Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Salvific Ethics and the Uneven World

Abstract

ABSTRACT Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Salvific Ethic and the Uneven world   Faiz Ahmed Faiz has a place among the greatest of Urdu poets ever born. His works as well as his life has inspired people from all walks of life. He brought path-breaking changes to the way Urdu poetry was written. Faiz combined socio-political messages, revolutionary ideas and romantic idealism with the sweetness of the Urdu language, thus creating an exhilarating oeuvre. He symbolized all that is humane, dignified, refined, brave, and challenging. His poetry reflects his intellectual resentment and resistance against an unjust and archaic social order, which he rejects on rational grounds as anti-human; yet his poetry has no bitterness.  He wrote against the excesses of ruling elite and challenged colonial and feudal values. Faiz's poetry exhibits a strong sense of commitment to lower-class people. He saw the world around him plagued by the evils and the dark forces of materialism, commercialism and commodity fetishism. He saw nations engaged in wars and the hearts of people full of hatred and cruelty.  He took the challenge to make the world a better place to live.  He used his poetic art as a vehicle to register a protest against the brutal and malicious forces. Fiaz gave voice to the voiceless and suffered with the suffering humanity of his times and his love of humanity is free from the prejudice of color, race or nationality. He sang a song burning with thunder and revolutionary fire but at the same time endowed it with the delicacy of beauty and love.  In my paper I will try to show how Faiz   makes use of  love and beauty to promote social and moral values and does not desist to use the language of love and beauty even while writing about political issues. How he made the agony of love the essence of his existence and imagination and used it to come to terms with the chaos and the anarchy of the modern world. The paper will also talk about Faiz’s redemptive ethics ,his emphasis on the sweet emotions of love and beauty, as an alternative vision to set right the wrongs of the jaded and bumpy world of present times.