I recently watched a clip showing music director Wajahat Atray narrating how the tune for this iconic song was composed. Atray Sahib seems to be saying that it was created as a traditional song with the mukhra first and then the antras. Certainly, Atray Sahib is credited for creating the tune for this song for the 1962 film Qaidi but we all know that it was a poem long before it became a song and there certainly is a question mark on if the tune was composed by the team Atray (Wajahat and his father Rasheed).
The poem itself is of great relevance, not only does it mark the transition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz from a romantic to a progressive poet, in my opinion, when Faiz Sahib wrote this poem he gave birth to real progressive poetry in Urdu.
The ideas of progressive literature, a literature that can be used to produce positive social and economic reforms of the society and not just entertains came to Indian writers during the 1920s under the influence of the Russian Revolution and its offshoot social realism in literature.
In 1930 Sajad Zaheer, son of a rich and prominent family of Lucknow returned after completing his studies in Oxford where he had been fully exposed to Marxist ideas. Zaheer who was a budding writer teamed up with three other like-minded young writers to form a group that decided to publish a collection of stories to shock and challenge the fossilized, regressive, and oppressive traditions of the Indian Muslim society. The other three were Ahmad Ali, Mahmuduzzafar, and Rashid Jehan, the last was the odd one out for she was a female and a medical doctor working as a gynaecologist.
The group published the collection under the title ‘Angaray (hot embers)’ in 1932 and all hell broke loose. The 10 stories in the collection attacked everything in the conservative Muslim society including oppression of women and the use of religion to prevent progress of the community. The book and its authors were criticized, abused, and threatened with death, under pressure from the community Angaray was banned.
Doctor Jehan was the biggest target of the critics, being a woman, she was expected to behave in a subdued and conservative way and act as the example of Easter values women are expected to act as.
Instead, from a liberal family of Allahabad where her father was a leading activist for Women’s education, Rashid Jehan was liberated and an amazing young lady, no doubt both Sajad Zaheer and Mahmuduzzafar fell in love with her (Ahmad Ali probably was already attached).
None of the writers offered any apology or regret over what they had published although Sajad Zaheer after getting engaged to Rashid Jehan went abroad till things settled down. Unfortunately, while he wanted to break the barriers of society, he was unable to overcome his own family’s opposition to his marriage to a Sunni girl and while he was still abroad Rashid Jehan married Mahmuduzzafar!
In 1935 Faiz Sahib completed his studies at Government College Lahore and started looking for a job. It was the time of The Great Depression and jobs were scarce. With the collapse of the commodity prices farmers had abandoned their fields and flocked to the cities where they faced a precarious existence while women of respectable families were forced to sell themselves.
Faiz had been writing poetry for around 5 years and was mainly a romantic poet, but he was not untouched by the misery and poverty he saw every day. Alama Iqbal’s young friend MD Taseer had recently returned from UK and had been appointed the principal of MAO College Amritsar and Faiz managed to get a job there as a lecturer. By coincidence, Mahmuduzaffar had joined the same College as the vice-principle and now known as Angaray-Wali Doctor Rashid Jehan had left her job for UP government and moved to Amritsar as well. Soon, young Faiz became a close friend of this couple who were committed Marxists.
Here we get an intriguing anecdote from the writings of Manto who as Faiz describes was supposed to be his student (supposed as he never attended lectures).
Manto has described Faiz as one of the teachers who was very lazy and in love with a Marxist doctor and wrote poems to impress her. As per Manto, ‘I don’t know if he was successful in his love but because of it we got some great poetry written’.
I am sure Manto is stretching the truth a bit, an ability for which he became very well known in Bombay days as well as becoming an outstanding writer of fiction, and though Faiz was very likely a little bit in love with Dr Jehan for she comes across a person who no one could help falling for, but much of Faiz’s progressive poetry was due to his genuine feeling for the poor and downtrodden people he saw around him. Although one wonders that as per Faiz’s own words during his days at Government College Lahore, he was bombarded with Marxist literature, why he had not taken to it then with such enthusiasm?
(Faiz claims that his friend Khawaja Khurshid Anwar, who later became a leading Music Composer, used to dump Marxist literature in his room but he only glanced at it curiously keeping himself to the reading of Tolstoy and Dovtovsky.)
In his own words, Faiz tells us that when he arrived in Amritsar, he had been in love for 7-8 years. He narrates that one-day Dr Jehan asked him, ‘Why are you looking so crestfallen? What is wrong?’ I said, ‘Well look…..’ She said, ‘You are in love and suffering from insomnia.’ She then gave me 2-3 books and said, ‘Read these books. What is this small sorrow of yours? Look at the masses of India, they are hungry, and they are suffering. What are your sufferings compared to theirs?’
One can easily see in these words the inspiration for the lines:
اور بھی دکھ ہیں زمانے میں محبت کے سوا
راحتیں اور بھی ہیں وصل کی راحت کے سوا
Among the books was the Communist Manifesto and reading them changed young Faiz’s life forever.
According to Madam Noor Jehan, while Faiz Sahib was in jail, she was asked to sing in a charity function where she wanted to sing this poem as a song for which she had composed the tune herself. However, the organizers told her she could not sing it and she said, if that is the case there would be no show and I am going home. At this, the organizers backed out and she sang the song for the first time to a standing ovation.
According to Madam Noor Jehan soon after Faiz Sahib was released from prison he came to her house and asked her to sing the poem for him and after that declared that this poem no longer is his but belongs to Noor Jehan. And certainly, from there on when asked to recite this poet Faiz Sahib would say that it is not his poem but Noor Jehan’s.
Only few years before that Dr Rashid Jehan had died in 1952 due to Uterine cancer aged 47. And so we had the journey of the poem from one Jehan who may have been responsible for its creation to another Jehan who was given its ownership by the poet.
