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Publisher: American Institute of Pakistan Studies (Total: 1 journals)

Pakistaniaat : A Journal of Pakistan Studies

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Pakistaniaat : A Journal of Pakistan Studies

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1948-6529 - ISSN (Online) 1946-5343
Published by American Institute of Pakistan Studies

[1 journal]

THE COLOUR OF MY HEART: on reading Faiz
- Authors: Aamer Hussein
  Abstract: This is a reflective piece narrating a journey from the heart to the lyrics of Faiz. The author looks back autobiographically at himself as a young boy travelling from Karachi to London with an interlude in Oooty. He comes of age in metropolitan London and finds himself returning to his linguistic roots. He ends on a nostalgic note recounting an old encounter between himself and the writer in London mirroring the memory of a cosmopolitan poetic journey intersecting with different cultures.
  PubDate: 2013-04-16
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2013)
From Agha Shahid Ali, The Rebel’s Silhouette
- Authors: Masood Ashraf Raja
  PubDate: 2013-04-16
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2013)
SOAS Students Forum on Faiz Ahmed Faiz
- Authors: Samreen Kazmi
  Abstract: This collection of thoughts from current students at SOAS attempts to go beyond academic debates surrounding Faiz through a subjective view of the impact he has had on their own views on the world. By exploring and presenting their own relationship with Faiz, these diverse authors raise questions about the multitude of meaning Faiz carries for young scholars of today.
  PubDate: 2013-02-08
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2013)
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: The Worlding of a Lyric Poet
- Authors: Amina Yaqin
  PubDate: 2013-02-04
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2013)
Cosmopolitan ventures during times of crisis: a postcolonial reading of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Dasht-e tanhai” and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers
- Authors: Amina Yaqin
  Abstract: In this essay I engage with two writers whose work includes elements of both internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Generations apart they connect with the idea of the national from positions of exile igniting a very contemporary and historical debate on the position of faith and the location of culture in the modern postcolonial nation. I argue that exile in the case of the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz is informed by an internationalism tied to national sovereignty, whereas the British Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam responding to a post 9/11 world turns to a utopian model of cosmopolitanism, looking for the universal theme of love to repair a dysfunctional society.
  PubDate: 2013-02-04
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2013)
Acknowledgements
- Authors: Amina Yaqin
  PubDate: 2013-02-04
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2013)
Faiz’s “Internationalist” Poetics: Selected Translations and Free Verses
- Authors: Christina Oesterheld
  Abstract: Faiz today is mostly remembered for his ghazals and his rhymed poems which have been sung by numerous singers of the Subcontinent, are quoted on many occasions and, like the famous “Ham dekhenge”, have become part of a culture of resistance. His free verses, which are far less in number, have attracted comparatively less attention. Free verse has never become as popular as the ghazal and pāband nazm in Urdu, although there have been a number of outstanding practitioners of the form. Even Urdu critics seem to have devoted more space to Faiz’ ghazals and pāband nazms than to his poems in less rigidly structured forms. It is perhaps no coincidence that Faiz started to use free verse off and on after he had come into closer contact with Pablo Neruda and Nazim Hikmet as well as with a number of Soviet poets during his frequent visits to the Soviet Union from 1958 onward. In the present paper I will discuss selected free verses written since 1962 to find out how far the inner structure and imagery of theses verses differs from Faiz’ more “classical” texts and whether and how they are influenced by the topic and the circumstances of composition, viewed also in the context of Faiz’ interaction with Nazim Hikmet and his works in prose and poetry. Faiz and Nazim Hikmet shared basic values and experiences, and it is striking to see how close they were in their attitudes to life and literature which is demonstrated by Faiz’ poem about Nazim Hikmet and by his translations of a few of his verses. Therefore reading Faiz side by side with the Turkish poet may help to look at his works from a fresh angle.
  PubDate: 2012-09-08
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
Rumination on Chronopoetics and the Political Subject: Miraji Reads Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Lyric
- Authors: Geeta Patel
  Abstract: Using the poet Miraji’s short exegesis of the Faiz’s poem Intebāh (warning or alarm), popularly known by its opening word , bol (speak), this paper will parse a small entry into Faiz’s poetics. What did this curious imbrication of modernist exegesis with political poetics allow us to see? In this paper I suggest that Miraji’s analysis allows us to see anew the ways in which romantic realism, fleshed politics and chronopoetics come together to give us another take on Faiz’s luminous corpus.
  PubDate: 2012-09-07
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
Finding Faiz at Berkeley: Room for a Celebration
- Authors: Laurel Steele
  Abstract: This paper examines how Faiz Ahmed Faiz is remembered at a program honoring him at the University of California, Berkeley. All over the world, Faiz’s centennial year is now an occasion for similar events. Faiz’s poems are read and recited. Daughters—if the program is lucky—or friends, increasingly fewer, speak. Bits of history and biography are recalled. There is no other Urdu poet, born in the 20th century, who could command such a worldwide celebration. But who is the Faiz that emerges?
  My analysis uses the September 2011 Berkeley program, “Guftagu: Celebrating Faiz Ahmed Faiz,” as a departure point to address issues that these formal festivities both reveal and conceal. I will take advantage of the fact that here is a gathering, in real space and in real time,
  thinking and talking about Faiz in the United States. Rather than lose the performative
  aspect of the occasion, I will utilize it to ask questions and seek answers. Is Faiz an Urdu poet or a Pakistani poet? What about his Marxism—where does that fit in the religious context of present-day Pakistan? Does the winner of the Lenin Peace Prize in
  1962 have any misgivings about the old USSR’s cultural machinery? Do we?
  What about ethnicity? Faiz was Panjabi, from Iqbal’s home town. His Partition did not
  leave him without a physical place to which he could return, unlike the poets and littérateurs
  who arrived from all over India to the newly-formed Pakistan. Did that make a difference to his poetry, or to his fame? What about Bangla Desh? What role did Faiz and his poetry play concerning the events in Dhaka in 1971? Finally, who are the participants in the Berkeley project? How do they see scholarship on Faiz? What about the “Tagore phenomenon?” Does Faiz’s light obscure other major twentieth-century Urdu poets or does it shine for all? We are in a world where an unrecorded event can happen only once, ephemera evaporates, and
  Urdu scholars frequently bemoan what is lost, un-captured, or distorted. My paper is a chance to record an evening in Berkeley when we meet to celebrate Faiz Ahmed Faiz and to examine the encounter in all its rich detail.
  PubDate: 2012-09-07
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
Faiz’s Letters to Alys
- Authors: Salima Hashmi
  Abstract: Faiz’s letters to his wife from jail (1951-55) were published in 1976. Titled ‘Saleebein Meray Dareechay Mein’ (Crufix in my window) they were translated into Urdu by Faiz himself. The originals, stored in his house in Lahore, were thought destroyed by termites during his exile in Beirut. Thirty five of them were discovered among Alys’ papers in 2009, restored and published in 2011.These form a small part of the correspondence between Faiz and Alys, which spans four decades. The earliest letters date from 1939 when they were courting and the last written in 1984, the year Faiz died. The letters are now in the process of conservation, which will take the better part of two years. As they become available to scholars, they will be a valuable source of information and insight into his personal reflections and his milieu. This piece represents mostly Faiz’s jail letters, including a cursory look at letters ranging from the 1940’s to the 1980’s.
  PubDate: 2012-09-05
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
Found in Translation: Revisiting the experience of translating Faiz for Merchant-Ivory’s In Custody
- Authors: Shahrukh Husain
  Abstract: ----
  PubDate: 2012-09-05
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
O City of Lights!
- Authors: Shadab Zeest Hashmi
  PubDate: 2012-09-05
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
Faiz Ahmed Faiz – The Relevance of his Poetry Today (Urdu)
- Authors: Iftikhar Arif
  Abstract: Faiz Ahmed Faiz is a great national personality. His cultural contribution is diverse, pragmatic and intellectual. Every great literary personality raises challenges to literary belief and tradition. Faiz’s poetry brings up such challenges as well. Critics in every generation have discussed his poetry and no doubt this analysis will continue into future generations. Faiz’s poetry is unique in terms of its high technical and nostalgic nature. The presentation will assess the poetry of Faiz and emphasise its relevance today. It also refers and renders from authentic intellectual sources such as Karl Marx, Hafiz, Edward Said, Elliot and Ezra Pound. It dwells on the words of Faiz, ‘I believe that humanity has never accepted defeat against its enemies and will be victorious in the end. And war, hate, oppression and prejudice shall one day be replaced by what Hafiz, the great Persian poet, proclaimed love as the ultimate and immaculate basis of human relationships.’
  PubDate: 2012-09-05
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
Rethinking Progressivism and Modernism in Urdu Poetry: Faiz Ahmed Faiz and N. M. Rashed
- Authors: A. Sean Pue
  Abstract: Literary historians of modern Urdu poetry frequently divide twentieth-century writers into two camps--progressives and modernists. In such a reading, Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84) is exemplary of the "art for life's sake" position associated with the Progressive Writers Association, and N. M. Rashed (1910-75) frequently represents the "art for art's sake" position of modernism. Through an assessment of these writers' understandings of each other and close readings of their poetry, this essay demonstrates that these familiar categories, first articulated in the late 1930s and early 1940s in progressive literary criticism, fail to capture the literary output of either poet. Instead of abandoning these categories, however, this essays suggests that they remain important to literary history as historical facts, as a part of literary discourse. This essay therefore considers the role of literary interpretation in literary production, and the way that these two prominent Urdu poets shaped their own work in accordance to the way it was received.
  PubDate: 2012-05-26
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)
“FAIZ FEHMI”: Understanding Faiz With Style
- Authors: Qaisar Abbas
  PubDate: 2012-04-08
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2012)