In late February, this year, I was invited to the Lahore Literary Festival. I spoke about my work, and naturally there was no dearth of interesting panels to attend and folks to meet. Like my fellow participants, I was also keen to see the city on my first trip there. My mother's family had been wealthy Sikhs in Western Punjab, who had fled to India during Partition. Lahore for me was a storied place, the locus of my maternal grandparents' memories of a charmed youth and a lost home. But as I met people, old friends and new, and visited many monuments, museums and markets, the place that left the deepest impression on me was Faiz Ghar, a small bungalow in Model Town, dedicated to the memory and legacy of the great Pakistani poet and revolutionary, Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984).
In contemporary Pakistan's fragile civil society, Faiz's poetry is a bulwark against a State that has not stood strongly enough for democracy, a bubbling sectarianism that can erupt at any moment into yet another scalding episode of fratricidal bloodshed, and a continual erosion of the secular, cosmopolitan, democratic and enlightened values that were central to the founding vision of figures like Allama Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. It may appear far-fetched to suggest that beautiful poetry could be a consolation for awful politics, but in Pakistan today this seems true.
Most educated Pakistanis, even in the younger generation, know their Faiz. His smoke-ringed picture hangs in the atmospheric Pak Tea House and his radical songs are sung by left-wing musical bands like Laal. Faiz's family - his daughters, Salima and Moneeza Hashmi (who married two brothers), and his grandsons, Ali, Adeel and Yasser Hashmi - through their collective efforts in the arts, academia, media and cultural life more generally, ensure that even thirty years after the poet's death, he remains a living presence in the minds and hearts of Lahoris, otherwise beleaguered by the escalating sense of political anarchy in Pakistan.
At Faiz Ghar, a room full of photographs shows him with both public figures and family members [picture]. I was riveted by images of Faiz, almost all of them black-and-white or sepia-toned, with fellow writers, artists, world leaders, dissident intellectuals - so many important and interesting men and women of his time. They reminded me of similar photographs of my father, Kailash Vajpeyi, a poet at home both in India and abroad. I did not know then that my father was going to die in less than five weeks from that day when I spent hours lingering in the gallery, library, archive and garden at Faiz Ghar, transfixed by the poet's charisma and drawn to his adventures in life and letters.
My father, Kailash Vajpeyi (1936-2015), belonged to the generation after Faiz Ahmad Faiz. But in the 1960s and 1970s, when my father was young and Faiz was getting older, there was a clear overlap in the circles they traversed, especially outside South Asia. The Communist world - the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Latin America - was where oppressive State structures combined with emancipatory Marxist, Leninist and Maoist ideologies were forcing literature underground, and spawning new genres, linguistic experimentation and transnational solidarities. Poets and writers in the post-colonial and Commonwealth nations were naturally drawn to these ideas and innovations flourishing in the shadow of Communism.
Faiz's searing poems, among his most famous, indicting the leprous dawn and the moth-eaten freedom of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the blood-stained independence of Bangladesh in 1971, reminded me of my father's Rajdhani ["Capital City"], Ganatantra ["Republic"] and Ek Naya Rashtrageet ["A New National Anthem"]. These had earned him Nehru's ire, heated questions in Parliament, temporary bans and blacklisting from All India Radio in the 1960s, and cost him his passport during Indira Gandhi's Emergency. He wrote of the perversion of freedom and self-rule, the bitter after-taste of nationalism, decolonization and Partition, and the crashing failures, disappointments, frustrations and resentments associated with the post-colonial state (Ek sil ki tarah jaise giri hai svatantrata/ Aur pichak gaya hai poora desh!). In his first three collections, published between 1964 and 1972, his poetry was seething with anger at the Cold War, the madness of the arms race between the two global superpowers, the poverty, the backwardness and corruption of the Third World, and the precarious condition of a planet overrun by nuclear weapons.
While progressive ideologies were a common thread between the older poet and his younger contemporary across the border, Islam connected Faiz to West Asia and the Palestinian struggle, while a keen scholarly interest in Buddhism turned my father's attention to the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the disaster of the 1962 Sino-Indian War. After 1980, though, he was increasingly drawn to Buddhist, Sufi and Advaita philosophies, and his poetry took a turn away from politics towards the deeper questions of god, soul, mortality and eternity.
Arguably, Faiz remained politically invested to the very end. His poems about the struggles of workers, peasants and ordinary people, the impoverished masses in the half-built cities of the subcontinent, about refugees, migrants and the unknown soldier, provide a lexicon of protest and dissent as much in India as in Pakistan. Poems like Hum dekhenge, Yahaan se sheher ko dekho, Ummeed-e-seher, Intisaab ( Aaj ke naam), Gulon mein rang bhare, Mujh se pehli si muhabbat, Dua ( Aaiye haath uthaaien hum bhi), Subh-e-Aazadi and Bol ki lab azaad hain tere are the anthems of the Left all across Urdu-speaking South Asia, beyond territorial nationalisms. Perhaps the note of undefeated hope, the indefatigable optimism in Faiz is what makes him attractive as the voice of struggle even today.
Like Faiz, my father used a mastery of poetic form and a firm grasp of the historical traditions of poetry in his language (Urdu/Farsi for Faiz, Hindi/Sanskrit for my father), to think about pressing contemporary issues. Through formal virtuosity, these poets bridged the classical and the modern. But an equally fecund source of creativity for both men was a private life rooted in a good marriage and sweet domesticity. The sheer unalloyed joy and affection on Faiz's face, his relaxed and happy appearance in his photographs with his wife, daughters and later his grandchildren, were so reminiscent of the closeness my father had throughout his married life of 50 years with my mother, later on with me and in his last years with my partner, who is a writer. Our home and family - small, intimate, seamless - were an inseparable part of my father's poetic métier, and provided the space and security for the free play of his imagination.
In June, this year, Moneeza Hashmi, Faiz's younger daughter, who has worked in television and broadcasting in Pakistan, travelled to Srinagar, Kashmir. She wanted to visit the Government College for Women, where her father and her mother, the British-born Alys George, were married in October 1941. The college itself was started in 1950 in the same building. Alys and Faiz's nikah-naama was read by Sheikh Abdullah, and later became the basis for an egalitarian and modernized Muslim marriage contract in Pakistan. Other progressive Urdu poets of the pre-Partition era, like Josh and Majaz, had attended the informal post-nuptial house party, and even today the college has a "Faiz Room" in honour of its eminent visitor, who was married there nearly 75 years ago.
We accompanied her to the college for an emotional visit to the site of her parents' marital union, so unusual for its time. Later we showed her around Srinagar, a difficult journey for all of us - my husband who is from Kashmir, me from Delhi, and Moneeza from Lahore - as we navigated the Valley's fabled landscape, now scarred and ravaged by decades of conflict, militarization, poor infrastructure and, most recently, the catastrophic floods of September, 2014. All of us, coming from different but intertwined histories and pasts, knew that this was not the place Faiz, Alys and Sheikh would have recognized from three quarters of a century ago. Together we could not have enough of the lore of Faiz's life and poetry, but we could also not deny the utter destruction of the dreams, hopes and struggles of our forefathers in the fractured and ruined political reality around us.
Salima's husband, Shoaib Hashmi, has translated Faiz's poetry into English, and Moneeza's older son, Ali Madeeh Hashmi, a psychiatrist by profession, has written a short biography of his grandfather, to be followed by a complete life in the coming months. On a trip to Gulmarg, the day after we had visited the Faiz Room, I told Moneeza about my father's death. After weeks of sadness, I felt some relief. In the company of a daughter of Faiz, I could think of my father not just as the parent I had loved and lost, but as a poet, an intellectual, a literary figure who belonged to his time and his language, and who would have a significance far beyond my personal experiences and memories of him.
We laughed as we compared notes - our respective fathers wrote at night, locked themselves away when they had to write, were shielded valiantly from external demands on their time by their loyal spouses, had busy public lives, thriving friendships with members of the opposite sex and boundless love for their daughters. Both talked about forthcoming poems in terms that resembled the language of pregnancy and childbirth, both were tormented and distracted until they had got the impending, gestating, brewing, blooming, erupting words out of their systems. Both had died of heart-attacks, but without any illness, hospitalization or prolonged suffering, for which we each felt grateful.
As we chatted for hours, I told Moneeza that unlike Faiz, my father had never been exiled or incarcerated, despite the radicalism, critical stance and anti-establishment tone of his early poetry. "Do you think that Faiz would not have had to spend all those years in jail, or in Beirut, Moscow and London, had he chosen to stay on in India after Partition?" I asked her. I wondered whether it was more or less uninterrupted democracy in India that had kept my father safe, but periods of autocratic rule, military dictatorship and political turbulence in Pakistan that had caused Faiz so much hardship, made his life so itinerant?
Moneeza looked out of the car window to the plunging mountainsides of pine forests and stepped rice fields rolling by below us, the cloud-wrapped snow peaks in the distance that stood between us and her city. "Yes, perhaps," she replied, after a while. "He was a genius, they say. Talent like my father's has to express itself, regardless of circumstances. India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Palestine... I don't know, maybe. He would have written poetry no matter what. But I suppose if he had not been through all that, then Faiz wouldn't have been Faiz."
vajpeyi@csds.in
