Punjab Research Group

In memory of Alys Faiz by Andrew Whitehead

15 September 2014

Alys George was born a century ago this month. She was better known as Alys Faiz – she married the renowned Pakistani poet, journalist and activist, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I met and interviewed her twice at her home in Lahore in the 1990s – and I am posting the audio of those interviews on this blog with the blessing of her daughter, the artist Salima Hashmi.

Alys was the daughter of a bookseller in the London district of Walthamstow. In the 1930s in London, she became politically active eventually joining the Communist Party, and got to know Indian nationalists and leftists in London. In 1939, she travelled to Amritsar to visit her sister Christobel, who married Dr M.D. Taseer, a noted Marxist thinker and educationalist. Two years later, Alys and Faiz married at Pari Mahal in Srinagar – with the nikah conducted by Sheikh Abdullah.

When I interviewed her in Lahore in October 1995, Alys reminisced at length about becoming involved in the British Communist movement (‘I wanted to go to Spain but my parents said no’), getting to know Indian activists, coming out to Punjab and spending time in Kashmir. She recalled the tragic, cathartic violence which accompanied Partition, and spoke of her husband’s ranguished poetic reflection on the manner in which India and Pakistan gained independence, ‘Freedom’s Dawn’.

See Andrew Whitehead’s website to listen to the interviews: http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/in-memory-of-alys-faiz

‘Perhaps some day I might end up as a poet after all’ By Salima Hashmi

7 March 2013

The daughter of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the Subcontinent’s iconic bard, discovers letters exchanged by her mother and father.

Since being Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s daughter has given me privileged access to the family archives, I have become an accidental archivist. In 2009 I embarked upon the Faiz Ghar project to set up a small museum in a house leased to us by a friend and admirer of my father. We commenced sorting through Faiz’s belongings, papers and books. It was not a massive collection by any means, owing to his nomadic, rather Spartan, but interesting life, that began on 13 February 1911 and ended on 20 November 1984. My mother Alys was instrumental in saving and sorting what little there was: a smart grey lounge suit, a cap, his scarf, his pen, and a reasonably large cache of letters, certificates and medals.

After my mother’s death in 2003 all these things had been packed away in cartons in my house, waiting for just the sort of opportunity that the Faiz Ghar project afforded. Sifting through the papers, I came across a plastic bag containing some scraps. On closer look, I deciphered Faiz’s writing, and the unmistakable stamp of the censor from the Hyderabad Jail, where Faiz spent part of his imprisonment between 1951 and 1955 for his role in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy – a Soviet-backed coup attempt against Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. These few letters were in poor shape, but readable. It is surprising that they have survived at all. Alys and Faiz had moved to Beirut in 1978. On return, all seemed to be in order in the house – except the cupboard, which had been attacked by termites. That cupboard contained Faiz’s letters from jail, which were later preserved with the help of Asma Ibrahim, transcribed by Kyla Pasha, and published in 2011 under the title Two Loves.

See Himal South Asia for full article: http://himalmag.com/perhaps-day-might-end-poet/