Poet of love and rage

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, arguably the most outstanding poet of the Indian subcontinent in the last half-century, was often com pared to his friend Pablo Neruda, the great revolutionary poet of Chile. He was often hailed as an activist for human rights, civil liberties and social justice. Faiz's verse, however, is now less familiar, especially among the younger generation, and to those whose language is not Urdu. For many years his poetry was denied access to the media, radio and television in Pakistan. The conditions were such that he went into self-imposed exile for some years, returning only to die in his beloved city of Lahore. Faiz, at first a composer of romantic ghazals, grew to become a writer with a passion for social justice. Faiz was an officer in the Indian Army in World War II, when his first collection of verse, 'Imprints', (Naqsh-i-Fariyadi), was published in 1941 from Lucknow. The youth of that epoch felt the impact of this entirely new 'voice' on the Urdu speaking world. Faiz grew up in the provincial but ancient city of Sialkot near Lahore in undivided India and his upbringing was that of an orthodox