Being unfamiliar with the name of Faiz Ahmad Faiz and what it signifies can make one extremely unwelcome in the literary circles of North India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as most of the countries that boast a sizeable Southasian diaspora. In Punjab province, despite a positive dislike for Urdu among some sections, Faiz remains as popular as the Sufi saints, Bulleh Shah or Baba Farid. Faiz was a trade unionist, a Marxist, and lived and died a communist, yet even reactionaries hold the man in high esteem. In Pakistan, he was hounded by several successive governments, and yet no fundamentalist group has ever passed a fatwa against Faiz. How did this happen? How did this mild-mannered, soft-spoken Punjabi, who spoke Urdu in a heavy Punjabi accent and was master of an awful reciting style, manage to surpass all the stalwarts, his seniors and contemporaries, in popularity? Faiz is certainly the only poet after Ghalib to have been translated into almost all languages of the Subcontinent and many further afield.
Of the galaxy of Southasian heroes, pre-or post-Partition, it is difficult to find individuals whose greatness is acknowledged even by their enemies – perhaps Ashfaqullah, Ram Prasad Bismil and Shaheed Bhagat Singh would so qualify. Even those who disagreed with their methods and worked against their ideological positions saluted their commitment to the cause, and accepted them as heroes of the freedom movement. While Faiz has been able to garner similar respect, there is a marked difference with these other three. Ashfaqullah, Bismil and Bhagat Singh were killed while fighting against the British. During this period, Faiz was writing poetry – albeit revolutionary poetry.
Throughout, he remained a consistent votary against imperialism on almost all issues, particularly during the extremely polarised days of the Cold War. Yet despite his publicly declared partisanship, how is it that many of those located on the other side of the ideological divide respected him? There seems to be only one answer: in his chosen field of poetry, Faiz simply stood tall – technically and, perhaps more important, morally. He chose poetry as his arena of revolutionary action, and he did this so well in the battle of ideas that he not only transcended the hitherto prescribed limits of expression, but also redefined the vocabulary of that expression. In doing so, Faiz successfully blurred the boundary between love poetry and revolutionary poetry to the extent that you cannot distinguish between the two.
With his felicity with languages and his brilliant academic record, Faiz could have had a bright career in nearly any field; but he chose a life of commitment, at great personal risk – to his freedom, citizenship and life – and at great cost to his family. Yet it was this steadfastness in his ideals and the uncompromising manner in which he worked that compelled all those who chose to stick to a safe path to bow their heads before him and acknowledge his leading role.