Epistle as eulogy to an evergreen Faiz

Nilanjan,

Before reading this splendid book written by you, I had read Romila Thapar’s unforgettable Just Being (A Memoir). I know that you are feeling slightly uneasy because, perhaps, you did not expect me to couple your name with that undisputed Empress of Indian history-writing. You might even protest and say, “Why this inexplicable comparison?”

But there are reasons, not one but three, which have prompted me to pronounce your name with Romila’s in one, indivisible breath. One, I have read both these books without permitting a pause, because both were so irresistible. Two, both of you have spread your canvases far and wide and included so many themes, from childhood memory to the articulation of your commitment at this moment of sociopolitical sacrilege. And third – this is perhaps most crucial – you two have reached your defiant terrain by recalling and relying on the creativity of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, laced as it is with rock-hard protest and sublime love.

Indeed, Romila pronounced Faiz’s resolution as well as hers even before beginning the first chapter. The resolve of the historian and the poet found a common expression in the following lines of the poem Bol/Speak:

Speak, for even this brief moment is ample

Prior to the dying of body and tongue.

Speak, that truth still lives

Speak, to say whatever is to be said.

But, Nilanjan, you have not confined yourself within the ambit of Faiz’s verse. You have drawn sustenance from its fervour and then, like Romila, you have spread your wings and traversed the sky. That is why I place this compelling query to you, recollecting the idiom of my illustrious cousin and poet, Alokeranjan Dasgupta: is Faiz your ‘heavenly excuse’ or ‘irrepressible vow’, or perhaps, both inextricably intertwined?

What has surprised me first is your stiletto-sharp comments on our desiccated reality. That is, the microcosm of protest in Faiz’s verse has led to the depiction of our actuality, macrocosmic, in its shocking expanse. I shall just quote three screenshots which reflect our diurnal condition.

One: “We know very well that in Pakistan and in other countries, Islam, like five other religions, has been abused and desecrated in a manner that has absolutely nothing to do with Islam.” (Page 117)

Two: “There is a fundamental difference between Fascist autocracy and other autocracies. The difference is, Fascism comes to stop power by winning the heart, by securing massive people’s support … and its terrible danger lies precisely here. The Fascist leader always incites a collective madness which you might describe as ‘mass hysteria’. The latter constitutes the real basis of its power and strength” (Page 125)

Three: “At least in India, the Communists have only invested in politics and that politics which is geared only to the capture of power. In comparison, they have not invested even a fraction in the socio-human sphere. They have left the social terrain of their countrymen totally open and unprotected.” (Pages 124-125).

These three observations are so outrageously honest that you do not need to dissect them. I have immense faith in my readers; they will realise why the author has pronounced these verdicts. But then comes the crucial question. If this is our scandalous actuality or Seiendes — to use the very appropriate German expression – wherein lies the counter-world, counter-reality and Nicht-seiendes? The author has answered this question. This counter-world has been created, is being created, will be created by creativity itself and the defiant aesthetic that sustains it. The acclaimed German dramatist, Peter Weiss, has defined it as the indispensable Aesthetic of Resistance, and it is this that ignites the poems of Faiz.

The author has not restricted his exploration within the poetic parameters of Faiz. He has used him, in the way Dante used Virgil, and traced the majestic tradition of Urdu poetry — from Ghalib to Meer, from Meer to Wali, from Wali to Faiz himself and further on to Kaifi Azmi. With what immaculate exactitude has he painted this entire canvas — memorable words encasing the social heartbeat. Here too, I shall discard the cloak of the pedantic professor and go directly to the verse itself, which says all like uninhibited prayers. Consider, for example, the following lines of Meer, written in 1782, more than two centuries ago (!), which address our own violated moment with striking immediacy:

What would you like to know more about Meer’s faith and religion,

He has drawn tilak on his forehead in the temple

And discarded Islam so many years ago.

It is impossible to decipher the route of this poetic heritage; it is so complex and subtle. Nevertheless, Meer leads us to Safiuddin, Kaifi Azmi and, above all, to Faiz, whom no less a reader than Edward Said described as the most eloquent voice in Urdu poetry. But before we come to him, let me recall the deathless defiance of Safiuddin:

Where have men fought

Where have men failed

Where have they been killed,

All these are human hymns

Which emerge and stand erect

(Night)

This same emotional disposition urged the sorrow-struck Kaifi Azmi to look for the ‘merciful and compassionate’ Ram in Ayodhya. He was not there when violence erupted; hence Azmi questioned: “To which deity are you offering prayers? Ram has left Ayodhya in grief.” Faiz represents the crest of this flow and the author has translated his poems, one after another, into chaste and vibrant Bengali. The latter compete with the masterly translations in English done by renowned poets like Victor Kiernan, Agha Shahid Ali and, finally, Baran Farooqi.

As with Pablo Neruda and Paul Eluard, the two polestars in Faiz’s firmament are love and resistance, and both have received resplendent expressions. The poem January 1958 resounds with the following words:

Intense commotion will no longer echo

In this silence burdened with sorrow

That commotion which demands inborn rights

Will not the slogan of battle ring again?

Such proclamations give way to the most tender utterance of romantic love and to hymns celebrating feminine beauty:

Colour: the name of your dress

Perfume: the name of your hair flowing in the wind

The season of the flowers is the name of

Your appearance on the balcony.

(Ghazal translated by Baran Farooqi)

I confess that I clasp Faiz with the help of Nilanjan and then I reach that ineffable world of love and defiance peopled by Heinrich Heine, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Nazrul Islam, Bishnu Dey – what an incomparable pantheon! Is this the discovery that awaits the ‘heavenly excuse’ about which I spoke at the very start?

This book is irreplaceable for another reason. Quite a few provoked the disruptive thought that Faiz, wedded to equality and enemy of authoritarianism, did not salute the Liberation War of Bangladesh. He was indifferent to it, they complained. The author has engaged in assiduous research and found throbbing evidence of his support in five tormented poems written in that dark year, 1971. Poems, and nothing else, reveal the poet at his truest, and Faiz has written in the fourth poem:

Look at that body, changed into killing field

What more has the viewer to see in the heart’s scaffold?

Again, in the third poem, which is simply an example of laceration:

I wash these morbid eyes with blood

I wash these two morbid eyes with blood

Now, every face

Every object in this world

Turn scarlet-red coloured by the blood

Of my two eyes.

The more I read these poems of searing agony, the more I realise that Faiz, with many other aroused Pakistanis, supported the war of liberation unflinchingly.

I, nevertheless, am particularly drawn to one tragic lyric which exhales our scarred history. This poet-humanist could not accept the Partition of 1947 like Ritwik Ghatak, Manik Bandyopadhyay, Akhtaruzzaman Elias and Kayes Ahmed. Wringing his heart out, he lamented on August 15, 1947:

This stained pitted first night

This daybreak battered by night

This dawn that we ached for

This is not that one

Agha Shahid Ali’s translation is impeccable. Nilanjan, why don’t you translate this poem into Bengali and include it in the next edition? Faiz reached the very pinnacle of our fragmented agony in this lament. I return to it again and again.

You have written a wonderful book, in gratitude and in love.