Writer: ALI MADEEH HASHMI
Publication: Rupa publication
Genre: Biography
Pages :310
The three sons of Urdu poetry, Meer, Galib, and Allama Iqbal, revolutionize Urdu history. With the birth of the fourth son, the future and legacy of Urdu have come to a new beginning.
With the fantasy of Urdu poetry, the 20th century gave birth to a new horizon, which later earned a lot of name and fame. Despite facing ups and downs, he didn't even consider leaving his homeland.
Faiz sought to make sense of the partition of Holodomor through his poetry while living through it. In the new nation of Pakistan, he was not only a cultural ambassador but also a journalist, an important voice of dissent that refused to be silenced, a builder of long-lasting cultural institutions, and an educator.
It begins with the description of the night before the death of Faiz Saheb.
This haunting poem was written when he was admitted to the hospital due to cardiac arrest. His emotions and mental state can be clearly understood in this poem.
Also, there are some anecdotes and eyewitnesses of the situations mentioned by his wife and relatives.
“Mard e khuda ka amal, ishq say sahib farigh.”
Awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest civilian honor after his death, Faiz Saheb has had a long battle with political victimization and incarceration, giving birth to his most eerie poetry.
Even though the writer is a psychiatrist, nowhere in this biography, it appears that the writer is psycho-analyzing the writing. Ali Madeeh Hasmhi, the grandson of Faiz Saheb, wrote this book and witnessed many incidents narrated by her mother.
This is extra, well-examined, and covers almost all segments of Faiz Shaeb’s life. Being the grandson of Faiz saheb, the way of expression used by the author shows his ardent admiration towards his grandpa.
On amazon, its rating is 4.6 out of 5 and 4.1 out of 5 on Goodreads.
I am attaching the preface to understand the author's perspective.
From the author:
“I tried, while writing this book, to follow the method of Faiz himself—that of locating a person, their life, and all of its many facets within their era. To make the person’s life a part of the larger life of their times. This is what I have understood of Karl Marx’s method of ‘historical materialism,’ a philosophy and an ideology that guided Faiz throughout his life. It helped that Faiz sahib lived in such ‘interesting times’ as the Chinese curse goes. The First World War, the Great Depression, India’s struggle for independence, the Second World War, and the creation of Pakistan (and its later dismemberment into Pakistan and Bangladesh), Faiz lived through them all. He also tried, to the best of his ability, to engage with these world issues and, in the process, became one of its most eloquent spokespersons for a whole generation, especially in the Indo-Pak subcontinent. The cataclysmic events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of his beloved USSR happened a few years after he died, but I suspect he foresaw at least some of what was to come. And unlike what the cheerleaders of Capitol predicted following the destruction of the ‘Red Menace,’ the world of the 21st century has only become more polarised, dangerous, and uncertain.
Governments come and go, and so do wars and empires. Emperors, kings, and presidents, too, rise and fall with the times, but through it all, humankind’s desire to grow to greater nobility and perfection persists. And poets, the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ as Shelley said, are our guides and fortune-tellers. They peer into the human heart and see what lies in its depths; they can discern what lies beyond the heavens, which is why they have always been revered and feared equally. A poet must understand and reflect something universal about the human condition to rise above the mundane. And great poetry requires much more. The ability to perceive and sing about the universality of all human life, both throughout history and in the context of the cosmos. And if one can wed this depth and breadth of vision to Love (with a capital ‘L’), as Faiz did, one can perhaps begin to touch greatness.
But this is an endless endeavor, as is the human struggle itself. Faiz wrote about this repeatedly. One human being, no matter how talented or hardworking, is, in the end, just one link in a vast chain stretching back through the mists of time to the origin of Life itself. Ultimately we are all, as Newton remarked, ‘standing on the shoulders of giants.’ I am a bit more fortunate than others, perhaps, to be standing on the shoulders of a giant of poetry and literature in the twentieth century and, while I am acutely aware of my shortcomings both as a writer. As a human being, I am happy that it fell to me to bring the life of Faiz sahib to a broader audience.”
Ultimately, two interrelated themes can best explain why Faiz and his poetry continue to be adored by millions, not just in South Asia but around the globe. With his technical and linguistic proficiency and his complete mastery over the canon of Urdu and Persian poetry, including the likes of Hafiz of Shiraz and even the seventh-century Arab master, Ta’abbata Sharra, Faiz could comprehensively express all manner of themes and ideas in his poetry, including ‘new’ ideas like socialism, humanism and the various permutations of politics.
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