Towards a Lyric History of India

The whole cannot be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction.

—Theodor Adorno¹

At its best, the Urdu lyric verse of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) can make available to the reader a disconcerting form of ecstasy, a sense of elation at the self being put in question, giving even the thoroughly secular reader the taste of an affective utopia not entirely distinguishable from religious feeling. It is, at the very least, a paradoxical structure of feeling, given the explicitly Marxist and anticlerical affiliations of his poetry, which displays a marked interest in the secularization of culture and language. Faiz is widely regarded as the most significant Urdu poet of the postcolonial period. His poetry exemplifies some of the central dilemmas of Urdu writing in the aftermath of the partition of India at the moment of independence from British rule. It represents a profound attempt to unhitch literary production from the cultural projects of either postcolonial state in order to make visible meanings that have still not been entirely reified and subsumed within the cultural logic of the nation-state system. Despite his stature as the uncrowned poet laureate of Pakistan during the first several decades of its existence, his is notoriously an oeuvre with vast audiences across what was once North India—the map of its reception seemingly erasing the national boundaries that are the territorial legacy of partition. Against much of Faiz criticism, I argue here that the foremost theme of Faiz's poetry, its defining theme as a body of writing, is the meaning and legacy of partition. I have argued elsewhere that the problematic of minoritization inscribes itself in Urdu narrative at the level of genre in a foregrounding of the short story as the primary genre of narrative fiction.² In poetry, it translates into debates about the meaning and nature, the very possibility, of lyric verse in modernity. In the decades following the 1857 Rebellion, for instance, the classical tradition of lyric poetry, and in particular the ghazal form, became the site of fierce contention about the prospects of a distinct "Muslim" experience in Indian modernity. The poetry of Faiz exemplifies the unique relationship of Urdu literary production to the crisis of Indian national culture that is marked by the figure of the Muslim.

The lyric element in Faiz's poetry—its intensely personal contemplation of love and of the sensuous—poses a notorious problem of interpretation: he is a self-avowedly political poet—laureled in the Soviet Union, repeatedly persecuted by reactionary postcolonial regimes—whose most intense poetic accomplishments are examinations of subjective states. The orthodox solution—shared by critics of many different political persuasions—has been to argue that Faiz merely turns a "traditional" poetic vocabulary to radical political ends, that we should read the figure of the distant beloved, for instance, as a figuring of the hoped-for revolution.³ I suggest a somewhat different direction here and argue that, first, the political element in Faiz's work cannot be read without the mediation of the social. Faiz's exploration of the affects of separation and union with the beloved makes possible an examination of the subject, the "I," of Urdu writing. It would be incorrect to assume that Faiz's "Progressiveness"—his association with the literary culture that carries the imprimatur of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA)—implies a dismissing of the question of identity. The central drama of his poetry is the dialectic of a collective selfhood at the disjunctures of language, culture, nation, and community. In his well-known argument about the relationship of lyric poetry to society, Theodor Adorno suggests that it is precisely lyric's apparent distance from social determinations that constitutes its social meaning. He holds out the paradoxical possibility that its distance from the social in fact made of lyric...