by AMIR SUHAIL WANI
The Urdu poet was born on February 13, 1911 in Sialkot of undivided India.
Exclusion, ostracism, imprisonment and other variations of imaginable/unimaginable infliction seem to be the universal fate of great minds and souls and those who stand for truth. History has been unkind to its heroes and has chased them to death. As we trace this trajectory, we see Socrates holding his hemlock, Jesus carrying his cross, Hallaj fleshed alive, Meera tortured, Sarmad beheaded. Their truth displeased their contemporaries and upset the societies they lived in. “Truth is an explosive, in whose presence everything is in danger”, remarked Nietzsche. No wonder that power and societies have always been afraid of truth and pushed it to margins, lest it usurp the tyranny and brings down “the earthly Gods” from their raised pedestals. The phenomenon that Faiz would depict as:
“When, from the seat of the Almighty
every pedestal will lie displaced…”— translated by Victor Kiernan
Art and truth have been eternal twins and art has been seen as the expression of truth in its most unalloyed form. That is why artists have been haunted by the power and made to suffer on one pretext or the other. Poetry, the sublime artistic expression is the most potent and radical way of articulating the truth. Poets have mostly stood on the wrong side of the power and took upon themselves the task of making the truth known. Faiz Ahmad Faiz is a poet of this family, the family of which Persian poet Nazeeri Nishapuri said, “The one who is not killed is not from our tribe”.
Poetry of passion
Faiz, born to a well-to-do and literature-loving family had a knack for poetry and had devoured a vast share of Persian, Urdu and English classics while he was still a teenager. Teachers like Moulvi Mir Hassan and Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabasum had tuned his poetic strings while he was a student at Government College Lahore. However, his revolutionary spirit was asleep and the poetry of defiance, which later characterised his style, was yet to flow from his pen. Besides his evolving poetic sensitivities, his mind and soul were open to the developments taking place at home and in the world and he was deeply disturbed by events such as the growing economic disparity among people, the rapid spread of fascism and the systemic intrusion of capitalism into the lives of masses world over.
However, this was just a feeling at this stage and had not assumed the character of a well-found ideology in Faiz’s mindscape.
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