Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
The term ‘saakhi‘ is from the colloquial version ‘sakshi’, a witness. Saakhi is also the term used for a selection of poet-saint Kabir’s poetry where the weaver poet stands a witness to his age:
Tu kehta kagad ki lekhi, main kehta aankhin ki dekhi
Main kehta surjhavanhari, tu rakhey urjhayi re
Mera tera manuva, kais eek hoee re
(You tell me what is written on paper, I tell you what my eyes have seen,
I try to untangle but you keep them tangled up
How can our hearts be one?)
Kabir poses a timeless question from a creative soul to the power wielders and opinion makers. His age resonated with major socio-cultural clashes, much like what we the writers face today.
So, I turn to the Saakhis of Kabir again and again. Outside of myths, little is known about the man, except that he was born in Kashi, adopted and brought up by a family of Muslim weavers, and remained a weaver of words and fabrics until his death in 1518. He was not literate and his poetry has come down to us mostly by word of mouth. It was first codified only later. There is this 1625 tempera water colour painting from the collection at the National Museum by an unknown artist. It shows Kabir sitting at his loom weaving and meditating quietly in the company of fellow Varanasi poet Raidas, a cobbler.
Where are we? The loom and the shuttle in Kabir’s right hand and the warp and weft threads hanging on a crude bamboo harness indicate the poets are sitting out in the open under some tree. Both look ageing and pensive. Kabir with a bare torso looks surprisingly clean, wearing his whimsical cap with a peacock feather tucked at the rim. His legs do not show. It is as though what he weaves has become an extension of his body.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Who was the painter’s model for a man who lived two centuries earlier? It might be rash but one cannot help feeling it may have been another indigent and powerless writer ,with a powerful presence only the truly creative and truly honest have. Kabir’s eyes are turned inwards. He is maybe recalling and rearranging all the noble and beastly scenes he has witnessed. He has a garland of beads around his neck, his friend Raidas has one around his wrist. They use the beads to decode the heart of reality. Kabir said, Mala ferat jug gya, gaya na man ka fer/ Kar ka manka daar de, mann ka manka fer (All your life you’ve been fingering the beads, but your heart remains full of lies. Drop the string and try to touch the beads within your heart). Friend Raidas agrees: Man change tau kathauti mein Ganga (If the heart is pure, the water in my wooden bowl used to soak leathers can turn into the holy water from the Ganges).
So this is what this column is about. In a way we, the narrators of history as it unfolds, seem what someone once referred to as “death’s secretaries”. The incidents we touch upon begin (we think) with the end. At the age I am, and in the age we live, Saakhis seem to warn us about that done-and-dusted bit so beloved of TV panelists, psephologists and column writers. Everything we see and record is eventually a part of history, not the whole of it. The questions we raise, therefore, have partial answers. The rest is all confessions, communiqués (governmental or corporate), personal opinions tinged with political partisanships, and fragments of a best-selling autobiography one secretly hopes to write one day.
Listen: Hindutva Cannot Reconcile With Kabir’s Message of Individuality
Last week, a well-known Hindi paper from Indore reported a tale for corroborating and celebrating the two poets. A group of farmers in Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh approached their village tehsildar to complain against the government’s revenue officials who were thoroughly corrupt and refused to move papers or release the funds earmarked for them. Do something, they pleaded. Shatrughan Singh, the tehsildar, says the report, told them bluntly: “Poorey Hindustan mein Lln-den chal raha hai. Issey koyi band nahin kara sakata. Kal tumhara ladka Babu ban jayega tau, who bhi yehi karega (There is give and take going on all over the country and no one can stop it. Tomorrow if your son were to become a revenue official, he too will do the same thing).”
The farmers complained to the media, who brought it to the kind notice of the district collector, who immediately sent the blunt talking tehsildar on leave and gave another tehsildar from a nearby village joint charge of both tehsils.
Make what you will of it. This is a Saakhi of our times.
“For we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:20)
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.