Love and Revolution: Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Biography)

From the author: 

I tried, while writing this book, to follow the method of Faiz himself—that of locating a person, their life and all of its many facets within their era. To make the person’s life a part of the larger life of their times. This is what I have understood of Karl Marx’s method of ‘historical materialism’, a philosophy and an ideology which guided Faiz throughout his life. It helped that Faiz sahib lived in such ‘interesting times’ as the Chinese curse goes. The First World War, the Great Depression, India’s struggle for independence, the Second World War, the creation of Pakistan (and its later dismemberment into Pakistan and Bangladesh), Faiz lived through them all. He also tried, to the best of his ability, to engage with these world issues and, in the process, became one of its most eloquent spokespersons for a whole generation, especially in the Indo-Pak subcontinent. The cataclysmic events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of his beloved USSR happened a few years after he died, but I suspect he foresaw at least some of what was to come. And unlike what the cheerleaders of Capitol predicted following the destruction of the ‘Red Menace’, the world of the 21st century has only become more polarized, more dangerous and more uncertain.