Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born at Kala Qader in Sialkot district in 1911, taught English literature at Amritsar and Lahore, served in the British Indian Army, and edited the Pakistan Times.
He is the major Urdu poet of the twentieth century after Iqbal, and his politics were of the left throughout. He was imprisoned for four years from 1951 in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case and wrote two collections in jail.
His poem on independence, Subh-e-Azadi, written in August 1947, begins by saying that this stained light, this night-bitten dawn, is not the morning that was waited for. It is the most quoted line about 1947 in Urdu, as Amrita Pritam's is in Punjabi.
Hum Dekhenge, written against Zia-ul-Haq's regime, has since been sung at protests across South Asia by people with no connection to its original occasion.
He was born in Punjab, wrote in Urdu, and is claimed by readers in both countries. His work is banned nowhere and is nervously handled everywhere.
He wrote in Urdu and came from Sialkot, and his imprisonment in the conspiracy case of 1951 produced the poems he is best known for.
He edited a Lahore daily, worked with the trade unions, and spent years in exile in Beirut editing a magazine.
His Punjabi is small in quantity and real. Rabba sachiya is his and it is sung in Punjabi on both sides.