i was somewhat surprised to learn, relatively recently, that one of the greatest poets of Pakistan - and i would argue one of the best poets, period - spent a fair bit of time in prison and was even deemed a traitor for some of his work. It’s sad that such a man should have been called anything but a proud Pakistani… his writings have been translated into numerous languages, are studied in different universities around the world (i just came across the website of a uni in North Carolina or somewhere around there who are studying his translated works). How could such a man be anything but a true Pakistani ? When we seek to silence these voices, we ensure that we ourselves are the worse off for it. Criticism of any country, of any government, does not label one unpatriotic. It is only those who possess a sufficient love for their country, who take the pains of expressing their lonely grief through whatever means possible.
Poet as patriot, Dr. Afzal Mirza, Jang
Is it treason to give a formal expression to the lament about a society’s aspirations going awry?
Both ‘patriot’ and ‘traitor’ have been used so frequently in Pakistan that they have lost much of their original meaning and almost all of their significance. In the case of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, bet on this observation to be true every time someone comes up with the hint that his poetry carries marks of unpatriotism.
Faiz became a target of an onslaught by the rightists and their ilk when he wrote his famous poem Subh-e-Azaadi (The Dawn of Freedom). Those were the days when Pakistan had just come into being and everybody seemed charged with a freshly acquired sense of patriotism. Many were instantly offended by this great poem. They thought it was a poem against Pakistan. So, they thought Faiz should be prosecuted for writing it. Right-wing newspapers and magazines became chockful of editorials and appeals to the government to take Faiz to task.
In those early and difficult post-independence days, religious and national sentiment flew high. People had stopped thinking in a dispassionate way. They were quick to jump to the conclusions without bothering to look into the real causes of the events.
Late Justice (retd) M R Kayani in his book Afkaar-e-Pareeshan has written about a relatively unknown poet Nafees Khalili. As legal adviser to the government in 1948, Kayani was asked his opinion about a verse by Khalili which read:
Dekhta kiya hai mairay munh ki taraf / Quaid-e-Azam ka Pakistan daikh
(Why do you look towards my face / Look at Quaid-e-Azam’s Pakistan.)
The authorities had thought this harmless expression of frustration to be libelous. Kayani rightfully turned down the suggestion that the poet should be tried for writing it. He opined that there was nothing libelous in what in his view was a simple expression of feeling by a sensitive soul.
The case with Faiz was somewhat different. His was a detailed and scathing criticism of the state of affairs in the then Pakistan. The rightists – who had taken upon themselves the task of judging what was patriotic and what was not – found fault with Subh-e-Azaadi because Faiz went much further than Khalili in pointing out the shortcomings and ills of the society. They were mainly offended by the following verses of the poem (as translated by Daud Kamal):
The conclusion the detractors of Faiz drew from the verses was that the poet had called the hard-earned independence as a night-bitten dawn and that he did no deem Pakistan his destination.
The poem was published in his collection Dast-e-Saba which appeared in early 1950s at a time when Faiz was already imprisoned for his alleged involvement in Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case.
His first collection of poetry Naqsh-e-Faryaadi appeared in 1941 when World War II was raging and there was an imminent threat of fascism looming large on the world horizon. It was a year later in 1942 that Faiz decided to join the British Army. He continued serving the army as a lieutenant colonel till December 1946 when the war came to an end. He had joined the army to fight against the menace of fascism. With that movement squarely beaten by the Allies, Faiz felt his mission in the army was over.
It was also the time when the struggle for independence in India had reached a critical stage. Muslims had raised their demand for a separate homeland in 1940 which to the liberals and the leftists was the expression of a minority’s right to self-determination. Even the highest communist body in India supported the idea.
Faiz leaving the army at this critical juncture had more to it than just ideology. He was saying goodbye to an organisation where he enjoyed a lot of clout. He used to attend top level meetings and his views were always solicited on important issues. As he would tell his friends, in those meetings he had found that the British government was not sincere in granting freedom to Indians and was looking for ways and means to wriggle out of their promise of giving India independence after the conclusion of World War II.
After resigning from the army, Faiz thought of reverting to his old profession of teaching. A job opportunity came his way when a left-leaning politician Mian Iftikharuddin decided to launch daily Pakistan Times from Lahore. Faiz was offered the position of its chief editor.
Somehow Pakistan Times had to start its publication earlier than scheduled. When in February 1947 it hit the market, a civil disobedience movement was going on in Punjab. When in August 1947, the British left India dividing the subcontinent into two states. But the Pakistan that the Muslims got as a result was not the one that they had demanded. It was, as Jinnah called it, a truncated Pakistan.
In the large scale bloodshed and migration that followed the partition of Punjab and Bengal, the society became acutely divided on religious grounds. In fact, the whole fabric of society became shattered. Another important political development taking place alongside all this was the influx of feudal lords of Punjab and Sindh into the bandwagon of Muslim League.
Under these circumstances, there emerged two diametrically opposite views of Pakistan. The common man favored the new country because in it he saw an end to the exploitative colonial system and its vestiges of feudalism and capitalism. The feudals saw in it a chance to continue their exploitation of the masses. But soon after Pakistan had come into being, the expectations of the common man were shattered with feudal lords and other exploiting classes remaining in the saddle of power as they ever were.
Faiz had joined Pakistan Times because he supported the idea of Pakistan as, for him, it stood for the emancipation of the masses. But he felt betrayed and disillusioned by what happened soon afterwards. The reasons were obvious as they were numerous. Firstly, it was not the Pakistan that the Muslims of India had demanded. Secondly, it was born amidst large scale carnage in which hundreds and thousands of human beings lost their lives and belongings and thirdly it did not bring about any change in the socio-political structure of the new country. The only change that happened was that the supremacy of white-men was replaced by the high-handedness of brown sahibs and henchmen of former rulers. It was not the anguish of Faiz alone. It was the feeling of every patriotic Pakistani.
All Faiz did through his verse was to articulate this common feeling of despair. For him, like most Pakistanis, the time for the liberation of heart and mind has not come as yet. That is why he wrote:
Continue your arduous journey / This is not your destination.
You summed up my feelings.
