oct 26th, 2008
rest then, disquieted heart. a toast to all exiles.
DIWALI --- Vikram Seth
Three years of neurotic
Guy Fawkes Days-I recall
That lonely hankering-
But I am home after all.
Home. These walls, this sky
Splintered with wakes of light
These mud-lamps beaded round
The eaves, this festive night,
These streets, these voices...yet
The old insensate dread,
Abeyant as that love,
Once more shifts in my head.
Five? Six? generations ago
Somewhere in the Punjab
My father's family,farmers,
Perhaps had a small shop
And two generations later
Could send a son to a school
To gain the conqueror's
Authoritarian seal:
English! Six-armed god,
Key to a job, to power,
Snobbery, the good life,
This separateness, this fear.
English: beloved language
of Jonson, Wordsworth's tongue-
These my "meridian names"
Whose grooves I crawl along.
The Moghuls fought and ruled
And settled. Even while
They hungered for musk-melon,
Rose, peach, nightingale,
The land assumed their love.
At sixty they could not
Retire westwards. The British
Made us the Orient.
How could an Englishman say
About the divan-e-khas
"If there is heaven on earth
It is this; it is this; it is this."?
Macaulay the prophet of learning
Chewed at his pen: one taste
Of Western wisdom "surpasses
All the books of the East,"
And Kalidas, Shankaracharya,
Panini, Bhaskar, Kabir,
Surdas sank, and we welcomed
The reign of Shakespeare.
The undigested Hobbes,
The Mill who later ground
(Through talk of liberty)
The Raj out of the land ...
O happy breed of Babus,
I march on with your purpose;
We will have railways, common law
And a good postal service-
And I twist along
Those grooves from image to image,
Violet, elm-tree, swan,
Pork-pie, gable, scrimmage
And as we title our memoirs
"Roses in December"
Though we all know that here
Roses *grow* in December
And we import songs
Composed in the U.S
For Vietnam (not even
Our local horrors grip us)
And as, over gin at the Club,
I note that egregious member
Strut just perceptibly more
When with a foreigner,
I know that the whole world
Means exile of our breed
Who are not home at home
And are abroad abroad,
Huddled in towns, while around:
"He died last week. My boys
Are starving. Daily we dig
The ground for sweet potatoes."
"The landlord's hirelings broke
My husband's ribs-and I
Grow blind in the smoke of the hearth."
"Who will take care of me
When I am old? No-one
Is left." So it goes on,
The cyclic shadow-play
Under the sinister sun;
That sun that, were there water,
Could bless the dispirited land,
Coaxing three crops a year
From this same yieldless ground.
Yet would these parched wraiths still
Starve in their ruins, while
"Silkworms around them grow
Into fat cocoons?", Sad soil,
This may as well be my home.
Because no other nation
Moves me thus? What of that?
Cause for congratulation?
This could well be my home;
I am too used to the flavor
Of tenous fixity;
I have been brought to savour
Its phases: the winter wheat-
The flowers of Har-ki-Doon -
The sal forests - the hills
Inflamed with rhododendron -
The first smell of the Rains
On the baked earth-the peaks
Snow-drowned in permanence--
The single mountain lakes.
What if my tongue is warped?
I need no words to gaze
At Ajanta, those flaked caves,
Or at the tomb of Mumtaz;
And when an alap of Marwa
Swims on slow flute-notes over
The neighbours' roofs at sunset
Wordlessly like a lover
It holds me-till the strain
Of exile, here or there,
Subverts the trance, the fear
Of fear found everywhere.
"But freedom?" the notes would sing...
Parole is enough. Tonight
Below the fire-crossed sky
Of the Festival of Light.
Give your soul leave to feel
What distilled peace it can;
In lieu of joy, at least
This lapsing anodyne.
"The world is a bridge. Pass over it,
Building no house upon it."
Acceptance may come with time;
Rest, then disquieted heart.
3 comments:
its a beautiful & a very appropriate poem but it repeats some of the old (& false cliches) -- that bit about the Mughals, etc.
I was reading an interesting article by Sandhya Jain some time ago. She writes that in bengal, the Hindus, zamindars especially, actually started celebrating Durga Puja with the pomp & show we are now so accustomed too, only after the british ended the Muslim rule in Bengal. Prior to that it was a risky thing, depending on the mood of the Muslim nawab. (One of Siraj-ud-daula's pastimes was abducting attractive hindu women, or torturing Hindu bankers for cash)
I am not denying the overall spirit of the poem. But it must be remembered that whatever the evils of the British rule, the Hindu renaissance (the reform movements, the re-discovery of sanskrit, classical dance, etc. etc.) only started when the Muslim rulers finally got the boot in 1857.
"Kalidas,Shankaracharya, Panini, Bhaskar" had long been "dead" before the British came (except perhaps among the brahmins and in the deep south). What we had was persian / urdu, ghalibs, haq, sufis etc.
Cheers and Shubh deepavalli.
Shubh Deepavali to all. May this year reinvigorate the Hindu Samaj to unite beyond all barriers of Caste, Language, Region and defend itself from predatory aggressors.
May there be peace and prosperity in our land. May there be no hungry, impoverished or disenfranchised Hindu and may the enemies of our civilisation bite the dust. Jai Shri Ram.
yes, ramesh, i agree that a lot of p-sec north indians have this strange romantic notion of mohammedans. i was appalled by vikram seth's portrayal of mohdans in 'a suitable boy' -- all of them are so noble, so aristocratic, so refined! (and i'm thinking, these are jihadis at heart.) it's as though p-secs have this nostalgia for mohammedan rule. but on the other hand, there is no question that it was the christist imperialists who bled india completely dry.
it's a really poor choice, the devil and the deep sea, between the mohammedans and the christists. hard to say which is worse. on balance, probably the christists, as they smile nicely while they're stabbing you in the back. and then write the histories to extol how wonderful they are to relieve the 'natives' of their wealth. can't trust them to keep their wealth, you see, just like you can't trust them with nukes. (except of course if they are pakis.)
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