poets

The Crafty Defiance of Great Art

Universally, writers, through their personal and collective experiences, often refrain from waving flags, worshipping at the grand statues of history and eulogizing the benevolence and divine stature of mortal regimes.

All through our history, during the officially declared ‘Swarn Yug’, or the Golden Period, or Amritkaals, most prefer succumbing to the vision of progress that leads nations to a radiant future a few years down the line. However, such literary craft often slyly undermines such stentorian high seriousness.

Great writers have often recorded tales about a very different face of totalitarianism, one that a benign child, hugging and backslapping, reveals in private. It is dark, menacing, undemocratic and morbid. From the humble Dalit poet Kumbhandas, sniggering at those queuing up to visit the capital Sikri to meet the Patsah, to a forest dwelling Sufi Jayasi with matted hair and torn clothes who asked the Sultan, ‘do you ridicule me or my maker?’, there is a long list of saint poets who watched parades of ephemeral power ironically.

“What does a saint need from Sikri? Your sandals wear down during the long journey and you forget your Lord’s name,”the poet Kumbhandas had said, some five centuries ago.

One meets Kumbhandas’s spiritual brother in the great Czech writer from Prague, Jaroslav Hasek, a drunk and an eccentric man in his personal life, but the writer of a great comic novel about the serious business of World War and its heroes. In The Good Soldier Schweik, the bedraggled protagonist reduces war and the awesome tyrant wearing all his medals to a joke with his exaggerated acts of subservience and by raising patriotic slogans suddenly after he has delivered a stirring speech and all routine clapping has died down. The very verbosity of his repeated shows of patriotism and devotion for the nation and the leader drive home the point far more effectively than any dark philosophical treatise on tyranny and destructive forces of a world war.

The same literary cauldron in Prague also produced another great writer, Kafka.

Kafka, who came from a middle-class background, was brought up as a Jew in the liberal city of Prague. He was both enamoured and horrified by the anti-Semitism experienced by his people from the eastern ghettoes. His writing takes us from the concrete to the metaphorical to the allegorical descriptions of the surrealistic mindset unleashed in Europe.

His writings resonate with the sheer absurdity of human civilisation, suddenly pitted against a vast labyrinthine bureaucratic machine. Wandering in these lanes we see alienation from oneself, a long convoluted history of migrant forefathers, losing an identity enjoyed since birth without gaining another.

How does a writer face it? In one of his best known stories, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a gigantic cockroach, lying on his back, frantically trying to stand on his feet with his hind legs, still stuck in sticky ancestral secretions! Today this poignant helpless cry, ‘What have I turned into?’, has become everybody’s agonised cry across nations. What is Muslimhood? What is being a Christian? What is being a female? What is being a Sanatani Hindu, or a non-Sanatani?

It is similarly fascinating to read two great satirists in Hindi from the 1990s: Hari Shankar Parsai and Sharad Joshi. Is it a coincidence that like Kafka and Hasek, both hailed from the bowels of Madhya Pradesh, the central state in India?

The media brouhaha over our recent Moon Mission led one to re-read Parsai’s immortal Inspector Matadin Chaand Per (Inspector Matadin on the moon). The story fantasises about an archetypal small town middle-level police inspector, Matadin, landing on the Moon as advisor to the Moon government, on behalf of the Government of India. The Moon government, keen to modernise its law and order machinery, sends a Chandrayaan to India with a formal request for advice and assistance on how to set up a sound infrastructure, create codes of conduct and SOPs for their police.

Matadin is sent because the bureaucracy in Delhi feels that since the Moon is a smaller planet, instead of the Inspector General of Police, a middle-level functionary with a reputation for getting work done should do. What follows the arrival of a crusty old police inspector from a small town is at once chaotic and hilarious.

Within a few weeks, the incorruptible, mild and democratic police force in the Moon is transformed By ‘Pector Sa’ Matadin ji, into a corrupt, muscular bureaucratic machine that learns how to maintain ‘crime registries’ and bypass laws in the process to show most cases as “solved”. These “results” are achieved with some help from a posse of false witnesses, trained by Inspector Matadin to lie, cheat and hoodwink the courts and get the so-called culprit silenced.

Looking at the chaos and public disruptions the earthly training course causes, the hapless government finally requests that Inspector Matadin be called back. So one day Inspector Matadin leaves with his trainees, who openly weep and touch his feet, carrying some awards and a porous piece of moon rock, which the Inspector General’s wife had asked him to bring for her to scrub her heels.

Sharad Joshi has created a similar gallery of such bureaucratese spouting rogues in Jeep Par Sawar Illiyan (Maggots riding a government jeep), Jaadu Ki Sarkar and tele serials like ‘Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi’ and ‘Vikram Aur Betal’. It is interesting that the memorable ruffians, buffoons and corrupt bureaucratic bullies the two have created are flat characters, with smudged pasts and no memorable families.

They, thus, become an every man’s experience of the bureaucratic and political power systems our times have created. Both satirists reject the road taken by those silky sentimental or psychologically obsessive popular novels. Their work with its ironic reading of the Indian democracy, seem much more relevant and readable in these absurd times because they carry a foreboding about the dark face of totalitarianism, about what is unsaid in democratic politics that floats all around us as unconfirmed whispers, and sudden bursts of sheer violence against the weak, which is never reported officially, and the reported versions of incidents. As the ghostly Betal of Joshi tells Vikram, ‘I am truth and you will never be able to control me!’ (Vikram, Main tere bus mein aaney wala nahin.)

It is very hard to slot subversive literature produced under any stressful and controlling regime. You can not call them purely political nor describe them as carrying a certain ideological orientation. In content and form, works like Ret Samadhi or Raag Darbari have simply arisen from the world of literature as a revolt against a controlling regime. In the better writings, (yes, there is plenty of bad writing too that is far more acceptable officially) behind the hilarity, one also senses an anxiety about the State bulldozing all protective barriers around civilised democracies and the freedoms of all its citizens cutting across race, gender, caste and class. This is when the arts close ranks as an antidote to classical arts, stamped with politically correct religiosity that leaves humans out.

Thus, in music, we notice a sudden surge of public interest in what was seen as the concrete and the plebeian. The revival of interest in Punjabi and Bhojpuri folk music and Nirgun and Sufi poetry came out of music saying ‘no’ to a suffocating feudalism. The father of the current change, vocalist Kumar Gandharva, set about defying classical gharana music with its obsolete regulations and made it free and available to all. He reconnected music to poetry and lent it an entirely new shape using folk music as the lode star.

In one’s bleakest moments, immersion in the constructive revolt by great art can still restore one’s faith in the unputdownable vitality of our great democracy. It was entirely befitting that when Kumar ji, one of the greatest musical innovators of our times, was being cremated in Devas, there were no State bugles nor smart battalions saluting the departed one. His lifelong cronies, the wandering Nirguni singers, stood with their simple Iktaras and sang :

“We are birds from afar Baba/ we sing without mouths/we fly without wings, we can walk without feet.”

Verse Affairs: Writing Kites From the Prison to the World

A new anthology brings together poetry written by poets who have been incarcerated.

Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz was arrested on March 9, 1951 on charges of trying to overthrow the Pakistani government under Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and replace it with a Soviet-style communist government. The subsequent trial of Faiz and his alleged co-conspirators was called the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case; the poet was sentenced to four years in prison.

This was his first incarceration in Pakistan, at the end of which he went into exile in the West. The story goes that while in jail, he was taken to the dentist in a horse-drawn tonga one day. On the road, people recognised him and started following him. This incident inspired Faiz to write his famous ghazal: “Aaj bazar men pa-ba-jaulan chalo (Let us walk through the market in shackles)”. Its melancholic rebelliousness has made it an anthem for all rebellious spirits across South Asia.

For, in Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit : Encounters With Prison by Shilpa Gupta (editor), Salil Tripathi (editor). (Context, November 1, 2022)

Faiz is one of the poets included in a new anthology For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit: Encounters With Prison, edited by artist Shilpa Gupta and poet and journalist Salil Tripathi. The book is the textual avatar of an eponymous exhibition on which Gupta worked in 2017, in response to a growing atmosphere of intolerance in India, which, as we now know, was the first symptom of the country’s democratic backsliding. Gupta had read Tripathi’s talk and her work took a new direction as she decided to celebrate poets who had been incarcerated.

“Writers, thinkers and activists were being murdered,” write Gupta and Tripathi. “First was Narendra Dabholkar. Then, writer Govind Pansare and his wife, Uma, were shot at by unidentified gunmen in broad daylight. …Next was the writer and rationalist M.M. Kalburgi.” Even as the exhibition went live in Edinburgh in 2018, journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead outside her home in Bengaluru.

But it was not only in India that poets and writers were being targeted by undemocratic forces. In Bangladesh, secular bloggers and writers were being hacked to death by suspected Islamists and imprisoned by their government. In Pakistan, Baloch poet Rehmatullah Shohaz was shot dead near his hometown Buleda on July 21, 2015. Liu Xiaobo, who had been in prison in China since 2009 and was prevented from receiving his 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in person, was released on medical parole in 2017, but soon succumbed to cancer.

W.H. Auden had infamously declared in his poem on W.B. Yeats: “(P)oetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making.” But autocratic governments around the world seemed to believe otherwise, and they put poets and writers in prison with alarming regularity. “In recent years, governments in Cameroon, Cuba, China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, among many others, have jailed poets,” writes Tripathi, who till recently served as the chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee, in his essay The Poet’s Work, included in the book under review.

Russia, too, has joined this list. On September 26, 2022, armed police broke into the house of Artyom Kamardin and his girlfriend Aleksandra Popova, after the former put up a YouTube video with a poem deriding the war in Ukraine. Kamardin was allegedly beaten up by the police and raped, while Popova was threatened with gang rape, reported Amnesty. The poet was forced to post an apology video and was taken away to an undisclosed location, reminding people all over the world of Soviet-era disappearances of poets and writers. Osip Mandelstam, one of the Russian poets who died in the Gulag, has been included in this volume.

It successfully provides a historic overview of poets in prison. “The earliest poem is from the 8th century, and there are contemporary poems by poets who are still in prison, or in hiding,” write the editors in their introduction. These include figures such as Giordano Bruno, a 16th century Italian philosopher, poet, and occultist, who was burned at the stake by the Catholic Inquisition.

Allen Ginsberg, who was charged with obscenity in the US in the 1950s for his poem ‘Howl’ that described sex between two men in graphic detail as well as Malay Roychoudhury, the Bengali poet and founder of the mercurial Hungry Generation, who was charged with obscenity in India in the mid-1960s for his poem ‘Stark Electric Jesus’ are included in this volume. Ginsberg had met Roychoudhury during his travels in India and came to his defence.

Other poets from South Asia include Habib Jalib (Pakistan) and Majrooh Sultanpuri (India), both imprisoned by the governments of their countries for leftist politics. Also included in this collection are Ram Prasad Bismil, who was hanged by the British for his revolutionary activities on December 19, 1927, and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the revolutionary poet of Bengal, who was imprisoned for several years for participating in the Indian freedom movement.

Faiz’s poem included in the book is ‘Speak’, an English translation by V. G. Kiernan of his Urdu poem ‘Bol’:

Speak, for your lips are free;

Speak, your tongue is still yours,

Your upright body is yours –

Speak, your life is still yours.

Besides the poets included in the original exhibition, the book also brings together others such as Varavara Rao, who was arrested in 2018 in the Bhima Koregaon case, and Karthika Naïr’s shape poem ‘Handbook for Aspiring Autocrats’.

Essays by novelist Nilanjana S. Roy, constitutional lawyer Gautam Bhatia, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, both of whom were imprisoned, and Umar Khalid, who continues to languish in prison on charges of abetting violence during the 2020 Delhi riots, map out the landscape of revolutionary desires, the limits of freedom, and the utility of poetry for those in prison.

Literature scholar Doran Larson, in her essay Toward a Prison Poetics (2010), argues that “prison writing bears not only a common subject but recurrent, internal, formal traits.” Prison writing, then, becomes a genre in itself, like travel writing or war writing, informed by the shared experience of incarceration but also the peculiarities of individual experiences. As poets and writers continue to be imprisoned by autocratic regimes for their words, this genre will grow.

Amy Washburn in her essay The Pen of the Panther writes that Black Panther poet Ericka Huggins’ work was often seized by prison authorities under the premise that she was writing “kites” — messages to other prisoners in prison slang. If one might extend this metaphor, it is possible to imagine that poems written by incarcerated poets are like “kites” to the world outside, soaring into the un-imprisonable skies beyond the prison walls. This gives us hope.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and writes a fortnightly column on poetry, Verse Affairs, for The Wire.

Note: An earlier version of this article stated that the exhibition mentioned was a collaboration between Shilpa Gupta and Salil Tripathi. It has been edited to reflect that the exhibition was only Gupta’s, though she was influenced by Tripathi’s work.

What Is Home? A Poet’s Quest for an Answer

For the migrant labourer, though, there’s neither a true home nor a body-home in which he can peacefully “grow old in” and “die in”.

I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.

The poet who wrote these lines couldn’t have felt fully at home in the world. What shelter was Eavan Boland after? What was it that a poem could give her but all else on the planet couldn’t? She was dying for it, and was ready to die in it. But before that, she wanted to live—live and age with grace in a space she could call her own even if she wasn’t its architect.

In her remarkable poetry collection Beauty, Jane Hirshfield writes:

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like glass.

The sound of an object dropped like this wouldn’t be heard as distinctly outside as it would be inside. To make us listen to the music it can make, private space does not depend on noise cancellation. Even if made only of shards, an hour seems to be sufficient for someone like Hirshfield as long as it can house her, because life cannot.

She is not looking to “go through” life “as if” it were a door “to another”. The only door she is interested in is the one that lets her in, and then lets her be. An hour can be enough to infuse meaning into life, in turn a repository of hours—one’s own bricks with “shape and proportion”. Both Boland and Hirshfield bring precision to the walls they want to inhabit, and imagination is the mortar they put to work.

When a home like that seems unattainable, even a pinch of the dust that sleeps within it is enough to acquaint you with the joy of acquisition. It’s this dust you are after when entering a poem’s interior, the enjambed lines replicating the edges of a wall that was knocked down from one side, not at random but with deliberate care. Your gaze hangs on the edge of a line’s ultimate word as if on a half-protruding brick.

Also read: A Prayer and a Love Poem For Our Stricken World

The jagged outline of the carved side gives the wall an individuality it would lack if it were allowed to attain the conventional straightness. The pleasures that irregularity promises are the most tempting, and also the most rewarding. The temperature, light, smell and texture of an interior depend on the interior of the person visiting. When resonant interiors mingle, a season happens. The home you find in a poem contains seasons that are not at the mercy of either the clock or the calendar:

But there’s a way of life
that is its own witness:
put the kettle on, shut the blind.
Home is a sleeping child,
an open mind

and our effects,
shrugged and settled
in the sort of light
jugs and kettles
grow important by.

That’s Boland again, in her poem ‘Domestic Interior’. The Rig Veda mentions two inseparable birds taking shelter in a fig tree. While one eats a fig, the other just looks on. The indulgence of the first bird (the impulsive soul, or the atman) happens well within the visual field of the second (the unruffled observer or Supreme Soul, the paramatman).

The presence of this second bird “that is its own witness” is unmistakable in Boland’s poem. Life is the tree to which both birds cling, and this tree is as much outside as it is inside the birds. It is both provider and witness that knows “the sort of light” unremarkable objects “grow important by”—a home that shelters as well as liberates.

There’s another dwelling to reckon with. Much before the walls and the ceiling, it’s the body that becomes a home. In the Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield version, the sixteenth-century poet-saint Mira builds on the idea of a body-home in this manner:

Friend, this body is a great ocean,
Concealing reefs and sea-vaults heaped up with jewels.
Enter its secret rooms and light your own lamp.
Within the body are gardens, rare orchids, peacocks, the inner music.
Within the body, a lake; in its cool waters, white swans take their joy.
And within the body, a vast market—
Go there and trade, sell yourself for a profit you can’t spend.

The keyword here is “own”. The treasure is there for the taking provided you carry “your own lamp”. Light loves a lamp that is free of soot, but nothing in the mercenary world is free of cost. Bodies perish while markets flourish. Markets bow to the machinations of those controlling them, but the body has only its modest ways to fall back on, ways it can either comply with or modify. Compliance is conventional. It helps keep the unknown at bay, and thus avoid peril. That’s ordinary trade, promising ordinary gain. If you are looking “for a profit you can’t spend”, you need to put much more at stake. Mira did.

Not everybody is capable of such a transaction, though. Some, like migrant workers, learn to remain content with whatever little comes their way. They can neither give the body-home the dignity it deserves, nor dream of a decent home for the neglected body toiling ceaselessly in workplaces that promise nothing more than two square meals a day—sometimes not even that. These workhorses are so ubiquitous that they become invisible. The world isn’t in the habit of looking into their eyes, which are forever filled with the dream of returning home. In his poem ‘Home is Always Away’, Mangalesh Dabral writes:

I’ve come back home much less often
than I’ve stepped out of home
the memories of stepping out of home
are much more than those of coming back home

The circuit has been completed many times, but every excursion exacted a price, which was inflated with each passing day.

With life locked inside the body, the keys melt into our bones the moment they come into existence. The time allowed to forge new keys is a lifetime. We may easily run out of it before we even become aware of the incarceration, let alone make effort to turn a new leaf as a keysmith. The very existence of old keys presupposes belief in the known unknown locked inside. Those turning away from this belief seem unwilling to bear the burden of being labelled spiritual or—to their consternation—worshippers of the divine.

Watch | Javed Akhtar Recites His Poem on the Plight of Migrant Labourers

However, the divine cannot exist without the human. For instance, thinking about the Sikh Gurus, we may tend to forget that they were, first and foremost, humans. They couldn’t have known what they knew without the refuge of the body. The trajectory of a flight begins with a point, and that point is situated in the ground. It may be a tree, a tower, a riverbank, a dune, a mountain. For those approaching enlightenment, it’s the body.

Even the Gurus despaired, but despair couldn’t stop them. They used their refuge to plant a full forest, each tree becoming the beginning of a new flight, each word a bird yearning for the unknown. Imagine what would have Nanak been going through when he wrote:

If the heart becomes a foreigner,
the whole world turns foreign.
Where do I unknot my bundle?
Every square inch is home to pain.

Living in a world that never tires of promising you its endless joys, there come occasions that make you turn to that orphan within, that outsider: the heart. All this while, you’ve been emptying your energy reserves into an abyss that remains unquenchable—all at the expense of your tiny friend, now a foreigner.

What happens when you wake up one day only to find that you don’t belong where you live? You become free of complaint, because it doesn’t matter in a land that is now alien. You get up and move on. But for a journey like this, all belongings—material or spiritual—are best left behind. The question is, can you?

In his poem ‘Checkpost’, the Punjabi poet Swami Antar Nirav addresses this question in the context of the labourer destined to remain a migrant:

Name?
Labourman

What do you do?
Now nothing

Coming from?
Home

Heading where?
Home

Where do you live?
Home

Where’s home?
Where I live

What’s on your head?
A bundle

What’s in the bundle?
Home

The migrant’s head is never free. Even when apparently free, this head balances the permanent outline of a burden. Awake or asleep, it carries the load which is tailormade to press the head down so hard that all the dreams within are crushed, including the dream of a safe passage home. In the words of the Marathi poet Mangesh Narayanrao Kale:

We of course leave
home behind
and for company we have
the search for a new home

For the migrant labourer, though, there’s neither a true home nor a body-home in which he can peacefully “grow old in” and “die in”. He is in perpetual exile. As the unforgettable John Berger put it in A Seventh Man, “The final return is mythic. It gives meaning to what might otherwise be meaningless. It is larger than life. It is the stuff of longing and prayers.”

Note: The excerpts by Guru Nanak, Mangalesh Dabral and Mangesh Narayanrao Kale and the poem by Swami Antar Nirav were translated by Sarabjeet Garcha.

Sarabjeet Garcha is a bilingual poet and the author of four books of poems, including A Clock in the Far Past. The recipient of a fellowship in Hindi literature from the Ministry of Culture of India, he is the founder and editorial director of Copper Coin, a multilingual publishing company. His Instagram handle is @sarabjeet.garcha.