Dreamer Meets Revolutionary

Dreamer Meets Revolutionary

by 

Raza Naeem pays homage to the man he calls “Pakistan’s Gramsci”, the writer Syed Sibte Hasan

From the Journal The Friday Times. For original click on the link: 

Among friends - Sibte Hasan, Dr M. Sarwar and Faiz Ahmed Faiz

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31 July marked the 99th birth anniversary of the pioneer of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in undivided India and of the Communist Party in Pakistan – Sibte Hasan. Like Antonio Gramsci, the Italian thinker and activist, Hasan endured repeated jail terms, first during his sojourn in the US, and then in Pakistan in 1951–55 and again during the Ayub regime. Both thinkers chose to write in their native language: Italian for Gramsci and Urdu for Hasan. Both Gramsci and Hasan were concerned with producing organic and original theories, applying Marxist concepts to their material realities rather than the other way round. Chances are that Pakistan’s younger breed of comrades knows their Gramsci, but not their Sibte Hasan.

Despite Sibte Hasan’s iconic stature in the Subcontinent, very little is known about him: neither he nor some of his closest comrades, such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote anything about him. Sibte Hasan was born in Azamgarh, India, in 1916 and graduated from Aligarh Muslim University. He embarked on a distinguished journalistic career, serving the Pioneer (Lucknow), National Herald (Allahabad) and the Bombay Chronicle besides the Urdu daily Payam of Hyderabad, Deccan. He was also the editor of the renowned literary journal Naya Adab and the Lahore weekly Lail-o-Nahar. His initiation into socialism began while he was a student. In his preface to Moosa se Marx Tak, which has for decades served as the bible of Marxism for thousands of left-wing activists in the Subcontinent, he admits: “I learnt the first principles of socialism from the prominent revolutionary historian the late Dr Muhammad Ashraf. Those were the days when the English were dominant in the country and the entry of socialist literature was totally prohibited.”

Sibte Hasan, the dreamer

In 1951, along with other comrades, he was arrested in the trumped-up Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and remained in prison until 1955. He was rearrested after Ayub Khan assumed power. After his release, he worked for a time with Ferozsons, later moving to the Eastern Federal Insurance Company as director in charge of publications and publicity. This gave him the time and opportunity to devote his energies to writing. Owing to his significant works in Urdu – Moosa se Marx Tak (From Moses to Marx),Adab aur Roshan Khayali (Literature and Enlightenment), Pakistan main Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa (The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan), Inqilab-e-Iran (The Iranian Revolution) and his sole English work, The Battle of Ideas in Pakistan, Hasan became a pre-eminent popular intellectual associated with progressive and secular ideas in Pakistan.

Earlier in April this year, while on a visit to Karachi, I accompanied a comrade to meet Naushaba Zuberi, Sibte Hasan’s daughter, in an attempt to piece together the latter’s life in the city he made his permanent home. Sibte sahib changed many homes throughout his life, but never owned one. Then, in 1975, his daughter and her husband built a house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and asked Sibte sahib to stay with them. He spent 11 years here and, as per his request, the house had no partitions or boundary walls in order that his grandchildren might come and go freely. He lived in two rooms: one for studying and the other a bedroom, and tended to his mehndi and haar singhar plants in the garden. As a rule, he refrained from accepting dinner invitations and would only make an exception for someone’s wedding or to call upon a sick comrade in Landhi or Korangi. Interestingly, said his daughter, given that he anticipated arrest at any time, Sibte sahib always kept a carton of milk and a packet of tea by his bedside and had instructed her to go to his friend Tariq Suhail’s house if ever he was arrested.

Gramsci

Pakistan’s younger breed of comrades likely know their Gramsci, but not their Sibte Hasan

After Sibte sahib’s death, Zuberi turned the house in Gushan-e-Iqbal into a library and even appointed a librarian for it. When no one came to visit, she was heartbroken and sold the house in 1988, Sibte sahib would not have approved…

Following his release from prison, Sibte Hasan wrote prodigiously. From current affairs to anthropology, and from the history of Marxism to a people’s history of Pakistan and the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and secularism in the country, he wrote in simple Urdu. During the Cold War, when most communists in the country were divided between their loyalties to either Beijing or Moscow, underground, in jail or executed, Sibte sahib was one of the few intellectuals and activists who courageously opposed military dictatorships uncompromisingly and, through his works, tried to sow the seeds of progressive thought in Pakistan, be it Marxism or secularism.

The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan, which was published exactly forty years ago, is one of his seminal works, but surprisingly ignored even by those on the left. Sibte sahib’s intent in writing the book was nothing less than what Gramsci had similarly intended for the Italian national condition in his Prison Notebooks: to ascribe a central role to culture in explaining the people’s history of Pakistan. He writes, “There is great fanfare about culture these days in Pakistan […] There is no denying that culture plays a very important role in shaping and construction of personality, but the negligence which has hitherto been shown towards cultural problems, whether these discussions would contribute to remedying it, no one can tell.”

In Sibte Hasan’s hands, the narrative of our cultural evolution becomes a history from below

Unlike Gramsci, however, Sibte Hasan spent considerable time discussing the definition of culture: “The system of meaningful creativity and social values of any society is called culture […] Therefore language, instruments and tools, methods of production and social relations, way of life, the arts, knowledge and literature, philosophy and wisdom, beliefs and magic, manners and habits, rituals and traditions, the behaviour of love and family relations, etc., are different manifestations of culture.”

From this definition, Sibte sahib moves onto the synthesizing elements of culture, which for him, form the basis for all the new and old cultures of the world. These are physical conditions, instruments and tools, systems of thought and feeling, and social values. Hasan adopts a wide panorama enveloping the ancient cultures of the Indus Valley, the Aryans, the Greek, Saka and Kushan influences, the Arabs, Turks and Iranians, and the rise and decline of Mughals before concluding with a reflection on Mughal culture in the mirror of its Western contemporary.

A number of things stand out in Hasan’s analysis. First, as mentioned before, this book came out in the mid-1970s when the democratic government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in power and there was much debate on the definition of Pakistani culture among both the left and the right. Sibte sahib wrote about the evolution of Pakistani culture in a detached manner – one not given over to emotion but tracing a 5,000-year-old civilization in a scientific manner. In his hands, the narrative of our cultural evolution becomes a history from below, a people’s history, rather than a mere chronicle of the exploits and adventures of kings and rulers and palace intrigues.

Sibte Hasan helped found the Progressive Writers Association

Second, Sibte sahib’s account painstakingly establishes the fact that the Subcontinent’s history has been a history of the separation of religion and politics. For example, one of the most powerful kings of the Mameluk dynasty in Delhi, Ghias-ud-din Balban, would say openly that matters of state were subject to national convenience rather than to the laws devised by theologians. Sibte sahib writes, “It is correct that the rulers used religion for the benefit of their class and did not find anything wrong with using the services of maulvis, pundits and clerics, but they were unwilling to accept religious representatives as their masters.”

The third distinctive feature of Hasan’s work is the space he devotes to popular movements of the Subcontinent. One is the Bhakti movement, which is usually dismissed as a “Hindu” movement, but was in reality a joint movement of lower-class Hindus and Muslims. The other popular movement, which Sibte sahib treats as more than a historical footnote, is the Roshaniya movement founded by the ‘Pir-e-Roshan’ Bayazid Ansari during the reign of Mughal emperor Akbar. Despite leading an egalitarian movement, says Sibte sahib, “Historians and religious scholars too have presented Pir Roshan’s character in a very biased manner and tried to prove him an infidel, heretic, dacoit and even a robber. His historical greatness should be reviewed in the light of the longstanding enmity between the Mughals and Pakhtuns. The Pakhtuns never accepted Mughal suzerainty; in fact, where and whenever they had an opportunity, they used it to rebel.”

Women, too, have their fair share in Sibte Hasan’s narrative, especially the present underdevelopment of women and the growth of brothels in the Subcontinent under the influence of Muslim notables: “Upper and middle class women were paralyzed because of purdah. Dancing and singing, which was considered a sacred prayer in Hindu society, was deemed as the forbidden tree among Muslims thanks to the cleric’s fatwas. And thereby Muslim notables began to patronize the dancing and singing establishments. This is how this sacred art became a source of entertainment for the full-bellied and for the satisfaction of lust in the cities.”

The Mughal period also comes alive in these pages and Sibte sahib gives more credit to this era for leaving a lasting influence on the region than many are willing to do. One of his great achievements in the chapter on the rise and fall of the Mughals is the way he has treated Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal emperor. Historians either usually depict him as a fundamentalist successor to the four caliphs or a cruel tyrant who showed no mercy to his own father, brothers and progeny in his quest for unlimited power. Despite being a committed secularist, Sibte sahib refuses to take sides, rather describing the man and his times as they were.

Writing about the celebrated battle of ideas between Aurangzeb and his learned free-thinker brother Dara Shikoh, he writes: “If Aurangzeb won and Dara Shikoh lost in this civil war, it was because such was the need of the times. Regarding the charge that the sharia-compliant Aurangzeb betrayed his brothers and put his aged father in prison, in the period of personalized rule, this was the norm everywhere regardless of West or East. To shed the blood of father and brothers for throne and crown was not really a new tradition and had Dara Shikoh won out, he would have treated Aurangzeb in the same manner as the latter with the former.”

One of the most crucial arguments of the book is the thesis that the chief blame for the decline of the Mughal Empire and subsequent British domination in India lay with the scientific and commercial short-sightedness of the Mughals. Very much like their Ottoman contemporaries, even as farsighted a ruler as Akbar refused to either set up the printing press or even to learn more about it, justifying this historic blunder by arguing for the inferiority of machines in relation to his calligraphers, fearing it would leave them unemployed. In a moving and lyrical passage, Sibte sahib writes, “We should search for the main reasons of the decline of Mughal culture in their self-sufficient society, which did not find the need for invention and innovation; in those instruments and tools which had not changed since centuries; in that feudal system which did not have space left for further progress; in that authoritarian personalized rule in which the authority to decide the fate of country and nation belonged to the king and the nobles, and the ruled had no right of representation at any level.”

When the book was published in 1975, forty years ago, it immediately set off a debate in South Asian Marxist circles regarding the social conditions in India before the arrival of the British, and what impact the latter’s development had on modes of production. Since this was the first time such a thesis had been presented in Urdu, it drew in eminent Pakistani intellectuals such as Safdar Mir, Muhammad Ali Siddiqi and Hamza Alavi.

2016 will be celebrated as the birth centenary of Pakistan’s greatest Marxist thinker. Throughout his life, he was respected in all circles despite his Marxist affiliations; his death was widely condoled by all shades of political opinion, including political parties and heads of state. Yet his seminal works are not widely known or taught in the so-called heartlands of Urdu or outside a tiny minority of dedicated leftists (they are certainly lapped up enthusiastically elsewhere in Pakistan, in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhuwa). Translation would certainly play a pivotal role here for the many people who still do not have access to Sibte sahib’s work. None of the eleven books he wrote in Urdu have been translated into English to date.

At a time where demagogues and opportunists have taken up the mantle of “public intellectual” and appeal to a middle-class youth hungry for change – rather than the modest and soft-spoken man born nearly a century ago – the challenge he has thrown to us in concluding The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan still remains:

“… what will be the fate of our national culture and regional cultures in the era of this industrial culture?”

The author is a social scientist, translator and critic based in Lahore. The translations in this essay are his

- See more at: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/tft/dreamer-meets-revolutionary/#sthash.wITy2J5h.IFATvZkV.dpuf

Letters to Uncle Sam: Saadat Hasan Manto

Source: https://universalpoetries.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/letters-to-uncle-sam-saadat-hasan-manto-2/

Letters to Uncle Sam: Saadat Hasan Manto

Between 1951 and 1954, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote nine letters to Uncle Sam (America).  Only the first letter was written in 1951. The rest all seem to have been written in 1954. I say ‘seem to have been written’ because three of them bear no date. The last one is dated 26 April 1954. These letters not only tell us a good deal about Manto and his concerns but even more about his political views. The man who speaks through these letters is well informed about international affairs and critical of American policy. We also see Manto’s lighter side at play, enlivened by his caustic, at times savage, wit. We also learn a good deal about his friends and foes. He makes fun of Pakistani communists whom he always considered somewhat fake because they looked for a signal from their political gurus abroad before taking a position on any issue. A man with the independent temperament of Manto found such conduct pathetic and made no bones about it.

It was a Satan’s self-declared disciple Uncle Sam wanted to recruit. The US interest in Manto has a background. Manto once ridiculed the USSR. This invoked US interest in Manto. The Americans must have thought they could recruit Manto on their side in the cultural Cold War.

It all took place in 1951. The United States, in a bid to increase its influence in Pakistan after the refusal by Pakistan to send troops to Korea, had begun to find sympathisers in Pakistan’s political, social and literary circles. An air-conditioned USIS (United States Information Service) library was set up on Lahore’s The Mall.

An US official, Mr. Smith, along with a Pakistani USIS staffer, arrived at Manto’s flat one day. Smith requested Manto to write something for the USIS. Manto replied that he was an Urdu writer and did not write in English. Smith said the articles would be published in Urdu. Manto replied he would only write what he wished to write. Smith had no problem with that. On the question of money, Smith said the USIS would pay Rs 500 per piece. Manto refused point-blank, insisting he would take no more than Rs 200. In the end, a compromise was struck at Rs 300.

A few days later, Manto made a lively entry at the USIS. He handed down an envelope. It was passed on to Mr. Withus, the senior officer at the USIS. Withus was flabbergasted. The envelope had Manto’s ‘First letter to Uncle Sam’. In his first letter, Manto begins with a note of rancour over the absurdity of the Partition, (de-)development in post-colonial Pakistan and US role in these affairs:

Excerpt First Letter to Uncle Sam

31 Laxmi Mansions,Hall Road,Lahore16 December 1951

Dear Uncle,

Greetings,

This letter comes to you from your Pakistani nephew whom you do not know, nor does anyone else in your land of seven freedoms.

You should know why my country, sliced away from India, came into being and gained independence, which is why I am taking the liberty of writing to you. Like my country, I too have become independent and in exactly the same way. Uncle, I will not labour the point since an all-knowing seer like you can well imagine the freedom a bird whose wings have been clipped can enjoy.

My name is Saadat Hasan Manto and I was born in a place that is now in India. My mother is buried there. My father is buried there. My first-born is also resting in that bit of earth. However, that place is no longer my country. My country now is Pakistan which I had only seen five or six times before as a British subject.

I used to be the All India’s Great Short Story Writer. Now I am Pakistan’s Great Short Story Writer. Several collections of my stories have been published and the people respect me. In undivided India, I was tried thrice, in Pakistan so far once. But then Pakistan is still young.1

The government of the British considered my writings pornographic. My own government has the same opinion. The government of the British let me off but I do not expect my own government to do so. A lower court sentenced me to three months hard labour and a Rs 300 fine. My appeal to the higher court won me an acquittal but my government believes that justice has not been done and so it has now filed an appeal in the High Court, praying that the judgment acquitting me be quashed and I be punished. We will have to see what the High Court decides.

My country is not your country which I regret. If the High Court were to punish me, there is no newspaper in my country that would print my picture or the details of all my trial.

My country is poor. It has no art paper, nor proper printing presses. I am living evidence of this poverty. You will not believe it, uncle, but despite being the author of twenty-two books, I do not have my own house to live in. And you will be astonished to know that I have no means of getting myself from one place to the other. I neither have a Packard nor a Dodge; I do not even have a used car.

If I need to go somewhere, I rent a bike. If a piece of mine appears in a newspaper and I earn twenty to twenty-five rupees at the rate of seven rupees a column, I hire a tonga and go buy locally distilled whiskey. Had this whiskey been distilled in your country, you would have destroyed that distillery with an atom bomb because it is the sort of stuff guaranteed to send its user to kingdom come within one year.

But I am digressing. All I really wanted to do was to convey my good wishes to brother Erskine Caldwell. You will no doubt recall that you tried him for his novel ‘God’s Little Acre’ on the same charge that I have faced here: pornography.

Believe me, uncle, when I heard that this novel was tried on an obscenity charge in the land of seven freedoms, I was extremely surprised. In your country, after all, everything is divested of its outer covering so that it can be displayed in the show window, be it fresh fruit or woman, machine or animal, book or calendar. You are the king of bare things so I am at a loss to understand, uncle, why you tried brother Erskine Caldwell.

Had it not been for my quick reading of the court judgment I would have drunk myself to death by downing large quantities of our locally distilled whiskey because of the shock I received when I came to know of the Caldwell case. In a way, it was unfortunate that my country missed an opportunity to rid itself of a man like me, but then had I croaked, I would not have been writing to you, uncle. I am dutiful by nature. I love my country. In a few days, by the Grace of God I will die and if I do not kill myself, I will die anyway because where flour sells at the price at which it sells here, only a shamefaced person can complete his ordained time on earth.

So, I read the Caldwell judgment and decided not to drink myself to death with large quantities of the local hooch. Uncle, out there in your country, everything has an artificial façade but the judge who acquitted brother Erskine was certainly without such a façade. If this judge – I’m sorry I don’t know his name – is alive, kindly convey my respectful regards to him.

The last lines of his judgment point to the intellectual reach of his mind. He writes: “I personally feel that if such books were suppressed, it would create an unnecessary sense of curiosity among people which could induce them to seek salaciousness, though that is not the purpose of this book. I am absolutely certain that the author has chosen to write truthfully about a certain segment of American society. It is my opinion that truth is always consistent with literature and should be so declared.”

That is what I told the court that sentenced me, but it went ahead anyway and gave me three months in prison with hard labour and a fine of three hundred rupees. My judge thought that truth and literature should be kept far apart. Everyone has his opinion.

I am ready to serve my three-month term but this fine of three hundred rupees I am unable to pay. Uncle, you do not know that I am poor. Hard work I am used to, but money I am unused to. I am about thirty-nine and all my life I have worked hard. Just think about it. Despite being such a famous writer, I have no Packard.

I am poor because my country is poor. Two meals a day I can somehow manage but many of my brothers are not so fortunate.

My country is poor, but why is it ignorant? I am sure, uncle, you know why because you and your brother John Bull together are a subject I do not want to touch because it will not be exactly music to your ears. Since I write to you as a respectful youngster, I should remain that way from start to finish.

You will certainly ask me out of astonishment why my country is poor when it boasts of so many Packards, Buicks and Max Factor cosmetics. That is indeed so, uncle, but I will not answer your question because if you look into your heart, you will find the answer there (unless you have had your heart taken out by one of your brilliant surgeons).

That section of my country’s population which rides in Packards and Buicks is really not of my country. Where poor people like me and those even poorer live, that is my country.

These are bitter things, but there is a shortage of sugar here otherwise I would have coated my words appropriately. But what of it! Recently, I read Evelyn Waugh’s book ‘The Loved One’. He of course comes from the country of your friends. Believe me, I was so impressed by that book that I sat down to write to you.

I was always convinced of the individual genius found in your part of the world but after reading this book, I have become a fan of his for life. What a performance, I say! Some truly vibrant people do indeed live out there.

Evelyn Waugh tells us that in your California, the dead can be beautified and there are large organisations that undertake the task. No matter how unattractive the dear departed in life, after death he can be given the look desired. There are forms you fill where you are asked to indicate your preference. The excellence of the finished product is guaranteed. The dead can be beautified to the extent desired, as long as you pay the price. There are experts who can perform this delicate task to perfection. The jaw of the loved one can be operated upon and a beatific smile implanted on the face. The eyes can be lit up and the forehead can be made to appear luminous. And all this work is done so marvellously that it can befool the two angels who are assigned to do a reckoning once a person is in the grave.

Uncle, by God you people are matchless.

One had heard of the living being operated on and beautified with the help of plastic surgery – there was much talk of it here – but one had not heard that the dead can be beautified as well.

Recently one of your citizens was here and some friends introduced me to him. By then I had read brother Evelyn Waugh’s book and I read an Urdu couplet to your countryman that he did not follow. However, the fact is, uncle, that we have so distorted our faces that they have become unrecognisable, even to us. And there we have you who can even make the dead look more beautiful than they ever were in life. The truth is that only you have a right to live on this earth: the rest of us are wasting our time.

Our great Urdu poet Ghalib wrote about a hundred years ago:

If disgrace after death was to be my fate,I should have met my end through drowning

It would have spared me a funeral and no headstone would have marked my last resting place.

Ghalib was not afraid of being disgraced while he was alive because from beginning to end that remained his lot. What he feared was disgrace after death. He was a graceful man and not only was he afraid of what would happen after he died, he was certain what would happen to him after he was gone. And that is why he expressed a wish to meet his end through drowning so that he should neither have funeral nor grave.

How I wish he had been born in your country. He would have been carried to his grave with great fanfare and over his resting place a skyscraper would have been built. Or were his own wish to be granted, his dead body would have been placed in a pool of glass and people would have gone to view it as they go to a zoo.

Brother Evelyn Waugh writes that not only are there in your country establishments that can beautify dead humans but dead animals as well. If a dog loses its tail in an accident, he can have a new one.

Whatever physical defects the dead one had in life are duly repaired after death. He is then buried ceremoniously and floral wreaths are placed on his grave. Every year on the pet’s death anniversary, a card is sent to the owner with an inscription that reads something like this: In paradise, your Tammy (or Jeffie) is wagging his tail (or his ears) while thinking of you.

What it adds up to is that your dogs are better off than us. Die here today, you are forgotten tomorrow. If someone in the family dies, it is a disaster for those left behind who often can be heard wailing, “Why did this wretch die? I should’ve gone instead.” The truth is, uncle, that we neither know how to live nor how to die.

I heard of one of your citizens who wasn’t sure what sort of a funeral he would be given, so he staged a grand “funeral” for himself while he was very much alive. He deserved that certainly because he had lived a stylish and opulent life where nothing happened unless he wished it to. He wanted to rule out the possibility of things not being done right at his funeral; as such, he was justified in personally observing his last rites while alive. What happens after death is neither here nor there.

I have just seen the new issue of ‘Life’ (5 November 1951, international edition) and learnt of a most instructive facet of American life. Spread across two pages is an account of the funeral of the greatest gangster of your country. I saw a picture of Willie Moretti (may his soul rest in peace) and his magnificent home which he had recently sold for $55,000. I also viewed his five-acre estate where he wanted to live in peace, away from the distractions of the world. There was also a picture of his, eyes closed, lying in his bed, quite dead. There were also pictures of his $5,000 casket and his funeral procession made up of seventy-five cars. God is my witness, it brought tears to my eyes.

May there be dust in my mouth, but in case you were to die, may you have a grander farewell than Willie Morrity. This is the ardent prayer of a poor Pakistani writer who doesn’t even have a cycle to ride on. May I beg you that like the more farsighted ones in your country, you should make arrangements to witness your funeral while you are alive. You can’t leave it to others; they can always make mistakes, being fallible. It is possible that your physical appearance may not receive the attention it deserves after you have passed away. It is also possible that you may already have witnessed your funeral by the time this letter reaches you. I say this because you are not only wiser, you are also my uncle.

Convey my good wishes to brother Erskine Caldwell and to the judge who acquitted him of the pornography charge. If I have caused you offense, I beg your forgiveness. With the utmost respect,

Your poor nephewSaadat Hasan Manto,Resident of Pakistan——————–

Manto dropped in a few days later and asked if he should bring another article. He was told by the USIS staff to allow time for the first one to appear. He never asked for money, nor did he enquire about the first article.

Sources –The letter has been translated from Urdu by – Khalid Hasan ( Letters to Uncle Sam by Saadat Hasan Manto, Alhamra, Islamabad, ISBN969-516-047-6 ).

Reading Faiz in Beirut.

LINK: http://culturemondo.org/node/650

For original visit above link

[For my comrades and poetry aficionados: Fawwaz Trabulsi and Mayssun Sukarieh, and for Raza Mir.]

Reading Faiz in Beirut.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) is one of the greatest Urdu poets of the 20th century. Born in Sialkot, Punjab, Faiz came of age under colonial rule and in the throes of nationalist anti-colonialism. He joined the British Indian Army; he was an integral part of the Progressive Writers Association. He wrote searing poetry about life, and revolution, taking older poetic forms and forging new idioms that chartered the emotions of socialism. When Pakistan was formed in 1947, Faiz went in two directions: as editor of Pakistan Times he was central to the creation of democratic mainstream institutions, as a communist intellectual he was part of the formidable attempt to create democratic culture in the new country. Both tasks floundered as Pakistan entered its unforgiving political grammar: the twenty something families that dominate the economy and polity subverted the democratic process by a turn to the Barracks, backed to the hilt by the United States imprisoned in its own Cold War calculus. Faiz went to prison. Pakistan, he wrote, has been “sold to the neo-imperialist block.” By the 1970s, when the dictatorship of Zia thwarted any democratic possibility, Faiz was put under house arrest. Feigning to go smoke a cigarette, the poet escaped his captor and fled the country. He became the editor of the Afro-Asian magazine, Lotus, and became a resident in Beirut.

Faiz absorbed Beirut. He befriended the radicals (including a young Yasser Arafat), and found himself at the center of the city’s concerns and its imagination. The energy of Lotus reveals some of this, as do Faiz’s poems written in Beirut. Among them is ek nagma Karbala-e-Beirut ke liye (a song for the battlefield of Beirut), written in June 1982 in the throes of the Israeli invasion. Faiz returned to Pakistan in the middle of that war.

Translating Faiz into English.

Faiz joined the British Indian Army in 1941. A communist, he was moved by the anti-fascist war and wanted to be a part of it. His commanding officer, a former journalist from the London Times, told Faiz, “I’ve read your file, and see that you’re an advanced communist. Are you?” Faiz, then thirty, said, “I don’t know what a retarded communist is.” “You won’t let us down?” the officer pleaded. Faiz impressed them with his forthrightness, honesty and decency. These qualities earned him his promotion, and brought him, eventually, to the head dinner table at the Northern Headquarters in Rawalpindi. At a party, an elderly English woman said to Faiz, “I hear that you are a poet.” “Yes, I plead guilty to that.” “How nice,” she replied, “We hope that we’ll listen to some poetry after dinner.” Well, said Faiz, “I’m sorry. I write in Urdu, my language.” She said, “Then why don’t you write in English.” “Why should I write in English,” asked Faiz. “Isn’t it so much easier,” she countered.

In 1938, a young Englishman, Victor Kiernan, left the safe confines of Trinity College, Cambridge for a journey to India. A communist since 1934, he carried in his bags notes from the Communist International to the Indian party. That was his side mission. His primary motivation was to follow the dancer and activist Shanta Gandhi, whom he soon married. Gandhi was a founder member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, and it was through her extensive contacts that Kiernan found his own feet among the radical artists whom he came to cherish. Among them was Faiz. They had communism in common, but also they had a deep love for poetry. The friendship flowered till Faiz’ death in 1984. In 1945, at Wular Lake in Kashmir, Kiernan took his remarkable facility with language toward Faiz’ ghazals. It was risky business, as Kiernan was soon to find. The tempo of the Urdu poetry is not the same as that of English verse. “Urdu prosody,” Kiernan wrote in 1955, “rests on a basis too remote from that of English to be reproduced with any exactness.” He felt that his own translations tried their best to give a sense of Faiz’ achievement, without pretending to re-present it as the original. The only way to Faiz, in other words, is to absorb the sounds in Urdu. “We all, it is probable, hear the rhythm of verse far more with an inner ear, an invisible chronometer developed by long habit and familiarity, than with the ear of sense. The best advice that can be given to a novice is to hear Urdu verse recited in the emphatically rhythmic style common in public declamation.” Kiernan first translated his other friend, Mohammed Iqbal, whose verse was more Persianate, more elaborate (Poems from Iqbal, 1955). “Iqbal wrote of the tribulations of the poor majestically,” Kiernan reflected, “as if looked down on them from heaven; he preached revolt of downtrodden peoples, relief of downtrodden classes by wealthier men infused with Islamic fraternalism.” Faiz was different. His poems sizzled with a different kind of hope. “Faiz belonged to a generation that examined poverty at close range, with its dirt and its sores, and he learned its problems in social, economic detail.” Translator and poet had a sympathy in their outlook.

In 1955, People’s Publishing House published Kiernan’s first translations of a selection from Faiz. It was an immediate success. The book, Poems by Faiz, had the Urdu text, prepared by Kiernan’s closest collaborator, Nazir Ahmed, the well-known teacher in Lahore. It also had the Urdu transliterated into English, and then two translations, one literal and the other with flourishes.

“This world knows other torments than of love,

And other happiness than a fond embrace;

Love, do not ask for my old love again.”

(mujh-se pahli-si mohabbat, meri mahbub na mang).

Kiernan is right about the need to hear the sounds. One evening, sixteen years ago, I sat with my friends Agha Shahid Ali and Tayyab Mahmud, and felt the tremors of beautiful words beat against my skin. Shahid was in full form, but so was Tayyab. I listened. It was my lot. My inner ear was in heaven. “Faiz has to be recited,” Shahid kept saying, as if to say that it was not possible to grasp the poetry in solitude, quietly.

Shahid had a magical hold on words, and he gave us his Faiz, sometimes in Urdu, sometimes in English. When Shahid was a little boy, Faiz had come to his house in Kashmir. So had the singer Begum Akhtar. Shahid had a cassette tape of the Begum singing Faiz. It is with this tape that he bribed the exiled Faiz in Beirut to allow him to begin a new set of translations. The impetus for his translations came from a chance encounter with the American poet Naomi Lazards’s attempt (The True Subject, 1987). Lazard met Faiz in Hawaii in 1979, and was taken with his verse. Faiz would give her his rough translation of a poem, and she would work on it. The method is similar to what Aijaz Ahmad did so wonderfully with Ghalib and a group of leading American poets (the result is in Ghazals of Ghalib, 1972). Lazard’s book had some wondrous interpretations of Faiz. It inspired Shahid.

Shahid wrote to Faiz, asking permission to take liberties with his poems as he took them on the long journey from Urdu to English. “I certainly knew your father,” Faiz wrote from Beirut, “and I am glad to have news from you. You are welcome to make your adaptations of my poems which I shall be happy to receive. Also some of your own poems and the tape or cassette of Begum Akhtar which you have kindly offered to send.” In a style that was only his, Shahid went after the poems. His translations are a collaboration with Faiz, but poems that he has truly authored. I hope, Shahid wrote, “that those who know both languages will find some pleasure in my moments of literal fidelity to Faiz as well as in those moments (of fidelity, I insist) when I am unfaithful.” Shahid followed Kiernan’s insistence on the importance of the sounds of Urdu, and in the magic of the imagery. The latter drew its sustenance, as Faiz put it the year before he died, “from the storehouse of classical tradition.” The point was to draw from this storehouse, not to be imprisoned by it. “Farhad of the Persian legend becomes the working class of today,” Faiz wrote, “and Laila of the Arabian Desert the goddess of liberation. The ghazal is a chameleon, mashuq-i-hazar in the Persian phrase, ‘a beauty with a thousand wiles.’ It continues to flourish because of the one quality which is necessary for the ‘survival of the fittest’; adaptability to changing environments.” This is why he was open to Shahid’s glorious adaptations (published in 1991 as The Rebel’s Silhouette).

“There are other sorrows in this world,

comforts other than love.

Don’t ask me, my love, for that love again.”

(mujh-se pahli-si mohabbat, meri mahbub na mang).

ek nagma Karbala-e Beirut ke liye.

Below is my translation of Faiz’s Beirut poem (helped at crucial points by Raza’s keen ear). I was glad to offer it as my gift to Beirut in January 2012.

Beirut, nigaar-e-bazm-e-jahaan.

Beirut, badiil-e-baagh-e-jinaan

Bacchon ki hansti aankhon ke

Jo aainay chaknachoor hue

Ab unke sitarron ke lau se

Is shahar ke raaten roshan hain

Aur rakshan hai arz-e Lebanon

Beirut, nigaar-e-bazm-e-jahaan

Jo chehre lahu ke ghaaze ke

Zeenat se siva purnoor hue

Ab unke dhamak partau se

Is shahar ke galiyaan roshan hain

Aur taabaan hai arz-e Lebanon

Beirut, nigaar-e-bazm-e-jahaan

Har kushta makan, har eik khandar

Ham-paayaa-e-qasr-e daaraa hai

Har ghaazi rashk-e-Askandar hai

Har dukhtar hamsar-e Laila hai

Yeh shahar azaal se qayaam hai

Ye shahar abaad tak dayaam hai

Beirut, dil-e-arz-e-Lebanon.

Beirut, nigaar-e-bazm-e-jahaan

Beirut, badeel-e-baagh-e-jinaan

* * *

Beirut, ornament of our world

Beirut, exquisite as Paradise’s gardens.

Those shattered mirrors once were

The smiling eyes of children,

Now are star-lit.

This city’s nights are bright.

and luminous is Lebanon.

Beirut, ornament of our world.

Faces decorated with blood

Dazzling, beyond beauty.

Their elegant splendor

Lights up the city’s lanes.

And radiant is Lebanon.

Beirut, ornament of our world.

Every charred house, every ruin

Is equal to Darius’ citadels.

Every warrior brings envy to Alexander.

Every daughter is like Laila.

This city stands at time’s creation.

This city will stand at time’s end.

Beirut, the heart of Lebanon.

Beirut, ornament of our world.

Beirut, exquisite as Paradise’s Garden.

To learn more about Faiz, please see the two books by Raza Mir and Ali Husain Mir: first, Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry (2006) and second, Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Poet of Resistance and Revolution (forthcoming from LeftWord Books, 2012).

Saadat Hasan Manto

Source: http://herald.dawn.com/tag/progressive-writers-associationVisit the above source for the Original

The politics of exclusion
By Sarmad Sehbai | May 14, 2012

Tossing the empty bottle he shouts,

‘Oh world! Your beauty is your ugliness.’

The world stares back at him

Their bloodshot eyes rattle with the question

‘Who nabs the pillar of time

By the noose of his drunken breath?

Who dares to break into dim corridors

Of twisted conscience?

Who intrudes upon poisonous dens

Of demonised souls?

Through icy glasses his rude glance

Chases us like a footfall

Foul monster!’

Bang! Bang!
                                              -Majeed Amjad, Poem for Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto, a red rag to both conservative and progressive writers, was feared by the reactionary press, the state and the literary mafias of his times. All his life he fought the bigoted social reformers, ideologues and religious fanatics, facing various court trials with a heroic smile. His characters were not the mouthpieces of ready-made truths who would sermonise from a pulpit as saviours; neither Noori na Naari, neither angelic nor satanic, Manto’s Adam was born out of mud.

Manto spent the prime of his youth in Bombay and Delhi where he celebrated his poverty and prosperity, his successes and failures with the same zest for life. In 1948, betrayed by his friends, Manto decided to leaveBombayand move toPakistanin the hope of a better life in the new country. He was disturbed by the communal riots and the gruesome scenes he had witnessed during the migration. With his failing health and two dependent daughters, he couldn’t figure out his whereabouts: “all day long I would sit on the chair lost in my thoughts not knowing what to do.”Lahore was far from welcoming. The doors of Radio Pakistan were closed to him and the reactionary press was hounding him for his bold writings. After a few months he wrote Thanda Gosht for which another trial was ready for him.

Manto could have survived all those slams and slurs but what threw him into total despair was the attitude of his own friends who expelled him from the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in 1949. What had created panic among the progressives was first, a book Siyah Haashiye, and then Urdu Adab, a literary journal, through which Manto included writers from all schools of thought without bias. Siyah Haashiye was a book of black jokes about the callous killings during the riots. It showed a terrifying despair where one could not tell laughter from a scream. Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, the secretary-general of the Punjab branch of PWA, said after reading the book, “What I can see is a field littered with dead bodies where the writer is stealing cigarette butts and money from their pockets.” Qasmi’s critique was as callous as the callousness of the characters in the book.

On the publication of Urdu Adab, edited jointly by Muhammad Hasan Askari and Manto, Qasmi as the spokesman of the PWA, wrote  an open letter to the latter: “Get rid of the opium of art for art’s sake; bring Askari into your fold by converting him to the art for life. Our movement is based on owning, understanding and respecting the suffering of the masses.” Qasmi guided Manto like a protective father, fearing that Manto could be spoilt by Askari’s “influence of decadent French writers like Baudelaire, André Gide and Flaubert.”

In November 1949, at the all-Pakistan conference of PWA, a resolution was passed against certain writers including Hasan Askari, Manto and, according to Abdul Salam Khurshid, Qurratulain Hyder, whose name was later withdrawn. While Manto didn’t react directly at the time, he later (1951) wrote in Jaib-e-Kafan, “I was angry that Alif (Qasmi) had misunderstood me, doubted my intentions … I am depressed. I earn through my writings by working day and night. I have my wife and children, if they fall sick and if I were to beg for money going door to door I will be really disturbed. Art is autonomous and is an end in itself. It’s no one’s monopoly and it cannot be hegemonised by ideology. The government takes me as a communist and the communists take me as a reactionary.” Probably during the same period he wrote his epitaph which was inspired by Ghalib’s couplet, “ya rab zamana mujh ko mitata hey kis liay/loh-e-jahaan pe harf-e-mukkarrar nahin hoon mein [Oh God, why is Time rubbing me off? I am not a letter twice written on the slate of the world].”

Urdu Adab was closed down after the publication of only two issues. In the first two issues both the progressive and non-progressive writers were published but soon after an ‘office order’ by the PWA forced the progressive writers to boycott the journal. Many of them requested Manto to return their work to them. A desperate and visibly intimidated Arif Abdul Matin wrote to Manto, “for God’s sake return the manuscript of my play; it is no longer possible for me to get it published in Urdu Adab as our union has decided not to cooperate with certain writers.” Qasmi also withdrew his request for Manto’s story which earlier he had wanted to publish in Nuqoosh: “I had asked for your story before the decision by the union to avoid publishing those authors who don’t agree with the progressive movement.”

Why was Manto considered a threat to the progressives? Could it be ‘obscenity’ that had offended them in the context of the newly-founded Islamic Republic of Pakistan? But Faiz Ahmed Faiz had appeared in his defence at the trial of Thanda Gosht, and had not found the story obscene. According to Intizar Hussain, writing in Saadat Hussan Manto — After 50 Years published by GC University,Lahorein 2005, the reason for Manto’s exclusion “was all about the reaction of progressives to the Partition of India.” Quoting Askari, he says, “the progressives in their opposition to Partition were implying that had there been no demand for a Muslim country there would have been no communal riots.” Even this doesn’t appear plausible. If the progressives were not in favour of a Muslim state, why would Faiz, a staunch progressive, be the first and one of the very few commissioned officers who opted for the newly established state of Pakistan, and continued his job with the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Public Relations? And why would he write an editorial in The Pakistan Times on “the glorious role” of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah in “the birth of a major state and the liberation of a major nation.”

In Siyah Haashiye or Urdu Adab, Manto did not appear to advocate a separate country but simply brought out the barbaric humour out of the killing of people in the name of religion. Manto in his writings had never defended one religion against another. Mozel, a Jewish woman, dies while saving a young Sikh, Tirlochan. While she is dying, Tirlochan tries to cover her naked body with his turban, but she sneers back: “Take away your religion.” In Thanda Gosht, it is the “wretched blood” of the wounded Ishar Singh that topples religion, caste and race. As to the demand forPakistan, Manto who had property in Amritsar didn’t claim anything after Partition except for an ice store inLahoreand that too was denied to him.

“Those who were talking of freedom of expression were resented by the progressives,” says Syed in Noori na Naari. But why should the progressives resent Manto when in their manifesto they had committed “to promote the freedom of expression”? They were struggling for the freedom of expression and so was he; they were “respecting the suffering of the masses” and he was going through suffering; they were talking about poverty and he was living it; they were romanticising the fallen man and Manto himself was the fallen man. So what caused such a reaction to the most gifted short story writer of his times? Muzaffar Ali Syed further elaborates, “immediately after the Second World War, the leaders of bourgeoisie socialism were ready to collaborate with the bourgeoisie — they were willing to sacrifice Mira ji, Manto and [Noon Meem] Rashid.”

Perhaps all that has been said are mere polemics of their times but there could be more than meets the eye…

Sometime in the mid-1930s, on a foggy “Night inLondon,” young Sajjad Zaheer saw “The Light.” In Nanking restaurant, amongst a coterie of like-minded male writers, Zaheer, lovingly called Banne Miaan, announced the manifesto of the PWA. Zaheer’s novel A Night in London established him as an icon of social commitment. The novel featured Hiren Pal, a committed freedom fighter who leaves his beloved Sheila Green to pursue the ideals beyond the love of a woman. This motif became a template for the progressive writers, “Aur bhi gham hein zamanay mein mohabat kay siwa [There are other woes in the world, apart from the woes of love]”.

The ‘othering’ of the female to assert the progressive mission created a binaric schizophrenia between the love of woman and social reality. The deferral of anima, the feminine side of male, is to repress the mother, the womb, the unconscious and to assert the father. As [French psychoanalyst] Lacan states, “When ideologues preach, they assert the patriarchy and it’s phallic.” Manto renames Qasmi as Alif, the vertical alphabet of Urdu language. The unbending thrust of ‘Alif’ is suggestive of phallic oppression. In his playful irreverence, Manto calls Zaheer an armchair communist, Faiz an afimi (lotus eater), and his own guru Bari Aleeg, a coward and a runchhor (unreliable). He prays to God to turn Chiragh Hasan Hasrat into Stalin who could dictate from behind the iron curtain. For Manto, they were the oppressive fathers who in Freudian terms would tell the child not to play with his genitals.

Mumtaz Shirin says, “Manto has presented the mother in the image of the prostitute.” In her book Noori na Naari, she discovers Manto in myth and religious archetypes. For her, Manto juxtaposes the holy mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, the sinful whore; the sacred and the profane. Manto’s heroines don’t queue up with the hearth-bound bibis or the drawing-room ladies of the elite; they stand out mostly as sex workers fighting for bare existence in a male’s world of exploitation and human degradation. With detached limbs and body parts as utility props they are the disfigured image of Madonna; damaged Eros. The loss of mother is the loss of womb, the loss of compassion, love and humanity in a society which is admonitory, tabooed and restrictive like the punishing father.

Manto resurrects the ghost of the feminine side, otherwise banished by the progressive patriarch, and by giving her a voice topples the despotic father figure of reform, pity and sympathy. Manto brings out the mother from the womb of a prostitute and confronts the oppressive father. He shatters the romantic ideal of the progressives by bringing out Sheila from their closets. He strips off her romantic trappings and places her next to Janki and Saugandhi. Perhaps this act of Manto made the progressives run for lights; he had nabbed “the pillar with the noose of his drunken breath.” His rude glance will keep chasing us like a footfall for many ages to come.

Sarmad Sehbai is a poet, playwright and drama director.