CBSE Drops Verses from Faiz Ahmad Faiz's Poems from Class 10 Curriculum

 CBSE Drops Verses from Faiz Ahmad Faiz's Poems from Class 10 Curriculum

The two excerpts from Faiz's poems had been part of Class 10 social science syllabus for over a decade.

CBSE Drops Verses from Faiz Ahmad Faiz's Poems from Class 10 Curriculum

Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

The Wire Staff

The Wire Staff

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BOOKSEDUCATION

23/APR/2022

New Delhi: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has excluded two excerpts from poems written by renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz from its curriculum for the academic year 2022-23, which was released on Thursday, April 21, the Indian Express reported.

The two excerpts had been part of the curriculum for over 10 years as part of the section on ‘Religion, Communalism and Politics – Communalism, Secular State’ in the Class 10 National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook, Democratic Politics II.

The excerpts were included in two images which showed posters created by Act Now for Harmony and Democracy (ANHAD), an NGO, and the Voluntary Health Association of India; both of which were removed from the syllabus.

According to the Express, the ANHAD poster quoted the lines:

“Not enough to shed tears, to suffer anguish, not enough to nurse love in secret… Today, walk in the public square fettered in chains.”

These lines were reportedly taken from Aaj Bazaar Me Pa Ba Jola Chalo (Let Us Walk in the Market in Shackles), one of Faiz’s poems written at a time when he was in jail in Lahore. He penned the specific poem when he was being transported from the jail to the dentist’s office in a tonga, himself in chains, crossing lanes familiar to him as he was recognised by passers-by.

Also read: Calling Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge ‘Anti-Hindu’ Is Both Laughable and Insulting

The other poster, issued by the Voluntary Health Association, quoted lines from Dhaka Se Wapsi Par (On Returning From Dhaka): 

“We remain strangers even after so many meetings, blood stains remain even after so many rains.”

Faiz wrote the lines translated above after returning from a visit to Bangladesh in 1974, three years after the country’s war for independence.

In addition to the Faiz verses, a cartoon by Ajith Nath, published in the Times of India, has also been removed from the curriculum. The cartoon shows an empty chair which carries a variety of religious symbols along with the caption: “This chair is for the CM-designate to prove his secular credentials…There will be plenty of rocking!”

Other exclusions

The Express report details several other components of the existing curriculum that have been removed for the upcoming academic year. 

In the Democratic Politics II textbook itself, chapters on ‘Democracy and Diversity’, ‘Popular Struggle Movement’ and ‘Challenges to Democracy’ have been removed. It is worth noting that the first of these chapters deals with social divisions and inequalities along caste, race and other lines in countries all over the world, including India.

From the history curriculum for Class 11, a chapter on ‘Central Islamic Lands’ has been removed, the Express reported.

Additionally, content on the “impact of globalisation on agriculture” has been removed from the Class 10 syllabus and one on the “Cold War era and the Non-Aligned Movement” has been removed from the Class 12 political science syllabus. 

Some chapters on mathematical reasoning have also been left out of the syllabus for Class 11.

Calling Faiz's Hum Dekhenge 'Anti-Hindu' Is Both Laughable and Insulting

Just as there was no dearth of the Right slandering an enlightened, secular poet like Faiz in Pakistan, there is no lack of such people in India too. The laughable charge that his iconic poem, ‘Hum Dekhenge’, written against the Zia-ul Haq dictatorship, is anti-Hindu, proves that.

Calling Faiz's Hum Dekhenge 'Anti-Hindu' Is Both Laughable and Insulting

Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

Raza Naeem

Raza Naeem

CULTURERELIGIONRIGHTS

16/JAN/2020

Truth is certainly stranger than fiction. Otherwise, a poem written by an avowed communist in opposition to a fundamentalist dictator would not have been branded anti-Hindu by some people in an august institution such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. Students who recited Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s iconic Urdu poem, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ (We will see) in solidarity with Jamia Millia Islamia students who were subjected to police brutality on December 15 while protesting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), were accused of reciting a poem that provoked anti-Hindu sentiments. Following several complaints, a committee was set up to probe the affair and we await its decision on whether the extremely popular ‘Hum Dekhenge’, recognised as a universal poem of protest, is ‘anti-Hindu’ or not. Clearly, it is a measure of the times we live in.

Faiz wrote Hum Dekhenge in January 1979, while visiting the US. It was a time when his country’s (Pakistan) first democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been overthrown in a coup by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977, was about to be hanged. Apart from writing this poem against the Zia dictatorship, Faiz also had in mind the Iranian people who were struggling against a dictatorial monarchy in their country at that time:

We will see

It is incumbent that we too will see

The day which it has been promised will be

Which is written on the tablet of eternity 

When the mountains of tyranny and oppression

will be like cotton scattered by an explosion

When the earth will palpitate in apprehension

beneath the feet of the ones bowed in subjugation

And over the head of the ruler

when lightening claps with thunder

When all the objects of idolatry

will be lifted from the Kaaba of God’s country

When we, the pure-hearted, the rejects of the holy sanctuary

will be made to sit on the throne of royalty

All the crowns will be thrown

All the thrones will be  strewn

Only the name of God will have eternal presence

who is absent, but also in attendance

who is the beholder as well as the countenance

The cry of ‘I am Truth’ will rise

Who is me and you likewise

And there will be the reign of God’s creation

Who is me and you even

Faiz passed away in 1984 and the famed singer Iqbal Bano immortalised this poem by performing it before a packed audience in 1986 in the Alhamra Arts Council auditorium in Lahore. During the dictatorship of General Zia, Pakistani women were prohibited from wearing the sari because it was deemed un-Islamic attire. Opposing the military dictatorship, Iqbal Bano performed wearing a white sari. A recording of the poem, done secretly, was smuggled out of Pakistan and reached the world.

Also Read: To Decide on ‘Hum Dekhenge,’ the IIT-K Panel Must Learn to Read First

While one does not know what the IIT committee will say in its decision, but to order an investigation into the poem is a clear indicator that the ideology of the ruling dispensation is as regressive as that of Pakistan at the time when Faiz wrote Hum Dekhenge.

This iconic poem forms part of Faiz’s collection, Mere Dil, Mere Musafir (My heart, my traveller). The shadow of remembrance of the homeland is very deep in this poem. Such too was the demand of the time. But in this sorrow, there is not a trace of the darkness of despair or defeat. The same trust in the human’s ability to overcome all travails, the same glad tidings of the victory of truth in the battle between good and evil, which was the philosophy of Faiz’s thought and art is dominant here as well.

Protests at IIT Kanpur. Photo: By special arrangement

Faiz and Sufi metaphors

Like many other poems written during Faiz’s incarceration by the Pakistani establishment, his poems abounded with Sufi metaphors. For example, he incorporated Masoor Hallaj’s famous declaration, An-al Haq (I Am God), as a political cry in Hum Dekhenge. The poem became as much an anthem of protest for Pakistanis struggling for democratic rights and civil liberties under Zia-ul-Haq as it has now become a call for resistance for the current generation of Indians under the Narendra Modi regime. This poem is the closest one can get in Urdu to an equivalent of Shelley’s equally iconic poem, Ozymandias, juxtaposing the inevitable decline of rulers with their pretensions to greatness.

The reference to the ‘objects of idolatry’ being ‘lifted from the Kaaba of God’s country’ was not intended to demean the followers or sacred images of a particular religion; nor is the pious hope, ‘Only the name of God will have eternal presence’, an advocacy of the religion Faiz was born into. He wrote the poem at a time when a dictator was claiming to be following God’s evangelical path, labelling those who opposed him as infidels, hence Faiz resorted to religious imagery to challenge Zia’s claims. The phrase, ‘the objects of idolatry’, becomes a metaphor for all the false and transient idols like fundamentalism, dictatorship, oppression and injustice – like Ozymandias for Shelley – and ‘God’ stands for secularism, humanism, democracy and justice, values which are destined to be permanent.

Just as there was no shortage of those from the Right slandering an enlightened, secular poet in Pakistan in Faiz’s own time, there is no shortage of such people in neighbouring India as well. Indeed, such slanderers are the real connoisseurs of Faiz, these men of ‘truth’ and ‘purity’. Just like the censor grasps the hidden secrets of the tavern better than the one who drinks, the circle of abusers understand the dangerous mysteries of Faiz’s personality and poetry better than his admirers. Indeed, Faiz said:

With the censor, indeed all is well

With his name, the names of the drunkards, bearer, wine, jar, measure all swell

If there were to be a Mount Rushmore of Urdu poetry, Faiz’s face would be in serious contention. Like Ghalib and Iqbal, Faiz has been written about, translated and commented upon abundantly.

Also Read: Why the Controversy Around Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’ Is So Fatuous

Faiz was a Ghalibian, a Gandhian and a Marxist rolled into one. His poetry was infused with an unsurpassed lyricism, but spoke evocatively and urgently against the regimes of exploitation. He was an early member of the Progressive Writers’ Association, and formed a Punjab chapter in 1936. He wrote poems against colonialism, and after Independence/Partition, he settled in Lahore. He was among the Pakistanis who travelled to India in 1948 to attend Gandhi’s funeral.

His activism in the labour movement irked the right-wing elements in the Pakistani state, especially Ayub Khan. Months after Khan’s elevation to the position of commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army in 1951, Faiz and several of his colleagues were imprisoned under trumped-up conspiracy charges. He was incarcerated for four years, during which he wrote some of his finest poetry. More than half of Faiz’s verses are the creation of his days in prison; almost all of the poems and ghazals of Dast-e-Saba (The hand of the breeze) and Zindaan Nama (The book of prison) were written between 1951 and 1955, when he was in jail. His fourth collection, Dast-e-Tah-e-Sang (Hand under the stone) also includes poems from his time in prison.

Even after his release, he was subjected to surveillance and harassment and he spent many years in quasi-exile in the Soviet Union and the Middle East, where his poetry developed a truly international ethos. He won the Lenin Prize in 1962, and things came full circle when the Pakistan government bestowed its highest civilian honour, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, on him (posthumously in 1990).