LAHORE, Nov 20 (TNS): The 33rd death anniversary of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, an intellectual, a revolutionary poet of Urdu language and an author was celebrated today.
Using expressions like ‘Daro Rasan’, ‘Pa Ba Jaulan’ and ‘Koocha e Jaanan’, Faiz’s poems convey the grievances of the lover as well as of the era, articulating both the themes of love and revolution simultaneously.
While the twentieth century poet, using the power of writing, raised his voice against social injustice, Faiz was restricted from expressing his views owing to which he was also imprisoned for four years, later.
Other than English, Urdu and Punjabi, Faiz was also well-versed in Persian and Arabic languages.
The poet gained the popularity of Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib and Iqbal Lahori by giving a new life to symbolism in poetry and raising his voice against the injustices of the time, passed away on November 20, 1984.
“There are few people who are as good in person as they are in their respective creative spaces,” is how some describe Faiz.
Born in Sialkot on February 13, 1911, Faiz Ahmad Faiz married Alys Faiz – a British national who had a tremendous influence on his life and poetry.
In the 1930s, he married Alys, a British national. They had two daughters — Saleema and Muneeza. Alys’ influence on Faiz’s life and poetry is reputed to have been enormous.
He started a branch of Anjuman Tarraqi Pasand Mussanafin-e-Hind in Punjab in 1936 and was also a member and secretary of this branch.
Faiz had also worked as editor of Mahanama Adab-e-Lateef (1938 1942 AD). He became a lecturer in English at MAO College, Amritsar in 1935 and then at Hailey College of Commerce, Lahore.
He briefly joined the British Indian Army and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1944.
He resigned from the army in 1947 and returned to Lahore to become the first editor-in-chief of the Pakistan Times — a paper started by Mian Iftikharuddin under Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s patronage. This paper played an important role in the partition.
Faiz spent much of the 1950s and 1960s promoting communism in Pakistan. He was charged with complicity in a failed coup attempt known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and was sentenced to four years of imprisonment in 1951.
The jail term gave him a first-hand experience of the harsh realities of life and provided him with much-needed solitude to think and write poetry. Two of his greatest works, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan Nama, were products of this period of imprisonment.
In 1959 he was appointed secretary Pakistan Arts Council and worked in that capacity till 1962. Returning from London in 1964, he settled down in Karachi and was appointed the principal at Abdullah Haroon College.
Faiz distinguished himself as a journalist and was editor of the Pakistan Times, the Urdu newspaper Imroze and the weekly Lail-o-Nihar.
In the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, he worked in an honorary capacity in the Department of Information. In exile, he acted as editor of the magazine Lotus in Moscow, London and Beirut.
Faiz was the first Asian poet to be awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, the Soviet Union’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize, in 1963.
