It’s a reality universally acknowledged that struggle, or a prospect of struggle, places limits on language and creativeness. To rescue each from these limits when the struggle drums roll in India and Pakistan right this moment, due to this fact, is an act of rebel. Holding their fort when the warmongers go on an overdrive, folks in each nations have been indulging in these acts of rebel since 1947. As an inescapable sense of foreboding envelopes us now, let’s refresh our reminiscence and hold the continuum of free language and creativeness alive.
Pakistan’s Masculinist Creativeness
To start with, Kishwar Naheed’s 1992 poem, ‘Girti hui Diwar-e Berlin, Günter Grass aur Primary‘, is a well timed reminder of what silence round traumas and mythmaking do to a rustic’s nationwide creativeness. Like Grass, Naheed was sceptical of the autumn of the Berlin Wall — it meant little greater than a frenzied collective act with out providing any decision or reconciliation. The traumas of the India-Pakistan partition, usually writ massive on girls’s our bodies, have discovered little expression in Pakistan’s masculinist nationwide creativeness. Thus the bellicist nature of its nationhood. Once we overlook in regards to the wounds of struggle, we do not assume twice earlier than waging a struggle. Naheed’s poem is a jolt to such public amnesia.
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Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s ‘Subah-e-Azadi‘ talks in regards to the aftermath of waging struggle within the milieu of this collective amnesia. Composed within the wake of the India-Pakistan partition, the poem talks in regards to the evanescence of manufactured utopia. The daybreak of independence described by Faiz is nothing like the thought offered to the lots by the communal management in each nations. The “dagh dagh ujala” will get grimmer with West Pakistan’s 1971 crackdown on East Pakistan. Faiz marked this with one other poem, ‘Hum Ke Thahre Ajnabi‘, reflecting pensively on the shadow traces that divide folks regardless of manufactured consent round non secular homogeneity. His ‘Hazar Karo Mere Tan Se‘ is a lament on the Indo-Pak struggle of 1971, the place the poet is upset in regards to the inadequacy of his physique in quenching the prevailing thirst for blood.
The Land Of Ram And Gautam
Ibn-e-Insha’s lyrical poem ‘Aman ka Akhri Din‘, composed in 1952, ends with the poet’s frustration at folks’s incapacity to attract classes from the horrors of historical past. “Ye wo yaadein hain ke dhundlayein na mitne payein, aur hum jung ki dehleez pe phir aa nikle“. In India, the same sentiment was expressed by Gyanpith awardee Ali Sardar Jafri in couplets like “Ram-o-Gautam ki zamiñ hurmat-e-insañ ki ameen/Baañjh ho jayegi kya ḳhuun ki barsaat ke baad” — “will the land of Ram and Gautam flip infertile after this rain of blood?”
Even the rousing poetry of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar sees mercy and peace as the tip merchandise of a righteous struggle. In his ‘Kurukshetra‘, Dinkar conceptualises righteous struggle in opposition to injustice as a device to ascertain the world order based mostly on “sahansheelta, kshama, daya“, that’s, tolerance, mercy, and compassion. Agha Shahid Ali’s poems, similar to ‘Lenox Hill‘, mix the intensely private and ubiquitously public griefs, exploring their identical level of origin: imminent loss of life and loss. Battle does not differentiate between private and non-private.
‘Qayamat Ka Shor’
Sahir Ludhianvi makes this private grief the leitmotif for his anti-war magnum opus, ‘Parchhaiyan‘. “Tumhaare ghar mein qayaamat ka shor barpaa hai/Mahaaz-e-jang se harkaaraa taar laayaa hai/Kay jiska zikr tumhein zindagii se pyara thaa/Vo bhaai narga-e-dushman mein kaam aayaa hai” — ‘”insufferable wails have prevailed in your house/The messenger has introduced a letter from the battlefield/Whose point out for you was dearer than your life/That brother has acquired killed within the enemy encirclement”. By bringing the truths of struggle dwelling, Sahir questioned the nationwide consciousness that conceptualises struggle in summary phrases. These traces puncture the concept that struggle is one thing that occurs to different folks.
Many might imagine it to be an act of treason to speak about poetry — pacifist poetry at that — when the spilt blood of innocents has not even dried up, and when India has carried out air strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and components of Pakistan in response to the Pahalgam assaults. The purpose of this train, nevertheless, is straightforward: it is very important keep in mind at a second like proper now that the worth and ache of struggle is immense. It is cowardice to bow to injustice, sure. However irresponsible warmongering is a fair larger evil.
(The writer is a Delhi-based writer and tutorial)
Disclaimer: These are the non-public opinions of the writer