The city and its poets

PRATISHTHA PANDYA

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Therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State, such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city.

– from Book III, The Republic by Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett

IN mid-4th Century BCE Plato wrote The Republic, encapsulating his vision of an ideal state. In two of the most famous dialogues in The Republic, in Books III and X, between Socrates-Adeimantus, and Socrates-Glaucon respectively, Plato powerfully argued for chasing poets out of his ideal state. His arguments about what he called the irrational, untrue, and imitative nature of poetry seem to be echoing from close corners in our era of state censorship. I remember being fascinated by these dialogues as an undergraduate and going back to them later, time and again, as I wrote and taught poems and introspected about the role of poetry in my life as well as in the world. It was exciting therefore to write about the city and its poets, but it immediately took me back to Plato. His arguments made me aware, once again, of the constant, lurking tension that exists between the two categories I speak of here, the city and the poet.

I began by paying close attention to the possessive determiner (its) standing between them, raising questions of belonging. Which of the two belongs to the other, the city to the poet or the poet to the city? What legitimizes this belonging? Who exudes the sense of belonging? Where does it come from? Who gives the final verdict as to who truly belongs and who does not and how, and on what basis? What is the politics of the city that turns some poets into tokens and monuments, awards, chowks, margs (roads), and bulldozes and flattens the monuments of another to make roads? What is the politics of the city? What is the politics of the poet? The more I thought about it, the more complex the equation seemed.

 

I began simply by thinking about the very first poet from Ahmedabad to receive one of the highest literary awards in India, the Jnanpeeth Award, in 1968. Umashankar Joshi is a familiar name to every child in Gujarat who has to read the State Board textbooks in Gujarati. I remember him being introduced by teacher after teacher as this towering critic and poet of eminence, grace, versatility, and erudition in the literary world of Gujarat, under whose shadow many lesser known literary talents struggled to grow. His sensibility shaped by the influence of Gandhi, often embraced the hungry, the poor, the untouchables in his poem:1

and yet, it embodies a conception of Gujarat and Gujarati that is nationalist, Sanskritic, elitist, and classical.2

Alongside this nationalist, secular impulse of his pen was a strong desire to escape the limitedness of identities, whether collective or individualistic, in order to be one with the enchanting world of nature that ran as much within him as outside of him. ‘Miles and miles run within me, as I stay still, unmoving in a running car,’ he would say. Time and again he rejoiced in annihilating the dualities of existence, or the divisiveness of identities, and found meaning in the all-effacing humanity of being. ‘Let me worship this soil, this earth and become a man of the world, let me stop being an individual.’3

 

Does this mean that a poet becomes the poet of the city when he is recognized by those outside the city apart from those of the city? Or simply by virtue of birth and birth alone? But then what do I make of those who were not born in Ahmedabad but had made the city their karmabhoomi: Kavi Dalpatram, ‘Sundaram’ (Tribhovandas Luhar), Priyakant Maniar, Rajendra Shah, Raghuvir Chawdhari? Or is it also important that the poets write about the city and respond to the spirit of creativity that fills the air here? Would Labhashankar Thakar, therefore, qualify more, like many of the other REIGH math poets – Chinu Modi, and Manhar Modi and others – working against the traditionalist worldview with their iconoclastic, experimental and absurdist poems, because he responded, confronted, and rejected the elitism of Umashankar?4

 

Or would not Farid Mohammad Gulamnabi, known to the city as ‘Adil’ Mansuri, born in the walled city, be the emblematic poet of the city with his famous ghazal immortalizing Ahmedabad in our imagination just before he left the city forever?5

Perhaps not. Perhaps Adil would be more of a ‘spy’, a ‘traitor’, who had brought the magic of poetry from Karachi, or a refugee, who had come to Ahmedabad in 1955 with a Pakistani passport, or an escapist to have left the city in 1985 for greener pastures in the US even after the citizenship that had seemed like a dream deferred in the wake of the communal riots of Gujarat in 1969 was granted.6

And what of Niranjan Bhagat, born in one city and writing more about another? I guess what is going wrong here is my own understanding of the city.

 

The city is not to be understood as a geographic locale but more as a sensibility that is urban, diverse, dismembered. His poetry, darkly outlined with the Bombay skyline, passes through the monuments of the city, its museums, zoos, cafes, aerodromes, aquariums, its neighbourhoods – Colaba, Walkeshwar, Falkland Road, Flora Fountain; and meets with beggars, sex workers, hawkers, and lepers. Niranjan is undoubtedly the poet of the city; enamoured of his ‘Pravaldweep’, his Coral Island in its beauty and ugliness, dreading its apocalypse.

 

His poems about the city capture the dryness of the asphalt, the roughness of the concrete, glass and stones, the sharpness of wires, bolts, rivets, screws, nails, but above all the violence of its speed and the loneliness of its dwellers; the scaly texture of urban existence. It makes this time-bound, machine-bound city stop in media res to reflect, to lament a life caught in fake neon-coloured glass cabins, like that of an aquarium, without the waves of the sea and the sunlight.7

The theme of his sixteen poems in Pravaldweep is not Bombay. Bombay is only a metaphor, a symbol for an urban landscape, a modern city alive in its anonymity and universality. As he himself observed, ‘Bombay is not a city on the map, nor a physical or geographical entity. Mumbai is a state of mind, a sensibility.’

 

But as we welcome the modernity of Nirajan within the walls of the city, we also begin to notice at the margins of modernity, another geography surrounding the central urban space, not far from it but distinctly separated from the central skyscrapers, in its slums and in its ghettos – a geography not of the mind, but of economies, societies, cultures, of lived experiences of exploitation and oppression. Footsteps from these ghettos roam the city streets in the morning light, cleaning, sweating, searching, begging, and disappear back into the ghettos as night approaches. A soul-stirring cry rises then from these outskirts of the city leaving us confused again.

What does one do when these mournful, angry voices surge and make their way from the ghettos towards the city gates, riding the stormy winds of the night? Do we listen? Do we ignore them? Do we drown them with our own loudness? Do we plug our ears, bolt our doors and windows tight? Or do we do the exact opposite? Are these also the voices of the city? Where do these voices belong? What should we name them? ‘Call us what you will!’ says Nirav Patel,8

The reality and materiality of this other geography comes alive in Nirav Patel’s angry voice that cares little about a certain established standard of beauty, aesthetics, form, rhythm, meter, figure of speech, or even ‘proper’ subjects for poetry. When he turns traditional poetry upside down, he finds a space to document the lives of the oppressed, till now sidelined in society, history, education, and literature. In the diction of ‘untouchable’ poetry, he finds a legitimate space of expression of his perspectives, his fury, as well as the physicality of a truth like the Jetalpur massacre.9 His poetry is inflammable:10

What should we do with the inflammable voices of Aakrosh, Kalo Sooraj, Sarvanam, Swaman that threaten to burn down the city?11 When the flames of Nirav Patel, Dalpat Chauhan, Praveen Gadhavi, Sahil Parmar, Jayant Parmar, Chandra Shreemali reach the wooden forts of the city, what are we to do? Should we call the police, the army, the fire brigade, the ambulance? Or should we just embrace the flames, for who knows, a new city may arise from the ashes of the old one?

Are there sparks or flames, Salagati Havao inside the gates as well?12 Where did they come from? Did sparks fly across the fortress or was the heat getting too much? Is the city still intact, protected, and safe within those twelve gates, or had it already left, leaving the arid land behind?13

The Urdu poems of Sadiq Noor speak of the amnesia that has plagued this city which has forgotten the richness of its own history of togetherness, people, culture, and languages. His poetry is often an acute cry of a community that is withering in an unfriendly soil, filled with pesticides of hatred, as it tries in vain to hang its teary dreams of a land that one can call one’s own on a shooting star!14 The question remains, can the city call a poet its own even when she refuses to speak the language of the city, literally and metaphorically? Can the city abandon those it owned yesterday? Or can it accept as its own those that keep dreaming of another time, another space?

What does one do when a poet born in the city, writing for the city, decides one day to treat it as dead and wants to perform its last rites?15

Can Saroop Dhruv, rebellious as she has been, be considered a poet of the city? There were times when researching and reading for this article I contemplated writing the piece on her poems alone, for they have traversed the gendered geographies of class, caste, religion within the city like no one else. Her poems, coloured by and woven out of the changing ethos of the city, seem to represent in a nutshell the changing social and psychological fabric of the city of Ahmedabad. Should I include her as a representative poet of the city here or should I leave her out as a recent anthology of women’s voices did? Should the city consider its rebellious children its own? Because how can one renounce that which one does not own? How could one perform last rites without belonging? And ironically enough, is there not a desire to unite with the one that we knew in another dimension through these acts of mourning? The questions seem more and more futile as I write.

The questions, however, do make me realize that the problem lies in this very idea of belonging. How does it matter to which city, country, community, class, group, religion I belong or not? Why do I need to belong? Does not the very concept of belonging come with its own violence, violence of borders, of written and unwritten laws, of inclusion and exclusion? I realized I would be able to make more sense if I were to ask instead – so, where does a poem belong? It certainly does not belong to a city or a poet, even if it comes from there. A poem belongs to those who inhabit the cities it creates. These cities are not the ones we live in, but those that we dream of. It is in her poems that a poet lives, creating spaces that do not exist in the world around her, negotiating the ones that exist, recreating those that we have lost, remembering those we have loved and let go of. Poetry lives, if I were to talk in the tongue of Imtiaz Dharkar, in ‘the cracks that grow between borders, behind their backs’. It knows no particular custom, no language, no culture. She must be from another city!

 

Footnotes:

1. When the hungry fire awakes

From the oppressed bellies

Hissing with infinite tongues

And destroys this mockery of the poor;

you shall find

not a clinker of the ruins

From Jatharaagni (Belly Fire) by Umashankar, and translated by Pratishtha.

2. I, an Indian Gujarati

I wish for prosperity for all

My mind makes a joyful call

I, an Indian Gujarati

Blessed is this earth of Krishna

Who rushed to help the grieving;

Blessed this earth of Gandhi

Who drank the nectar of Gita smiling;

Let the acts of love, acts of Gandhi and Krishna

Swell my heart… I am.

From Hun Gurjar Bharatvaasi (I, an Indian Gujarati) by Umashankar, and translated by Pratishtha.

3.

From Vishwamanavi (Man of the World) by Umashankar, and translated by Pratishtha.

4. Looking at words

– thus sliding,

Melting like ice

Unblinkingly,

Hey Laghara*!!

Look here

Even this Himalaya is going to melt tomorrow.

And slide away towards the sea.

And yet it will stay

And you will stay

Words will stay

The memory of the words will stay

Stay, the process of melting will stay

Because…

Oye Laghara! You slept off? So quickly?

From Laghara *(The Ragged One) by Labhashankar Thakar, translated by Pratishtha.

5. You may or may not find this city playing in the riverbed

This scene may or may not surface in your memory

Let me fill my hair with the sand of my homeland

This sand I may or may not get in a lifetime.

From Male Na Male (May or May not Find) by Adil Mansuri, and translated by Pratishtha.

6. I confess, I am a spy.

changing names

I wander here

in disguise

to fathom dark secrets of silence.

From Kaboolaat (Confession) by Adil Mansuri, translated by Pratishtha.

7. Mapping the miles span after span

And yet reaching nowhere.

Walking speedily forward forever

Not to stop, not to lament.

Only a man

(I see many like myself beyond this glass

who are no exhibits!)

has learnt this art

So profound.

A fish swims

Not a care for the life left behind!

From Aquariumma (Inside Aquarium) by Niranjan Bhagat, translated by Pratishtha.

 

8. We bow to the ordinance

We call the flowers by some other name

The fragrance is not going to die, is it?

And we will call these flowers

The stink is not going to go away, is it?

(from Phoolvado (Ghetto of Flowers) by Nirav Patel, and translated by Pratishtha)

9. Asprushya Kavita (Untouchable Poem) by Sahil Parmar, Jetalpur Hatyakand (Jetalpur Massacre) by Nirav Patel.

10. Here, torch a fire to my tail;

And I will burn down this upper-caste city.

Fill my cheek’s cavities with explosives

And I will bring about riotous destruction.

Grind my bones and add phosphorous

And throw it around like Gulal on their white faces

Or draw with it the sacred lines on their forehead,

Squeeze each and every word of mine

To fill bright green cups of poison

That will pollute the stoup of Gangajal

Make a Vajraor an armour if you please from my bones.

I am a chamar

What else can I offer while I live?

(from Dalit Dadhichee *by Nirav Patel and translated by Pratishtha Pandya)

*Dadhichee refers to a hindu sage, who sacrificed his life so that Gods could use his bones to make a ‘Vajrastra’ that was to help them win the heaven back from the serpent kind Vritra)

11. Aakrosh (Anger), Kalo Sooraj (Black Sun), Sarvanam (Pronoun), Swaman (Self-respect) are names of various Dalit magazines in Gujarati

12. Saroop Dhruv’s Collection Salagati Havao (Flames of Air)

13. Among all these is also a gate to my house

I go out from that gate

Weave a few dreams

And come evening I come back to the same gate

But you –

Outside the prison of your gates, free!

Burying your

vaults, domes, minars

The exquisite examples of art in stone

Missing remains of Vali

Inside my heart

You have walked to the other side of Sabarmati

Outside the prison of your gates, free.

Mubaarak, the new lanes to you,

Ahmedabad.

(from Ahmedaabad (Prosporous Ahmedabad) by Sadiq Noor, and translated by Pratishtha Pandya)

14. Tootate Tare (Shooting Star), Matoob Shajar (Cursed Tree), and Maun (Silence) by Sadiq Noor in Nadi Ka Ghar (The House of the River).

15. Amdavad! What all has happened…? How come your blood doesn’t curdle?

Belly… this exploding pumpkin! Your secret underbelly!

How it has swallowed it all!

You swallowed this much flesh and blood

You burped,

And now you gently stroke your belly.

You Ahmedabad, how can I claim I am your own?

How can I?

You are almost dead, dead, half-dead, madly craving for death, heading towards death, intoxicated with death…

Ahmedabad! I wanted to sing an epic song of glory

At least once… but here I am composing an elegy!

Where elegy?... only laments now!

You are my mother, my father… here; at the end of 2002 and at the dawn of 2003

I burry you – cremate you – I give you to the crows… my city!

And I announce to the world that from now on I am

Without a mother

without a father

a vagabond

An absolute orphan.. my Ahmedabad! Absolute orphan!!

Lavaris (An Orphan) in Hastakshep (Interference) by Saroop Dhruv, and translated by Pratishtha Pandya.

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