Nuskha Haye Wafaنسخہ ہائے وفا

About the book

Nuskha Haye Wafa, published in 1984, is the complete poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. The title means, roughly, prescriptions of fidelity: a nuskha is a prescription or recipe, and wafa is faithfulness. It is a kulliyat, a collected volume, gathering the seven collections Faiz published in his lifetime into a single book. It appeared in the year Faiz died, and it has been the standard Faiz volume ever since: the book readers buy when they want all of him, and the book singers, students and translators reach for first. It runs to more than seven hundred pages in the usual hardcover edition, and it holds the whole arc of his work, from the romantic lyrics of a young man in Lahore to the prison poems and the poems of exile.

What is inside Nuskha Haye Wafa?

The volume gathers seven collections, in the order Faiz published them. Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1941) is the first, the book that made his name, full of love poems in the classical ghazal form. Dast-e-Saba (1952) and Zindan Nama (1956) are the prison books, written during and after the four years Faiz spent in jail following the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. Dast-e-Tah-e-Sang (1965) and Sar-e-Wadi-e-Sina (1971) carry the poems of the middle years, when Faiz was working as a journalist and editor and travelling for the cause of peace. Sham-e-Shahar-e-Yaran (1978) and Mere Dil Mere Musafir (1981) are the late collections, written after the fall of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government and Faiz's self-exile in Beirut. Read in order, the seven books tell the story of a life: love first, then prison, then the long work of resistance.

The poems readers know

A few poems in the volume are known far beyond the people who read poetry. Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang, from the first collection, is the love poem every Urdu speaker knows, in which the lover admits that the sorrows of the world have crowded into the space where love used to be. Subh-e-Azadi, written in August 1947, is Faiz's unsparing answer to Independence: a dawn that arrived stained, not the morning the country had been promised. Nisaar Main Teri Galiyon Pe is the lover's offering laid at the beloved's streets. And Hum Dekhenge, written in 1979, has become a protest anthem across South Asia, sung at marches and on campuses whenever people gather against power. These poems are why the volume matters: it is not only a library of one poet's work, it is the book that holds the words crowds still shout.

The poet

Faiz Ahmad Faiz was born on 13 February 1911 in Kala Qadir, a village in what is now Narowal district of Punjab. His father was a barrister who had studied law at Cambridge. Faiz studied at Government College and Oriental College in Lahore, taught English at colleges in Amritsar and Lahore, and joined the British Indian Army in 1942, rising to lieutenant-colonel. After Partition he became editor of the Pakistan Times and the Urdu daily Imroze. In 1951 he was arrested for his part in the Rawalpindi conspiracy and spent four years in prison. He was a leading figure of the Progressive Writers' Movement, and in 1962 he became the first Asian poet to receive the Lenin Peace Prize. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he died in Lahore on 20 November 1984, the year Nuskha Haye Wafa appeared.

Love and resistance in one voice

What makes Faiz unlike any other Urdu poet is that he never chose between love and politics. In his early poems the beloved and the country are the same figure, and the pain of separation is both personal and political. In the prison poems the cell becomes a place to see the world clearly, and the poems written there are among his calmest and most exact. The ghazal, the classical form of the love lyric, becomes in his hands a way of talking about tyranny, and the nazm, the free poem, becomes a way of talking about hope. That is why his work travels so well: a reader who knows nothing of Pakistan's history can still feel the poems, and a reader who knows the history hears a second meaning in every line.

Reception and legacy

Nuskha Haye Wafa has been reprinted many times since 1984, and it remains the best-selling collection of modern Urdu poetry in both India and Pakistan. Faiz's ghazals have been sung by almost every major singer of the subcontinent, from Noor Jehan and Mehdi Hassan to Iqbal Bano, whose singing of Hum Dekhenge in Lahore in the 1980s, in defiance of a ban, made the poem famous across the world. His poems have been translated into many languages, including English, and Victor Kiernan's translations brought him to readers in Britain and America. In Pakistan he was given the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the country's highest civil honour, after his death. For a new reader, Nuskha Haye Wafa is the place to start: one volume, the whole poet, and the poems that still get sung whenever people need words for love or for resistance.