FAIZ AHMED FAIZ
THE COLOURS OF MY HEART
Selected Poems
Translated from the Urdu by Baran Farooqi
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Translator’s Introduction
Naqsh-e Fariyaadi
1. View (1)
Ek Manzar (1)
2. Beloved, Don’t Ask Me for the Love That Was
Mujhse Pehli Si Muhabbat Meri Mehboob Na Maang
3. Ghazal: Having Lost the Two Worlds to Your Love
Donon Jahaan Teri Muhabbat Mein Haar Ke
4. Solitude
Tanhaai
5. A Few Days More, My Love
Chand Roz Aur Meri Jaan
6. The Death of the Fires of Love
Marg-e Soz-e Muhabbat
7. Speak
Bol
8. Iqbal
Iqbal
9. Highway
Shahraah
Dast-e Saba
10. Poem
Nazm: Mata-e Lauh-o Qalam
11. My Companion, My Friend
Mere Humdum Mere Dost
12. The Dawn of Freedom, August 1947
Subh-e Azaadi
13. Ghazal: The Tablet and the Pen
Lauh-o Qalam
14. Ghazal: As Soon As the Wounds of Your Memory Begin to Heal
Tumhaari Yaad Ke Jab Zakhm Bharne Lagte Hain
15. To Your Beauty
Tumhaare Husn Ke Naam
16. Ghazal: Colour, the Name of Your Dress
Rang Pairaahan Ka Khushbu Zulf Lehraane Ka Naam
17. Ghazal: Your Forgotten Sorrows Wander Back into the Heart
Dil Mein Ab Yun Tere Bhoole Huwe Gham Aate Hain
18. The Heart’s Wine Glass, Once Broken, Can’t Be Repaired
Sheeshon Ka Maseeha Koi Nahi
19. Ghazal: Let There Be Some Clouds, Let There Be Some Wine
Aaye Kuchh Abr Kuchh Sharaab Aaye
20. An Evening in the Prison House
Zindaan Ki Ek Shaam
21. A Morning in the Prison House
Zindaan Ki Ek Subh
22. Remembrance
Yaad
Zindaan Nama
23. Meeting
Mulaqaat
24. Ghazal: When Does the Memory of You Leave My Side?
Kab Yaad Mein Tera Saath Nahi
25. O City of Lights!
Ay Raushniyon Ke Shahr
26. Ghazal: Some Is Supplied to the Secret Assemblies
Kuchh Mohtasibon Ki Khalwat Mein
27. A Lover to a Beloved
Koi Aashiq Kisi Mehbooba Se
Dast-e Tah-e Sang
28. Hand Trapped under a Block of Stone
Dast-e Tah-e Sang Aamdah
29. Ghazal: How Can Friends and Comrades Gather in Celebration?
Jamegi Kaise Bisaat-e Yaaraan Ki Sheesha-o Jaam Bujh Gaye Hain
30. Ghazal: The Sick Are Almost Lifeless Now
Be-dum Huwe Bimaar Dawa Kyun Nahin Dete
31. Life
Zindagi
32. Ghazal: The Sorrow of Your Love Needed Lives
Tere Gham Ko Jaan Ki Talaash Thi
33. The Rain of Stones Has Stopped
Khatm Hui Baarish-e Sang
34. The Colours of My Heart
Rang Hai Dil Ka Mere
35. Stay Close, Close to Me
Paas Raho
36. View (2)
Manzar (2)
Sar-e Waadi-e Seena
37. Observe the City from Here
Yahan Se Shahr Ko Dekho
38. Ghazal: Life of the Whole World
Kis Harf Pe Tu-ne Gosha-e Lab Ay Jaan-e Jahaan Ghammaaz Kiya
39. Wall of Night
Deewaar-e Shab Aur Aks-e Rukh-e Yaar Saamne
40. Compacts Made with Desire and Longing
Kiye Aarzu Se Paimaan Jo Ma’al Tak Na Pahunche
41. Prayer
Dua
42. Ghazal: It Would Be Impossible
Sharh-e Bedardi-e Haalaat Na Hone Paayi
Shaam-e Shahr-e Yaaraan
43. The Day of Death
Jis Roz Qaza Aayegi
44. An Evening in Ashkabad
Ashkabad Ki Ek Shaam
45. If My Pain Was Given Words
Mere Dard Ko Jo Zubaan Mile
46. Evening, Be Gracious
Ay Shaam Meherbaan Ho
47. Ghazal: No Rivals, No Counsellors, No Sharers of Grief
Na Ab Raqeeb Na Naasih Na Ghamgusaar Koi
48. After a Visit to Dhaka
Dhaka Se Waapsi Par
49. Do What You Must Do
Tum Apni Karni Kar Guzro
50. I Spent Some of My Time Loving, Some of My Time Working
Kuchh Ishq Kiya Kuchh Kaam Kiya
51. Imagination Again Seeks a Word
Aaj Ek Harf Ko Phir Dhoondta Phirta Hai Khayaal
Mere Dil Mere Musaafir
52. My Heart, O My Wayfarer!
Dil-e Mann Musaafir-e Mann
53. View (3)
Manzar (3)
54. A Ghazal for the Hafiz of Shiraz
Nazr-e Haafiz
55. Ghazal: Tyranny Giving Lessons in the Fidelity of Love
Sitam Sikhlaayega Rasm-e Wafa Aise Nahin Hota
Ghubaar-e Ayyaam
56. Ash of Disunion, Blossoms of Union
Hijr Ki Raakh Aur Wisaal Ke Phool
57. Homage to Maulana Hasrat Mohani
Nazr-e Maulana Hasrat Mohani
Footnote
52. My Heart, O My Wayfarer!
Dil-e Mann Musaafir-e Mann
Notes
Appendix: Urdu Transliteration of the Poems
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Translator’s Introduction
Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in 1911 in Kala Qadir, a village near Sialkot, now in Pakistan. He died in November 1984, having lived an illustrious life as the leading Urdu poet of his time. He was the one modern Urdu poet after Iqbal whose fame and reputation spread far beyond the boundaries of language and place. He was a poet whom the world knew for his melodious poetic voice and revolutionary message—a message, it must be added, that was never delivered in a strident or rabble-rousing manner. His poetry continues to charm and fascinate generations of poets and readers after him. In fact, eminent writers of the 1960s, who professed to scoff at the achievements of the Progressives, spared and stinted nothing in admiring Faiz and writing about him.
It is clear that Faiz became a legend in his lifetime. Many factors contributed to the Faiz phenomenon: his image as a revolutionary who had an aristocratic background; the circumstances of his political life (he was imprisoned twice for his political acts and beliefs and went into self-exile later); his personal charm and his refusal to be dragged into controversies or even reply to his critics (of whom there were many to begin with, especially in the so-called ‘classical’ camp); the music of his verse and its rich imagery which was not only evocative of Urdu poetry’s resplendent and much-admired premodern idiom, but which also still sounded contemporary and relevant; and his melancholy voice which was never devoid of undertones of hope and promise. As his reputation grew, so did his image, so much so that it almost became larger than life. And its lustre continues to dazzle us long after his death in 1984.
The Making of a Poet
Faiz was born in incredibly turbulent times for the world at large, and particularly for the Indian subcontinent. Though born into an affluent, aristocratic family (his grandfather had been a provincial governor in Afghanistan), Faiz did not go abroad to study like some of his peers from wealthy families. He studied philosophy and English literature in Lahore and finished with an MA in Arabic. He started his career as a junior lecturer i
n a college at Amritsar. What was it like to be Faiz Ahmed in those times (for Faiz hadn’t yet adopted for himself the pen name Faiz Ahmed Faiz)?
It was 1934–35. Anti-British, or nationalistic sentiment, the desire for freedom, to rid the country of the foreigner, was everywhere in the air. So was, unfortunately, the feeling of ‘communal’ conflict between the two main communities of Hindus and Muslims. Left-wing thought was making its presence felt, but it was generally side by side with the nationalist struggle and was mixed with it, not alien to it. The Communist Party of India had been founded in 1925, but its identity was often the same as the Indian National Congress, the main political party in the country at that time. Nevertheless, life in Amritsar ran to a sweet, slow tenor, and the young Faiz could indulge in discussion and debate with his young friends, read voraciously and compose poetry. The tradition of the mushaira was strong and poetry was still something of a public affair at that time. Even Iqbal, whose poetry was philosophical and complex, was as much a public figure in the Amritsar of the 1930s as any major political leader like Mahatma Gandhi.
Poetry recitation at small or large gatherings inevitably led young poets to do ‘more of the same’. Suggestions from and even participation by the audience in such recitations gave poetry a reality and a place in public life which now seems to have been appropriated by the film song.
The All India Radio, founded in 1930, was also becoming a medium to disseminate and share music and poetry among large audiences. Faiz must have felt inspired to compose more and more. In spite of the largely conventional image that Urdu poetry had at that time, patriotic fervour was bound to make its appearance in any poetry being written at that time. Urdu was no exception and, in fact, led the field in patriotic songs and poetry. In their twenties at that time, Faiz and his friends and peers felt the urge to come up with a line of thought capable of not just combating the colonial presence in the motherland but also of making a stand against the forces of communalism.
The struggle against poverty and the fight against the forces of capitalism gave young Faiz’s poetry a sense of direction. The fight against political and social exploitation provided a common platform for poets who did not recognize the Hindu–Muslim divide, a divide which could have been a concern in Faiz’s poetic imagination. But a common platform for the larger struggle for freedom and social change made communal consciousness irrelevant and superficial. The Marxist ideology, which gave primacy to economic and social forces governing human life in history, and which regarded the struggle for emancipation through revolution an imperative of history rather than a transcendental view of time and change, served the cause of communal harmony well, leading to the rejection of parochial concerns which seemed to be fanning the fires of communalism in those times.
By 1939, Faiz had made a name for himself in poetic circles. By that time he was also spending his time mingling with the working class, teaching them how to read and write and also refining their political sensibilities.
It is an interesting fact of Indian social history that the Muslim leftist intellectuals of those times came mostly from affluent families, or in fact even from what could be described as ‘the ruling elite’. Brought up in the shadow of the Russian Revolution and nurtured on the populist notions of the French Revolution, they felt drawn to Marxism because of their dissatisfaction with the sociopolitical structure of the times, the oppressiveness of the British rule and a strong sense of the need for change. They were inveterate idealists, and though they were later derided for being ‘armchair socialists’ who wouldn’t soil their hands with the sordid dirt of real life, they were true dreamers and idealists. Some well-known names among them are Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Mahmud-uz Zafar, Z.A. Ahmed, Muhammad Habeeb, Sibt-e Hasan, Kaifi Azmi, Sardar Jafri, Muhammad Ashraf, Abdul Aleem and Faiz himself. These wealthy or upper-middle-class intellectuals belonged to different regions but shared the same ideology and the same dream: the world needed to be changed, and Marxism was the force that could bring about the change. The Progressive Writers’ Movement, founded in 1935 in London by Sajjad Zaheer and Mulk Raj Anand, among others, was the literary form of that dream.
To be sure, both Ideology and Dream suffered many shocks in the years to come. The first one was the ugly, nakedly imperialist truth of the pact between Stalin and Hitler which in any case couldn’t prevent Hitler from invading the Soviet Union. But that truth was revealed later; the Soviet war and Hitler’s comeuppance in that war came before. Yet, the Communist Party of India didn’t pause to consider why Stalin didn’t join the war against Hitler as other Western nations had done. The war was viewed in communist circles as an ‘imperial war’, which perhaps it was not, but which quickly became the ‘War against Fascism’ when Hitler invaded Soviet Russia in 1941.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union gave the Progressives the opportunity to express their sense of shock and dismay and protest by joining the British Indian Army. By doing so, Faiz had joined the war against fascism, fighting the oppressors, siding with the oppressed. Then came Indian independence. His poem ‘Subh-e Azaadi’ (The dawn of freedom, August 1947) records the disappointment that he personally, and the communists as a party, felt with the way things ultimately turned out for the Indian subcontinent. The Partition served a massive blow, not just to leftist ideals but also to the Progressive Writers’ Movement. When Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic, Faiz expressed his sense of deep loss by actually attending Gandhi’s funeral in Delhi, despite the fact that Hindu–Muslim relations at that time were more fraught with tension than ever before in history.
Freedom and Its Aftermath
The poem ‘The Dawn of Freedom, August 1947’ expresses disappointment and sorrow on two levels: the Partition and the carnage that accompanied it, and the disappointment that the freedom that came that morning was not a freedom brought by an armed revolution by the people and was therefore incomplete. True to his poetic voice, Faiz expressed his meaning through metaphors which are ambiguous in their nature anyway and seemed even more ambiguous in the context. It began thus:
This light, smeared and spotted, this night-bitten dawn
This isn’t surely the dawn we waited for so eagerly
If the beginning was accusatory and melancholy, its end was some sort of a call to continue the struggle for the revolution:
The weight of the night hasn’t lifted yet
The moment for the emancipation of the eyes and the heart hasn’t come yet
Let’s go on, we haven’t reached the destination yet
Not unexpectedly, the poem drew a stinging rebuke from Sardar Jafri, the ‘official’ spokesman of Progressive literary thought at that time. He blamed Faiz for being ‘too metaphorical’, hence ambiguous, and praised Kaifi Azmi’s poem on the same theme which, he once famously said, had ‘a hortatory and rhetorical voice’.
In February 1947, Faiz became the editor of two dailies in Lahore: the Pakistan Times (in English) and the Imroz (in Urdu). Faiz was also active in the trade union movement and acted upon his beliefs to a very large extent. In 1951, he became the vice president of the Trade Union Congress, the labour wing of the Communist Party of Pakistan. The Pakistan government sent him to San Francisco in 1948 and to Geneva in 1949–50 as a part of the Pakistani government’s delegation to the International Labour Organization.
Things seemed to be going well for Faiz for a while—until he was arrested in March 1951 in connection with the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case.1 He was held in solitary confinement for three months in Sargodha and Lyallpur, where he was even deprived of writing material. It was during this period that he composed the following poem:
My pen and tablet, all that I had
Taken away from me
But what’s there to grieve for?
For I have dipped my fingers in my heart’s blood
So what if my lips have been sealed shut?
I have now put a tongue in
Each and every link of the chain
Denied
pen and paper, Faiz had to commit this verse to memory even as he composed it. This poem exhibits a successful mingling of the classical flavour and revolutionary fervour with which Faiz infused his poetry. It was eventually published later in his collection Dast-e Saba (The touch of the breeze, Nuskha Ha-e Wafa, p. 107).
In 1953, Faiz was transferred to Hyderabad (Sindh) jail. He was released in April 1955 on bail and acquitted in September that year. Faiz’s years in prison have been described in detail by Major Muhammad Ishaq, a fellow ‘conspirator’ and inmate in jail. The account serves well to construct the image of Faiz as the great revolutionary poet, struggling against odds but moving unflinchingly towards the realization of heroic dreams. During the period of his imprisonment, Faiz’s poems had been ingeniously smuggled out of prison or else sent out with his letters and circulated widely. Hence, by the time of his release, Faiz had become a local celebrity, rather, a ‘people’s hero’, with his verses being recited in almost every household across Pakistan.
Faiz was again imprisoned during the period of Ayyub Khan’s martial law in 1958. However, it was not easy to keep him in jail this time as many in the military regime itself had become admirers of his poetry, and he was released after five months. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962. This prize, regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize, was widely acclaimed in the Indian subcontinent. According to Faiz himself, this was a humbling experience for him. I quote a major part of the latter part of his acceptance speech here:2
A few days ago when the world was resounding with the latest Soviet achievement in space, it occurred to me time and again that today when we can observe our world by taking a seat in the world of stars, then these petty meannesses, these selfish actions and these attempts to divide into parts and grasp the essentially small tracts of lands known as countries and the desire to make our writ run among small groups of people—how distant from rationality and reason these things are. Now that the paths of the universe are wide open before us and the treasures of the whole world can easily be under the control of human hands, is there still not present even a small number of people among us who are reasonable, just and honest, who can make everyone agree to wind up military installations, to sink in the ocean the bombs and rockets, the guns and cannons? And let us all, instead of trying to rule one another, go to conquer the universe where there is no shortage of space, where none needs to engage another in battle, where the environment is unlimited and where there are countless worlds. I am quite certain that in spite of all obstruction and difficulties, we will be able to make our human brotherhood agree to this suggestion.
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