Partition, Patriotism and Pathos (Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mulk Raj Anand) by Aishwarya Lakshmi

Note: This is a series on Progressive Writer's Movement. Read the post on Manto and Ismat Chughtai by Aishwarya. 


How Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mulk Raj Anand ignited the Progressive Writer’s Movement 


The overarching divide between the British and a colonized India, reveals an Indian society creating its layers of colonizers, thereby rendering nationalism an extremely problematic concept. Partition was all but certain and the years following it were truly scared with wounds that were beyond healing. The social and political exploitation provided the progressive writers a platform to voice those who were muted and looted in the name of culture, tradition, and status.


While Sadaat Manto and Ismat Chugtai may have stolen the spotlight with their words, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mulk Raj Anand were known for their stern revolutionary ideologies. While one’s versatile and creative ghazals still find voices to date, the other expressed his angst for social indifferences through his words and pros.

“The fair of life is beautiful to a child as long as he is under the protective umbrella of his parents,” writes Mulk Raj Anand in his short story, The Lost Child. Mulk Raj Anand belongs to the clan of progressive Indian writers who wielded his pen in English with inimitable ease and grace. As a voice of the commoner, his work delineated their daily life with utmost sensitivity and poignance. His novels Coolie and Untouchable set an entire generation of educated Indians thinking about India's social evils that were perpetrated in the name of religion and hollow traditions. Once mocked by a young critic Edward Sackville-West for trying to write a novel about a lower-caste protagonist, his writings changed the face of reality. 

He believed that every writer has a social responsibility and a social conscience. If an artist chooses to stay in an ivory tower and celebrates only his pains and pleasures, he will not be able to immortalize his art. “The substance of my work is the whole of my varied experience, the theme of my work became the whole man and the whole gamut of human relationships, rather than only a single part of it,” wrote Anand.

The struggle against poverty and the fight against the forces of capitalism gave young Faiz’s poetry a sense of direction. Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry has long reflected a syncretic spirit, both across place and across time. It found a place among many local cultural traditions and also beyond. 

His poem, Hum Dekhenge, has taken India by storm as protests erupted across the country against the new citizenship law. Subh-e Azaadi (The Dawn of Freedom, August 1947) records the disappointment that he personally, and the communists as a party, felt with the way things ultimately turned out for the Indian subcontinent. The Partition served a massive blow, not just to leftist ideals but also to the Progressive Writers’ Movement.



This blemished light—this dawn devoured by night—
Surely this wasn’t what we we’ve all been aching for.

The heavy darkness of night hasn’t yet lessened.
The moment of salvation hasn’t yet come for our hearts or eyes.
So let’s keep going—for that destination [manzil] has yet to come.


Freedom finds life as a rousing again that calls us not to prayer, but the imagination. In uncertain times, poetry offers an opportunity to queer what we think we know about this past and present, as a medium through which we might imagine a new future. Longing can be a productive sentiment, a feeling filled with potential for change. 

Faiz’s verses, falling somewhere between rebellion and devotion, anxiety and peace, stay with me as my eyes open to a new political morning. When the world was in the hands of rabble-rousers and the reality filled with pain and despair, Faiz’s poetry gave the commoner an opportunity to envision the horizon anew and clear, and to imagine how the next day, as the sun burns off the dew, maybe better. His verses both challenged structures of power and the failure of governments to heed the concerns of the downtrodden, and they reflected a new direction for poetry itself—a revolutionary one. 

Faiz stood for the dignity of man, the holiness of pain, the constructive power of the word, and the sanctity of individual belief. He will always be the needed, and that is his triumph and our tragedy.

“The Word within the word  
Unable to speak the word”

- T.S. Elliot



References: 

  1. Why We Need Revolutionary Poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz More Than Ever- https://lithub.com/why-we-need-revolutionary-poet-faiz-ahmed-faiz-more-than-ever/


  1. Mulk Raj Anand, writer for the ages- https://www.freepressjournal.in/analysis/mulk-raj-anand-writer-for-the-ages


  1. Mulk Raj’s every man walks among us- https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/musings/mulk-rajs-every-man-walks-among-us-697418


  1. Faiz Ahmad Faiz: The years that preceded Hum Dekhenge- https://theprint.in/features/faiz-ahmad-faiz-the-years-that-preceded-hum-dekhenge/364310/


  1. Mulk Raj Anand — the man who was mocked by an English critic- https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/mulk-raj-anand-the-man-who-was-mocked-by-an-english-critic/297814/


 

Bionote:

“If reading is like breathing, I’m breathing a book or two every day”, says this designer born with a never-ending bucket list. An architect by profession and a bookworm by passion, she manages creativity with ample tablespoons of imagination.

Aishwarya who currently pursuing her master’s in design loves to write across the board. When her thinking cap is on and her thoughts begin to flow, the train of words cannot be stopped until it reaches its destination. 

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