(Courtesy: https://soundcloud.com/tehzeebtvc/mujh-se-pehli-si-mohabbat-meri-mehboob-na-maang-faiz-ahmad-faiz-yasir)
 

What Bertolt Brecht did to European drama in the 20th century with his epic theatre, the Progressive Writers Association (P.W.A.) did to Indian literature in 1936. That is to establish a radically new philosophy of literature and aesthetics, one in reaction to the treacherous political tides of the time, that inspired writers from across India to produce literary texts not as ends in themselves but as definitive means to attain and propagate a Marxist and humanist ideology.

Living and writing in India in the tempestuous times of the 1930s, the progressive writers were confounded with profound and discomforting questions such as: what purpose would a writer perform amidst this mayhem of mankind? How should he/she meaningfully contribute to the mass struggle of one’s nation against the tyranny of a foreign colonial power? Will the classical works that obsess over the tresses of the mashooq or the favors of the saqi work to oust the colonizer? Or does a revolutionary and explicitly political stance – of the likes of the Bolshevik Revolution- be adopted to challenge the criminal structures of colonialism and capitalism?

It is in response to such scintillating questions that the P.W.A. had its inception; officially in the year 1936, at the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (A.I.P.W.A.) held at Lucknow on the 9th and 10th of April. The doyen of Hindustani literature Premchand gave his unequivocal support to this avant-guard movement by accepting the invitation to become the president of the first A.I.P.W.A. meet of 1936; where he showed his complete solidarity with their cause by delivering his momentous presidential address called Sahitya ka Uddheshya (“The Nature and Purpose of Literature”). In this address, he proclaimed:

Literature can best be defined as a criticism of life. The literature of our immediate past had nothing to do with actuality; our writers were living in a world of dreams and were writing things like Fasanai Ajaib or Chandra Kanta tales told only for entertainment, or to satisfy our sense of wonder. (185)

Therefore, inevitably, romantic love, the central preoccupation and the mainstay of classical poetry was put to the test by the progressives. Sunny afternoons spent chasing sights of love was a luxury Indians forfeited at what M N Roy called “the last spasm of a dying feudalism” i.e. the Revolt of 1857. The feudal economy provided the time, money, and patronage to both the nobles and their court poets to indulge in the idle fancies of amorous and intense love affairs, which the post-1857 world could never afford.

The poets and prose writers of the PWA were products of this post-1857 India, but I must hastily highlight here that the discussion till now should not lead you to conclude that the progressives were against the very idea of love per se. This is far from the truth. In fact, I would argue it is love alone, though not only for a single individual but for the entire humanity, that is at the heart of their literature. In other words, progressives had a broader definition of love that included not solely the beloved but the entire human race within its gambit.

Moreover, I must point out, that the progressives also did not have any personal vendetta against even the romantic idea of love in life and literature. It is just that they deemed it, quite rightly, to be selfish to make it the top priority of their lives in the grim and miserable times in which they were living. As Brecht laments in his poem “To Those Born After,” if they had been fortunate to be born in more peaceful times, they would certainly have entertained the idea of a romantic attachment, but in an unjust and war-ridden world they were robbed of that liberty and luxury along with the other simpler and sweeter necessities of life. A capitalist-colonial society not only disenchants the proletariat from the fruits of their labor but also from the labor of their love. (https://allpoetry.com/To-Those-Born-After)

The same condition holds in terms of the content of the progressive literature. Had the progressives been living in a freer and more carefree age, they would happily and certainly have written literature of the highest aesthetic order, for the singular purpose of contributing to the craft of the art alone; fashioning every word with the utmost care of the form on the lofty and soaring themes of love and courtship; manufacturing literature, like the classics, as an end in itself: “to fulfill the cause of art -that is, art for art’s sake.” (Premchand, 39) However, the progressives were conscious of the fact that their maddening modern world did not permit them this choice, so they deliberately chose (or did they have any choice?) an explicitly political tone whose anger and anguish were, as they fervently believed, the appropriate reaction to the viciousness of their times.

In his interesting essay on the craft of the novel called - “Upanyas” (The Novel), Premchand defends the literature of the progressives for its overtly political leanings, by saying:

The time for art for art’s sake can only be ripe when there is prosperity and happiness in a country. It is impossible for a sensitive soul not to be jolted on seeing mankind bound in all kinds of political and social chains, on witnessing horrific scenes of suffering and poverty, and on hearing loud lamentation over catastrophes (39).

The literature of the progressives is, therefore, not anti-love but is a direct humanitarian action against the crooked social and political forces at hand. Thus, they philosophized a new, materialistic, and more realistic articulation of love which was seen not as an absolute or unconditional entity but as a social institution that was governed, pretty much like other social institutions, by structures of economy and power. As a result, love came to be seen not as a fundamental human instinct or benevolence of divinity but as a socio-economic construct that is not autonomous to external events but conditional to them. It increasingly came to be seen as another superstructure that was built upon a clear materialistic basis. Love, if there is such a thing, then too should inspire and contribute to the revolutionary cause and cease to be an abstraction to seek metaphysical truths.

Therefore, even in the love poetry of progressives, one could not miss noticing that the symbols of love in it are this-worldly and not like it is in the poetry of say Ghalib, Meer, Momin, or Zauq (all classical poets), other-worldly: and since it belongs to this realm, it is inevitable that it will follow the dictums of this society, which are organized around the means and modes of production decided by the colonizer. In other words, in a colonial world, the white master has authority not only over how his subjects live, grow crops, practice their religion, procreate, and go to war, but also over how they think about, experience, and practice love.

The influence of Marxism on the progressive notions of love is transparent here. In this context, it is crucial to note that the thinkers and writers of the P.W.A. seem to be heavily borrowing concepts from Marx’s elegant philosophical treatise called The German Ideology, where he elucidated a materialistic basis for the rise of consciousness in human beings. In it, Marx wrote: “The production of ideas, of conceptions and consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life (659).” A few lines later in this tract, Marx offered us the maxim of materialism, thereby destroying the metaphysics of the German idealists in one stroke, when he succinctly argued: “Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life” (659).

The progressives appropriated this theory and extrapolated it to forge a new, this-worldly, hard-headed conception of love in their stories and poems. Like Marx, who borrowed his pragmatism from English political economists like Locke and Smith and gave us an economic interpretation of Hegelian history, the progressive writers presented love in an increasingly skeptical light and brought financial, real-world considerations to its domain and offered us an economic theory of love. Love, like consciousness and the historical spirit (Hegel called it the “Geist”), thus came to be increasingly seen as an objective reality that has a firmly materialistic basis and was not a metaphysical entity that could be held by the grasp of individual subjective experiences. On this theory of the progressives, the noted Urdu critic- Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has rightly said: …they shifted the center of literary experience from afaq (the universe in the abstract) to anfus (people and things). (Faruqi 432)

The question is what is the value and experience of love in a highly capitalist world that has turned human lives into statistics of profit and loss? This could be further extended to ask – how do war and economy alter the way we experience love and form bonds with fellow human beings? Does the psychological trauma – which Fanon terms “the epidermalization of inferiority” (Fanon, 13)- of a colonized and incarcerated individual, like Faiz, affect their capacity to love in terms of experience, articulation, and expression? Does Marx’s idea of alienation which is a natural outcome of the dog-eat-dog world of profit also influence our most intimate relationships and inherited conceptions of love?

Let us attempt to seek insights, if not definitive answers, into these fascinating and crucial questions by doing a close reading of Faiz’s most famous nazm: Mujhse Pahli Si Muhabbat; taken from his debut poetry collection, Naqsh-e-Fariyadi (1941).

Born in 1911 in Sialkot (then in Punjab, now in Pakistan), Faiz was the most notable and celebrated poet amongst the progressives. He came out of the land of resistance and revolution – Punjab, which had produced the greatest poets of Urdu in the 20th century. We have Iqbal, Faiz, and later Sahir coming from a Punjabi-Muslim family. Faiz belonged to the first generation of progressive writers and represented the pinnace of the poetic output of this movement. His poetic experiments in Urdu, where we witness the fusing of classical aesthetics with progressive ideology; personal pain with political emancipation, and the romantic poet with the revolutionary comrade, set the template for much of progressive poetry in the subcontinent in the years to come. Amongst the second-generation progressives, Sahir Ludhianvi, the most popular amongst them, borrowed heavily from Faiz and he publicly admitted Faiz’s influence on his poetic sensibility.

The forte of Faiz’s poetry, as is the case with most of the progressive literature, is what Premchand called “idealist-realism” which is again a derivative of Marx’s ideas. But the genius of Faiz is that despite using literature as a political weapon, he never turns it into a medium of out-and-out propaganda. His verses communicate Marxist ideology but not at the cost of literary aesthetics; this is the reason that they never turn didactic and continue to be one of the finest specimens of literature.

Initially, in his poetic career, we find Faiz’s poetry inundated with the classical tropes of youthful romance and unrequited love (read the initial verses of Naqsh-e-Fariyadi). But in the decade of 1930s, when he was introduced to The Communist Manifesto by Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-ud-Zafar at M.A.O. college in Amritsar, where he was a lecturer in English Literature, his dreamy poetic assumptions turned asunder and he became more political and subversive: love got filled with the pain and anxieties of the world. This becomes evident in the second half of this book which begins with the nazm, Mujhse Pahli Si Muhabbat Mere Mehboob Na Mang, which marks the point of his departure from the ideal notions of love towards an acceptance of the grim realities of life. This point of transition from the romantic to the progressive is marked by this famous couplet: Aur bhi dukh hain zamane mein muhabbat ke siva / Rahatein aur bhi hai vasl ki rahat ke siva (16).

This nazm is a quintessential piece of progressive literature that has at its heart this dialectic between romantic love and social realism, and it speaks of the realization of the poet of his incapacity to love like he used to or like he could, owing to a consciousness that has been disillusioned by the displays of inhumanity that he beholds in the lanes and bazaars of his incarcerated country. Thus, he says the famous titular line of this poem: Mujhse Pahli Si Muhabbat Mere Mehboob Na Mang (16).

Later, he points out the abominable sights of capitalism and imperialism –bodies being sold in the markets (ja-ba-ja bikte hue kucha-o-bazaar me jism) (Faiz 16), the uncertain and dark magic of centuries of foreign powers (anginat sadiyon ke tarikh bahimana tilism) (Faiz 16) translating into puss-filled wounds (galte hue nasooron se…), and lacerating flesh (jism nikle hue amraz ke tannuron se) - stare at him and disenchant him from the ideals of love, which, in comparison to the larger suffering at hand, looks petty and inconsequential.

These gruesome and at the same time dreadful sights, the result of centuries of domination by the British, alienate our speaker from the simple joys and emotions of his life; so much so that even a mere thought of them seems to him like a crime! as more demanding matters stand at hand. He confides in a very personal and restrained diction to his beloved about how he can no longer entertain the old, romantic, and ideal notions of love; expressing his sheer incapacity to engage in an authentic relationship. This brings to the fore the affective aspect of his alienation and trauma. This is interesting to me, because often, when we read about the damages done by the colonial experiences, we only focus on, and therefore are only aware of, its political and socio-economic consequences, but Faiz’s poem draws our attention to the emotional (affective) damage and the neurosis caused by the colonial experiment. As Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Mask, this psychological mutilation is more deep-seated and dangerous than political and economic subjugation, and, thus, is more permanent, and difficult to eliminate from the psyches of the natives.

The consciousness of this loss moves the speaker of this nazm to say: Mujhse Pahli Si Muhabbat Meri Mehboob Na Mang (16) The most important words, I would argue, in this line are the pahli si (like the bygone days) which are symbolic of the pre-colonial times when India was a self-governing land and its people had more comparative liberty to live, love, and laugh under a free sky. It is also a reference to a pre-capitalist time when the Indian economy was self-sustaining and one of the biggest in the world and was less exploitative of the masses as it became under the colonial Empire.

In the pre-colonial days, as the metaphors in the first stanza tell us, love was the essence of their existence and with which they identified themselves, as it gave meaning to their lives. But, with the nexus of colonialism and capitalism taking on the role of the arbiter of their destinies, they have become alienated from that essence, and a profound chaos of meaningless has set in. They have been turned into what Eliot said, “the hollow men.” In other words, people have lost the emotional capability to love another human being with complete abandon and authenticity; everything has been commodified and ossified, most of all love!

In the first half of this nazm, Faiz presents profound images of this long-lost sort of love. It sounds almost like an elegy for all the myriad dimensions of emotional intensity that he can no longer feel and enjoy in the recesses of his heart, which has been dehumanized and othered from all the selfless toil and misery. Recounting what he has heard from his ancestors about the notions of Romantic love, Faiz laments his incapacity to experience them in his lifetime. He, therefore, concocts all the clichéd metaphors that were associated with the beloved by the classical poets, only to abandon them in the next stanza. The first part of the verse goes like this:

Maine samjha tha ki tu hai to darakhshan hai hayat
Tere gham hai to gham-e-dahar ka jhagdra kya hai
Teri soorat se hai aalam me baharon ko sabaat
Teri ankhon ke siva duniya me rakkha kya hai (16)

All these heart-rendering images and comparisons, made in a tone of intense nostalgia, establish the sense of loss of a carefree and romantic era gone by; echoing of a life not had or a life that could have been. Life is no longer free enough to be spent in such lofty thoughts and soaring mysticisms of love anymore.

On this aspect of this nazm, the renowned Urdu scholar: Rakhshanda Jalil comments-

He (Faiz) juxtaposes the beloved’s beauty against the miseries and ugliness of the world, a world that has hunger, disease, and deprivation, a world that can never let him love her as he once did, for a love that is divorced from social reality is too individualistic, too meaningless (274). 

And then the latter half of the ghazal changes its entire tone and symbolism to become, almost at once, a painful account of the socio-political contemplations of a sensitive poet, who is disturbed and heartbroken by the repulsive and grotesque sights of pain and anguish of the world. Observing them, with utmost horror, he realizes his own love-sick heart and its qualms to be irrelevant in comparison to the wider suffering of humanity. The collage of grief goes like this in the poem:

Anginat sadiyon ke tariq bahimana talism
Resham-o-atlas-o-kamkhwab me bunvaye hue
Jaa-ba-jaa bikte hue koocha-o-bazar me jism
Khaq me luthhdre hue khoon me nahlaye hue (16).

Here the first line conjures a complex metaphor of the ‘centuries-old black and animalistic magic’ that has been decorated with expensive and exquisite fabric of silk, satin, and brocade. I infer this as an image of the elaborate and inhumane systems of oppression that mankind has devised since eternity and which in Faiz’s times could aptly be equated politically to colonialism and economically to capitalism. The centuries of despotic rule of the colonizer, which he pointedly mentions, have been immortalized on the pages of history and remembered by the annals with pomp and extravagance. The silk, satin, and brocade here are transformed into symbols of the embellished and ornamented justifications that are sought for the upholding of the gloomy magic of oppression.

Later in the verse, in the characteristic style of progressive ideology which stands up to the grotesqueness and the nudity of reality and does not shy away from facing it, Faiz stuns us with the portrayals of sick people and their ugly bodies which are lacerating with boils and wounds. Here, the scarred flesh of the colonized native is an extreme and poignant example of the hideousness of the colonial violence performed in India, where the mutilated flesh of the individual can be read as the damage done to the Indian terrain. The lines picture like this: Jism nikle hue amraz ke tannuron se/ Peep behti hui galte hue na nasooron se (16).

These two lines are crucial for the message of this poem as they are in complete opposition to the epitomes of beauty professed in the first half of the poem. Imagining them in our mind’s eyes in juxtaposition to the coyness and sensuality of the beloved serves to heighten our sense of disgust at the colonial administrative machinery. These two verses, therefore, perform a crucial purpose that is they take this nazm to the peaks of human suffering and poetic tension is at the highest in the nazm at this point. With this, he alienates the reader’s intellect into thinking about the cold and cruel nature of colonial domination, where love is also held within the clutches of forces of production.

Considering these profound ideas, the questions we are forced to come to terms with are: can true love ever blossom in the absence of freedom? Does the colonized native also lose the right to love, the moment he surrenders his land, life, and freedom? And does a personal sort of love really have any significant place in the life of a revolutionary, or a sensitive or enslaved individual?

It is towards the end of the poem that Faiz seems to offer us some reflections on these complex questions. He begins, after this stanza, to loosen the built-up tension with the lyricism and casual, apologetic tone of these later lines: Laut jati ha udhar ko bhi nazar kya keeje/ Ab bhi dilkash hai tera husn magar kya keeje. (16). With these words, he brings us to the central dilemma of this verse by revealing the helplessness of his heart to his beloved. He asks- how can I love you wholeheartedly when in times of war, poverty, and disease? How can I be so oblivious to turn my eyes away from the misery of my nation? In other words, Faiz comes to the grave realization which in the words of Brechtian critic Katherine Hollander is: It’s simply that love, like everything else, cannot stand up reliably in the face of a war. (Hollander 24)

This stance gains pertinence and beauty with the poet’s consciousness of the fact there is no lessening of the beloved’s beauty and attractiveness. But the truth remains that he cannot entertain any committed thoughts of romantic love while at the same time harboring the firm resolve to do everything in his agency to rebel against the injustices of the world. He knows, like Hegel, that “it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained” (Hegel 233) In other words, the fight for freedom always comes with a cost; and it is usually either life or, in this case, love. 

Thus, in conclusion, Faiz requests, with a heavy heart, to his beloved that she should not misjudge his love for her; that if given the milieu of peace and contentment, he would surely have loved her in every classical and romantic sense of the word. But, amidst the unbearable and slavish existence of the countrymen he sees around him, he experiences a denial of his own existence. More so, when he realizes that being captives in their own nation, they have no control over their lives, which are operated on by forces that are out of sight (therefore called tariq (dark), but which still dominate us. These sights and experiences of torture do not affirm his previously held sense of identity and they dislocate him from himself. They alienate him. Thereby, they become mediums that subjugate him and do not allow him to be set free. And since there is no freedom to live, how can there be freedom to love? What meaning does love have then?

Faiz, then, seems to be saying that the objectification meted out to us by the colonial economy and political setup – which is at the root of alienation in the modern world- has turned us more disenchanted towards life. More than our land, resources, and society, it has robbed us of the simple joys of life – the greatest of which was being in absolute love. That old, romantic idea is now lost on us forever, perhaps never to return to the alcoves of our hearts again.

Works Cited

Brecht, Bertolt. “Themes,” Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. by John Willett, ed. by Katherine Hollander, Bloomsbury Publications, India, 2022.

Faiz, Ahmed Faiz. “Mujhse Pahli Si Muhabbat Mere Mehboob Na Mang.” Pratinidhi Kavitaen, Rajkamal Paperbacks, 2023.

Fanon, Frantz. “Introduction.” Black Skin, White Masks translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 1967.

Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. “Modern Urdu Literature.” Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology, Surveys and Poems, ed. by K.M. George, Sahitya Academy.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J. B. Baillie, 2nd rev. ed., Allen and Unwin, London, 1949.

Jalil, Rakhshanda. “Progressive Poetry.” Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Urdu, OUP. 2014.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels. “From The German Ideology” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. United Kingdom, W.W. Norton, 2018.

Nayar, Pramod K. The Great Uprising: India, 1857 by Pramod K. India, Penguin Books Limited, 2007.

Premchand. “The Nature and Purpose of Literature.” Indian Literature, vol. 29, no. 6 (116), 1986, pp. 184–91. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24159090. Accessed 11 Feb. 2023.

Premchand. “The Novel.” Premchand on Literature and Life, edited by Ameena Kazi Ansari and Ruchi Nagpal, Aakar Books, 2021.