Faiz Festival

The Incarcerated Poet
Article in Pioneer

The play Chand Roz Aur Meri Jaan drew its inspiration from Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry and was a dramatised reading of his wife’s letters. By Utpal K Banerjee.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984), Pakistan’s poet laureate and one of the most important litterateur of Urdu language, had seen many variegated dimensions of life. Following the Muslim traditions of South Asia, he was given an early grounding in the basics of religious studies in a mosque. Later, he became an avowed communist and founded in 1936 the branch of All India Progressive Writers’ Movement in Punjab. He was a staunch supporter of Sufism and had close relations with several Sufi poets of his time. He had joined the British Army, Indian Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1944, resigning from the Army in 1947. He was a journalist of very high repute, having become the first editor-in-Chief of the Pakistan Times, the leading newspaper of the land, after Partition. He was also a government official, — appointed secretary of Pakistan Arts Council in 1959 and working in that capacity till 1962.
Faiz’s birth centenary falls in November 2011 and it is entirely appropriate that the Urdu Academy of Delhi administration would dedicate their 23rd Urdu Drama Festival to the centenary event of the great poet, whose many ghazals and nazms have enriched the entire subcontinent’s music and celluloid world. The inaugural play, Chand Roz Aur Meri Jaan (Few Days, My Beloved), presented by Wings Cultural Society, drew its inspiration from the Poet’s immortal lines: Chand roz aur merii jaan faqat chand hii roz… Directed by the thespian Salima Raza, the play was basically a dramatised reading of Faiz’s own letters as well as letters written by his wife Alys, graphically recreating the days when Faiz was imprisoned for his involvement with the political party and Major General Akbar Khan’s coup plan in 1951 and release came some five years later.
As Raza explains, “Alys was an English woman who had come to India, looking for a Sikh gentleman whom she intended to marry. This didn’t happen and meanwhile she had met Faiz. They fell in love, got married in the 1930s and had a partnership in the truest sense. They were utterly devoted to each other and to their daughters, Moneeza and Salima, whose names keep cropping up in the letters. Faiz’s imprisonment was on ludicrous charges of sedition and conspiracy under some antiquated law of the 1860s and Faiz was moved from their Lahore home to a Sind jail. But, even in the middle of her deep anguish, Alys was steadfast to him, exhorting: ‘You must write, write, write; the coming generations demand it’!”
The dramatised reading follows the worthy tradition of Dear Liar, George Bernard Shaw’s letters exchanged with his old flame Ellen Terry (whom he used to address as ‘Ellen, Ellener, Ellenest’), read by Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak-Shah; and Tumhari Amrita, Amrita Pritam’s exchange of letters with her young painter-companion Imroz, recreated by Shabana Azmi and Farooq Sheikh. In the case of Chand Roz, the enchanting voice of Salima Raza, along with the powerful presence of Danish Iqbal, cast a spell on the audience with enchanting poetry and magical music: played on from time to time. Comments the director, “For anyone to create poems anytime, someone has to be his or her muse. While Faiz created poems of ineffable beauty, Alys had lived poems all the time!” As to why the letters were selected rather than a full play, Taza replied,” I wanted to reflect the poet’s private persona. Poems do manage to reveal only what Faiz would have intended to show!”
A dramatic moment awaited the end of the recitation session. It appeared that Faiz’s daughter Moneeza was present in the audience and, when she was invited to the stage, she broke into tears to say, “I could never bring myself to read these tender letters exchanged between my parents. Now that you have brought them alive on the stage, the world can see that it was not merely that my father was a great poet; it was also that my mother, who never came to limelight, was equally responsible for all his outpourings!”