Removal of Faiz’s poetry from textbooks indicates protests no longer permissible: Naseeruddin Shah

Last month, some of Faiz’s verses were dropped from India’s Class 10 curriculum and Shah has a response in writing.

On the removal of Faiz's verses from school textbooks in India, Naseeruddin Shah quotes Saudi human rights activist Manal al-Sharif, to say, “’The rain begins with a single drop.’ However, in our country, that first single drop was of acid rain, and it fell when Narendra Modi was elevated to Chief Minister of Gujarat as reward for being the charioteer of L K Advani’s hate-fuelled ‘rath yatra’, which opened the floodgates of the othering of the Muslim community.”

In his article published in The Indian Express, the actor goes on to address the criminalization of triple talaaq in his country, to call it, “a stroke of genius designed to alienate Muslim men and women from each other.” He then alludes to the “inherent irony” in Modi’s declared concern for solely Muslim women, and never men, dubbing it a “hypocrisy”, granted how quickly these ‘behen, betiyan’ become traitors instigated by a “foreign hand” when part of the Shaheen Bagh demonstrations.

He also calls out Modi’s attempts to later “tar” the protesting farmers as “andolanjeevis and parasites”, to add, “Millions of Modi’s apologists, of course, will argue that the PM is not personally responsible for every ill-deed and cannot be expected to comment on everything, including the barbaric instigations spewed forth almost every day by Hindutva clerics. That open calls for a genocide of Muslims elicited no response (forget condemnation) at all is proof, if proof were needed, that the rot begins at the top.”

Shah feels the examples of Aurangzeb and Mahmud Ghaznavi are merely used to aggravate imaginary wounds among the right-wing Hindu populace and even Tipu Sultan, “who resisted the British with all his might is not safe from vilification.” He then writes, “of course the Taj Mahal and Qutb Minar were ‘Hindu temples’ converted into Muslim memorials,” before he points out that Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Hum dekhenge was written during the rule of Zia-ul Haq.

“He [Faiz] penned Aaj bazaar mein… during his imprisonment by the Ayub Khan government — neither despot bothering with even putting up a pretence of democracy. The removal of his verses from school textbooks indicates the chilling fact that protest of any kind is no longer permissible,” asserts Shah. “Is someone afraid that these poems will resonate with the imprisoned intellectuals, activists and teachers in our country? Or is it just that Faiz is Pakistani? The removal of Hum ke thehre ajnabi… is baffling as it was written to heal, not rub salt in, wounds when Faiz visited the newly created Bangladesh. I really wonder if the worthies on the education board who forbade these poems have actually even read or understood them,” contemplates the actor in his articulate analysis of the prevailing circumstances in India.

Referring to a faculty member of IIT Kanpur, who opined that the verse “Sab taj uchhale jaayenge, sab buth ukhaade jayenge”, was a glorification of Ghaznavi, Shah asks, “Does someone with such tunnel vision and limited understanding of imagery deserve to be teaching at an IIT or anywhere at all? The supreme irony is that Hum dekhenge… was considered anti-Muslim by right-wingers in Pakistan at that time!”

Shah wonders whether Faiz’s, or any Urdu poetry and literature will eventually be banned in totality in India, given the rambling anxiety to declare Urdu a foreign or Muslim language, as he addresses “the speed with which attempts to erase all traces of India’s Muslim past are under way while our Pradhan Sevak addresses the nation from ramparts of Red Fort, which of course was built by ‘Hindu kings’ and for which the marauding Mughals “falsely” claim credit!”

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