Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Remembering Bhagat Singh and Pash: March 23

 

 

Remembering Bhagat Singh and Pash: March 23

March 23 is a memorable day, certainly in Punjab but also elsewhere in India. On this day in 1931, Bhagat Singh, along with his revolutionary companions, Rajguru and Sukhdev, was executed by the British Indian government. Pash (Avatar Singh Sandhu), a revolutionary poet, was shot dead by militants, along with his friend Hans Raj, also on March 23 in 1988. For Punjabis Bhagat Singh remains, after the Sikh Gurus, the most admired figure. And Pash, himself a great admirer of Bhagat Singh, has become an iconic figure in modern Punjabi poetry and literature.

   I believe it is not inappropriate to use this memorable occasion to showcase on this blog a few poems of a Punjabi Dalit poet, Madan Veera. who carries forward the revolutionary message of Bhagat Singh of social equality and rejection of religious bigotry, and the revolutionary poetic tradition established by poets like Pash, and Lal Singh Dil.

   Madan Veera is one 21st century face of that message and literary movement. His poetic world is the one in which the Dalits have moved out of the ostracized world, similar to an animal enclosure, through education and social awareness. A number of them have, after moving out, joined the mainstream, leaving the rest behind. Veera writes primarily about those left out. He can also relate himself to non-Punjabi Dalit figures like Phule, Periyar, Dalit Panthers. He does not restrict himself to the Dalit issues limited to Punjab but relates to the Dalits and the marginalized all over India, including women. He is by and large in agreement with the agenda of the progressive writers. He is angry, assertive, aggressive, and rebellious, loud and bold. The titles of three of his four collections of poetry show it clearly: Bhakhiya 2001 (Smouldering); Nabaran di Ibarat 2009 (Writings of the Rebellious), Khara Paani 2018 (Brackish Waters).

   His poetry is almost one of total alienation from the great ancient Indian civilization. He distances himself from its foundational basis the Vedas, Upanishads, epics, puranas, its gods, goddesses and heroes, the Varna Dharama, the Law of Karma, Manu Smriti and all else. He rejects its claims of a glorious past. He even rejects its present dispensation, its freedom movement, its leaders including Gandhi and Nehru, its constitution and democratic pretensions based on the parliamentary system, elections, its economic planning, its politics, its arts and literature. He recognizes the influence of Buddha and Nanak only reluctantly because for him their followers have refused to live by their teachings. The reason stated by him is very simple. The total absence of Dalits and tribals from the mainstream civilization, and their presence there only as victims . The promises made in the constitution and the benefits accorded to the lower caste communities and tribes are nothing more than charity based on compassion reserved for the lowly and the poor, not for an equal.

   Thus, it is a turning away from the Indian state, the Indian civilization since its inception up to the present time. Veera talks of a different world hidden by the media not much visible in the progressive secular literature. He claims that he derives his world view from the lived experience of the wretched, including his own, both in the village and the Mahanagar, rather than from any books or literary sources because their existence is recorded nowhere. He even denies any direct influence on him of Marx and Ambedkar.

   He brings the Dalit to the centre of his poetical act, the pain of being a Dalit as the central fact. But he goes beyond Dalits to include all the poor and marginalized, including women. He rejects the upper caste world altogether, its success, its affluence, upward mobility, its literary aesthetics, eroticism and romance. He keeps in mind the larger world of the marginalized India and presents a comprehensive image of the rural Punjab.

  In his poetry ‘the pain is as deep as the hurt’: Jitni gehri chot utni gehri dard.

How you respond to his poetry is up to you, but listen to him in the words of Pash, in one of his poems.  

 

  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

---

[A poem by Pash from his collection: Ud-dian Bbajan Magar (1974)

(After the Flying Hawks), translated by me in Pash, A Poet of Impossible Dreams, Published in 2010.}

 

 

A few poems by Madan Veera translated by me from Punjabi. Please bear with me for the poems may need further honing, even changes.

 

 

 1.     Nameless (from Bhakhiya p11)

 

The application form in my hands

is shaking like a dry leaf

and my heart

is searching for my own self

in my own courtyard

 

The official wants to know:

The soil I have sprouted from?

My caste?

My colour?

My religion?

 

Another column says:

Are you Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isaai

Boddhi or Jaini bhai?

 

I’m a resident

of this raggle-taggle world

divided in colours and races

splintered into castes and religions

yet I’m not its citizen

 

I have eyes, features

yet I am faceless

Written on a soiled form

with an address

dirty and smudged

I have a name yet I am nameless

---  

 

2.     Rebellious (from Nabaran di Ibarat p 46)

 

O brilliant men of learning

drenched in knowledge

great scholars!

Let me remain ignorant, unlettered

Let me be an illiterate pumice stone or just stone

I’m happy to be artless

bereft of colours and swings

 

 Keep it to yourself

your Kav Shastra

principles of Rasa, rhyming tricks

your brand of arts

I don’t need your sea of aesthetics

the earth divided into pigeonholes

the sky the size of an umbrella

 

So don’t propose to me

new themes for poetry

don’t suggest

untouched and virgin metaphors

I don’t need

the uniqueness propounded by you

your frigid and frightened originality

 

You high and mighty!

The words that don’t smell

of my sweat

are meaningless for me

The speech that does not

exude the heat of my blood and its warmth

is for me empty

lowly and worthless

 

I don’t set beauty in words

I fight for beauty

Words are not just words for me

They are jehadis

fighting in the battlefield of life

Words are a weapon for me

a shield

arrows

a sword

questions

Poetry for me is

not just poetry

but a mission

----

3.     Gritty Irritant  (from Nabran di Ibarat p79)

 

If chairs are deaf

so what

If the officer is blind

so what

You have a tongue

words

a voice

wings and flight

 

 

You are neither a tutored

gangaram

nor a willing

slave

You are a smouldering fire

filled with lava

 

Before you are swallowed

by your house’s four walls

or stricken by the bollworm

of demands and duties

before the soil of your selfhood

 is eaten away by salinity

before it melts away bit by bit

come and speak out

become a roar

resound like a conch into the deaf ears

become a gritty irritant in the squinting eyes

---  

4.      Fully Fledged Man’s Tale (from Nabaran di Ibarat p 48)

 

When there was talk of hunger

many bellies were empty

When there was talk of nakedness

many a stark naked came forward

When there was talk of livelihood

there was a miles-and-miles long line of the unemployed

When there was talk of a shelter

footpaths became crowded

 

The answers to all my questions

were right in front of me

When the arrows of questions

pierced through my body

in a burst of passion I said:

I’m one of you

your very own;

enroll me

in your ranks

 

They said:

First tell us

are you the head or torso

legs or feet…

I kept on saying

I’m a man

whole and complete like you

not a head

or a torso

nor legs nor feet

 

I am shouting

from the depths

of a bottomless well

waiting for a response

but the peddlers of pure sanskriti

followers of Manu

heirs of Baba Nanak

remain deaf to my appeals

and the words of Kabir –

Allah above all ‒

are blown to smithereens

      ---

   

 5.     Brackish Waters (from Khaara Paani p 84)

 

I have returned

from my ancestral village

just as the shadow

returns with the body

A hundred doubts resurface

together with

an army of worries

Unfulfillable demands call forth

Incurable maladies

lacerate the soul

A few coins to some one

False promises to another

some cold some brackish

I am playing strange games

having returned from the village


How should I tell the village ‒

how should I

that the city for me

is like a beggar’s begging bowl

or the stale weary and forced laughter

of a sleep-starved girl in a call centre ‒

A bit of sugar candy in brackish waters?

                             ---

6.     Faceless ( from Khaara Paani p72)

 

It’s true

a man does not die

under the weight of joblessness

He does drown

in the waves swelling

from home to the employment office

like the catastrophic tsunami

but does not dissolve

 

The sun and the moon and the stars

inside him go down the horizon

even before they rise

Joblessness sucks bit by bit

every drop of longing

in the wretched stomach

Like the little girl walking on the rope

life’s string begins to wobble

 

The look on the face

fades and hollows out

The shine in the glassy eyes

dims and disappears

Fine feelings drown somewhere

when the partridge-winged clouds of hope

neither become a shade

nor a drop of rain nor a shower

Life then becomes

a faceless image.

--- 

 7.     The Poet and Poetry    (from Khara Paani p 86)

 

Today the poet looks

helpless

like a grandmother

tired broken exhausted

begging, not for life, but death

deep in depression.

He is stringing together a garland

of sterile stinking words

There is no warmth in them

There is no energy in their meanings

Today the pen is not a sword

shining with a sharp edge

yet he is writing a poem.

 

Just as a mother

battered by poverty

is piecing together a shirt

for her elder son

out of his father’s worn-out shirt

that would have come to him

as a gift

but one that the younger one

has rejected and thrown away

refusing to wear it

 

The poem and the shirt

are so alike

how alike

may be unravelled by an expert…

 

Now or later

a reader would perhaps cast away

this shirt-like poem

pieced together with tired worn-out words

after reading or without reading it

If he finds

no warmth no heat in it

he would find here

skilful use of words

in which the poet is absent

  ----  

8.       

Identity  (from: Madan Veera di Kavita da Kav Shastra p130)

You are searching for my past

in books

on stone inscriptions

in ruins

so that you can redefine

my existence

my identity

my ancestry…

You are scanning books

that I have neither written

nor read

you are looking at stone inscriptions

that contain neither my defeat

nor my victory

you want to know about me from the ruins

but I am a builder

how would the ruins know me?

 

Janab

Remove your eye glasses

Come out of libraries

forget the inscriptions

forget the ruins

Come, I will show you

the splendour of my blood

the fragrance of my sweat

the magic of my hands:

Look at the smooth roads

dams on silver-coloured canals

singing crops

brightly lit nights

milk white cities

neat and clean homes ‒

this has been my journey

from the Middle Ages

till today

 

But I

or my identity…

 

On the ration card or voters’ list

my name is found there, you can see,

as someone special something singular

I am an S C or an S T

for religion on the fifth step lower down

unworthy of the society or a word of abuse

an animal or a bumpkin or a thief

a terrorist, a Naxalite, or some other

 

But I…

What about me?

before I was trapped in the crisis of identity

I have been undone by the struggle for life

and in your words

I have walked out or been cast out

from the so-called ‘mainstream’.

---

 

9.     Rising India (from Nabran di Ibarat p 58)

 

India is rising

in newspapers

in sarkari advertisements

in the few smooth shining faces

While crores of people in the country

are sinking

India is rising

 

The minions of Rajdhani

are digging up mountains

sprucing up places

by hiding garbage and filth

A cocktail of slogans

is being cooked up

a crowd of promises has descended

like a swarm of locusts

How can promises

change the fortunes of the poor

There is darkness

in the houses of the poor

the dawn is miles away

yet India is rising

 

The army of dyed jackals is on the march

having had fun for five years

stealing tears from crocodiles

hiding their crookedness

under titbits

yet India is rising

 

Old players who have to play

a long innings

are on the move

with folded hands

The game of pulls and pushes is on

but India is rising

 

The knives’ edges would shine

The bloody daggers would flash

Forces are being readied

for the decisive battle

for the chairs

to rob people

to defeat them

yet India is rising

 --- 

10.  MY India-Your India (from Nabran di Ibarat p 91)

 

That India was yours not mine

only yours

the one that was the golden sparrow

My India

my India even then was

a bog of sufferings

a land of hunger

a kicking footpath

writhing-yearning for relief

a mud street of a village

 filthy lane a broken broom

 

That India is not mine but yours

only yours

that has inherited glory

honour and pride

where every page is brightly lit

each word is filled with light


My India

my  India is the tip of a thorn

a bed of spikes

sullied dignity and a baffled mind

a branded forehead

a document printed in blood

 

That India is only yours not mine

only yours

the one that is a haven for Rishis

playground for fairies

the court of Indra

the conclave for thirty-three crore gods

 drenched in fragrance

resplendent in colours

 

My India

my India is the tale

of broken homes

and woodworm eaten doors

a building that crashed

before it was raised

 

That India was yours not mine

only yours

on whose chest

the firangis had ridden

the ruler of the times was blind

was deaf

and the wound on the chest was deep

 

I have been pulled and pushed

from generation to generation

by those inside and those from outside

have been robbed at every step

and used and abused…

 

That India was not mine was yours

only yours

that became free in’47

it was uprooted

but it was rehabilitated

 

My India still bears chains

on its feet

bears lines of tears on its face

is dressed in rags

like beggars

Its Ranjhas have been exiled

from Takhat Hazara to the mound of Balnath

Its Heers

have been forced out

from their homes in Jhang and among the Khedas

 

The darling star in the eyes of the world

the lighthouse to enlighten the world ‒

that India is only yours

My India

My India is still

a dark and terrifying night

For the high castes it is low caste

Helpless at every step

desperate at every turn

an unanswered question longer than life

----