Tradition and Metaphysics in Faiz
Aziz Butt

It is worth reviewing some of the statements critics make about the disjunctiveness of the poetic tradition identified in Faiz’s approach to literature and life. Some argue categorically that the literary tradition sustained itself through continuity and dynamism until the great manifestation of the pattern of Urdu literature in Iqbal’s poetry. It is averred that thereafter a crippling deviancy assailed Urdu literature as an unfortunate malaise in the form of the movement initiated by progressive writers in 1936.
Henceforth, some critics claim that Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq was assigned the role of maintaining tradition as a spiritual duty. They also claim that the second fruition of the literary tradition was re-achieved as a grand experience in the writers of the 1960s and 70s, and thus the tradition was restored to its original, pristine roots. But it is no use to dig up the controversy again. As it is, it would be instructive to take a second look at Faiz’s poetry, develop insight into his poetic vocabulary and images, and see how it relates to what preceded it in poetry and literature.
It is a truism to repeat that Faiz’s poetic diction and image structure are heavily indebted to Ghalib in particular and to the Turco-Persian tradition in general. It is not only Ghalib, but also the later discovery and rediscovery of layers of meaning and the variety of subjects in Ghalib’s poetry as experienced by poets who came after him, till Iqbal converted it all into an expansive heritage, both in terms of thought and diction, which became an invaluable traditional pattern for Faiz to draw on. Without this heritage, Faiz’s poetry collapses, as any poetic structures evolved by poets in the post-Ghalib period would collapse if Ghalib and his poetic tradition were eliminated from the poetic landscape. Of these poets, Faiz is most deeply rooted in Ghalib’s poetry because he struggles with the tradition, using his own sense of history and age to engage with it. The Western liberal tradition could be incorporated into the pattern of mysticism and morphology of Eastern escapism, or into an age-specific preoccupation with the subjective layers of the individual psyche or the age. The West’s rediscovery of the East in the latter half of the 19th century brought the two approaches closer together. In rediscovering Hindu religion and Buddhist ideas of time, the West found a new hypothesis for an anti-intellectual stance, which was gaining ground among Western intellectuals as a powerful counterpoise to the scientific investigation of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Western scientific tradition had, in fact, been declining as 19th-century capitalism gave way to finance capital. The West readily reprocessed the East’s anti-intellectual ideas and gave them new authenticity. Hence, Iqbal’s great effort culminated in articulating modern European ideas in Urdu poetry, using mutuality and consonance to form a community of feeling and thought between writers of the East and the West. It was a renaissance of Urdu poetry, leavened by ideas flowing into the East through Western channels. It also expanded Ghalib’s diction and broadened its creative use, reinterpreting the West in Urdu diction and poetic style. Iqbal’s poetry is a confluence of the East and the West, and his world is a brave new world engineered by his Titanic imagination. Iqbal’s vast spaces and tremendous stretches of time produce a Tamerlanean magnitude of the universe, in which the drama of human beings is staged as a titanic excursion into time and timelessness.
Faiz inherited this tradition and used it as a vehicle for an idea that was neither metaphysical in Iqbal’s style nor religious in the traditional sense. Iqbal’s world remains solidly structured, sanctioned by religion and hallowed by a Turko-Persian tradition. But Faiz’s universe, as he wanted to evolve it, did not hark back to the tradition in this traditional sense, though it would sound paradoxical to say that Faiz did not refer back to its traditional past in the traditional sense of Iqbal, and yet he took pains to retain the basic form of the tradition of Urdu poetry. In his choice of themes and phrases, he is compulsively driven by something in him, in his psyche, or in his sense of history and tradition to cling to something in Ghalib that could provide him with an identity. When he tentatively moves into his Naksh-e-Faryadi and tries to delineate his poetic theory, he is inexplicably and powerfully drawn into the regions of love and sex so ineluctably celebrated in the Urdu literary tradition. He gives all the concomitants of Ishq, or love, a physical correlative in the images he tries to create in his poems of romantic love. He does not want to be trapped by this romanticised image of love alone, and he keenly desires to add a chunk of reality to it in the form of social analysis. They sometimes appear as two separate notes, brought together in a poem as two coordinate clauses. His main effort is to bind these two nodes into a unity.
But his sensibility, broadly romantic and overall Eastern in style, submits to Ghalib for training and education, where the traditional and the modern are woven into a poetic experience. Ghalib had this poetic charisma. He was deeply shaped by the Mughal Persian tradition, and his psyche was shaped by the grand Mughal civilisation, which was tragically disintegrating as a palpable historical event. He is a great Bard who can recreate the heroic image of the past and the resplendent idea of a great tradition, and yet he is a sensitive observer endowed with a mechanism of sensibility which can creatively view what is happening in his own day: the British rationalism and realism confronting the historical reality of the Mughal past and present. This was a pivotal moment in the Subcontinent’s history, and Ghalib alone could imagine the two great, powerful movements confronting each other in an ironic situation. This is Kierkegaard’s ironic situation. Ghalib’s vision of this tragic collision deeply disturbed him. But Ghalib was a great figure who could see this conflict’s tragic potential. Iqbal used Ghalib’s diction and its expansion to create an amalgam of the latter half of the 19th century’s anti-intellectualism and the anti-intellectualism of his traditional past. But Faiz chose to work for a new renaissance. Ghalib had much to offer both to Iqbal and Faiz, but Faiz’s poetic task was difficult to achieve because his commitment to socialist realism enjoined on him to master Ghalib’s technique of dealing with the ironic situation in a more subtle manner, because it was not only a juxtaposition of two cognate ideas, but a tragic proposition too in which the Eastern metaphysics collided with socialist realism, and this collision sparked off huge tensions which created areas of disjointedness and disjunction. Faiz saw this renaissance as real in that he wanted his tradition to grapple with a new idea or dispensation. It required wrenching things together, aiming at a synthesis or syntheses in the style of the 15th-century European Renaissance, in which medieval romanticism or monasticism collided with the paganism of the classical past.
This new worldview was born of this drama for the people of 15th-century Italy or 16th-century England. Faiz had long looked forward to this kind of real chance. He tried to lead the Subcontinent out of the period of romances, or Dastan, into a new era of realism and social analysis. He wanted society to be the main domain and the earth the main theatre on which human drama was staged. He wanted to be a poet of the human situation within earthly experience. But he did not mean to build a halfway house between the tradition and the social analysis. He struggled to retain the poetic tradition and strove to reconcile the contradictions within his heritage and early perspective. It would sound odd to emphasise that his ‘paganism’ did not mean making his poetry’s canoe unencumbered by dispensing with the tradition’s jetsam and flotsam.
It would sound odd to assert that he wanted to use the traditional pattern of metaphysics as a basis or hypothesis for a new revolution. As the poetry of the tradition provides us with authentic tidings from the depths of the being of the universe and the being of God, so would Faiz desire a devotee to be enlightened by a vision or by a divine flesh; it would not be wide of the mark to say that he chooses the same scenario which was chosen by God for Moses for the revelation of his word to his prophet in the poem Sar-e-Vadi-e-Sina. It is the same desert of Sinai that became the setting for Moses’ spiritual odyssey. The great vision revealed to Moses on the mount of Sinai gave the world a grand design, a new structure of sociological existence, and a new law that would guide human beings for a whole range of centuries. It was a great affirmation of the essential link between man and God, but history shows that human responses change, and great religions are reduced to a mere aggregate of superficial ritual. Ecclesiastical self-centredness and expediency defile the essential purity of God’s truth. The chosen of the earth develop a new way of dealing with fellow human beings, and to perpetuate their hegemony, they adopt tyranny as a main instrument of rule. Not only that, but the priest also openly sanctifies this mode of tyranny, and thus the whole divine scheme is turned topsy-turvy. Faiz wants Mount Sinai to be lit with divine illumination, and he wants a new commandment revealed to the modern Moses.
But this commandment, he says, should be the commandment of negation of the former religion of affirmation and obedience, which has been reduced to mere tyranny. This is the whole stuff of tradition hallowed by thousands of years of human experience. It is the same mountain Sinai; it is the same God and the same man. What is demanded is only a new pact between man and God which would cut across the status quo and demolish the ecclesiastical structure that has gradually rooted itself in injustice, tyranny, and high-handedness. Naturally, such a use of mysteries could not be a bland, suave repetition of an existing situation falsely promoted and cunningly emphasised in another poem, Prayer. Faiz once again uses the traditional mechanics of a ritual, but fills it with new content. As noted earlier, Faiz aimed to rejuvenate this decadent tradition by giving it new content, bringing about a renaissance in the real sense of the word and shaping the Subcontinent’s history in a more constructive and creative style. The ritual he uses in Prayer is part of daily religious practice: praying to God is routine for us, but what matters is the prayer’s content. In this, Faiz calls on God to inspire religious zealots who are primarily inured to falsehood and hypocrisy, with the boldness to deny and the courage to investigate. This is, in fact, the essence of the scientific method, which, according to Faiz, is needed to cut through the whole chunk of false beliefs and hypocritical ecclesiastical and feudal stuff.
At this stage, it is better to remember that Faiz wanted to be grounded in Ghalib’s poetic methodology. Faiz’s use of metaphysics and religious tradition finds sanction in Ghalib’s handling of these themes. He is a poet of ironic mode in a Kierkegaardian sense; a century ago, he saw the conflicts that would become the main components of 19th- and 20th-century history. The poets who came after him, who did not see the truth of his poetic experience or develop insight into his sense of history, failed to understand their age and the situation they were placed in. Then there were writers who deliberately denigrated Ghalib to stem the tide of change and history’s progressive movement. They accepted the West’s decadence and Western literature as the age’s creative accumulation. They embraced defeatism, subjectivism, and a preoccupation with death and absurdism as the authentic themes of their creative experience, but Faiz insisted on a healthy struggle, hope, and life in Ghalib’s true style.
Sigmund Freud stated that man was determined by two instincts: sex and death. By death, he meant subjectivism, regression, etc. From the 15th century onward, people in the West developed modes of celebrating life and created institutions and systems to preserve their commitment to life. They moved away from the subjectivism and eschatological vision of the Middle Ages and advanced the heroic ideas of humanism, rationalism, scientific analysis, the conquest of the material world, and the expansion of human experience. They pushed back the boundaries of death, i.e., subjectivism, etc., and expanded the domain of life, energy, dynamism, and change. When this movement began to decline, Western intellectuals again succumbed to medieval thinking, and Eastern writers triumphantly took a cue from them, rejoicing in the idea that reason had ultimately proven to be a weak God. But Faiz and Ghalib see life differently. Faiz, in the true style of Ghalib, clings to the optimism that the man-made world is the real world, and that reason, life, and earthly surroundings form the locale where man plays the role of chief architect of his own fate and the main arbiter of his life.