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Last week, the Central Board of Secondary Education tweaked the history syllabus for Class 10, dropping among other topics, two verses by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the subcontinent’s most well-known poets.
Faiz (1911-1984) was born in Sialkot, and grew up surrounded by literary greats including Muhammad Iqbal. Later, after Partition, he edited the leftist English daily, Pakistan Times, and as his grandson Ali Madeeh Hashmi writes in his biography Love and Revolution, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Rupa, 2016), “his poetry, his life’s work and his personality had combined to make him the most popular poet in the Indian subcontinent since Iqbal, Pakistan’s national poet.” When Faiz passed away, during Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s time and big gatherings were banned, people came out in the thousands to bid farewell. Everyone wanted to pay their respects to a “people’s man, a poet of revolution”, who had been “a thorn in every Pakistani government’s side since the country’s formation in 1947,” and had spent several stints in prison. At protest meetings, his ‘nazm’ Hum Dekhenge is still heard loud and clear. As long as the four things that infuriated him – “exploitation, injustice, tyranny, oppression” – are around in the world, his poetry will be remembered, says his grandson. Honoured with the Lenin Prize in 1962, Faiz was popular in Russia and Ludmila Vasilieva has written a definitive biography on his life and letters. The two verses dropped from the CBSE text accompanied posters on harmony and democracy; one is an English translation of his Urdu poem, ‘Aaj Bazaar Mein Pa-ba-joulan Chalo (Let us walk in the market in shackles)’. The online portal, Rekhta, says when Faiz was being taken from jail in Lahore, in chains, to a dentist in a tonga through familiar streets, people recognised him, and he wrote about it in the poem. The second poem, ‘Dhaka se Wapsi Par’ was written after his return from Dhaka in 1974, following Bangladesh’s liberation, in which he says, ‘Hum keh thehre ajnabi itni mudaraato ke baad/phir banenge ashna kitni mulaqaton ke baad./Kab nazar mein aayengi be-daag sabz ke bahar/khoon ke dhabbe dhulenge kitni barsaton ke baad.’ (We remain strangers despite our warmth and hospitality, how many encounters will it take for us to be friends again./When will we see spring in our eyes/when will the rains be able to wash away the bloodstains?)
In reviews, we read a monograph on the ancient Buddhist site at Phanigiri, Naushad Forbes’ wishlist for India’s growth, Wendy Erskine’s edgy stories and more. We also talk to Geentanjali Shree whose book Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi), translated by Daisy Rockwell, has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the first time a Hindi novel has been nominated.
Books of the week
Last year, Naman Ahuja collaborated with a galaxy of art historians and scholars of Buddhism to bring out a well-crafted book, Phanigiri: Interpreting an Ancient Buddhist Site in Telangana (Marg Publications), built around extant material – remains of viharas, sculptures, coins, inscriptions – that brings to life a well-planned Buddhist monastic habitation on a hilltop. Each of the six contributing scholars provide insightful descriptions and details of exquisite art and architectural remnants of the past. In her review, Aloka Parasher Sen says that while Akira Shimada’s deep insights on the region enable him to chronologically place many sculptural features found at Phanigiri within the larger subcontinental tradition of Buddhist artistic trends, John Guy sensitively pieces together intricate details to focus on the Yashtis and Yakshas articulating their rich meanings. “Peter Skilling’s imaginative gaze turns to textual allusions to highlight ‘memories’ encased in the material remains so as to eruditely share with us his intuitive faith that this hill must have ‘echoed with melodious sounds of Prakrit and Sanskrit liturgies…’. Art historians Parul Pandya Dhar and Naman Ahuja bring their best skills forward to suggest some innovative interpretations of two unique aspects of the artistic finds at the site.” In his introduction, Ahuja says that he “hopes to keep alive… [the] goal of documenting and bringing attention to Phanigiri through knowledge that will be useful to those who live there and work for its benefit.”
Phanigiri: Interpreting an Ancient Buddhist Site in Telangana review: Echoes from the past
Industrialist Naushad Forbes, Co-Chairman of Forbes Marshall, a steam and process engineering solutions provider, lays out a compelling vision of what needs to be done to actualise India’s immense economic potential, in his new book, The Struggle and the Promise: Restoring India’s Potential (HarperCollins). Armed with a wealth of charts, anecdotes, eclectic references from diverse fields of study and R.K. Laxman’s inimitable cartoons, Forbes, posits that India’s struggle to create a business-friendly environment has been accompanied by governments that ‘control some things too much and neglect others’. In his review, Suresh Seshadri writes that as a remedy, Forbes suggests we first acknowledge the low state capacity and limit the state’s actions to very few areas such as public health, in which it must seek to excel. “Forbes’s book, however, is not another well-intentioned homily on what the government must and must not do. He is equally demanding of his fellow industrialists. Observing that India, and especially the country’s industry, patently lags in innovation, Forbes notes that there is barely any emphasis laid on design and research and development.” The book offers invaluable insights on why and how India can yet aim to attain global leadership, “a vision he is deeply convinced of.”
The Struggle and the Promise - Restoring India’s Potential’ review: Forbes’ wish list
Wendy Erskine’s new collection of stories, Dance Move (Picador), starts quietly, unobtrusively. She collects small facts and gestures and ends up saying much more about the human condition located mostly in or around Belfast in Ireland. “Erskine is significant,” says Tabish Khair in the review, “not only because she is a brilliant short story writer, but also because she is at the cutting edge of an impetus beyond postmodernism and magic realism.” Khair points out that academics have not yet found a name for this shift yet as it multigeneric spread cannot be easily slotted into some compact ‘ism.’ “But I once heard the French bilingual writer, Sebastien Doubinsky, refer to it as edgy literature. It is not a bad description.”
Good morning, Belfast: Tabish Khair reviews Wendy Erskine’s ‘Dance Move’
Spotlight
The nucleus of Geetanjali Shree’s creative journey is often an image. For Tomb of Sand, that image was the sight of many old women lying in bed for the entire day, with backs towards people. “I have often wondered if they are turning their backs towards us or life,” says Shree in a conversation with poet Kinshuk Gupta for The Hindu. In the novel, the first part has the narrator wondering “does she wish to enter the wall as a dismissal of life or want to break through it to enter another dimension?” Shree (64) is a notable Hindi fiction writer whose first short story collection, Anugoonj, was published in 1991. She has published five collections of short stories and five novels so far. Her work often traces an old frail woman, usually a mother with a haunting past, on her journey of self-reclamation —as in her previous well-acclaimed novel, Mai, and a short story, ‘March, Ma Aur Sakura’. The mother in Tomb of Sand slips into depression after her husband’s death, and eventually comes out of it to find a new lease of life. However, writes Gupta, “Shree’s novel is not only about a mother making peace with her gnawing past but is also a political satire on the times we are living in — this comes out most sharply in the way the transgender Rozi, whom the mother befriends, is treated by most.” The translation stays true to the original, says Gupta. India will be rooting for Shree at the award ceremony on May 26 in London that she has been invited to attend.
‘I haven’t ever cared about anything except my writing’: Geetanjali Shree
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- On March 24, 2020, after the outbreak of the coronavirus, a complete nationwide lockdown was announced. Among other restrictions on travel, it was decided that the Indian Railways would no longer operate. The Great Shutdown (Harper) by Jyoti Mukul examines the impact of these decisions on millions, especially migrant workers.
- Tracing the moments and events that have marked the conflict in Kashmir, Siddhartha Guha Ray, a professor of history, narrates the complex past and present of a people stripped of their special status and Statehood. In Paradise Lost (Setu Prakashani), he writes an account explaining why Kashmir has stumbled from one crisis to another.
- Battles of Our Own (Penguin Modern Classics), by Jagadish Mohanty and translated by Himansu S. Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre, is set in the coal-mining region of western Odisha, where Jagadish Mohanty worked. The conflict between the colliery administration and the trade union drives the plot, setting and characters.
- In Sea of Tranquility (Picador) by Emily St. John Mandel, a detective is hired to investigate an anomaly in time. He stumbles across a series of lives: the exiled son of an aristocrat drifting towards madness, a writer left homeless as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a friend who gets the chance to do something extraordinary.
