It is a truth universally acknowledged that war, or a prospect of war, puts limits on language and imagination. To rescue both from these limits when the war drums roll in India and Pakistan today, therefore, is an act of rebellion. Holding their fort when the warmongers go on an overdrive, people in both countries have been indulging in these acts of rebellion since 1947. As an inescapable sense of foreboding envelopes us now, let’s refresh our memory and keep the continuum of free language and imagination alive.
Pakistan’s Masculinist Imagination
To begin with, Kishwar Naheed’s 1992 poem, ‘Girti hui Diwar-e Berlin, Günter Grass aur Main‘, is a timely reminder of what silence around traumas and mythmaking do to a country’s national imagination. Like Grass, Naheed was sceptical of the fall of the Berlin Wall — it meant little more than a frenzied collective act without offering any resolution or reconciliation. The traumas of the India-Pakistan partition, often writ large on women’s bodies, have found little expression in Pakistan’s masculinist national imagination. Thus the bellicist nature of its nationhood. When we forget about the wounds of war, we don’t think twice before waging a war. Naheed’s poem is a jolt to such public amnesia.
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Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s ‘Subah-e-Azadi‘ talks about the aftermath of waging war in the milieu of this collective amnesia. Composed in the wake of the India-Pakistan partition, the poem talks about the evanescence of manufactured utopia. The dawn of independence described by Faiz is nothing like the idea sold to the masses by the communal leadership in both countries. The “dagh dagh ujala” gets grimmer with West Pakistan’s 1971 crackdown on East Pakistan. Faiz marked this with another poem, ‘Hum Ke Thahre Ajnabi‘, reflecting pensively on the shadow lines that divide people despite manufactured consent around religious homogeneity. His ‘Hazar Karo Mere Tan Se‘ is a lament on the Indo-Pak war of 1971, where the poet is upset about the inadequacy of his body 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 people’s inability to draw lessons from the horrors of history. “Ye wo yaadein hain ke dhundlayein na mitne payein, aur hum jung ki dehleez pe phir aa nikle“. In India, a similar 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 turn infertile after this rain of blood?”
Even the rousing poetry of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar sees mercy and peace as the end products of a righteous war. In his ‘Kurukshetra‘, Dinkar conceptualises righteous war against injustice as a tool to establish the world order based on “sahansheelta, kshama, daya“, that is, tolerance, mercy, and compassion. Agha Shahid Ali’s poems, such as ‘Lenox Hill‘, blend the intensely personal and ubiquitously public griefs, exploring their same point of origin: imminent death and loss. War doesn’t differentiate between public and private.
‘Qayamat Ka Shor’
Sahir Ludhianvi makes this personal 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” — ‘”unbearable wails have prevailed in your home/The messenger has brought a letter from the battlefield/Whose mention for you was dearer than your life/That brother has got killed in the enemy encirclement”. By bringing the truths of war home, Sahir questioned the national consciousness that conceptualises war in abstract terms. These lines puncture the idea that war is something that happens to other people.
Many may think it to be an act of treason to talk about poetry — pacifist poetry at that — when the spilt blood of innocents has not even dried up, and when India has conducted air strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and parts of Pakistan in response to the Pahalgam attacks. The point of this exercise, however, is simple: it is important to remember at a moment like right now that the price and pain of war is immense. It’s cowardice to bow to injustice, yes. But irresponsible warmongering is an even bigger evil.
(The author is a Delhi-based author and academic)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
