PASH: A POET OF IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

The book 'Pash: A poet of impossible dreams'  is a collection of about 100 poems of Pash translated by me. The book has been published  by Pash Memorial International Trust in collaboration with Shilalekh, Delhi.The book was released on 23rd March 2010(see link  http://paash.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/paash-talwandi-salem-23rd-march-2010-3/ ) ,  the day on which  Pash was assassinated (23 March 1988)  by the Khalistani terrorists. Interestingly 23rd March is also the day on which Bhagat Singh, along with Raj Guru and   Sukh Dev ,was hanged by the British in 1931.Bhagat Singh's influence on Pash was very great. Here are  a few of Pash's poems translated by me. These are among his most mature poems.

WHEN REVOLT RAGES 

When in the pitch dark nights

Moments recoil

And stand in terror of each other

The light in the attics

Jumps from the windows

And commits suicide

When revolt rages

In the womb of such peaceful nights

I can be done to death any time

In the broad daylight

In the thick of the night

---

TO THE NIGHT 

The millet stalks hang their heads in dejection

The stars too are speechless -

What’s wrong with the night!

Oh night, don’t grieve for me

You owe me nothing

Don’t worry

That the cud-chewing cattle are so dumb

Don’t worry

That the village air, always full of warmth,

Is so quiet today

Don’t worry

You just look into my eyes

That are never going to see again

That valiant friend of mine

About whom the newspapers have written today…

O night, where is that temper of yours

When he had descended here

Raging like a hill torrent.

First, we read in the moonlight

Then, like thieves, we argued,

Then fought

Oh night, you were happy then

When we fought

Why are you sad 

Now that we have parted?

Oh night, I plead with you

In the name of the dead one

It does not become of you

It is I who owe you something

Not you

Night congratulate me

And I congratulate these fields

They know everything:

Where the blood of humans spills,

And how to prize that blood

They know all this

So night

You look into my eyes

And I look into the future.

---

LISTEN 

Listen to the music of our hearth

Listen to our cry laced with pain

Listen to my wife’s requests

Listen to my daughter’s demands

Measure the poison in my bidi

Listen to the drumbeat of my cough

Listen to the cold sighs of my patched trousers

Listen to the heartache of my worn out shoes

Listen to my silence

Listen how I express myself

And gauge the depth of my misery

Listen to the arithmetic of my rage

Here is the corpse of my civilized behaviour

Listen to the music of the beast in me

Listen to the song of the literate

Sung by the illiterate and the barbaric

Whether you like it or not

Listen to what we have to say

---

WE SHALL FIGHT COMRADE

 

We shall fight, comrade, for the unhappy times

We shall fight, comrade, for the bottled-up desires

We shall gather up, comrade, the fragments of our lives

The hammer still falls on the bare anvil

Furrows are still made in the clayey soil 

Is it our duty to fight?

We shall forget this question

And fight, comrade

We swear by our crushed desires

We swear by our hopes turned to ashes

We swear by our horny hands

We shall fight, comrade

We shall fight

Until Veeru the goatherd

Has to drink goat piss

Until those who till the land

Cannot inhale the fragrance of mustard blossoms   

Until the swollen-eyed school teacher’s husband

Does not return from the war front

Until the police constables are duty bound

To strangulate their own brethren

Until the babus keep writing on their files

In human blood

We shall fight

Until there are reasons for us to fight

If we don’t have the gun, we shall have the sword

If we don’t have the sword, we shall have the passion

If we don’t know the art, we shall have the reason 

And we shall fight, comrade…

We shall fight

Because one gets nothing without a fight

We shall fight

Wondering why we did not fight until now

We shall fight

To acknowledge our guilt

To keep alive the memory of those who died fighting

We shall fight, comrade…

---

TO A POLICE CONSTABLE 

I have left behind

My sisters, shedding an ocean of tears

My father’s beard

Quivering under some unknown fears

A mother supplicating before God

And fainting every now and then.

No one will shift into shade

My dumb cattle at the manger

Or give them a drink of water

And the fireplace will remain unlit

For days, out of mourning.

O constable, tell me,

Do I look so dangerous even to you!

O brother, be honest,

Don’t you see

On my whip-skinned body  

In my bleeding mouth

A glimpse of your own self?

Lined up with the enemy

You may brag and boast

But your sleepy eyes

Your stony forehead

Your worn out shorts

And its pockets

Soaked in tobacco stench

Tell another tale.

If there’s one thing

That draws the line between us

It is this uniform of yours

But even today your family woes 

Are the same as mine

When your father unloads

The bundle of fodder from his head

His over-strained muscles too

Ache to crush the tyrant’s head

There and then.

When you are unable to meet

Your children’s school expenses

Your wife’s heart too,

My brother, is torn apart.

When the bribes drunk by you

Corrode your inside,

You too wish to slash

The state’s jugular vein -

The state has eaten away

In a few years

Your sandalwood body

Your rishi-like temper

Your family’s happiness

Pleasant like the monsoon breeze

You may distance yourself from me

Under the cloak of this uniform

But the world within you

Wants to hold my hands

How can we, always stacking up our losses,

And kneading our derelict childhood,

Be a threat to anyone?

And those who sold and ruined themselves

For our happiness could be no cause of trouble

For anyone.

You might have become a truncheon

In the hands of the enemy

But tell me

Swearing on your belly

How can we be a threat to each other?

We are a threat only to those

Who see danger everywhere.

Save your obscenities 

For your precious anger

I am not the son of a white-clad leader

I’m just one of thousands of faces

That, drenched in dust, are shaping

The destiny of this hapless country

The rivers of my country are far smaller

Than the lines of sweat on my forehead

No religious book is holier

Than the silence on my lacerated lips.

And the story of our pain is far more intense

Than the three colours in the flag

You salute, clicking your heels

And each hole in our hearts

Is far bigger than the Ashok Chakra on it.

My friend, trampled under 

Your spiked boots I am still higher

Than Mount Everest.

Your cowardly officer

Has misled you to believe

I am a violent and dangerous enemy

Of this state

No, I haven’t yet begun

To spin the first thread of rebellion

As yet I am helpless before   

My family’s misfortunes

As yet I fill up the void of action

With my pen

As yet I am a tenuous link

Between the peasants and wage earners,

And you too, my right hand,

Remain estranged from me.

I have yet to change the barber’s razors

Into daggers

I have yet to write ‘Chandi di Vaar’

On the masons’ trowels

And the womb

That shall give birth to blazing slogans

Is yet to be pierced 

With the cobbler’s poison-tipped bradawl

And Dhamma carpenter’s roaring adze

Is yet to be hoisted higher

Than this devil’s flag

And the menials

Ever condemned to wash your dirty dishes

Have yet to recover their customary dues

For the jubilees

And the sweeper Khushia

Has yet to smoke in his hookah

The soft thigh bone

Of a high ranking vulture.

The day I become a rainbow

Stitching all the seven colours together

All my thrusts against the enemy

Shall prove deadly.

Then the spray of stinking spittle

From a car brandishing the state’s flag

Shall not sully my life’s lusting face.

I cannot reach that lighthouse all alone

I need you

And you also have to reach there.

We are a caravan

Of life’s strong fragrances

Your forefathers too have

Fertilized this beautiful land.

We are passionately in love

With the song of life

And in our longing is contained

The tune of your sadness too.

O constable, tell me

Do I look so dangerous

To you?

I have left behind…

---

A THORN PRICK  

(To a man whose birth no calendar commemorates)

He lived long

Hoping his name would shine 

The earth was very big

And his village so small

All his life he slept in the same hut

All his life he defecated in the same field

And kept on hoping

His name would shine

All his life he heard only three sounds:

The crowing of the rooster

The huffing and puffing of his cattle

And the chomp of his own jaws while he ate.

He never heard the sound of the sun  

Setting on the silky sand dunes

He never heard the sound of flower buds

Opening in spring

The stars never sang a song for him

All his lifetime he knew only three colours:

One the colour of the earth

Which he never knew how to name

Other the colour of the sky

Which had so many names

None of which he could remember

And the third of his wife’s cheeks

Which he never named out of shyness

He could compete against anyone in eating moolis

He won many a bet on eating the corn on cobs

But he himself was eaten away without any wager.

His years, like ripe melons, were swallowed whole

And his fresh milk temper

Was drunk with great relish

He never came to know how

Health-giving he was!

And the desire that his name should shine

Chased him like a bee.

He mutated into his own statue

But no one ever celebrated this.

The pathway from his home to the well

Is frequented even today

But in his footmarks

Buried under innumerable footprints

There yet smiles a wound

A wound inflicted by a thorn

Yet smiles there.

---

JOGA SINGH’S SELF-INTROSPECTION 

O friends, how during this war shall I hide

The wounds I already have

My three marital vows shall neither become my shield

Nor act as balm.

When I set out all the five K’s rode with me

All the while I felt I held the reins in my hands

Without knowing I was being driven

By the wayward paths   

That sometimes brought me to a brothel

Sometimes to the magical lakes

Where songbirds were learning

To die in bliss

I had never realized

Pathways had a will of their own

And the three vows

Their own history, however brief…

Oh my God, when shall my body be rid

Of this fever of the three vows

That has become my sixth K

Had I turned my back on the Guru 

It would have been different

But now Joga Singh is nothing more than his feet in the stirrup

And when I reach Bhangani I shall only be a hand

I’m sometimes my hand, sometimes my foot

But never Joga Singh.

And the fourth vow!

Sometimes I feel it is no more than a bright corner

Of an imagined land with no corners beyond

Friends, even if I lose in the battlefield

It would only be the destiny of those six K’s

Joga Singh neither ever wins nor loses

Joga Singh is ever ready to obey the commands

Joga Singh neither ever wins nor ever loses

---

A NOTE FOR MY VILLAGE FROM JAIL  

My village, come to meet me sometime at night

When the vulture sitting on the watch tower

Has folded its wings, and

Only the guards are awake, but they don’t matter

You just come, like the bird

That flies, unmindful, over a burning pyre, and ask:

Where is that solitary prisoner, blinded by the cell walls,

Whose sight was once like the bright sunshine

Dancing on the village pond?

But no -

You won’t have the time

You must be engrossed in manipulating the wind   

To winnow the groundnut crop

Before the stock of fodder is used up.

You must be busy making a bed of sand

For the tender-fingered children

To practise the alphabet on,

Children who won’t be able to escape

From the loops of the first letter of the alphabet.

O my village, your green fields

Must be soaking up the aura of stateliness

Radiating from the new crop of young girls

Casting secretive glances sideways,

And again and again retreating into shyness.

You must be busy gathering the fragments

Of laughter that broke up on the lips of the young

Whose engagements broke off

Just as the pitcher full of wort
Ready for distillation   

Should fall and break into pieces

Just before distillation

You are after all a village, not a romantic poet

Lost in the wasteful question:

Do two and two make four?

You quite well know if two and two don’t make four

You have to peel and chisel to make them do.

You are the roar of valour, my village,

Don’t come like a thief.

I shall return, one day, by myself

I have no identity

Without looking at your muddy and slippery pathways,

Without shimmering, along with the earthen lamps,

At the burial mounds raised to your ancestors.

I have to come, to shed my innocence,

At the meeting place

Where life-wearied old men sit together

And talk of sacred and ageless truths.

---

GRASS    

I’m grass

I shall green-wash all your misdeeds

You may bomb the university

Reduce every hostel to a heap of rubble

Level all our jhuggis …

How will you deal with me?

I’m grass and I shall cover everything

Rise from every heap.

You may pulverize Banga

Decimate Sangrur,

Pulverize Ludhiana into a heap of dust  ?

My greenness will do its act

And two or ten years hence

Passengers will ask the bus conductor:

‘Where are we?

Drop us at Barnala,

Where green grass grows thick.’

I’m grass, I’ll do my act:

Green-wash all your misdeeds.

----

A SUPPLICATION FOR INITIATION 

Dharam Guru, I have but one son -

My man and bread-earner is dead.

After your thunderous roar

No men survive far and wide.

Now there are only women,

Or herbivorous bipeds

Who earn bread for them.

You, Dharm Guru, are skilled in all the sixteen arts

The faintest fold on your brow

Can despatch happy homes into destitution.

Everyone, after settling scores with one,

Tries to ram his head into another

But I have only one head, Dharam Guru,

My son’s – and my man and bread-earner is dead.

I shall worship only the gods prescribed by you

I shall sing only the hymns sanctified by you.

I shall despise all other faiths as worthless.

But I have only one voice, Dharam Guru

My son’s – and my man and bread-earner is dead.

All these days I have been a dimwit

Paying no attention to the faith

Professed even by my own family.

I have been committing the heresy

Of regarding the family as my faith.

Foolishly, on hearsay, I have regarded my husband as God

The joys and sorrows of my family

Have been my only heaven and hell.

I was perhaps the bird-shit of Kalyug, Dharam Guru.

But now in the resounding bugle of faith blown by you

The fog of apostasy has lifted from my eyes.

From now on I shall hide my own truth

And parade your truth

As the only possible truth.

After all, just a woman, I am a cipher

Before your daredevil warriors.

At any time of my life,

I have always been less beautiful than your sword

In my most shining moments,

I have been colourless before your refulgence.

I was ever non-existent

It is you, and only you, O Dharam Guru

Dharam Guru, I have only one son

Had I seven

They would have been no match to you

Your dynamite has Godly fragrance

It lights up the night skies

And drives the heretics back on the righteous path

I shall offer holy water to your sacred bullet

I have only one son, Dharam Guru

And my man and bread earner is dead

---

 MA, YOU ARE WEARING OUT 

Ma, you stop worrying

I have bid goodbye to my friends.

Do you know what they said:

Now your going back is impossible.

They are lying, ma.

Now don’t let me go back there.

And we won’t let Babloo also go.

They are the people

Who took away your elder one from you.

Ma, you stop worrying,

I shall catch hold of that rascal Ashim Chatterjee

By his moustache and throw him at your feet

And you ask him to hand over your elder son’s corpse.

They spellbind young boys

Using father’s bones as a magic wand

Why do you cry, ma?

I’ll make even my elder sister

Retrace her steps

And then we all, brothers and sister,

Shall sit together and laugh and laugh

As in our childhood days

When we, blindfolding you,

Would hide ourselves under the cot

And you groped for us spreading your arms

Or, exactly like that

When I used to run away

After pinching your back

And you would hurl the rolling pin after me

And I used wave the broken pin

To make fun of you.

I know father’s memory still rankles in your heart.

He was very gentle – don’t you remember -

How once, having fallen off the tree

While axing a branch, and broken his arm

He had kept laughing

Lest you should faint with shock.

And how very small was sister

Just like a doll

Who, now living in the city, has become so clever.

But ma you stop worrying

We shall daub her hands with the bridal paste

And then I and Babloo

Shall lie in your lap and

Listen to the fairy tales

And talk about that Tamluk

Which was once Tamralipti

Ma, we shall go far away

Where there are only birds

And the sky is not small like a tent’s roof

Where trees are like human beings

And not human beings like trees.

Ma, you stop worrying

We shall go back to the days

When the way to the city

Led through a huge forest.

---

http://paash.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/paash-a-poet-of-impossible-dreams-2/

  http://paash.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/paash-talwandi-salem-23rd-march-2010-3/

P S KANWAR : A SEASON OF NIGHTS

     

     Punjabi Poetry

Puran Singh Kanwar (1942-96): A Non-ideological Radical

That is how some one has described Dr Kanwar as a poet: a non-ideological radical. Dr Kanwar's first and only collection of poetry, "Rattan di Rut" was published in 1984 and hailed as poetry of "a unique individuality and unique paradigm". My translation of his poems from Punjabi titled "A Season of Nights" was published in 2006. Here are a few of his poems in translation and an extract from my introduction to the collection, to give you an idea of the uniqueness of Dr. Kanwar's poetry.

LINES ON MY PALM

Bhrigu is dumbstruck -

Thrusting my eyes

Into his

I laugh through them.

He starts -

The mad man might

Suddenly charge

And strangle him

In broad daylight

He is the master of his art

And has peered

At the innumerable lines

On my palm...

One of them

Spells suicide

And hundreds

That speak murder.

When I was born,

People tell,

My mother

Had laughed and laughed

That laughter

Was her death-knell.

In my childhood

During his sleep

I had slit open with a knife

My father's jugular vein.

He has been asleep since then...

I have let him sleep.

At our mansion

Nuptials are performed

Everyday

The family barber dresses me

In the royal bridegroom robes

The palki-bearers

Seat me in the palki

And move in a trance

As if snake-sniffed.

Everyday I sleep

With the living corpse

Of a new queen.

At dawn the priest

Calls...

O prince

Wake up

You have to be ready again

For the nuptials...

---

THE DAZZLE OF AN OYSTER- SHELL

Eyes...

From these eyes many a time he had taken off his glasses

And in their deep oceans

He had found an oyster-shell.

From then on nothing else had stirred his heart

He steered clear of his friends

At home he sat idle doing nothing

For hours on he would pluck out

And send floating into the air

Plumed seeds from the dry milkweed pods

Even a hundred entreaties

Would not shake him.

In his wailing one could hear the howling of jackals

In his yelling one could hear the roar of lions.

In his childhood,

His mother tells,

He used to thrust his hands into wasp nests...

That oyster-shell

That he used to flaunt in front of his friends

He has now flung away into the sun!

Why does the brilliance of that shell

Now dazzle his eyes?

In this brilliance

His eyes see flying at once

Now silken plumes

Now yellow wasps...

---

POSSESSED

Lulled to sleep

In the cradle

My ungrown hair

Washed in curds...

I wake up

What's this?

My mother died long ago!

My yards long hair

All white

Wrinkled skin

Bare hairy chest

Virile and masculine -

Signs of manhood...

My younger brother's little daughter

Pulls the hair on my chest

And teases: Uncle, aren't you a bear?

No? She repeats she taunt.

Silly girl! Can't keep her mouth shut.

I shake off my body

Shake off? No! No!

I tear my body

Limb by limb

And fling it away.

Dismembered thus

I'm complete.

Look, Vandana, run!

Look at uncle

He's possessed

His limbs lie scattered

On the floor

Look at his head

Severed from the trunk:

It blesses us

Shanti...shanti...shanti...

---

THE JUNGE OF RELATIONSHIPS

My friend!

The riddle you have propounded today

About the tangle of relationships

Is yet incomplete.

Today someone has bound me to her honour...

I'm innocent, I'm shamed, may I be damned...

Whenever from the distant horizon

I sensed her presence

I started - and I ran

But my way was crossed

Sometimes by a black cat

Sometimes by a black brahmin

Sometimes a stranger sneezed, unwittingly,

And every time, instantly, I retraced my steps

Holding my head in shame

I'm innocent, may I be damned...

We drift and grope around, unrelated,

In this jungle of relationships

Deadly snakes haunt our ways

And flying snakes...

If I sleep I'm stung by scorpions

While awake I'm tormented by my pledge

My chest huffs and puffs like the bellows

My thoughts flicker like the glowworm's light

My hopes are unfounded, my desires impossible

My neighbours resentful

Scheming to drive me from the neighbouthood...

But why has this flight of cranes landed

In my courtyard today?

A flight of cranes!

Flying snakes!! Scorpions!!!

While awake I'm tormented

By the same thoughts - my word of honour...

---

A SEASON OF NIGHTS

I have the voice

Of words

To create meaning

But the words I utter are

Dumb

Empty

Lifeless

Signatures of my being

I have nothing

Only an attempt

That goes on

And on...

When shall the voice of words

Create silence?

My friend

Has just now shown me a mirror.

Have I laughed at my own reflection?

My black image

Has borrowed its blackness

From the darkness

Of a jungle of leafless trees

And you are looking

For a ray of light!

After endless supplications

Shunning the company of friends

Depriving myself of my father's wealth

Turning my back on my mother's love

Scoffing at the rays of the sun

Extinguishing all the lamps

For my own joy

I have nurtured

Within the jungle of my heart

A season of nights.

I have the voice of words

My words are dumb

Signatures of my being

I have nothing...

---

Here is an extract from the introduction to my translations of Dr Kanwar's poetry:

"... Dr Kanwar’s poetry seems to fit into the Surrealist framework quite well. The title of his collection - A Season of Nights – is extremely suggestive. It conjures up a mysterious phantasmagoria of nightly images. Night, of course, is associated with sleep and dreaming, when there is a ‘lowering of resistance’ created by the superego against the repressed and secret world of the unconscious, and when desire has free play – desire in all its manifestations, desire to love, to murder, to destroy, to inflict pain or enjoy its infliction, delusions of grandeur and grandiose wishes and infinite longings that rise from the depths of the primal experience and float on the surface to find expression in dreams. There’s a breakdown of barriers erected by the waking state leading to a free flow of what has been repressed and hidden.

Almost every poem of Dr Kanwar’s is a first person narrative-cum-theatrical presentation of a non-ordinary state of mind - a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy, a trance, a delusion, a hallucination - each poem diving into the bottomless pit of the unconscious and bringing out the forbidden and subversive elements that surprise, shock and overwhelm the reader and shake the ground beneath his feet earthquake-like. Each poem illustrates a way of seeing the world that is radically different from the sanitized framework through which the world is perceived in terms of categories of thought devised by the intellect, the world given shape by the whole range of philosophies and ideologies invented by man. It comes close to a rejection of the rationally apprehended world of Sancho Panza by the fevered imagination of Don Quixote – what are windmills to Sancho Panza are fearful monsters to the Don, to be subdued and conquered but with little success.

Dr Kanwar’s poetry is thus a subversion of the commonsensical and neatly categorized world of everyday reality in favour of the primal world of the collective unconscious, the mountain heap of human experience – uninhibited, undefined, chaotic, and ultimately inexplicable to the human intellect.

It is this aspect of Dr Kanwar’s poetry that makes it unique and sets it apart from all literary movements in Punjabi poetry. His poetry is not a turning away from one movement and trend in favour of another. It is rather a rejection of all movements in poetry, and anti-poetry and anti-tradition in that sense. There is no conscious attempt to cultivate style or form; no attempt to use or reject rhyme or rhythm or to deliberately construct; no attempt to clothe or dress the poem in a literary mould. All this, in spite of the fact that Dr Kanwar was so well read in the modern European literary criticism, more particularly the American New Criticism (his doctorate was on its influence on Punjabi literary criticism) which saw poetry as pure form and hardly as content. Although Dr Kanwar was an admirer of the American New Criticism and its theoretical formulations, his poetry is almost their complete negation. Dr Kanwar’s poetry has no form in that sense; it is all content and closer to Blake’s prophetic poems, amorphous rather than crystallographic – though often exuding the brilliance of a crystalline object. Or, rather its form is determined by the dialectical relationship between the conscious and the unconscious states, between intellect and desire, which results in a dynamic interplay between irreconcilable forces, often generating a tension to the breaking point..."

---

Dr. Puran Singh Kanwar: A Biographical Note

Dr. Puran Singh Kanwar was born in 1942 in a land-owning Rajput family in Jodhanagari, a small village in Amritsar district. He began his education in the primary school in Dehriwallah, a village about 2 km from Jodhanagari. He passed his high school from Guru Tegh Bahadur High School in a small town, Tarisikha, about 4 km from his village. It was during his stay in this school that he imbibed great reverence for the Sikh Gurus and a view of Sikhism as a liberating force. It is said that, later, whenever he visited his village he used to lecture on the true meaning of Sikhism in the village Gurudwara.

 He came to live in a city for the first time when he joined DAV College Amritsar in 1960 to do his intermediate. In 1962 he came to Delhi and did his graduation from Dayal Singh College in 1964. In Delhi University he came under the influence of Dr. R.K.Das Gupta of the Department of Modern Indian Languages, who dissuaded him from going for English literature, and encouraged him to work in his mother tongue, Punjabi. Dr. Kanwar did his MA in Punjabi from Delhi University in 1966. He joined as lecturer in Punjabi in DAV College Chandigarh in 1967. It was perhaps during this period that he flirted with radical ideologies and turned an agnostic, but he retained, throughout is life, his deep reverence for the Sikh Gurus, and mystics and Sufis. He was hostile to all varieties of bigotry and communalism. He was dismissed from service in 1970 for his radical views, being accused of showing irreverence to the pictures of Swami Dayanand, and defying the strict DAV code of conduct. He taught for a brief period in Arya College Ludhiana too.

He returned to Delhi in 1973, where he came in contact with Dr Harbhjan Singh, poet, critic and a professor in the Department of MIL Delhi University and who was emerging as a leading critic in Punjabi by introducing the newest trends from European literary criticism into Punjabi. Dr Kanwar developed a special interest in Russian Formalism, the Prague School and the American New Criticism. Because of his mercurial temperament and outspoken nature, his fierce egotism, defiant attitude and subversive views he failed to develop a positive relationship with anyone who could help him to get a teaching job in Delhi University or set him on a smooth career in research. So, for nearly ten years he remained out of job, unanchored, defiant, lonely, living on translation and journalistic work and support from his family.

During this period of self-exile, as if, he did maintain a love-hate relationship with the Punjabi literary circles. He was also an occasional visitor at the residence of Amrita Pritam, the queen-bee of Punjabi poetry those days. Amrita Pritam published at least two of his poems in her magazine ‘Nagmani’, in1976 and1977. Publication in ‘Nagmani’ was then considered a stamp of authenticity in poetry. He translated, for the National Book Trust, Aurobindo’s biography into Punjabi, and also translated one of Amrita Pritam’s novel, ‘Sippi te Samundar’, into English, which was serialized in an Assamese daily newspaper from Gauwhati. Sometime between 1965 and 1975 he was traumatized by a love affair with a girl of his own community. Because she belonged to a sub-caste into which he could not marry, the girl’s parents absolutely ruled it out. This set him on a course of irreconcilable hostility towards his father and family and the society at large.

 It was only in 1982 that he got a permanent job in Deshbandhu Evening College in Delhi as a lecturer in Punjabi. Dr Kanwar published his first and only collection of poetry ‘Rattan di Rut’ in 1984 and it was dedicated to Amrita Pritam, and Dr Kanwar’s friend Raj Gill, a journalist. He obtained his doctorate in 1986 for his work ‘New Criticism and its Influence on Punjabi Literary Criticism’. Dr Kanwar married in 1985. A permanent job and marriage stabilized his life to a great extent but perhaps also tamed the restlessness of spirit that had led him often to tilt Quixote-like at the windmills of commonsense and conventionality. May be it also destroyed his urge to write poetry. In 1995 he was found suffering from lung cancer, and he died in July 1996. He is survived by his wife, Mrs. Usha Kanwar.  

AJANTA CAVE PAINTINGS

THOUGHTS ON VISITING AJANTA CAVES

What's this princess doing here

In this solitary gorge

Among the monks

Meditating on life's sorrows?

Even after fifteen centuries

One can inhale the fragrance

From her freshly bathed body

The jewels that adorn her

Are still avant-garde

The chipped-off paint still brings out

The dark lustrous smoothness

Of her youthful form, as she stands

Between her maids, a mirror in hand

Enamoured of her own beauty

Glowing like a forest fire at night

What's she doing here

Among these monks

Who have vowed to conquer desire?

Is she here to remind them

Of the cycle of countless births

They must traverse

To cool the fires that sear their loins?

Or, perchance, she's here to melt

The sculptured serenity of the Buddha himself

And lead him back to the world

To a celebration of desire?

***

-T C Ghai

SAVE THE TIGER

Tiger image: Courtesy The Hindu

The Tyger, as William Blake (1757-1827) the poet saw in its pristine grandeur

THE TYGER

TYGER, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare He aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat

What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears

And water'd heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

TYGER, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

-William Blake

And the Tiger Now!

THE TIGER

TIGER, tiger burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What mortal hand or eye

Would maim thy fearful symmetry?

What wicked mind with evil eyes

Does thy death devise?

On what pretext dare he conspire?
To what end dare he quench thy fire?

And what folly and what crooked art

Is ripping the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart ceases to beat

What dark day and what dread feat?

What the gun? What the shot?
In what furnace were they wrought?

What the trigger? What the aim

Dare thy deadly terrors claim?

When the stars throw down their spears

And water heaven with their tears,

Would he smile his work to see?
Would he who undid the cheetah undo thee?

TIGER, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What mortal hand or eye

Dare maim thy fearful symmetry?

-T C Ghai

Lal Singh Dil

                                 Dil at his tea shop, on the right



A Million Dollar Poem by LAL SINGH DIL (1943-2007)

Here below is a translation of a great poem by Lal Singh Dil, a Punjabi revolutionary poet.

Lal Singh Dil (1943-2007) was one of the foremost revolutionary poets thrown up by the Naxalite Movement in Punjab. Politically, the Naxalite resurrection in Punjab was a short-lived eruption, but in the Punjabi literary world it created shock waves that suddenly changed the subject matter, the idiom, the tone and tenor of Punjabi poetry by questioning the fundamental assumptions of Punjabi and Indian socio-economic and cultural order based on the hierarchies of class and caste, apart from many other things.

Lal Singh Dil represents one of the very distinctive voices of this new Punjabi poetry. The trajectory of his life is exceptionally singular. Through out his life he remained at the margins of everything that makes life liveable, except perhaps for the short period when the Naxalite movement in Punjab was at its peak in the early 1970’s when he was one of the leading poetic voices of the Movement. Belonging to the tanner community (Ramdasia Chamars), he grew up suffering isolation, indignities and insults heaped upon the ‘low castes’. The Naxalite Movement with its promise of socio-economic equality gave him a hope of breaking out of this ancient Indian curse of social exclusion; but with the decline of the Movement in Punjab the ages old social divisions infected the Naxalites too and Lal Singh was pushed to the margins again and that is how he lived the rest of his life, an uncompromising rebel, a suspect in the police records, accepted as a poet but allowed nothing much to make a decent living, in self-exile in Uttar Pradseh to hide from the police persecution, converting to Islam but without gaining much out of it, working as a wage labourer and later as a chowkidar in a mango orchard, and ending up as a tea vendor at a small town bus stand , Samrala, close to his home, in Punjab, where he died after an illness.

What kind of poetry would you expect from such a poet? Other poets, Pash foremost among them, sang of a revolution round the corner, used blood and thunder imagery to denounce, frighten and challenge the ‘class enemies’, predicting the imminent fall of the comprador bourgeois state. Lal Singh Dil shared this optimism but in most of his poetry he remained a poet of the understatement. In Pash and the others the hope for revolution rises like a gigantic wave breaking the surface of the sea with a force that would sink the Titanic of the bourgeois state. In Lal Singh Dil the desire for revolution flows as a huge Tsunami surging deep down below the calm surface of the sea. But his poetry is revolutionary in another very fundamental sense. His poetry focuses on the daily lives of men and women and children who are absolutely at the lowest rungs of the Indian society, the social and economic outcastes - the landless labourers and field workers, the daily wagers, the sweepers and the dishwashers, the construction workers, in short the ‘scum’ of the earth in the Indian civilizational hierarchy, the people to be exploited and humiliated, to be used and abused and kept out of bound from everything decent and worthwhile. This rather than the desire for a revolution makes his poetry truly revolutionary and different from his fellow revolutionaries.

The poem ‘Kudeli Pind Dian Wasana’ (The Women of Kudeli Village), from his collection ‘Bahut Saare Suraj’ (So Many Suns), 1982, is an indication of a highly self-conscious social outcaste’s complete alienation from the Indian civilizational superstructure. The women of Kudeli consciously align themselves with what is regarded as dark, evil, villainous and dangerous in the mainstream worldview - Ravana, the Rakshasas, the thieves and the most venomous snakes. The poem is a telling example of how in Lal Singh Dil’s poetry an utterly uncompromising dissent operates as a silent and subterranean but powerful undercurrent. I think this very short poem is worth a million dollars.

The Women of Kudeli Village

The women of Kudeli, wearing black,

Pass through the gardens green

To work in the fields

They know that Ravana’s countrymen wore black

Even then they wear black

They know the Rakshasas wore black

Even then they wear black

They know the thieves wear black

Even then they wear black

When in the rainy season

The gardens turn green

Black shines through them

They know Kudeli is the name of a she-serpent

The most poisonous she-serpent

Even then they have named their village Kudeli

And they wear black

They know…

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