At an event organised last week in memory of actor and activist Vira Sathidar, a group of young cultural activists sang the lyrics of Faiz’s famous Hum Dekhenge. The Nagpur police have now booked the organisers and the event’s speaker under Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which pertains to sedition, along with other sections of the BNS, including Section 196 (promoting enmity between groups) and Section 353 (statements conducive to public mischief).

Sathidar, an accomplished actor, prolific writer, journalist, and political thinker, died on April 13, 2021, after battling COVID-19 for over a week. Satidhar was also an Ambedkarite and the editor of Vidrohi magazine. Since his passing, his wife, Pushpa, is one of the organisers of the annual memorial. A committee was formed after Sathidar’s death under the name ‘Vira Sathidar Smruti Samanvay Samiti’ which has been instrumental in organising the annual event. This year, social activist Uttam Jagirdar was invited to speak. Although the FIR does not name individuals explicitly, it refers to the event’s organiser and speaker.

At the event organised on May 13 at the Vidarbha Sahitya Sangh, attended by over 150 people, Jagirdar talked about the contentious Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill, 2024. The  BJP-led state government is aggressively pushing to convert this bill into a law and implement it. Activists and academics believe this bill, if enacted, will lead to blatant violations of human rights and allow dissenting voices to be labeled “urban Naxals”.

The FIR, filed by one local Nagpur resident Dattatray Shirke, cites a news report aired on ABP Majha, a Marathi channel. The channel was likely the first to find issue in reciting Faiz’s poetry in India. In his complaint, Shirke claims, “At a time when the country valiantly fought Pakistani forces, the radical left in Nagpur were busy singing Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem.

Shirke further claims that the line “Takht hilaane ki zaroorat hai (a need to shake the throne)” constitutes a direct threat to the government. However, while the FIR quotes the above line, the actual line in the poem is “sab takht giraye jayenge”. The poem was performed by young Mumbai-based cultural activists from Samata Kala Manch.

Despite an ongoing stay by the Supreme Court on the application of sedition charges, the Nagpur police have booked the organisers and speakers under the section. On May 11, 2022, the apex court had issued a historic order, staying all pending trials, appeals, and proceedings under section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code until the sedition law’s re-examination was complete. Since then, the BJP-led government has replaced the IPC with the BNS. However, the new law does not eliminate the sedition provision. Instead, the BNS introduces Section 152, which closely resembles the sedition law without explicitly using the word ‘sedition’.

Journalist arrested on same month

This is the second case this month in which the Nagpur police have targeted an individual’s freedom of expression. Earlier this month, a 26-year-old Kerala-based journalist, Rejaz M. Sheeba Sydeek, visiting Nagpur, was arrested for posting a photo of himself posing with two fake guns and opposing the Indian Army.

Initially investigated by the Nagpur city police and now handled by the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), Rejaz is accused of opposing Operation Sindoor – India’s military strikes against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The agency has also alleged that Rejaz has connections with banned organisations, including the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. These banned organisations have radically different ideologies and the police have accused Rejaz of espousing ideologies of each of these banned groups.

Vira Sathidar’s endless protest

During his lifetime, Sathidar faced constant harassment from the police due to his political activism, keeping him under their radar. In a long interview with The Wire, months before his death, Sathidar had raised concern over the government’s tactics of employing new methods to control its citizens. For instance, while shooting for the film Court in 2013, the Gondia police arrived unannounced on the Mumbai set, searching for a “Naxal from Nagpur.” A year before his death, after raising issues against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, his house was raided by local police. During the raid, a sword was found, but local youths chased the police away.

In October 2020, when the NIA filed a supplementary chargesheet in the Elgar Parishad case, Sathidar’s name appeared among the so-called “urban Naxals,” a term loosely used by the Devendra Fadnavis-led government to target dissenters. Now, with the Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill, the state government seeks to formalise the term “urban Naxal” within the legal framework.

The government had made several attempts to criminalise Satidhar when he was alive and such efforts have seemingly continued even after his death.

Courtesy: The Wire

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“Hum Dekhenge, Laazim Hai ki Hum Bhi Dekhenge” after these words by poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz became the new song of dissent starting with it resounding among the walls of IIT Kanpur, the administration of the University issued an inquiry alleging that the poem provoked “anti-Hindu” sentiments.

The poem was written by Faiz in 1979 chastising General Zia-ul-Haq recounting the Prophet’s conquest of Mecca. The complaint was filed by IIT Kanpur professor Vashi Mant Sharma and 16 others including teachers and students saying that some words of the poem could hurt the sentiments of Hindus.  

https://twitter.com/IITKanpur/status/1213136442534187008

In light of the recent reports in the media regarding a committee that has supposedly been constituted at IIT Kanpur to investigate whether a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz is communal or not, the institute would like to issue the following clarification pic.twitter.com/HtQcd2YWUo

— IIT Kanpur (@IITKanpur) January 3, 2020

A committee was set up to probe the matter which alleged that after the poem was read, inflammatory social media posts were put up and IIT Kanpur Deputy Director Manindra Agrawal intervened to stop the unrest from being escalated. He had also clarified that the committee was not set up to look into the contents of the poem itself, but to address the complaints of violence and communally insensitive posts. “Both sides are our own students — we’re viewing this as an in-house issue and trying to understand both sides’ perspectives and hoping to calm things down,” Agrawal told The Telegraph.

The move to set up a committee was highly condemned by opinion makers, calling the same to be “ridiculous” and “shameful”.

https://twitter.com/IITKanpur/status/1213142234972844032

फैज़ अहमद फैज़ की कविता पाठ के बारे में संस्थान का बयान@agrawalmanindra @karandi65 @PIBHindi @PIBHRD @HRDMinistry pic.twitter.com/pi6J9xouOv

— IIT Kanpur (@IITKanpur) January 3, 2020

Today, The Telegraph reported that sections of the faculty have come out in support of the students’ right to “fearlessly express” their opinions. Members from multiple departments have written a letter urging the students to learn to voice their opinions in a manner that engages the community, even amid disagreements, underscoring the space for contrarian views in a democracy, the paper reported.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2805122029519904&id=100000664038694

Their letter read, “We as teachers would like to remind ourselves and our students, to whom we are primarily accountable, that the duties of a public-funded university in a democratic country include critically examining every issue, curricular and extra-curricular, that concerns the society we live in and also to be tolerant to contrarian views.”

Offering encouragement to the students, through their letter the faculty members said, ““We stand by your right to discuss, debate and dissent on issues that you feel are important and as teachers we will strive to create an atmosphere in our campus where you can fearlessly express your opinion in any form, responsibly and conscientiously.”

Agrawal who was aware of the letter, but not a signatory expressed his assent to the ideas mentioned in the letter, saying that it should never be the case that the students feel that their voices were getting suppressed. He said, “We would like our students to be responsible and introspect about damage that posting on social media can do. Social media posts have this potential to amplify distances between different points of view — that can make the atmosphere worse.”

Amid this rancour that was being spewed at a brilliant work of art, India Today reached out to Saleema Hashmi, Faiz’s daughter who resides in Pakistan asking for her view on the matter. She told the channel, “I must say I am having a good laugh over people who are making suggestions to a dead poet that he can make his vocabulary more secular’. Sorry guys, he can’t hear you! If you can rewrite the poem good luck to you!”

Mentioning that poetry and poets are friends of social movements Hashmi said, “Poem is an instrument of focussing the fervour and passion of young people – leading them towards an understanding of how they must move forward – very upsetting for the powerful who can sense the fragility of their position, once people’s energies are unleashed. Thus poets, writers, singers and indeed all creative people have been the natural enemies of dictators.”

Today, the core message of Hum Dekhenge has leapt above the walls of IIT Kanpur and spread through the corners of India to become a rallying cry that is set to reverberate through all protests and agitations for the freedom of the masses from oppression and injustice.

Related:

Bengal: Matuas and Gorkha Janmukti Morcha march against CAA on same day
Streets around Jamia coloured live with protest art
Mumbai comes in to ‘Occupy Gateway’ in solidarity with JNU students

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Great poets like Faiz are warriors and serve as the sentinels of the collective conscience of their times. Countries have frontiers but the war against slavery and exploitation has no frontier. Faiz understood that a society without meaningful poetry is a society on the last legs of its wretched existence. It is a society bereft of dreams and thus, a society bereft of hope. Faiz’s verses wee redolent with  prison terms, privation, exile, protest, resistance.

Faiz espoused the cause of freedom and ranks with poets like Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet, and Louis Aragon. His poetry, rich with the classical hue of Ghalib and Iqbal, acquired a characteristic tone and he excelled in the nazm and ghazal, the two major forms of Urdu poetry, blazing a trail of love and revolution.

At the hands of an artistic rebel like Faiz, even surrealism became a weapon in the advance of the proletariat. Faiz was traditional in the sense that he was inspired by the Sufi tradition of dissent and was progressive in the sense that he was an avowed Marxist.

Faiz became one of Pakistan’s most prominent and beloved poets of all time, next only to the legendary Iqbal. He realised at an early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of poetry. He firmly believed that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its totality and wholeness.

Faiz’s literary studies laid the foundation for him to construct a modern Urdu verse that took on larger social and political issues of his times while still retaining the polished style and diction of the ghazal. He consciously wrote poetry that reflected the concerns of the masses: Oppression, injustice, exploitation, poverty, the suffering of ordinary people and women.

Those who attempted to put labels on him didn’t understand the essence of his poetry. Or maybe labels were used to cover up their superficial understanding of these issues. Faiz’s lament at India’s independence is characteristic of his passion for freedom for the masses and not just for the country from colonialism:

“this is not the morning we’d fought for,
In whose eager quest, all comrades
Had set out, hoping that somewhere
In the wilderness of the sky
Would emerge the ultimate destination of stars…”

Faiz’s work is replete with religious symbolism but his understanding of religion was more in line with Sufi thought and not the obscurantist interpretations advanced by religious scholars. References to the beloved (which in Sufi is always the Creator) are most vital. He once said, “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.” His philosophy was one of inclusivity, collectiveness, love for all beings, and no anger or aggression. He didn’t resent even those who imprisoned him, maligned him and wanted him dead or silent. All of these are reflections of Sufi beliefs.

As a Marxist, Faiz rejected the notion of “art for art’s sake”. Referring to the poet Keats’s famous lines that beauty is love and love is beauty and a beautiful object is an eternal source of joy, Faiz says that, notwithstanding what Keats may have felt, beauty can only be eternal when it is creative, when it inspires the onlooker’s enthusiasm, thought and action with promoting more beauty. Faiz’s poetry reflected a syncretic spirit, both across place and time. He navigated the space between Hindus and Muslims with grace and his poetry resonated with the same poignancy in both cultures. The best English translations of his poetry have come from India.

Faiz’s poetry hybridised several styles and devices straddling centuries of literary history’ fusing classical forms like the 14th-century with   the free verse that the British had been importing into the subcontinent since the Raj took hold of it a century earlier. He was greatly influenced by W.H. Auden and it is likely that Auden’s poetry stimulated Faiz to use the modern British literary form.

Faiz’s work reverberated with the pathos of contemporary times which were both turbulent and significant markers of historical changes. His verses challenged both structures of power and the failure of governments to poetry itself—a revolutionary one. Most importantly, Faiz adopted and adapted the forms, themes, and images of Urdu poetry to galvanise the masses against the oppressive colonial regimes. In the words of Dylan Thomas his was this fervent belief :

“Do not go gentle into the good night/
Rage rage against the dying of the light’. 
This rebellious spirit is patent in his every verse:
“Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.
See how in the blacksmith’s shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws, And every chain begins to break.”
Later came poetic gems like,
Shaam ke pech o kham sitaron se
Zeena zeena utar rahi hai raat
“From the winding stars in sky
Stair by stair descends the night”

Aside from being a poet, Faiz was a journalist, songwriter, and activist. He is the voice of conscience of the suffering humanity of our times. A voice which is a song as well as a challenge, which has a burning faith and cries out against the agony of its era, a constant endeavour and the thunder of the revolution, as well as the sweet recital of love and beauty. This had particularly affected the colonial economy of India. Thus, according to Faiz:

“My heart repents neither this love nor the other,
My heart is spotted with every kind of sorrow,
Except the mark of repentance.”
 
If Faiz had become a legend during his lifetime, it was because he was a versatile genius—a political thinker who was committed to Marxism in his early years, a distinguished poet, a liberal humanist and, above all someone who never compromised his integrity with the Pakistani rulers of his time. Faiz was, truly speaking, a citizen of the world who did not recognise any barriers between religions, languages, and countries. Being an irrepressible social and political activist, he spent many years in prison, and also as an exile in Lebanon and England. It is no wonder that prison emerges as an expanded metaphor in several of his poems.

Faiz made the transformation of the individual human being and his passage through the infinite variety of situations and moods   the subject of his poetry. He was concerned, above all, with the experience of the individual human soul in the long and arduous journey of revolutionary struggle. And yet love remained the leitmotif of his poetry.

Faiz is one of the great lyricists who has sung of nothing with greater passion than love which, he believed, was the primary engine for human progress. Faiz’s acceptance speech when he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, which appears as a brief preface to his collection Dast-i-tah-i-Sang (Hand under the Rock), is a great piece of humanist literature:

“Human ingenuity, science and industry have made it possible to provide each one of us everything we need to be comfortable … However, this is only possible if the foundations of human society are based not on greed, exploitation and ownership but on justice, equality, freedom and the welfare of everyone….”

Courtesy: Counter View

The post Faiz’s poems reverberate contemporary pathos: Turbulent and marked with historical changes appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Press Statement:  May 14 2018

Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar

We are shocked to learn that Moneeza Hashmi, eminent Pakistani media personality, was not allowed to speak at the 15th Asia Media Summit, where she had been invited as a speaker. Reportedly, even her  Delhi hotel booking wasn’t made. 

The post Statement of journalists on treatment given to Moneeza Hashmi appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Let us analyse the iconic and popular poem ‘hum dekhenge’.

hum dekhenge
laazim hai ke hum bhi dekhenge
woh din ke jiska waada hai
jo lauh e azal mein likha hai
hum dekhnege
[We shall Witness
It is certain that we too, shall witness
the day that has been promised
of which has been written on the slate of eternity]

Anyone who is acquainted with the basics of Quranic discourse, knows the meaning of the term ‘lauh e azal’. It has been used in Quran to refer to the eternal slate on which the destiny of the whole universe from start to end has been recorded. Besides, the slate metaphor is used for the Quran to refer to itself, lauh e mahfooz or the protected slate. In this introductory phase, Faiz is declaring that we are to witness that day which has been promised in the eternal slate. One might ask: promised by whom, and promised where? Promised by God, and promised in Quran. This is made explicit by the following stanzas:

Jab zulm-o-sitam ke koh-e-garan
Rooi ki tarah urh jaenge
Hum mehkoomon ke paaon tale
Ye dharti dhar dhar dharkegi
Aur ahl-e-hakam ke sar oopar
Jab bijli kar kar karkegi
[When the enormous mountains of tyranny
blow away like cotton.
Under our feet- the feet of the oppressed-
when the earth will pulsate deafeningly
and on the heads of our rulers
when lightning will strike]

The mountains blow away like cotton, the earth shaking under the feet of humans, or lightning striking the heads: all three are prominent Qur’anic tropes while describing the inevitable doomsday, which precedes the judgment day.

For instance:

It is the Day when people will be like moths, dispersed;  and the mountains will be like wool, fluffed up. [Quran 101:4-5]

When the earth is shaken with its earthquake, and the earth discharges its burdens, and man says, “what is [wrong] with it?” [Quran 99:1-3]

Jab arz-e-Khuda ke kaabe se
Sab but uthwae jaenge
Hum ahl-e-safa mardood-e-harm
Masnad pe bethae jaenge
Sab taaj uchale jaenge
Sab takht girae jaenge
[From the abode of God
When icons of falsehood will be taken out,
When we- the faithful- who have been barred out of sacred places
will be seated on high cushions
When the crowns will be tossed,
When the thrones will be brought down.]

In this paragraph, Faiz uses the image of a victorious Prophet Mohammad emptying Kaaba of hundreds of idols after the conquest of Makkah towards the end of his prophetic career. The term mardood e haram, i.e. barred out of sacred places, refers to Mohammad and his companion who were forced to leave Makkah 8 years earlier, because of the Islamic rejection of idolatry. The mardood e haram finally defeat the Meccan idolators, come back to the Haram [kaaba], and purify it from idols.

The connections are obvious between the basic Islamic slogan ‘la ilaha illa alla’ [no deity but the deity] and Faiz’s imagination of an idol-less world, where those who have been most oppressed by the false deities such as crowns, thrones etc. will finally be vindicated. This idol metaphor has been used in similar ways throughout the revolutionary Urdu poetry, for instance Iqbal invites the Muslims to break the modern idols of Nationalism, Capitalism etc.

In taaza khudaon mein bada sabse watan hai
jo pairhan iska hai woh mazhab ka kafan hai
[of all these recent deities, the nation is the greatest,
and the cloth that makes its clothes is the shroud of religion]

Now lets come back to the last stanza of hum dekhenge:

Bas naam rahega Allah ka
Jo ghayab bhi hai hazir bhi
Jo manzar bhi hai nazir bhi
Utthega an-al-haq ka nara
Jo mai bhi hoon tum bhi ho
Aur raaj karegi Khalq-e-Khuda
Jo mai bhi hoon aur tum bhi ho
[Only The name will survive
Who cannot be seen but is also present
Who is the spectacle and the beholder, both
I am the Truth- the cry will rise,
Which is I, as well as you
And then God’s creation will rule
Which is I, as well as you]

Faiz comes back to the issue of finitude of humans and their societies, and reminds us that besides God, every other entity is going to perish. Following the traditional Islamic discourse, Faiz defines Allah through contradictions, [cannot be seen but is also present], or [who is both the spectacle and the beholder]. In the last two couplets of the poem, Faiz talks about the legendary mystical quote of Islamic history: anal haq i.e. I am the truth. As Quran explicitly rejects religious mediation through any class clerical or otherwise, individuals themselves become careers of religious knowledge and enlightenment in Faiz’s Islamic imagination.

The poets of Islam, if one goes through a long list across languages, have taken the basic Islamic slogan of tauheed [monotheism] as the central idea, and have praised Muhammad as the greatest revolutionary, and Hussain as the greatest martyr of human history. Belief in Tauheed entails rejection of deities and superstition, and hence it is incumbent on a believer to destroy the false deities like race, class and images. In other words, tauheed defines the ideal by negation. When confronted with the Marxist ideas in post-1917 world, these poets incorporate leftist ideas such as class struggle etc, into their thought and poetry.

Some like Iqbal, whom Faiz considers the last Islamic thinker of his age, engage on the level of ideas with Marxist thinkers and prepare the base for others who follow. Others like Faiz and Hasrat, one of the founders of Communist Party of India, cooperate with Marxists very closely, and were active members of Communist parties. When asked why he supported communist movements in Pakistan inspired by USSR or China, he explained it by pointing out that although Islamic systems are superior to Communism, no Muslim country currently follows a better implementation than the regimes in USSR and China. However, if the Islamic systems are implemented in its true revolutionary spirit, or its faulty implementation is reformed, then results better than the Communist regimes can be achieved.

Faiz was a self-declared Muslim poet. He was brought up in a Muslim family, and trained in Islamic discourses early on in his life. He started memorising Quran, but had to give it up because of health issues, something that he regretted throughout his life. His declared murshid, i.e. spiritual and philosophical guide, was the legendary Muslim scholar and poet Maulana Rum or Rumi. His poetry is imbued with Islamic themes, goals, allegories and metaphors.

The famous poet Qateel Shifai asked Faiz about it in an interview:

Qateel: Islami adab ki tehreek ke silsile mein kuchh farmaiye.

[please tell us something about the movements in Islamic literature]

Faiz:     hamare khyaal mein muslim mamaalik mein musalmaan likhne walon ki adabi tehreek islam hi ka hissa hai.

[in my opinion, the literary movements of Muslim writers in Muslim countries is a part of Islam]

In Rudaad e Qafas, Major Ishaq, who was a companion of Faiz, mentions that when they were jailed together, Faiz famously taught Quran and Hadees to the prisoners in the Hyderabad jail. Faiz himself mentions that a colonel explicitly asked him, why he was teaching Quran when he was an atheist. When Faiz clarifies that he is a Muslim, the colonel starts appreciating his Quranic lessons.

His support for the Palestinian cause, which was expressed in Quranic terms [qad jaa al haq wa zahaq al baatil: the truth has arrived, and falsehood perished], his praise for the Iranian students who were bleeding for an Islamic revolution, and his ode to Prophet Muhammad which is his only Persian poem, his grand elegy for Hussain: all stand witness to the centrality of Islamic thought in Faiz’s poetry and his revolutionary spirit.

An illusion has been created over time, where Faiz is considered an atheist poet, who has no relation with Islam. This was done by the conservative Muslims, who wanted to dent his legitimacy among Muslims. The conservative and literalist Muslims were not afraid of non-Muslim revolutionary thinkers, they are always more afraid of revolutionary trends within Islam, and hence the declaration that Faiz is a kafir or a dahri (i.e. atheist). It is unfortunate that this orthodox Muslim propaganda has succeeded in convincing many Muslims as well as many progressive and liberal circles in the subcontinent that Faiz was indeed an atheist, or at least his revolutionary ideas had nothing to do with Islam. It is high time that this distortion should be rectified.

(The authors are currently pursuing their M.Phil at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, Delhi.)

Courtesy: Twocircles.net
 

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