A few months ago, the Rekhta Foundation organised Jashn-e-Rekhta, its annual celebration of Urdu poetry. While contemporary poets with strong popular followings drew the largest crowds, Faiz Ahmed Faiz had clearly not receded from view. Across the venue, several attendees could be seen carrying cloth bags printed with lines from his widely quoted nazms—Bol, ke lab azaad hain tere (Speak for your lips are free) occupying a central place.
A brief conversation with a young attendee carrying one such khadi bag offered an insight into Faiz’s afterlife in the age of algorithms. The poet, it appeared, functioned as much as a cultural signal as a literary influence—an aesthetic marker that travelled easily through Instagram stories and curated photographs. In an era shaped by visual appeal and instant circulation, arguably the greatest Urdu poet of the last century has found a new audience: the influencer, the Instagrammer, the casual admirer.
In the age of algorithms, Faiz risks being admired for his surface while being evacuated of the political discomfort his poetry was meant to produce.
Why Faiz deserves more than his quoted couplets
In the living room of a friend who works at a leading IT firm hangs a poster featuring Faiz alongside Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar. When I asked what the image meant to him, the answer was disarmingly honest: it had more to do with “aesthetics” and the “vibe” it created than with any sustained engagement with the ideas the figures represented. Later in the conversation, he spoke of listening to ‘Mujhse pehli si mohabbat na maang’ (Don’t ask for the love of the old days, my beloved), a song written by the poet that has reached millions on YouTube, often played on loop.
That a poet like Faiz has entered everyday spaces is, in itself, not unwelcome. What is unsettling is the ease with which he risks being reduced to a symbol—consumed as entertainment or ambience, rather than encountered as a thinker whose work demands moral and political engagement. This may be one aspect of an artist’s afterlife; to limit Faiz to it alone, however, is to do grave injustice to the rest of his oeuvre.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz was imprisoned and forced into exile during his lifetime. But that, by itself, is hardly unique. Writers who challenge power have always been punished. Persecution alone does not make a poet exceptional. What does is the nature of his resistance—and the hope his poetry continues to offer against injustice, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or elsewhere.
It has been 44 years since the poet of Hum Dekhenge and Bol, ke lab azaad hain tere died. Long before algorithms began deciding the fate of creativity, his verses moved across India and Pakistan as a living language of dissent—a reminder to power that it is neither permanent nor invincible.
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What is lost when Faiz becomes aesthetic
Faiz’s poetry was never merely lyrical expression. It was dissent, rebellion, and—at times—hope articulated in a language that made power uneasy. If it were otherwise, the public recitation of a poem would not attract legal scrutiny, nor would institutions of national repute feel compelled to respond defensively to its invocation.
In 2019, for instance, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur constituted a committee to inquire into a complaint against the recitation of Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge on campus, where students had read the poem in solidarity with their peers from Jamia Millia Islamia. Speaking to The Indian Express, the committee’s chairperson and then deputy director, Manindra Agarwal, said the matter was closed after the student expressed regret, noting that “perhaps, at that time and place, it was not the most suitable thing to say.”
Such episodes underline what is lost when Faiz is stripped of context and reduced to a visual or performative object. His poetry unsettles precisely because it refuses easy reconciliation with authority.
Why Faiz continues to unsettle fundamentalism
A staunch communist, Faiz was also a sharp critic of religious fundamentalism. He believed that art could not exist in solitude, detached from responsibility. For him, poetry carried an ethical burden—the obligation of the artist to stand against injustice.
When celebrations followed the creation of Pakistan, even as the violence of Partition unfolded, Faiz chose not to join the triumphalism. Instead, in Subh-e-Azadi (Dawn of Freedom), he confronted the moment with unease:
ye daaġh daaġh ujālā ye shab-gazīda sahar
vo intizār thā jis kā ye vo sahar to nahīñ
(These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light—
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Faiz was not rejecting independence; he was questioning the cost at which it arrived. He hinted at the city of justice he imagined in the lines that followed:
chale the yaar ki mil jā.egī kahīñ na kahīñ
falak ke dasht meñ tāroñ kī āḳhirī manzil
(We had set out in longing, certain that somewhere
in the desert of the sky lay the final haven of the stars.)
Faiz spoke not only against Partition, but also against the authoritarianism that followed it—often indifferent to the personal cost such resistance invited. Hum Dekhenge, written in 1979, was a poetic indictment of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship. Decades later, it continues to travel from university campuses to protest sites, resurfacing whenever dissent encounters censorship—often louder than the censorship itself.
Few governments are comfortable with such sentiments. Certainly not one where the Leader of the Opposition is denied the right to speak in the very House that elected him; where a publisher receives police notices for an unfinished book; where films are stalled not by statutory censors but by vigilantes aligned with power. These are not abstractions—they are the current affairs of our present.
Faiz once imagined a moment when sovereignty would return to its rightful owners:
aur raaj karegī ḳhalq-e-ḳhudā
jo maiñ bhī huuñ aur tum bhī ho
(And the people shall rule—
you, and I, and all those like us.)
In the age of algorithms, the danger is not that Faiz will be forgotten, but that he will be endlessly circulated without being read. His poetry survives not as aesthetic affirmation, but as political disturbance—one that resists comfort, consensus, and easy admiration. It is in that resistance, rather than in visibility alone, that Faiz continues to matter.
