Hum Dekhenge

Background

The nazm was composed as a medium of protest against Zia Ul Haq's oppressive regime. It gained a rapid cult-following as a leftist song of resistance and defiance, after a public rendition by Iqbal Bano at Alhamra Arts Council on 13 February 1986, ignoring the ban on Faiz's poetry.

However, scholars of Urdu such as Rauf Parekh and others argue that while Faiz was critical of Zia, this poem wasn't written with him in mind but as a tribute to the 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran, this poem having been written just a few months after the revolution. This also explains the poem's Islamic symbols and Sufi motifs.

Themes

Faiz employs the metaphor of traditional Islamic imagery to subvert and challenge Zia's fundamentalist interpretation of them; Qayamat, the Day of Reckoning is transformed into the Day of Revolution, wherein Zia's military government will be ousted by the people and democracy will be re-installed.

In popular culture

Media

The song was recreated in Coke Studio Season 11 on 22 July 2018, under the aegis of Zohaib Kazi and Ali Hamza. In the movie The Kashmir Files (2022), it was depicted as being sung by students of a left-leaning Indian university to as a song of protest

Protests

Pakistan

The poem gained importance in protests against Pervez Musharraf in the early 2000s.

India

During the Citizenship Amendment Act protests in India, faculty members of IIT Kanpur took issue with Hum Dekhenge being sung by protesting students in the campus, and alleged it to be "anti-Hindu". The IIT instituted a commission to look into the issue. The student media body rejected the charges as being misinformed and communal, which divorced the poem from its societal context. During the same period of early 2000s Madan Duklan, a prominent actor, director and poet in Garhwali language translated 'Hum Dekhenge' in Garhwali language. Encouraged and directed by Dr. Sunil Kainthola, local artists who were participating in a production orientation workshop for 'Mukhjatra' sang the Garhwali version of Hum Dekhenge in front of the Uttarakhand movement's martyrs monument in the court compound at Dehradun.

References

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