When the Progressive Writers’ Movement emerged in the 1930s, it was an attempt by the Urdu literati of the day, such as Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, and Premchand, to redefine the purpose of Urdu literature by shifting its focus from romantic escapism to the material realities of social life. Premchand’s call to “alter our standards of beauty” captures this ideological turn, urging writers to embrace truth over ornamentation. Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang (Don’t ask for the love of the old days my beloved)” embodied this shift with exceptional clarity, moving from classical romantic imagery to the stark landscape of collective suffering. Yet contemporary readings often romanticise only the poem’s first half, erasing its progressive vision and the conflict it stages between love and social consciousness: conflict, that was central to both Faiz’s political poetics and the aims of the movement.
The Progressive Writers’ Association, officially founded in 1936, emerged from a moment marked by colonial oppression and the growing influence of Marxism. Writers began to question the purpose of literature during a period when poverty, exploitation, and political turmoil were the order of the day. The movement rejected “Art for Art’s Sake” (Adab Bara-e-Adab) and instead embraced “Art for Life’s Sake” (Adab Bara-e-Zindagi), ultimately culminating in “Art for Revolution’s Sake” (Adab Bara-e-Inqilab). Traditional Urdu poetry, with its focus on the beloved, beauty, longing, and the lover’s suffering, was now considered insufficient for a time of mass struggle. The Progressives argued that literature had for too long remained confined to fantasy and emotional excess while ignoring the brutal realities around them.
Premchand’s presidential address at the first Progressive Writers’ Conference, “Sahitya ka Uddeshya,” became a foundational text. He criticised literature “told only for entertainment” and urged writers to reflect actuality and awaken social consciousness. Romantic love, the central theme of classical Urdu poetry, was thus put under intense scrutiny. To devote one’s writing entirely to the beloved was seen as morally inadequate when the world outside was burning. Because of this consciousness, this realisation of the sociopolitical realities, they deliberately chose to focus on Art for Life’s sake. One could even claim that there was no choice at all; that choice was taken away by the coloniser.
Marxist thought shaped this shift significantly. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels argue that consciousness is shaped by material life, rather than the other way around. Progressive writers extended this insight to emotions, arguing that love itself must be understood in the context of historical and economic realities. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi noted that the movement relocated literary focus from afāq (the abstract universe) to anfus (people and things). Beauty, too, was redefined, not as the beloved’s rosy lips or silk-like hair, but as the weathered hands of workers and the dignity of the oppressed. As Premchand wrote, the movement required that “we alter our standards of beauty.”
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, born in 1911 in Sialkot, Punjab (in Pakistan), became the most celebrated voice of this aesthetic revolution. His early poetry drew on classical romance, but after encountering Marxist thought, his vision underwent a transformation. His first collection, Naqsh-e-Fariyadi (1941), exhibits this shift, particularly in the iconic nazm titled “Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat.” The poem marks a movement from idealised romance toward a recognition of collective suffering. This transition is crystallised in the famous couplet:
Aur bhi dukh hain zamāne mein mohabbat ke sivā
Rāhatein aur bhi hain wasl kī rāhat ke sivā.
(There are other sorrows in the world, apart from the anguish of love
there are other reliefs, more potent than the relief of our reunion.)
The poem maintains a balance between classical romantic love and revolutionary fervour. The first half of the poem draws from familiar tropes of ishq-e-mijāzī (earthly love): the beloved’s luminous beauty, her eyes as the axis of the universe, and the lover’s entire existence orbiting around her presence.
The lover’s conviction, captured in lines such as “terī āñkhoñ ke sivā duniyā meñ rakkhā kyā hai (What is there in this world except your eyes?)” and “maiñ ne samjhā thā ki tū hai to daraḳhshāñ hai hayāt (I used to feel your presence would keep my life brighter),” reaffirms the classical notion of beauty as entirely concentrated in the beloved. This encapsulates the classical romantic worldview in which personal love overshadows every other human experience.
Yet the poem opens with a refusal: “Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang (Don’t ask for the love of the old days, my beloved)“, signalling that this world of enclosed love is already in question. The speaker asserts that what he once believed was only wishful thinking, “yun na tha, maine faqat chaha tha yun ho jaaye (it was not to be, yet I wished for it to be so simple).”He can no longer offer that same exclusive devotion to his romantic love because he has awakened to other, more urgent realities.
With the famous declaration “Aur bhi dukh hain zamāne mein mohabbat ke sivā” (“(There are other sorrows in the world, apart from the anguish of love, “), the poem ruptures its romantic enclosure. The beloved’s beauty is no longer enough to eclipse the suffering of the world. Faiz forces a confrontation with systemic violence through stark imagery: bodies sold in markets, bodies bathed in blood, diseased figures emerging from “ovens of sickness,” and countless people crushed under centuries of oppression, as he writes “jism nikle hue amrāz ke tannūroñ se, piip bahtī huī galte hue nāsūroñ se (bodies emerge from the disease-ridden furnaces, pus flows from the decomposing ulcers).” The emotional universe shifts from the lover’s longing to collective pain.
In “lauṭ jaatī hai udhar ko bhī nazar kyā kīje, ab bhī dilkash hai tirā husn magar kyā kīje (and yet I cannot look away my love! your beauty is still as alluring as ever),” Faiz concedes that the beloved remains beautiful, just as she has been for centuries in the classical literary tradition, but he can no longer remain absorbed in that beauty. The moment demands that he turn away from the beloved’s radiance and toward the far more pressing realities of suffering and injustice. In this recognition, love becomes inseparable from political consciousness.
This transition, central to the poem, is precisely what popular reception suppresses. In popular culture and social media, the poem is circulated almost exclusively through its opening lines, which celebrate the beloved’s beauty while omitting the revolutionary turn that gives the poem its force. This selective romanticisation distorts Faiz’s careful balancing of love and political consciousness, reducing what he crafted as a dialectical movement into a one-dimensional love lyric. When recital after recital dwells only on the lush imagery of the first part, the poem’s central theme, its movement from private passion to collective suffering, from romance to responsibility, is effectively erased. By ignoring the second half of the poem, readers unconsciously reenact the classical poet’s retreat from social reality, returning Faiz’s work to the sentimental frame he explicitly sought to break.
Premchand warned that literature must awaken us, not lull us into a state of sleep. Ignoring the Conflict at the heart of Faiz’s poem, between inherited aesthetics and historical urgency, is to succumb to the very slumber Premchand warned against. The selective romanticisation of the poem, which amputates its second half, becomes a kind of cultural intoxication: soothing, pleasurable, but ultimately numbing.
Faiz shows that colonialism robbed people not only of political agency but of the simple human capacity for unburdened love. Today, modern forms of colonial domination, such as consumerism, spectacle, and digital circulation, continue this work in more subtle ways. They train us to consume only the comforting half of a poem, to prefer desire over disruption, and to retreat from collective suffering. Reclaiming the full poem is thus not just an exercise in literary accuracy; it is an act of resistance. To restore the poem’s balance between love and revolution is to resist a culture that dulls feeling, fragments attention, and encourages political forgetting.
Faiz’s poem, therefore, stands not only as a critique of classical romanticism but also as a living reminder that literature must keep us awake – emotionally, ethically, and politically. Only when we read the poem in its entirety can we honour both Faiz’s Art and the progressive vision it sought to illuminate.
