Grammaticalizing Suffering: Symbolic Meaning-Making in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Aj Bazar Main Pa Ba-Jolan Chalo” through Systemic Functional and Verbal-Art Analysis

Abstract

This paper explores how the poem ‘Aj bazar main pa ba-jolan chalo’ by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, builds symbolic meaning through a set of grammatical patterns and reconstitutes culturally familiar signifiers of pain in a symbolic code of communal determination. The study employs Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) to analyze how transitivity, mood, and thematic options structure the experiential, interpersonal, and textual meaning in the poem. The verbal-art theory discussed by Hasan (1985, 1989, 2007) is applied to explain how these linguistic structures help the poem form its semantic structure and symbolic expression. The analysis suggests that relational clauses create emotional inadequacy; material imperatives grammaticalize movement into embodied, public action; cumulative relational existential listings create an environment of widespread scrutiny; interrogatives anticipate the future loss of ethical categories; and final propositions articulate a collective position. Instead of formulating the historical assertion about deliberate humiliation, the study understands fetters, dust, blood, and the gaze of people as culturally charged semiotic materials in the symbolic system of the poem. In turn, these metafunctional patterns perform a revaluation of suffering as a basis of a common agency. The article thus shows the usefulness of combining SFL with verbal-art theory to study the semiotic process of constructing meaning in South Asian poetry and provides a linguistically based explanation of the symbolic reorientation in the Faiz’s oeuvre.

Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Symbolic Meaning-Making, Grammaticalization of Suffering, Verbal Art Analysis, Resistance Poetry