While under a directive from the Central Board of Film Certification Bhansali was compelled to change the name of his film from Padmavati to Padmaavat, he was either unable or unwilling to engage with the spirit of the medieval text he admitted to basing his film on. Composed in Awadhi (a dialect spoken in the qasbah of Awadh in Uttar Pradesh) and originally written in the Farsi rasmul khat in 1540 by Malik Muhammad Jaisi, under the patronage of Sher Shah, Jaisi’s Padmavat allows itself to be read at two levels: one, as a wondrous tale of a brave king, guided by a talking parrot, wooing a princess from a distant land, bringing her home where an envious and discredited courtier, banished by the king, runs off to the sultan in Delhi and incites him to capture the lotus-like queen. The tale ends in tragedy: the queen commits jauhar, the king is killed in battle, and the sultan finds nothing but ashes in the captured fort. At another level, it can also be read as an allegorical tale containing a profoundly mystical message about all life being ephemeral. But nowhere does it provide the slightest latitude for the communal, polarized reading of an encounter between two opposing forces: chastity and lustfulness, purity and impurity and, by extension, between ‘native’ Hinduism and ‘foreign’ Islam.
Dipping in the current of love, drawing upon the existing tradition of premakhyanaka kavya or ‘poetry of the tales of love’, brimful with the images associated with medieval Sufi poetry, Jaisi’s epic poem begins with a hamd, an invocation to the Almighty Allah. That the hamd is replete with Hindu images and references to Hindu mythology is indicative of the pluralistic age it was written in and the easy, almost organic, familiarity of its Muslim author with Hindu iconography. Moving almost seamlessly to a naat, a panegyric in praise of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, it moves to a glowing reference to Sher Shah, the author’s patron and the sultan of Delhi, and finally his own spiritual master, Saiyid Ashraf who belonged to the Chishtiya silsila. From the second canto itself he gets down to telling his tale thus: ‘I sing the tale of Simhala-Dvipa and tell of the Perfect Woman.’
A close reading of Jaisi’s poem reveals several points of departure between the text and the many legends it spawned. Of a text running into fifty-seven cantos, the conquest of Chittor is consigned to the last few; the bulk of the text is about the adventures of King Ratansen and the beauty of Padmavati. What is more, apart from the radiant beauty of the queen, the wily courtier, Raghava, incites the sultan with the promise of five other gems in Chittor: the swan that picks up pearls; a gem impregnated with ambrosia that can dispel a serpent’s poison; the philosopher’s stone, paras, that can turn iron into gold; a hunting tiger that can seize all the elephants in a jungle; and, lastly, a hunting bird with a voice of thunder that can pounce upon its prey like a mighty hawk. So, the attack on Chittor is as much about seizing these priceless gems as the queen whose beauty is matchless. Also, Ratansen doesn’t die at the hands of the lustful sultan but the covetous Devapal, the prince of Kumbhalner, an inveterate enemy of Ratansen who too is desirous of possessing Padmavati. Entering a fortress filled with the ashes of the dead, the sultan exclaims, ‘Earth is vanity!’ thus articulating a profound mystical truth.
Louche and menacing when not outright sinister and bestial, Ranveer Singh’s portrayal of Allauddin Khilji in Bhansali’s film feeds every Hindu right-wing fantasy about Muslims. His slanting kohl-lined eyes heightening an almost feral appearance, his homoerotic encounters with the slave Malik Kafur, his lust for both men and women matched only by his greed for the untold wealth of Hindustan and his unbridled ambition to sit on the throne of Delhi at all costs, combine to make him the ku-sanskari foreign invader; in comparison, the serene and stately Ratansen, played by Shahid Kapoor, is the epitome of a sanskari native ruler.
In his glorification of women taking their own lives for the sake of upholding their family’s honour, Bhansali peddles regressive, patriarchal values in the guise of hyper-nationalism. In depicting the siege of Chittor as an early example of the perfidious practice of Muslim men dishonouring chaste Hindu women, he lends credence to what has now been dubbed ‘love jihad’. And, worst of all, in establishing the binary of a valiant and honourable Hindu king fighting a just war against the treacherous Muslim invader, he feeds the paranoia of an already divided society.
10
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
‘JAI JAWAN! JAI KISAN!’
THE PRESENT APATHY TOWARDS THOSE who, quite literally, give us our daily bread seems strange given our ethos and civilization that has traditionally celebrated, even valorized, the tiller of the land. In an age when most mainstream newspapers either shuffle the news of phenomenally large gatherings of irate farmers who congregate from the hinterland or disregard their presence altogether in our midst when they make the long march to our cities to voice their anguish, we are reminded of a time when we as a people were less blithe and our writers, thinkers, poets less fearful at best, and less blasé at worst.
From culture to literature to fairs and festivals, the farmer has held a place of pride in the popular imagination. Across the length and breadth of India, many of our festivals have their origins in older, agricultural rites and rituals. Given that we are a largely agrarian society depending on seasonal monsoon rains for irrigation, the land and those who till it to fill our food baskets have always featured in the Indian literatures from the various bhashas. And be it folk song or high literature, the farmer has never been as beyond the pale as now, nor so pushed to the margins of our collective consciousness as at present.
In the early twentieth century, with large-scale land reforms happening in different parts of the world and the Russian Revolution opening a window into a world of immense possibilities, Hindi and Urdu writers, led by Premchand, began to write robust, socially purposive literature located in India’s vast hinterland. Village tales such as ‘Sadgati’ (Salvation), ‘Poos ki Raat’ (A Winter’s Tale), ‘Do Bailon ki Katha’ (The Story of Two Oxen), ‘Sawa Ser Gehuun’ (A Quarter and One Ser of Wheat), ‘Kafan’ (The Shroud) among others feature arrogant Thakurs, bhang-drinking pundits, hard-working but often landless labourers, and portray a world of stark poverty and inequality. But the villains, and there are plenty in Premchand’s oeuvre, are usually products of a rigid social order and caste inequalities in most of these stories.
It was not until the spectacular flowering of the literary grouping known as the Progressive Writers’ Movement from the 1930s onwards that the focus shifted to government policies, need for land reform and urgent redress of the farmer’s genuine problems. Until this point, writers and poets were content to draw attention to agrarian distress without linking it specifically to policies at the apex that would trickle down to the farmer at the lowest rung of the food pyramid. Some such as the poet Iqbal were content to write rousing, even inflammatory poems, addressing the peasants struggling under the yoke of imperialism in ‘Punjab ke Dehqaan ke Naam’ (To the Farmers of the Punjab):
Butan-e-shaub-o-qabail ko torh
Rasoom-e-kuhan ke salasil ko torh
Yehi deen-e-mohkam, yehi fateh-e-baab
Ke duniya mein touheed ho be-hijab
Break all the idols of tribe and caste
Break the old customs that fetter men fast!
Here is true victory, here is faith’s crown –
One creed and one world, division thrown down!
And more famously in ‘Farman-e-Khuda: Farishton Se’ (God’s Command to His Angels):
Jis khet se dahqaan ko mayassar nahin rozi
Us khet ke har khosha-e-gandum ko jala do
The field that does not yield bread for its farmer
Burn every ripening ear of wheat that grows in that field
It was the progressive writers, and the poets in particular, who took up the cause of the farmers and brought the villages, where Gandhi said the real India lived, close to the cities. Urdu shed its cosmopolitanism and began to speak for rural India like it had never before. In June 1938, a most unusual conference took place in Faridabad. Organized by Syed Mutt
alebi Faridabadi, this was a gathering of poets from the rural areas surrounding Delhi who wrote in Brajbhasha or Haryanavi or the countless other dialects that broadly came under the category of ‘Hindustani’. Faridabadi had been active with the peasants and workers in the Gurgaon, Alwar, Bharatpur and Rohtak region and was convinced that big literary events in big cities did not address the needs of people closer to the soil and the continuing distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture meant that the urban was necessarily high and the rural (which included the folk) was always low. He had written a verse drama, Kisan Rut, in a style redolent of the sights and smells of the countryside but using a pleasing mixture of Urdu and Haryanvi. His derelict haveli in Faridabad became the venue for a large gathering of rural poets. Peasants squatted on the ground while on a makeshift dais sat Faridabadi, and heavyweights such as Ahmed Ali and Sajjad Zaheer, representing the central committee of the PWA. A sprinkling of teachers and students from the Jamia Millia Islamia, some political workers from Delhi and its neighbourhood listened to the peasant poets who sang their compositions to the beat of folk instruments. While the subjects were topical – even overtly social and political – the style was the time-honoured baramasa.
Over the next three decades, the PWA became a self-appointed custodian of peasants’ and workers’ rights and vast amounts of poetry and fiction came to be written on the dehqaan (peasant) and mazdoor (labourer). A great deal was expected from the coming of Independence, not the least being the safeguarding of farmers’ rights. While zamindari abolition and land reform was put into effect almost immediately by the Nehru government, the rosy future predicted by some failed to materialize. Josh Malihabadi, for instance, had hoped:
Banaaenge naii duniyaa kisaan aur mazduur
Yahii sajaaenge diivaan-e-aam-e-azadi
The farmer and labourer will create a new world
Together they will decorate the People’s Assembly
Here’s Faiz Ahmad Faiz in his iconic ‘Intesaab’ (Dedication), dedicated to peasants who are the most marginalized, the least empowered:
Dahqaan ke naam
Jis ke dhoron ko zalim hanka le gaye
Jis ki beti ko daaku utha le gaye
Haath bhar khet se ek angusht patwar ne kaat lii hai
Doosri maaliye ke bahaane se sarkar ne kaat lii hai
Jis ki pag zor walon ke paao taley
Dhajjiyan ho gaii hai
To the peasant
Whose cattle has been driven off by the tyrants
Whose daughter has been abducted by the robbers
From his hands-width of a farm, a finger’s width has been cut by the revenue officer
The rest deducted by the government under some pretext
Whose turban has been torn to shreds
Under the feet of the oppressors
And here’s Sahir Ludhianvi ruing the fate of the farmer who feeds others only to go hungry himself in a poem entitled ‘Mujhe Sochne Do’ (Let Me Think):
Lahlahaate hue kheton pe javaanii kaa samaan
Aur dahqaan ke chhappar mein na battii na dhuaan
All the ingredients of fulsomeness are bedecked on lush green fields
While there is neither light under the farmer’s shed nor fire in his hearth
In a similar vein, Kaifi Azmi wrote ‘Kisan’:
Chiir ke saal mein do baar zamin ka siina
Dafn ho jaata huun…
Piercing the breast of the earth twice a year
I am buried…
But it was Makhdoom Mohiuddun, the poet from Hyderabad, who for all his romantic and poignant ghazal writing was the first to draw attention to the great agrarian distress in Telangana, a situation that led more than seventy years later to the creation of an independent state, where ironically enough, the problems of the farmers have still not found complete redress. By 1946, the CPI had set up communes and Left poets were holding up Telangana as a model for revolutionary uprisings in other parts of the country. Another poet, Zahir Kashmiri, exhorted the Telangana Model thus:
Today, communes are sprouting from the land of Telangana
Today, the scorched earth is bearing varieties of beautiful life
Today, men of Telangana are spreading the glad tidings of conquering love,
Today, men of Telangana are giving the blessed news of the renaissance of East
Today, men of Telangana have joined in the struggle of Java and Greece
It is another matter that the CPI, after having fostered armed insurrection against the state did not achieve the success it had hoped for. The point, however, remains that there was a time when the poet and the writer came together with the political thinker and activist, and were willing to engage with the crucial issues of the time. That engagement seems to have tapered off as some occupy islands of privilege while others are cast adrift in a sea of distress.
The lyricists in the Bombay film industry, many of whom were either inspired by the Progressive Movement or were full-time members of the PWA, too were watchful of the interests of the farmers and agricultural labour. As late as the 1960s, when India found itself facing acute food shortages, mainstream masala movies of the Manoj ‘Bharat’ Kumar brand such as Upkar interpreted prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s slogan of ‘Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!’ with songs such as ‘Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle ugle hire moti…’ The motif of the farmer and the labourer was taken up all through the 1980s in films such as Mazdoor:
Hum mehnatkash iss duniya se
Jab apna hissa mangengey
Ek bagh nahii ek khet nahii
Hum saari duniya mangengey
When labourers such as us
Ask for our share of the world
We will not ask for an orchard or a field
We will ask for the entire world
Regrettably, even the Hindi film industry, ostensibly with its finger to the pulse of the nation, while churning out films on small-town India such as Gangs of Wasseypur or the Amazon Prime series Mirzapur, has turned its gaze away from rural India. Is it because rural India is neither hip nor cool? Or because it’s an unseemly blot on ‘Shining India’? Or because it flies in the face of the narrative of development and progress?
III
THE MOSAIC
OF LITERATURE
1
URDU: ‘REST IN PEACE’ OR
‘WORK IN PROGRESS’?
WHILE, ON THE ONE HAND, the importance of Urdu and Urdu writers to the national mainstream is acknowledged in many ways and at different levels – with Urdu writers and poets such as Shahryar, Ali Sardar Jafri and Qurratulain Hyder being conferred the prestigious Jnanpith Award, the country’s highest literary honour for a creative writer, and several noted Urdu writers being annually felicitated by the Padma awards by the Indian government - we also have a substantial number of ‘prophets of doom’, those who declare that Urdu is dead or dying. Given the extreme views, it is important to reflect on the position of Urdu in our lives today. Is Urdu confined to ‘gajals’ of dubious vintage sung by flashily-dressed singers in dimly-lit, smoke-filled rooms? How modish is it to say, ‘I love Urdu, especially Ghalib,’ when one might actually remember more Shakespeare or Wordsworth than Delhi’s pre-eminent poet? Or, how wannabe is it to sway, without having a clue to its import or meaning, to the sheer sonorousness of Urdu poetry when read or recited with vim and vigour in salons and soirees? Or worse still, must the route to mass popularity of a language and its literature necessarily lie through Bollywood studios and popular film lyrics? More importantly: what happens to a language when it is spliced from its script?
While there are no easy answers to any of the above, it is equally hard to write an obituary of Urdu. For far too long, the doomsayers have been predicting the end of Urdu and a whole way of life that accompanied it. The Urdu-Hindi debate has divided Urdu-wallahs and Hindi-wallahs into warring champions occupying opposite ends of a Great Divide, a bit like wrestlers in a wrestling pit (akhada). Yet, despite the formidable odds stacked against it, Urdu
has not merely survived but flourished. Yes, fewer people read it in its own script. Yes, its propagation is not tied to employment generation. Yes, the government has paid mere lip service to safeguarding its interests. Yes, many of those who nod their heads in appreciation when they hear Urdu poetry being read or recited possibly do so because it sounds pretty rather than because they fully understand the real meaning of those mellifluous words. But that is not to say that Urdu is dead, or dying. Despite the odds, Urdu has not merely survived but remained relevant. It is still the language of the heart and soul of India.
The Urdu poet has, more so than the prose writer, never failed to hoist the flag of Urdu’s popularity. Shahryar, for one, had gone on record to say that more people appreciate Urdu poetry in India than ever before. ‘Jaise jaise shehri tehzeeb badh rahi hai, Urdu zuban bhi badh rahi hai,’ he never tired to point out, scoffing those who decry the state of Urdu in India; he believed he was optimistic about India and about Urdu. He felt the government had done what it could; it was now up to the Urdu-wallahs to do the rest! Until we as a people are not proud of our language, no government can ever do enough. Admitting that he was an optimist, he told me in the course of an interview shortly before he passed away: ‘Aaj ka din bahut achcha nahin taslim hai/Aane wale din bahut behtar hain meri rai hai (I agree that today has not been a good day/But I am convinced tomorrow will be a better day).’
But You Don't Look Like a Muslim Page 10
