What Faiz meant

As ‘Hum dekhenge’ gains traction, the threat of misinterpretation remains

Universities have been at the centre of ongoing debate over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act debate. The central universities, especially Jawaharlal Nehru University, are the usual suspects.

The “degenarate” JNU has often been contrasted with the more noble Indian Institutes of Science repeatedly. Push this further, and you see a “useless” liberal arts education versus “important” science and technology education debate.

This conversation was given a twist when a committee of professors at the IIT-Kanpur decided to have a look at Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem ‘Hum dekhenge’ and see if it is “communal” and “anti-national”.

For the uninitiated, the ‘Bas naam rahega Allah ka’ (Only Allah’s name will remain) might have been the first trigger. With the later line, ‘Aur raaj karegi Khalq-e-Khuda’ (And then God’s own people will rule), the suspicions would be confirmed.

Pop culture has not been kind to many commonplace expressions used in Islam. One frequently sees movies on terrorism where some dastardly attack is preceded by one of the many such calls.

But before Muslims became the sterotypical villains in global geopolitics, many Muslims in the last generation of British India were flag-bearers of the progressive, and often Marxist, spirit. Faiz was one of them.

Looking back, the stories of their lives often appear delightfully cheeky. It was not easy for a Muslim woman in the 1940s to write about lesbianism, but Ismat Chughtai pulled it off with her ‘Lihaaf’ (The Quilt).

She was, of course, tried for obscenity. But in a scene that itself makes for great literature, Chughtai demanded that she be shown which words in her story were obscene.

Fortunately, although Chughtai’s story spoke of things her prosecutors feared it did, her approach was entirely suggestive. And therefore, she was acquitted.

The other writers of the time, which includes Faiz, had similar stories to tell: of fights against the traditional and oppressive set-up.

When Partition came, these writers reacted strongly against it, but finally had to choose a side.

Not wanting to do so made Saadat Hasan Manto write ‘Toba Tek Singh’, in which a man doesn’t want the new India or Pakistan, so decides to sit on a tree.

It was a double whammy for those stuck in Pakistan. Because Zia-ul-Haq would go on to junk the country’s democracy, claiming that he is doing God’s work.

This is the time when Faiz writes ‘Hum dekhenge’: a call that democracy will ultimately win. “Jab zulm-o-sitam ke koh-e-garan, rooyi ki tarah ud jayenge/Hum dekhenge. (When the mountains of oppression and cruelty/ Will float away like carded wool/We will see),” the poem says.

And these are the lines that many students protesting against the Narendra Modi government have been stressing the most.

Why the reference to Allah when Faiz is a Marxist seems a fair question. While some in the Left have been calling Faiz an atheist, this may not be entirely correct.

Faiz had a complex relationship with Marxism, Gandhism and Sufism till the very end. Through ‘Hum dekhenge’, Faiz was trying to say that Zia’s attempt to junk pluralism is not God’s way, as is claimed, a point that has resonance in today’s India.

While IIT-Kanpur decided not to make any investigation into the poem, the threat of historical poets being subjected to dangerous misinterpretation at the hands of people not trained in history remains.

As the debate rages, Faiz has been marked safe for now.