By Afsan Chowdhury
Where
does Faiz the poet and pan-Southasian Marxist end and Faiz the
Pakistani begin? This is a question to which Bangladeshis, among others,
still seek an answer.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz remains one of the great unsolved enigmas of
Southasian literature. Where does Faiz the poet end and Faiz the
politician begin? Where does the pan-Southasian Marxist end and the
Pakistani begin? His engagement with these contradictory identities
constitutes a painful puzzle for his admirers. This becomes all the more
complex because Faiz never seemed to have belonged fully to any one
land – the boundaries of his literary, political and cultural life are
fluid, flowing and overlapping.
The issue becomes even more complex for a Bangladeshi admirer such
as this writer, who was born in the 1950s and to whom Faiz offers a
complex identity and a bonding to great ideals crossing all borders. He
is one Pakistani whom Bangladeshis have looked upon with the greatest
possible admiration and affection. Yet what challenges this bond is the
Faiz of during and immediately after 1971. During those terrible days,
Bangladeshis who knew about or of him would ask each other, What is Faiz saying about all this?
He had become the ‘Good Pakistani’ in the eyes of those in the East.
Yet, was Faiz ever a person who represented more than Pakistan? Was it
possible for him to escape being a Pakistani and have a wider identity
encompassing all the admiring nations of Southasia and beyond?
During the late 1960s, Munir Chowdhury hosted a literary television
show in East Pakistan, during which he would discuss various writers of
Pakistan. He was a legendary speaker, and employed his dramatic skills
to present literary luminaries to a devoted public. In one show he
talked about Faiz, his friend and fellow-traveller. Chowdhury focused on
the poem ‘Mujhse pahli si muhabbat mere mehboob na maang’,
presenting Faiz as a social revolutionary and a poet of the oppressed.
This presentation suited Chowdhury, who had been a Communist Party
member, jailed in 1952 for his activism during the Bengali-focused
Language Movement, and a lifelong literary activist who had become an
icon of Bengali nationalism. He had moved on from his firebrand days,
however, to become more a writer than a politician, an unparalleled
teacher and East Pakistan’s leading dramatist.
Most importantly, Chowdhury’s love for Faiz’s poetry was real. His
introduction was one of the memorable moments of my life, an
introduction to a poet of passion and beauty whom I admire to this day.
Though I understand little of the literary tradition that Faiz upholds
or the magnificent language of his poetry, I appreciate it – somewhere,
there is a deep bond that transcends poetic pursuits. Yet my affection
is also tinged with pain, as I see Faiz nationalised, regionalised, made
language-specific. This is a tragedy for a poet who spoke to all of us
once.
Defanging the revolutionary
During the 1940s, Faiz was certainly a Marxist. At that time he was in
then-undivided India and had gone to war as an officer of the British
Indian army, but returned home to become a journalist. He was married to
Alys, a British sympathiser of the communists, whose sister was married
to an Indian who taught in Aligarh. During this period, as the
nation-states of Pakistan and India came into being, the Communist Party
(CP) told its members to choose countries according to their religions.
Thus, many communists in India and Pakistan emigrated across the new
border obeying the party diktat. Many critics argue that the Communist
Party went ‘communal’ even before that, when it asked cadres to join the
Muslim League or Congress as per their respective religious identity.
Harnessing India’s political will proved to be quite beyond the capacity
of the party, and the CP was relegated to a marginal role.
After Partition, Faiz, who had earlier worked on both sides of the
new border, chose to live in Pakistan. Was this because he believed in
the political structure and state ideology of the new country, one that
subsequently moved increasingly towards becoming what was obvious in its
charter – a state for one faith alone? Faiz was never a Muslim Leaguer,
nor even a ‘Muslim’, so why then would he choose Pakistan? Perhaps it
was never more than a move to his homeland, which by all standards was
much less open than India. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons
that attracted him to Pakistan, but the new country’s ideals certainly
would not have been guiding his decision – maybe, going home was all it
was about.
In Pakistan after 1947, Faiz was known for his views and activism, a
man clearly a part of the left. He was involved with trade unionism,
which even in those early days in Pakistan was considered an activity
almost treasonous. In 1950-51 Faiz was arrested, along with Communist
Party leader Sajjad Zahir and a few military officers led by General
Akbar Khan, for planning a military takeover. There was a period of
prolonged incarceration and a trial followed by a four-year sentence.
What was Faiz trying to do? Gen Akbar, leader of what has since
become known as the Rawalpindi conspiracy, was a rabid Pakistani
nationalist. He wanted to take over Pakistan – not because he wanted a
new form of the state, but because he was frustrated with the Pakistani
leadership, considering it too moderate in dealing with India. How did
Sajjad Zahir and Faiz get involved with such a person? Where was the
common space? I have not come across any material on the motives of the
participants, or of the deals that must have been made between these two
completely disparate groups, the communists and the ultra-nationalists,
to achieve this alliance.
Around the world, communist parties generally tend not to be
pro-army when out of power. But there has always been a fatal attraction
among communists towards the military, in the belief that a coup can
deliver revolution in a quick stroke, rendering organisational work and
resilience unnecessary. This has been tried in Africa with a marked lack
of success, as in Ethiopia and Mozambique; and so too in Bangladesh,
where a one-legged War of Liberation hero, Colonel Abu Taher, came to
power for a few hours in November 1975. He led his Marxist activists in
an anti-officer uprising, which was to deliver socialism. Along with
many others, he was hanged. History has also shown that attempts by
communists to use the military path to power usually end in failure.
There seems to be no satisfactory explanation for the left
involvement in the 1950 Pakistan coup attempt. But Faiz was involved, or
we assume he was, because no ‘confession’ exists. Soon after the
imprisonment, his active political life also began to fade and, anyway,
the CP was banned in 1954. In the public mind, Faiz gradually became
many other things: one of the great poets of our time, a friend of the
Sufis of Pakistan and, finally, the safest and most innocuous, an
outspoken lover of alcohol. Faiz was transformed and fitted into the
benign identity of a great poet who does not challenge the state. Yet
the fact remains: he did challenge it, albeit unsuccessfully.
Poets as communists
The identities of poets and communists do not always go well
together. Poets usually tend to be people of words and passion, moved to
politics by the power of the heart, not ideology. Over time, the two
identities can become contested, if not came in direct conflict. The
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was always a better poet than a Marxist
revolutionary, but he did try to cultivate a mix of both identities.
Bangladesh’s national poet, Nazrul Islam, was jailed for sedition and
was a fellow-traveller of the Communist Party; he even ran the party’s
official newspaper in Bengal but drifted away over time, as his poetry
and songs began to take priority. Also his inter-faith devoutness,
believing in the mystic constructs of Islam and Hinduism (hardly a
Marxist attitude, whichever way you look at it) became increasingly
important to him. Early senility robbed him of his faculties when barely
past forty, and things therefore never really reached a point where
this conflict could grow larger.
Faiz had a better formal education than Nazrul, and also had a
better knowledge of Marxist dogma and its application. He was also more
middle-class and shareef (genteel). His poetry’s roots and tools were the fine wine of Urdu and Persian literature; even his most famous poem ‘Mujhse pehli simuhabbat’,
was written in the language of a chosen few, a highly stylised
articulate Persian-Urdu that would be meaningful only to the
well-educated. He was in many ways far more representative of the CP
leadership’s class and cultural roots than was Nazrul, who came from a
peasant background.
Yet that only underlines the original question: Where could Faiz’s
politics find space in Pakistan? Unlike East Pakistan, where the
communist tradition was deep and its politics itself spurred on by
Marxist intellectuals and cultural activists, West Pakistan was almost
completely bereft of such impulses, united in hatred for India but not
much more. One could name Mian Iftikharuddin and Wali Khan, but these
politicians were more Pashtun than Marxist, and much of the left
nationalism was limited to NWFP and Balochistan. The Punjabis of
Pakistan were not known for their leftist leanings. Was Faiz’s much
vaunted loneliness merely a poetic expression, or did it go deeper?
As children in Dhaka, we heard about Faiz’s refusal to write a laudatory editorial in the Pakistan Times
– the paper owned by Mian Iftikharuddin and edited by Faiz – about the
martial law imposed by Gen Ayub Khan in 1958. Soon the paper was taken
over by the government and Faiz had to leave. For some reason, the
political Faiz went missing after that defiant stand, at least as far as
pan-Pakistani politics was concerned – the kind of politics that could
also resonate in East Pakistan. Faiz was from then on a poet, not a
socialist poet.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan that Faiz wanted to transform in the image
of his ideals ended in 1971. During the days after the crackdown on
Dhaka on 25 March of that year, as people wondered how the people of the
Western half felt about the bloody events in the East, they heard a
chorus of approval, led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto saying, ‘Thank God! Pakistan is saved!’
This was a famously premature statement, of course, as all of Bhutto’s
machinations ran out of momentum in the end, with Pakistan collapsing in
ignominy in December of that year. During those days, those who knew
would ask, What did Faiz say? Did he protest? Did he give a statement saying it was wrong?
In fact, we do not know what Faiz did. But we do know that this was one
man many Bangladeshis expected to stand up for them. Of course, it was
unfair to expect that Pakistanis who wished to express dissent could do
so in a martial-law governed Pakistan. Very few could, and those who did
went to jail or paid an even higher price. But Bangladeshis were
demanding all this from the person – poet and politician – they imagined
Faiz to be, rather than a person of flesh and blood who lived in
Pakistan. In a way, Faiz had become a prisoner of the history of
Pakistan.
As the war reached a gory climax, Bengali supporters of Pakistan,
particularly those belonging to the Jamaat-e-Islami, went around the
curfewed city, picking up as many poets, academics and intellectuals as
they could find. It was always their view that Bengali nationalism was
produced by these people, the so-called Hindu-loving secularists and
cultural activists. If the crackdown on 25 March 1971 was the beginning
of the end, the day when most intellectuals were picked up, 14 December
marked the explosive end of the carnage. Many bodies could be seen
dumped in the swampy killing fields, but few could be identified due to
the advanced state of decomposition. Corpses with arms tied behind their
backs, bearing marks of torture and missing eyes, have become the
visual memories of the torture and murder of 1971. Among the many who
disappeared and were never found was Munir Chowdhury, the man who
introduced me to Faiz.
Friends and strangers
Faiz did visit Bangladesh in 1974, as part of an official
delegation as an advisor on culture. He met with his friends but the
closest ones like Shahidullah Kaiser, Munir Chowdhury, Zahir Raihan, all
writers and CP activists, had disappeared. Others were uneasy with Faiz
as memories, unshared history and the reality of two distant states
came between friends. He clearly missed the warmth of their friendship.
In one of his most painful and beautiful poems, ‘Hum ke thehre ajnabi’
(We who have been rendered strangers), Faiz summed up his personal
agony – and that of many Pakistanis and Bangladeshis whose friendship
had been torn asunder by the war. The final lines are:
Un se jo kehne gaye thhe Faiz, jaa sadqa kiye
Ankahi hi reh gayi vo baat, sab baatoon ke baad
Faiz, that one thing which I went there to say with all my heart
That very thing was left unsaid, after so much had been spoken
Friendship is a much more complicated matter than one imagines, for
in Southasia politics can burn friendship with the flames of conflict.
Faiz’s politics died in Pakistan soon after he was jailed in 1950;
only his poetry remained. With each day, though, his status as a poet
soared, while admiration for him spread throughout the Subcontinent.
Eventually, Faiz had become among the greatest legends of all. One could
ask whether he left the building of his people – the somewhat fuzzy
definition of ‘people’ which Southasian socialism imagines existing
beyond borders – as after 1947 his world was determined by the country
in which he lived. His socialist imagination was encircled by Pakistan’s
politics, and the very politics he wished to change overcame his
resolve.
Faiz’s personality was much more than just that of a poet. Indeed,
that is the root of my sorrow – an unreasonable feeling, I concede. We
have also seen how people who are unable to change politics sometimes
become depoliticised beings. Munir Chowdhury once lamented publicly that
he was defeated by the temptations of life – he gave up the life of a
party cadre to become a teacher. I am not sure what path Faiz followed,
but I hope he found peace in supporting political causes in Pakistan.
It might be heretical to say this, but perhaps Faiz would have been
happier in the more politically variegated soil of India, where his
poetry is as much admired as it is in Pakistan. In India, only a
crippled form of socialist politics breathes, but at least it exists. I
concede that to suggest another home for Faiz, particularly India, will
be tantamount to committing blasphemy in the eyes of some. It is cruel
to Faiz, too. He lives on wherever Urdu remains alive. And yet, it is
important to remember one more time that Faiz grew into adulthood and
recognition in an undivided Subcontinent amid its dreams.
The communist, the rebel, the secularist, the romantic poet, the
happy lover of alcohol – all had in the end become a Pakistani. So it
was that when he visited Dhaka in 1974 with Bhutto, it was only to find
that many of his friends had been killed or disappeared by the same
forces he represented in Bangladesh. The chasm became infinite and
complete: he visited accompanied by those with whom his Bangladeshi
friends could no longer associate.
People who dream of a better world are often condemned to become what history demands of them.
