Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born
on February 13, 1911, in Sialkot, India, which is now part of Pakistan. He had
a privileged childhood as the son of wealthy landowners Sultan Fatima and
Sultan Muhammad Khan, who passed away in 1913, shortly after his birth. His
father was a prominent lawyer and a member of an elite literary circle which
included Allama Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan.
In 1916, Faiz entered
Moulvi Ibrahim Sialkoti, a famous regional school, and was later admitted to
the Skotch Mission High School where he studied Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. He
received a Bachelor's degree in Arabic, followed by a master's degree in
English, from the Government College in Lahore in 1932, and later received a
second master's degree in Arabic from the Oriental College in Lahore.After
graduating in 1935, Faiz began a teaching career at M.A.O. College in Amritsar
and then at Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore.
Faiz's early poems had
been conventional, light-hearted treatises on love and beauty, but while in
Lahore he began to expand into politics, community, and the thematic
interconnectedness he felt was fundamental in both life and poetry. It was also
during this period that he married Alys George, a British expatriate and
convert to Islam, with whom he had two daughters. In 1942, he left teaching to
join the British Indian Army, for which he received a British Empire Medal for
his service during World War II. After the partition of India in 1947, Faiz
resigned from the army and became the editor of The Pakistan Times, a
socialist English-language newspaper.
On March 9, 1951, Faiz
was arrested with a group of army officers under the Safety Act, and charged
with the failed coup attempt that became known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy
Case. He was sentenced to death and spent four years in prison before being
released. Two of his poetry collections, Dast-e
Saba and Zindan Namah, focus on life
in prison, which he considered an opportunity to see the world in a new way.
While living in Pakistan after his release, Faiz was appointed to the National
Council of the Arts by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government, and his poems, which
had previously been translated into Russian, earned him the Lenin Peace Prize
in 1963.
In 1964, Faiz settled in
Karachi and was appointed principal of Abdullah Haroon College, while also
working as an editor and writer for several distinguished magazines and
newspapers. He worked in an honorary capacity for the Department of Information
during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, and wrote stark poems of outrage over the bloodshed between Pakistan,
India, and what later became Bangladesh. However, when Bhutto was overthrown by
Zia Ul-Haq, Faiz was forced into exile in Beirut, Lebanon. There he edited the
magazine Lotus, and
continued to write poems in Urdu. He remained in exile until 1982. He died in
Lahore in 1984, shortly after receiving a nomination for the Nobel Prize.
Throughout his tumultuous
life, Faiz continually wrote and published, becoming the best-selling modern
Urdu poet in both India and Pakistan. While his work is written in fairly
strict diction, his poems maintain a casual, conversational tone, creating
tension between the elite and the common, somewhat in the tradition of Ghalib,
the renowned 19th century Urdu poet. Faiz is especially celebrated for his
poems in traditional Urdu forms, such as the ghazals,
and his remarkable ability to expand the conventional thematic expectations to
include political and social issues.
By Gulraiz Kamal
No comments:
Post a Comment