employment: Lecturer in English at
Marriage & Children: In March 9th, arrested under Safety Act and charged in the
Despite working with the army and government, Faiz remained involved with literary pursuits, serving as editor of the
His legacy
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Faiz was acknowledged long ago as the greatest Urdu poet after Iqbal. Even those who were critical of his progressive social and political beliefs could not deny him that position, although they always qualified their praise of him by regretting that such a good man should have fallen among the Communists.
He was a keen student of various traditions of classical poetry in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English among others and had realized at an early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of poetry, that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its totality and wholeness.
His Critical essays, written mostly during his formative years, are a testimony to the fact that he had arrived at, and formulated clearly the essential elements of the poetics necessary for our age, the age of the masses.
Iqbal had sung poems of glory to the fact of revolution and given out a clarion call to the people to rise up against the master-classes and tyrants. Faiz, having joined the people in their rebellion, and having adopted the collective cause as a poet of the revolution, made the transformation of the individual human being and his passage through the infinite variety of situations and moods in this process, the subject of his poetry. He is concerned, above all, with the experience of the individual human soul in the long and arduous journey of revolutionary struggle.
And yet love is the leit motif of his poetry. Faiz is one of the great lyricists who seems, from one point of view, to have sung of nothing with greater passion than love.
Faiz takes Ghalib's plea for a deeply philosophical coordination of the poetic profession as his premise to refute the arguments of the aesthetes of his time for whom poetry was merely peripheral activity. But he goes further and comments that Ghalib's definition of creative vision is incomplete, because the poet is not only required to see the ocean in the drop, but also has to show it to others.
That is why, apart from being a great revolutionary poet, he was a great love poet, and there was no distinction between the two, love and revolution had become identical in him.
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Faiz Ahmad Faiz is the voice of the conscience of the suffering humanity of our times. A voice which is a song as well as a challenge, which has a burning faith and cries out against the agony of its era, a constant endeavor and the thunder of the revolution, as well as the sweet recital of love and beauty. This had particularly affected the colonial economy of
The young, smart lads of college, who considered themselves all-powerful, were grovelling in the country lanes in search of livelihood. These were the days when the laughter of the children ceased. Bankrupt farmers left their farms and looked for menial work in cities. Respectable women took to prostitution.
When personal sorrow drank the elixir of world-sorrow, the lovers' love became doubly strong:
My heart repents neither this love nor the other,
My heart is spotted with every kind of sorrow,
Except the mark of repentance.
Faiz is a poet of beauty and love. His message is the reign of beauty and love in the country. The passion for enjoying the beauty of life, his deep attachment to love of self and the agony of the world, his love of humanity, his patriotism, his passion for revolution, his sense of justice, are all metaphors of the agony of love. That agony of love which is the soul of his imagination and feeling, on account of which he illuminates the beauty of both worlds with the desolation of his heart.
He does not agree with the doctrine of art for art's sake, or of existentialism that artistic and social values are things apart. Referring to the poet Keats's famous lines that beauty is love and love is beauty and a beautiful object is an eternal source of joy, Faiz says that, notwithstanding what Keats may have felt, beauty can only be eternal when it is creative, when it inspires the onlooker's enthusiasm, thought and action with promoting more beauty. For Faiz, the testing power of beauty is in its creativity. Beauty is not mere artistic value, it is also a social and moral value:
The candle of a look, the star of imagination, All these illuminations have come from your gathering.
Whichever be the source of pain, we ascribe it to you,
Whatever complaints we have, are on account of you.
If it be the agony of the world, if it is the beloved's face or the hand of the rival,
We responded towards all of these with love.
Faiz wrote a sad revolutionary battle-song, the like of which is not be found in any language of the world:
For the love of your flower-like lips,
We were sacrificed on the dry branches of the noose,
For the desire of the candles of your hands
We were killed on half-dark paths.
And with revolutionary dignity:
On our lips the words of the ghazal,
And the torch of misery in our hands,
Gather our banners from the place of murder,
Caravans of other lovers will emerge,
For whose path our feet have shortened the distances of pain.
Faiz Sahib has said that poetry is not only seeing, it is also struggle and in this struggle, one's participation according to one's ability is not only a demand of life, it is also a demand of art.
Faiz Sahib's philosophy of love is derived from his philosophy of beauty. He was very fond of the verse of Hafiz Shirazi in which the poet considers love to be of everlasting reality. The repetition of this verse is to be found in Faiz Sahib' poetry. In the Lenin Peace Prize speech he had said:
I believe that humanity which has never been defeated by its enemies will, after all, be successful; even now and at long last, instead of wars, hatred and cruelty, the foundation will rest on the message of Hafiz, an old Persian poet: "Every foundation you see is defective, except the foundation of love, which is faultless.
And Faiz Sahib prays:
Let us too lift our hands,
We who do not remember the customary prayer,
We who do not remember any idol or God except love.
This agony of love is not only a part of the human condition but it is a relationship which extends from one end of the world to another. Faiz Sahib's love for humanity is free from the prejudices of race, colour or nationality. The new literature of protest suggests a radical change and, in the words of Faiz, it confers on us the power of "forcefully spurning the hand of the killer". It does not accept defeat because it is convinced that darkness should and must end.
Publications
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.Naqshe Faryadi, 1941
• Daste Saba, 1953
• Zindan Nama, 1956
• Mizan, a collection of literary articles,1956
• Daste-Tahe-Sang, 1965
• Sare-Wadiye Seena, 1971
• Shame-Shehr Yaran, 1979
• Merey Dil Merey Musafar, 1981
• Nuskha-Hai-Wafa, 1984
