A POEM ON PASH, THE PUNJABI REVOLUTIONARY POET

                                     from the back cover: Pash a Poet of Impossible Dreams

Read the following poem on Pash, the Punjabi revolutionary poet, which I wrote while I was in Mumbai residing for a short while in a flat close to Worli Seaface,  and from where I had an almost 180 degree view of the Arabian Sea  and could watch, fascinated, the continuous rush of waves towards the seashore. The original English version is followed by my own Punjabi translation written in my bad Punjabi handwriting. Hope the poem will interest readers and admirers of Pash. 

My poem is followed by my translation of a beautiful poem by Pash: Face to Face with the Present.(Vartman De Rhu-b-Rhu)

READING PASH AT THE SEASIDE

The waves keep coming, keep coming

Towards the shore, relentlessly,

Like moths towards light.

The sea changes its colours

With the changes in the sunlight that falls

Or stops falling

But the waves keep coming, keep coming…

Reading Pash,

That country lad turned revolutionary poet,

In revolt against the idea of civilization,

I also see the human habitations along the seaside:

The ever- rising high rise towers of the rich,

The earth-embedded lowly hutments of the poor

Both irreconcilably mismatched

The waves are indifferent

To these hierarchies in the human world.

They don’t tell me why Pash’s revolt against them

Was as ineffectual as their own breaking against the rocks.

They keep coming, keep coming…

They don’t tell me anything.

----

FACE TO FACE WITH THE PRESENT

These days I am scared of newspapers

They must have published somewhere the news

That nothing happened today.

You may not know, or you may

How terrifying it is for nothing to happen

For the eyes to become breathless

And for things to stay still, like a frigid woman.

  

These days, even the conversation at the village gatherings

Looks as if a tree, longing to rock and swing,

Were caught in the coils of a python gone to sleep.

I wonder how this world,

Seeming forlorn like empty chairs, views us?

Centuries have gone past, and even today

Bread, toil and crematoriums might still think

We live only for them.

I’m at a loss – how should I convince

These shy mornings

These nights and beautiful twilights

We haven’t come here to be saluted by them!

Where is that someone, like us,

Whom we can take into our embrace

With open arms? 

These days the events, when they happen,

Are like the old man gone breathless

Climbing the stairs to a brothel.

Why something like the first meeting of lovers

Does not happen here?

How long shall this country

Founded by Mahatmas

Let itself be chased by a one-horned grave!  

After all, when shall we, exiled from the din of living,

Return to our homes that are alive

With things that happen

And when shall we sit around the fire

And listen to her overweening tales?

One day surely we shall imprint our kisses

On the cheeks of a season

And the whole earth shall turn

Into a wondrous newspaper

That will publish news after news

Of things happening.

---

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/

IS PREMCHAND STILL RELEVANT?

Here below is a write-up on Premchand which  I wrote for a magazine in 1980 on the Birth Centenary of Premchand, the Hindi  novelist, short story writer, and much more.

I am posting it on my blog to see how  far my write-up has dated, but, more than that, to find from viewers how far they think Premchand is still relevant and how since his times the issues that he took up in his writings have been transformed, over-ridden or become more or less relevant in Indian literature. In 1980, when I wrote the article, I was  firmly of the view that PremcChand was forcefully relevant . Since 1980  the political and socio-economic environment in the country has undergone a sea change as a result liberalization and globalization and the emergence of  new political forces and gradual empowerment of many communities of whose spokesperson Premchand was. To a certain extent these communities have become their own spokespersons. Have the new voices drowned or added greater intensity to the issues raised in Premchand's writings Has Premchand become dated or do his writings still move and entertain us, and trouble our conscience?

Here is the write-up.

PREMCHAND’S RELEVANCE TODAY

Writing on the birth or death anniversary of a writer one can easily slip into sentimentality or a meaningless verbal eulogy. Fortunately, in Premchand’s case this danger can be easily avoided, there being so much that is still forcefully meaningful in all that he did and wrote.

As a man he was one of the most remarkable Indians of his time. All those who knew him talk of his simple, self-effacing, cheerful, unassuming nature, of his uncompromising honesty, freedom from malice, his sense of humour, his open ringing laughter. Shunning publicity he is a man who easily merges into the crowd – both as a man and a writer he remained a man of the people, identifying himself completely with the unfulfilled aspirations of the Indian masses. He was not one of the greatest Indians, yet he was one of the so many lovable, humane yet rebellious ones – a non-believing saint, as Jainendra has affectionately called him. It is not surprising that Dr Ram Vilas Sharma should have likened him to Kabir.

As a writer, his contribution to Hindi literature is so substantial that it is impossible to imagine Hindi prose fiction of the first forty years of the 20th century without Premchand. By switching over from Urdu to Hindi he hastened the process of modernization of Hindi literature, inducting into it the realism and social concern of his teacher, Sarshar. He weaned away the Hindi reading public from the crude sensationalism and infantile escapism of Chandrakanta and Bhootnath and brought it face to face the contemporary social reality. Through a dozen or so novels and a few hundred short stories and scores of essays spread over two decades he made Hindi literature a faithful mirror of the renascent consciousness and the awakened aspirations of the Indian people. And he was the first writer to have brought to the centre of Hindi literature the lowliest Indian and to have passionately pleaded that his life was as important as anyone else’s, and that the central issue before the Indian civilization was to rescue him from the abyss of poverty and inhuman degradation, not out of mercy, not out of pity, but because social justice demanded it.

All this is enough to make Premchand an immortal figure in Indian literature. But there is a tendency to underplay this achievement and to dismiss Premchand as a second rate writer, a propagandist and a social reformer whose work has dated and become stale. That he was a propagandist and a social reformer, that he thought literature as utilitarian and wanted to use it as an instrument of social change and education Premchand openly proclaimed. In his writings he made it repeatedly clear that for him the attainment of political independence, to raise his voice against social injustice, to champion the cause of the poor and the repressed, the liberation of Hindi literature from eroticism and the mood and tone of abject devotion and self-surrender, to give an altogether new content and to enlarge the concept of the beautiful in literature were the most important aims.

Whether or not we approve, we must remember that Premchand regarded literature not as a profession but a selfless devotion, and the writer as a man who owed his responsibility to the society; and for him the greatness of a literature lay in the greatness of its message, and he had no regard for pure aestheticism. This view of literature was particularly relevant to the times in which he lived. In a letter to one Mr. Sabharwal in Japan he wrote:
     
 You may not have liked the didactic element in my (those) stories; but so long India is under the foreign rule she cannot touch the peaks of great art. It is here that the difference between the literature of a free and a subject country lies: social and political realities force us to be didactic…

The statement unambiguously reveals where Premchand’s mind and heart lay. He believed that a sensitive writer, in the revolutionary phase such as India was passing through then, became of necessity, a handmaid of the revolutionary urge. As such the serenity and calm detachment that is the gift of stable periods of history and give rise to the greatest works of art is denied to the writer.

This, of course, cannot justify Premchand’s recourse to idealistic solutions to the problems he raised in his novels, and one must confess that Premchand, Dickens like, could not completely shed his mechanical approach to plot and character. It is perhaps only in Godan that Hori’s tale moves to its inexorable end through its inner dialectic. Premchand’s idealism generally leaves us cold, but when that idealism survives in the doomed world of Hori’s, it cannot be lightly dismissed. That Premchand should have clung to his idealism even where he found it tottering and even when he had become completely disillusioned with ‘this Mahajani Sabhyata’, is not a sign of weakness, but of strength and vitality drawn from the same sources as Gandhi drew from.

 What then is Premchand’s relevance today? We do not know what will happen in the 21st century, but the issues that he raised in Indian life and literature remain alive today, in fact have become more urgent, and are likely to remain urgent at least till the end of the century. National freedom was won a long time ago, but the common man with whom Premchand had identified himself and made the focus of his writings still remains on the fringe of our social, political and literary concerns. Hindi literature under the impact of the West as well through its own experience has become technically more accomplished, more sophisticated, its language more precise and less verbose and its mode more introvert and introspective. But along with this superior technique it has also borrowed Western man’s despair --- the kind of despair quite unknown to the vast majority of Indians. As contrasted to this Premchand had known the characteristically Indian despair, born not out of the consequences of an unbridled pursuit of power but of the crushing burden of the tyranny of the powerful, not out of a surfeit of material goods but out of an unfulfillment of even the minimum human needs; and he gave expression to it in his writings without succumbing to the negativism of the West. This is his greatest strength.

Premchand’s idealism often distorts reality and makes his plots and characters mechanical, but he never pretended to be a thoroughgoing realist. For him the function of literature was both to reveal life and to ‘make men better’ and the Indian models before him were the authors of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. He was quite aware that both the great Indian epics had not only entertained millions of Indians for centuries but had also molded the lives and thoughts of so many men and women; and he continued to create characters who were truthful, courageous, dedicated to a life of selfless service in the image of our own ideal heroes whom many Indians, big and small, have for ages tried to emulate in real life.

Although he adapted the idealist-moralist function of the Indian epics, he, inspired by the West and the Russian Revolution, rejected  the prevalent fossilized , decadent, unjust and repressive social system and wanted it to be supplanted  by one that was just, humane and egalitarian. As a craftsman Premchand remained quite traditional, and may not mean much to us; as a thinker he was not original, but, I doubt, if since Premchand any Hindi novelist has displayed his passionate concern so comprehensive in its sympathies, and his ruthless rejection of all that was anti-man in the Indian civilization without alienating himself from the hard core of distinctively Indian humanism.
                                                                 ---

PUNJABI POET PASH'S LONG POEM: A CONVERSATION WITH THE COMRADE

“A Conversation with the Comrade”  is Pash’s longest poem, autographical and in many ways a reflection of his dynamic and constantly evolving personality and poetic practice. Written sometime between 1974 and 1978, it is in one sense an attempt at stocktaking of his ideological position as well as an honest assessment of the movement of which he was a part. In that sense it is also a critique of his ideology, of the movement and an attempt not only to state his own position, his own reservations or hesitations, before his critics but also an understanding of the causes of the failure of the movement and flaws in the ideology, its theory and praxis.

But that would, one might say, make it didactic, more a treatise than a poem. This is partly true and Pash himself was not fully satisfied with the poem for he felt that it was a little too cerebral and doctrinaire and therefore less poetic. But in my view the poem is able to lift itself far above a mere doctrinal statement for one can sense a sustained undulating undercurrent of meditative sadness through out the poem which reaches a culmination at the end. 

  

One might say that the poem is  Pash’s dialogue with his comrades, with his ideology and with himself. So it is at once argumentative, ideological and meditative. And importantly it is an attempt by the poet to break out of the straightjacket of his ideology and move towards a more open ended position.

  

The poem is a testimony to the fact that Pash was constantly evolving as a poet, always looking to step into new territories but without compromising his basic revolutionary concerns. Read the poem in my translation extracted from my book of translations : Pash: A Poet of Impossible Dreams. Here is the poem.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE COMRADE 

 

                        I

O cold cauldron, I salute you

And the times seething within you!

O you limping bird, I salute you

And the sky petrified in you!

O yogi of the blazing forests, 

I salute your damp asceticism, and

Your god turned to ashes !

I salute the child who stood in the fair, unbudging,

Demanding the colourful lac toy-horse and the tuneless shehnai  

I salute the downy moustaches, and the manly hand

Habitually caressing them.

Dear comrade, I bow my head to the crematorium

Still active in both our bodies.

Comrade, this bourgeoisie – you know –

Has matured like the old wine

And we have rotted like a hunk of flesh.

Comrade, the middle class is fugitive even today -

Not from the struggle but from the mad house,

Like a criminal, and the ideology is chasing them

Sometimes like the family and sometimes like the police.

Excuse me, comrade, it is unfair to curse

The echoes of one’s own past.

It is a brutal coincidence, friend,

That we had together read

Engels’ ‘Property, Family and the State’. 

That day you spat on your tottering Property,

Said goodbye to your Family

And walked away to take on the State.

And I, fighting the woodworm

Eating into the beams of the roof, as if it were the State,

Kept denying the loss of meaning  

From the word Family.

It is a brutal coincidence, friend,

That day, while reading the great Engels

And about the role of chance,

Speculating on the role of tools

In the development of the brain and language,

You had quietly walked out into the open

Where night and day,  

Poised at the opposite poles of the earth,

Fought like adolescent lovers in their yearning to reconcile.

In a way everything was in order, in principle,

Right it was for you to leave me alone

To read about the role of chance

For you to plunge into the struggle

And for me to show my back

You do not know, comrade,

All this was in order.

                        II

The dry sticks we had planted and watered,

One by one, during our early days,

Had burgeoned in our daydreams into a lush jungle.

Occasionally the sound of your gunshots

Echoing through that jungle has reached my ears.

I have heard that sound

Mingling with mother’s dumb sighs

But that wretched gunfire has never been in tune

With our Guddo’s artless songs.

This Guddo, comrade, is a counter-revolutionary

A class enemy out and out!

She hides her set of five pebbles

Under my learned books

Even after repeated admonitions

She prefers to play a round of the game

Than worry about the fate of the society.

Just imagine, how painful it is

When she calls Lenin the smooth-pated child- abductor

And confuses Mao with Sharma, that shameless police inspector!

After you, I did not go anywhere

But I have been a co-traveller

In the journey towards extinction of the hapless home

You had, in your far-sightedness,

Abandoned on its last gasp.

After you, comrade, harbouring the illusion

That the break-up of a home is an expansion of the family

I have come down like rains

On the shrinking rooftops  

And the expanding courtyards.

I have been running about,

Thirsting for life, like the man

Who knows he will go blind the next moment.

Comrade, it is a bit convenient

To call such a runner a ‘sprinter’ or a ‘deserter’

But mere shuttling cannot be the manifesto for every race.

                       

III

Comrade, the State for you

Is just a manger built with five Roman bricks 

Where you see fattening a four-horned bull.

And look at me, a wild expression of theory,

For me the word ‘court’ has become undefinable now.

Each day of appearance there

Sprouts through my body like a bamboo spike -

Perhaps, I would still have believed myself

To be human, had I not heard

That deafening darkness inside a strange voice,

Like a message from an alien world in outer space:

P- A- S- H versus S -T- A- T- E.

Would you believe it, comrade,

After hearing that voice,

Both Pash and the State cease to exist.

I wish I had never seen that terrifying ultimate disdain

Radiating from that file-shuffling court assistant’s eyes

I wish I had never known that slumber

In which the judges swim before and after lunch.

Those who have seen what remained

Of the village Talwan after the riots in Doaba,

Would know how I, who wanted

To build a Chandigarh there, feel about it.

Dear comrade, your secret night training schools

Are now meaningless for me.

I have watched Machiavelli’s corpse

Burning under the earth’s hotplate

I have seen the State fighting, with the help of people,

Sometimes against people, sometimes for them.

I have seen Aristotles and Stalins

Fighting for centuries

Just to define the kind of animal man is.

Forget the animals, comrade,

Many things about which even the sky knows nothing

Are known only to the human blood.

The shadow of the gun is drowned in the human blood

Just as the tired peasant’s drunken songs

Are lost in the evening twilight

And to those who argue for the sake of arguing

About the earth, the stars, the oceans,

The energy waves and the moon -

Man’s heroic blood, surrounded by this rigmarole,

Is a very patient listener.

Your Stalin, comrade, was a braggart

He did not know that the alternative

To ‘true history' lies in the human blood.

What he called ‘true history’ was really

One of the blades of the revolving fan of chance

That whipped past him.

How would you feel, comrade, if someone

Held by its neck just one moment in any today

And declared he had ‘Time’ in his grasp?

Comrade, which T in the word State is your favourite?

Plato’s  Republic?

Aristotle’s  Monarchy?

Or Commintern’s axe lodged in Trotsky’s skull?

Do you find anything common among these three, comrade?

And, the hot human blood spilled on a cold floor?

And how do you react, comrade,

To the excuse to purge  the race? 

This four-horned bull has always

Fed on the greenery in the human soul

And mankind, in all ages,

Has felt the presence of this ghost.

I have seen ascetics trying to exorcise this ghost:

They get so lost in their austerities,

They forget to conjure up

As they have forgotten their deeds in the previous birth.

I don’t believe, comrade, this ghostly spirit,

So used to live like a ghost, will ever

Undergo rebirth.

I don’t know, comrade,

When your attempts to deliver this ghost

Shall end up as a pastime.

Comrade, what if one day

Our desire to capture state power

Should end up as something like an old couple’s longing

To recapture with their tired bodies

The vigour of their first love-making?

IV

You don’t know, comrade,

The havoc you have played with words

By draining out all their sensitiveness.

Why did you condemn them

To a destiny of State’s power brokers?

Why did you, comrade, let the stockpile

Of class hatred become their dowry?

You have learnt to trim words

To suit your own convenience

Like someone bribing the patwari

To alter the boundary of his land.

You have never looked at them

As if they were chicks

Lusting to come out of the eggs

As if they were the sunlight dissolved

In a rain-soaked silvery afternoon.

I have suffered these words,
Along with their sharp edges -

I have sheltered them in my blood

Against the harshness of seasons.

I’m not Guru Govind 

I have shed tears for long

After stringing them off in my poetry.

When words are scorched in the heat

Of your speeches, the shade of my poetry

Fighting to save them from death,

Loses its delicate poise. ?

By destroying the reed-pens I could have wielded

To breach the siege of monsters,

You provide a feast of fun to the cowardly critics.

Leave  it to the secret service intellectuals,

Why should the defeat of a poet

Become for you, comrade, the matter to brag about?

Comrade, you have learnt to hate the defeated

You really don’t know them -

They who have tasted defeat.

                       

                        V

Does the newspaper sometimes reach you, comrade?

Don’t you believe those beggarly reports.

The woman drowned in the village pond the day before

Was not mother.

It was just a brick that fell from the sky -

Mother had escaped during the very first raid,

Like the mother in Gorky’s novel,        

And fled beyond the reach of the police.

Even now at times she stares at the margins of the novel

And sometimes she begins to wear out like her own blessings.

And the news you heard

About the poet who had joined a party out of expedience!

I was not that poet: It was a ladder against the backyard wall

That evil spirits in the garb of policemen had learnt to scale.

Much before that news was published

When night was descending into words

And the serpents of darkness were coiling round names

I, stealing the residual essence of the word 'party',

Had slipped out amidst the din raised by people.

When my own footsteps were listening to me

As to love songs

I had thoughtfully picked up that dying essence

And deposited it among crows’ eggs.

I had even complained to Sadhu Singh and Zirwee

About such news.

They say the news, stricken with paralysis,

Cannot travel on its feet, and to reach me

It needed the crutches provided by their death.

If we had believed ,

We would have mourned your death many a time.

After reading any news about an encounter

I tell mother

It was not you but another warrior bearing your name.

In the cold innocence of her old age

She does not understand the finer points of grammar.

She can mistake a proper noun for a common noun

And a common noun for a collective noun.

Whenever a gunshot is fired on a name

She sees it as the murder of a community or a belief.

Comrade, mother is still as naïve as ever

We two and the news could not change her.

And whenever you come back

She will first thrash you for late-coming

With anything she can get hold of in the house

And then thrust her dry breast into your mouth.

                       

                         VI

Never mind the home or the news

I’m right before you, comrade

Like a nich that peeps through the debris of a house

Like words that survive on a burnt love letter

Like the body bag come home

Of one who had gone to a foreign land to make his fortune

Like the girdle, worn by a long lost son,

Suddenly discovered in the family chest

Like the feeling of virginity after an abortion

Like the tune of a song one fails to recollect.

This is how I managed to escape

The police dragnet of the wealthy

Using my middle class cunning.

Where is your red pistol, comrade,

Come and train it on my bourgeois detachment

I am a poet!

In my heart all roads lead west

Where all the bragging suns go down,

When they talk too much.

I never know when the sun of class hatred goes down, untimely,

And I feel like crushing the withered smile

On the face of time

And I begin to wish that Newton’s sage-like Diamond
Should come all of a sudden for a moment

And topple in my mind’s open drawer a lighted candle

And burn up all the half- truths lodged there 

Before they crystallize into theory.

Otherwise they may prove dangerous.

I am a poet!

My heart becomes sad without reason.

How does it matter!

The evening dissolving among dumb stones

The rattle-song of bricks 

In the pannier on a donkey’s back

Pale, dust-laden sunshine dangling

On the autumn leaves that still cling to the bows.

Or so what!

If this plump humanity, 

Spinning like the ring of spectators
In the eyes of the downed wrestler flat on his back,

Wets my barren eyes for no reason at all?

Why think about it, comrade?

Does it matter?

---

For more informaton on this Punjabi revolutionary poet see my previous blog on Pash and  also visit:

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/

And visit Pash blog maintained by Pash Memorial International Trust 

MEDITATIONS ON THE INDIAN MEDIA

THE MEDIA 

Is anything wrong with the media, the Fourth Estate and the people’s watchdog on the misdeeds of the state? Has the media wandered far away from its basic objective and become more a political tool, a profit driven big business, an expression of the megalomania of the pretentiously self-righteous journalists? Has news become a commodity? Lots of questions need to be answered. Why is the media not interested in discussing openly the role it is expected to play and its present deviations? Are the journalists always above board and deserve the moral high ground they have appropriated for themselves? Has the media entrenched itself as the mouthpiece of particular class interests? Is the media so sacrosanct that it can tear into any reputation but in itself  it is above public scrutiny, ridicule and censure? How to deal with journalists who are dishonest and corrupt? How to expose  the media misdeeds? Who will expose them? Aren't the journalists alway fighting shy of criticizing their  fellow journalists?  

Well, people have there own views about the media, but here are four poems of mine that  present an image of the media shared by many. You may or may not like this image. But, here are the poems for you to read and comment on.

1. THE WOODWIND ORCHESTRA

Just as a dog returns to its vomit

I turn again and again

To listen to the woodwind orchestra

Every Sunday morning

It’s a seven member ensemble

The pick of players

Engaged by the capital’s select newspaper bands

To reach out to their Sunday listeners

With their tunes on ‘the state of the nation’

The orchestra can play across seven octaves

From the sinking bass

To the screeching treble

From a funeral adagio

To the machinegun staccato

The symphony the ensemble plays

Is one of pure discord

A concert of squirty notes

Always tuned to assault

The ears like washroom music 

I wonder 

What’s wrong with the players!

A bowel disorder

Flatulence

Dyspepsia

Stomach flu

Dysentery

Diarrhea

Retching

Sickness

Sexual dysfunction

That brings out

An uninterrupted flow of gases

That fills the air with sewage stench

But perhaps

Their stomachs are stirred up

By their sense of duty

As members of the Fourth Estate,

And they can’t help

Opening their Pandora’s box

To cleanse the air

Of all the stink

The rulers constantly let off

It is wisely said:

‘Diamond cuts diamond.’

And consequently,

‘Stink drives out stink,’

Is the motto of this seven member ensemble.

That’s why I turn

Again and again

To this woodwind orchestra

Every Sunday

Like the dog that returns to its vomit

---

2. IPL: THE CARNIVAL OF DESIRES

Hey, what’s this?

What’s the problem?

Why are you kicking up

This cloud of dust?

Raising another smoke screen?

Another exposure

Another scandal

Murky deals

Money laundering

Match fixing

Tax evasions

Sleaze

Late night orgies

Money! Money! Money! Money!

And all that money can get!

Hold on

You news mongers

You dealers in branded truths

Waving the flags

 Of transparency

Of probity

Of uprightness

Of accountability

Of public service

Of national honour

Hold on

Who’re you?

The voice of the people?

High minded whistle blowers?

Washers of dirty linen?

Drain inspectors?

Sniffer dogs?

Compulsive voyeurs?

But the people are 'loving it’

From top to bottom

From end to end

Here’s everything they enjoy

Cricketing gladiators

Hired from four corners

Complete in their battle gear

Engaged in deadly combats

Hurling their missiles

Flourishing their truncheons

The cannon balls

Tearing along the ground

Sailing through the air

Crashing through the legs

Bollywood Shahan Shahs

And Malikas

Blowing kisses

Waving their arms

Revealing their smooth armpits

Scattering their smiles all around

Breaking millions of hearts

The cheer girls

Rocking their bodies

Their chest swells

Flinging their bare arms and legs

Extending the limits of frenzy

And the stadium crowds

Cheering, dancing, screaming

Haa-ing and hoo-ing

Partying to the accompaniment

Of pipes, bugles, drums…

Waving flags, placards, messaging

Now ecstatic, now dejected

The corpo-opulent giants

Surrounded by the glitterati

Backing up their boys

And, add to this the jokers

The string pullers, the game changers

The betters, baiters, abettors

The backseat drivers

There’s everything in it

And everyone neck deep

In this carnival of desires

You self-righteous bums

Rooting for carcasses

Like vultures

Tearing apart bodies

Splattering limbs

Baring entrails

Hollowing up eye sockets

Spreading the stink…

Stop this charade

Take off your squeaky clean mask
Of purity and sainthood

Of chastity and coyness

Leave it to the saffron-clad babas

We know

You too are in it

Behind the smoke screen

Let the show go on

Without full stops

Leave it to the gods above

To judge

---

( This poem was written soon after the IPL scandal broke out.)

3.  THE WASHING MACHINES

We all agreed

We needed a washing machine

To wash our dirty linen

And lo we are now blessed not with one

But a whole array that’s always on

Sixty into sixty

Twenty-four into seven

All the three sixty-five days of the year

Busy ceaselessly

In the act of cleansing

After all we have so much of dirt to wash

After all we have no sense of cleanliness

And keep on piling heap upon heap

Of dirty, stinking, blotchy linen and undergarments

The heavenly Ganga working for millennia

Having failed to clean up the muck

And in turn having sullied itself beyond redemption

Its task is now taken over by these machines

That promise to clean up every black spot

Like the magical skin lotions, dish-washers and toilet cleaners

And restore the pristine shine and the day-of-creation purity

  

They are a great blessing, these machines,

Without them we won’t ever know

We have so much washing to do

Without them we won’t ever know 

The cupboards that should be ripped open

Without them we won’t ever see

The bed linen that has been sullied

Without them we won’t ever inhale

The stink rising from the soiled unders

Without them we won’t ever know

How squeaky clean we need to be

Without them we won’t ever know

That cleanliness is next to godliness

Their passion for laundering

Is so intense so overpowering

They never miss any blot or yellow spot

Not even a speck of dust

And they never stop

Being ablutomaniacs, these wondrous machines

Will, rest assured, never stop

Until the end of the world

So they go on and on and on

Sixty into sixty

Twenty-four into seven

All the three sixty-five days of the year

---

4. THE VULTURES

Floating space rovers

On a 24-hour prowl

Wings spread out

Scanning the earth below

Eyes zoomed in and focused on

A scene of disaster

A swift sleek descent

A perfect landing

Then a shuffling scramble

For the victim,

Snapping and snipping

With hooked beaks…

The carcass denuded

Of all substance

Its wholeness defiled

In quick bites

Revealing

A messy nakedness –

A head with empty eye-sockets,

A torso ripped open,

Bones

Limbs

Intestines

Hooves

All apart

A rapacious obscenity

Committed in full view

On TV screens,

Lapped up by millions of hungry eyes:

A tribute

To the scavenging virtuosity

Of the Fourth Estate.

---

(In western Rajasthan, which is so frequently drought-stricken, the people, when they see journalists descending upon them to paint their misery, cry out: The vultures have come.)

                                                             xxx

RAGPICKERS

.  THE RAGPICKER AND THE MUSE

I sometimes wonder what kind of a poem

Would this nine year old black-faced scavenger write,

Were the Muse to infect him with divine madness,

Were the goddess Saraswati to come and sit on his tongue?

How would he respond as he discovers a sprawling pile

As big as the treasure Ali Baba had found

In the cave of the forty thieves?

Heaps of kitchen garbage, peelings of vegetables and fruits, bones,

Plastic bags, bottles, empty cardboard cartons, plastic pouches, bags

Of tea, medicines, spices, sweets, toothpastes, juices,

Wrappers of soaps, biscuits, soiled sanitary pads, infected swabs of cotton

Broken or empty ballpoint pens, scraps of newspapers, notebooks,

Egg shells, used condoms, mouldy bread, used shaving blades,  

Tooth brushes, metal scrap, fused bulbs, broken glass pieces,

China cups without handles, wires, strings, rags…

His eyeballs bursting at the sight of such a bounty

His nose assaulted with a cornucopia of odours

His legs entrenched knee-deep into the heap

His hands sifting the treasures and stuffing them into his huge plastic sack

Dogs, flies, cockroaches, mosquitoes contending with him for the leftovers…

Back in his den after disposing off his wealth

For the day’s earnings, lying flat on his back

How would he sum up his thoughts at the grand discovery

How would he thank the donors of these treasures

What kind of an invocation would he make to the Muse

And what kind of a poem would he compose?
                                                                                                       -T C Ghai

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/