Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies
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Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Salvific Ethics and the Uneven World
Get PDFABSTRACT Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Salvific Ethic and the Uneven world  Faiz Ahmed Faiz has a place among the greatest of Urdu poets ever born. His works as well as his life has inspired people from all walks of life. He brought path-breaking changes to the way Urdu poetry was written. Faiz combined socio-political messages, revolutionary ideas and romantic idealism with the sweetness of the Urdu language, thus creating an exhilarating oeuvre. He symbolized all that is humane, dignified, refined, brave, and challenging. His poetry reflects his intellectual resentment and resistance against an unjust and archaic social order, which he rejects on rational grounds as anti-human; yet his poetry has no bitterness. He wrote against the excesses of ruling elite and challenged colonial and feudal values. Faiz's poetry exhibits a strong sense of commitment to lower-class people. He saw the world around him plagued by the evils and the dark forces of materialism, commercialism and commodity fetishism. He saw nations engaged in wars and the hearts of people full of hatred and cruelty.  He took the challenge to make the world a better place to live. He used his poetic art as a vehicle to register a protest against the brutal and malicious forces. Fiaz gave voice to the voiceless and suffered with the suffering humanity of his times and his love of humanity is free from the prejudice of color, race or nationality. He sang a song burning with thunder and revolutionary fire but at the same time endowed it with the delicacy of beauty and love.  In my paper I will try to show how Faiz   makes use of  love and beauty to promote social and moral values and does not desist to use the language of love and beauty even while writing about political issues. How he made the agony of love the essence of his existence and imagination and used it to come to terms with the chaos and the anarchy of the modern world. The paper will also talk about Faiz’s redemptive ethics ,his emphasis on the sweet emotions of love and beauty, as an alternative vision to set right the wrongs of the jaded and bumpy world of present times. Â
Rethinking Progressivism and Modernism in Urdu Poetry: Faiz Ahmed Faiz and N. M. Rashed
No full textLiterary historians of modern Urdu poetry frequently divide twentieth-century writers into two camps--progressives and modernists. In such a reading, Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84) is exemplary of the "art for life's sake" position associated with the Progressive Writers Association, and N. M. Rashed (1910-75) frequently represents the "art for art's sake" position of modernism. Through an assessment of these writers' understandings of each other and close readings of their poetry, this essay demonstrates that these familiar categories, first articulated in the late 1930s and early 1940s in progressive literary criticism, fail to capture the literary output of either poet. Instead of abandoning these categories, however, this essays suggests that they remain important to literary history as historical facts, as a part of literary discourse. This essay therefore considers the role of literary interpretation in literary production, and the way that these two prominent Urdu poets shaped their own work in accordance to the way it was received
Inter-Provincial water sharing conflicts in Pakistan
Get PDFThe growing conflict over the issue of sharing water resources is a global phenomenon and Pakistan is not an exception. The growing pressure from increasing population is putting up continuous pressure on this limited resource. In Pakistan the dominance of Punjab over the state institutions is being blamed for all past and present water-sharing related problems. The incumbent government has taken certain measures to improve the decision making process related with water-sectors but due to fragile system and nascent democratic institutions it’s too early to predict the future of that constitutional arrangement
Faiz’s “Internationalist†Poetics: Selected Translations and Free Verses
No full textFaiz today is mostly remembered for his ghazals and his rhymed poems which have been sung by numerous singers of the Subcontinent, are quoted on many occasions and, like the famous “Ham dekhengeâ€, have become part of a culture of resistance. His free verses, which are far less in number, have attracted comparatively less attention. Free verse has never become as popular as the ghazal and pÄband nazm in Urdu, although there have been a number of outstanding practitioners of the form. Even Urdu critics seem to have devoted more space to Faiz’ ghazals and pÄband nazms than to his poems in less rigidly structured forms. It is perhaps no coincidence that Faiz started to use free verse off and on after he had come into closer contact with Pablo Neruda and Nazim Hikmet as well as with a number of Soviet poets during his frequent visits to the Soviet Union from 1958 onward. In the present paper I will discuss selected free verses written since 1962 to find out how far the inner structure and imagery of theses verses differs from Faiz’ more “classical†texts and whether and how they are influenced by the topic and the circumstances of composition, viewed also in the context of Faiz’ interaction with Nazim Hikmet and his works in prose and poetry. Faiz and Nazim Hikmet shared basic values and experiences, and it is striking to see how close they were in their attitudes to life and literature which is demonstrated by Faiz’ poem about Nazim Hikmet and by his translations of a few of his verses. Therefore reading Faiz side by side with the Turkish poet may help to look at his works from a fresh angle
Finding Faiz at Berkeley: Room for a Celebration
Get PDFThis paper examines how Faiz Ahmed Faiz is remembered at a program honoring him at the University of California, Berkeley.  All over the world, Faiz’s centennial year is now an occasion for similar events.  Faiz’s poems are read and recited.  Daughters—if the program is lucky—or friends, increasingly fewer, speak.  Bits of history and biography are recalled.  There is no other Urdu poet, born in the 20th century, who could command such a worldwide celebration.  But who is the Faiz that emerges? My analysis uses the September 2011 Berkeley program, “Guftagu: Celebrating Faiz Ahmed Faiz,â€Â as a departure point to address issues that these formal festivities both reveal and conceal.  I will take advantage of the fact that here is a gathering, in real space and in real time, thinking and talking about Faiz in the United States.  Rather than lose the performative aspect of the occasion, I will utilize it to ask questions and seek answers. Is Faiz an Urdu poet or a Pakistani poet?  What about his Marxism—where does that fit in the religious context of present-day Pakistan?  Does the winner of the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 have any misgivings about the old USSR’s cultural machinery? Do we?  What about ethnicity?  Faiz was Panjabi, from Iqbal’s home town.  His Partition did not leave him without a physical place to which he could return, unlike the poets and littérateurs who arrived from all over India to the newly-formed Pakistan.  Did that make a difference to his poetry, or to his fame? What about Bangla Desh?  What role did Faiz and his poetry play concerning the events in Dhaka in 1971?   Finally, who are the participants in the Berkeley project?  How do they see scholarship on Faiz? What about the “Tagore phenomenon?†Does Faiz’s light obscure other major twentieth-century Urdu poets or does it shine for all?  We are in a world where an unrecorded event can happen only once, ephemera evaporates, and Urdu scholars frequently bemoan what is lost, un-captured, or distorted.  My paper is a chance to record an evening in Berkeley when we meet to celebrate Faiz Ahmed Faiz and to examine the encounter in all its rich detail