Persona
The Legend lives on…

By Maira Ahmed

Pakistan is blessed by many renowned and great poets; Faiz Ahmed Faiz is, without any doubt, one of them.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry proved to be a major breakthrough in the darkest times of our country's history. Many critics believe that after Iqbal, Ghalib and Mir, he is the fourth greatest poet of the Urdu literature. Revolutionary and rebellious touches can be easily distinguished in his poetry.

Faiz was born in 1911 in Sialkot. He received a bachelor's degree in Arabic, followed by a master's degree in English from the Government College, Lahore in 1932. Later, he received another master's degree in Arabic from the Oriental College, Lahore. After graduating in 1935, Faiz began a teaching career at M.A.O College in Amritsar and then in Hailey College of Commerce Lahore.

Faiz's early poems had been conventional and light-hearted, mostly on love and beauty, but while in Lahore he began to expand into politics and community, as he felt it was essential in both life and poetry.

In 1942, he left teaching to join the British Indian Army, for which he received a British Empire Medal for his service during World War II. After the partition of India in 1947, Faiz resigned from the army and became the editor of The Pakistan Times, a socialist English-language newspaper.

On March 9, 1951, Faiz was arrested with a group of army officers under the Safety Act, and charged with a failed coup attempt that became known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. He was sentenced to death and spent four years in prison before being released. Two of his poetry collections, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan Nama, focus on life in prison, which he considered an opportunity to see the world in a new way. While living in Pakistan after his release, Faiz was appointed to the National Council of the Arts by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government, and his poems, which had previously been translated into Russian, earned him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963.

In 1964, Faiz settled in Karachi and was appointed principal of Abdullah Haroon College, while also working as an editor and writer for several distinguished magazines and newspapers. He worked in an honorary capacity for the Department of Information during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, and wrote stark poems of outrage over the ensuing bloodshed. However, when Bhutto was overthrown by Zia-Ul-Haq, Faiz was forced into exile in Beirut, Lebanon. There he edited the magazine Lotus, and continued to write poems in Urdu. He remained in exile until 1982. He died in Lahore in 1984, shortly after receiving a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

Throughout his eventful life, Faiz continually wrote and published, becoming the best-selling modern Urdu poet in India and Pakistan. While his work is written in fairly strict diction, his poems maintain a casual, conversational tone, creating tension between the elite and the common, somewhat in the tradition of Ghalib. Faiz is especially celebrated for his poems in traditional Urdu forms, such as the ghazal, and his remarkable ability to expand the conventional thematic expectations to include political and social issues. Popular ghazal singers have transformed his beautiful poetry into sweet melodies. His popular ghazals transformed into songs are Dasht-e-Tanhai, Bahar Aie, Hum Dekhain Gay, etc.