Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Faiz Ahmad Faiz took his master's degrees in English and Arabic at Government College, Lahore, and began as a college lecturer before the Progressive Writers' Movement pulled his verse toward politics. He served in the British Indian Army during the war, rising to lieutenant-colonel, resigned at Partition, and became editor of the Pakistan Times — a poet who was always also a working public man.

The defining rupture came in 1951, when he was arrested in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, accused of plotting against the state, and held for four years across the jails of Montgomery, Karachi and Mianwali. Some of his greatest work was written behind bars — the collections Dast-e-Saba and Zindan-Nama, the 'Prison Journal' — and it is there that his fusion of the love-lyric with the language of imprisonment and hope reached its full power. He was detained again in 1958, and after Bhutto's execution left for a long exile in Beirut, editing the Afro-Asian journal Lotus.

His genius was to take the oldest furniture of the ghazal — the beloved, separation, the longed-for union — and let it carry a second meaning, so that the beloved is also the revolution and the homeland. His nazm 'Hum Dekhenge' became an anthem of protest, sung by Iqbal Bano in defiance of a dictatorship and revived by Indian students decades later. He remains, with reason, the most quoted political poet the language has produced.