Dream And Nightmare

In 1958, when the Sputnik blasted into space, itreceived one of its most lyrical tributes from an unlikely source, SahirLudhianvi. In a poem titled Mere Ahd Ke Haseeno (Beauties Of MyGeneration), he presented the event as a success of humanity over yet another ofnature’s barriers, the stars. Taking aim at those who saw their futures asastrally determined, Sahir saw in the Sputnik’s rise yet another sign thathumanity had trumped nature:

Those exalted stars, those heaven dwellers
Who revealed themselves, but mocked our tantalised reach
Those ravishing children of light, those princes of space
Who established their vain kingdom over our fates.

Beauties of (the new) generation
Accept this loving gift of the very stars from mine
The passion that has already enslaved water and fire
Now commands obeisance from the depths of space.

You who live with me, and you who will follow me in time
May this gift from my generation bring you joy
May you fly in space looking for a silver-bodied beauty
And may someone of rosy cheeks come here looking for you.

There is a passionate optimism in Sahir’s poem, which works at severallevels. First, it is imbued with internationalism, in the way in which itappropriates a foreign achievement with unselfconscious ease. There is a mockingdisavowal of tradition, implying that those who irrationally believe inastrology and the eternal power of the stars are now to be pityingly invitedinto the scientific fold. But above all, the poem demonstrates an abiding faithin technology, a belief that nature will ultimately bow down toward the power ofhuman endeavor.

Sahir’s poem is not an isolated instance of thecelebration of modernity by the Urdu poets. Progressive poets developed thetrope of modernity incessantly in their writings, as a marker of their era, andas a solution to the several problems that beset Indian society. This sense ofmodernity was to be marked by the triumph of reason, the creation of a"pure present" that would wipe away the horrors of the past, ateleological march towards social perfection, and the eventual elimination ofall exploitation and inequalities. 

In his famous poem Makaan (House) for instance, Kaifi Azmi wroteevocatively about construction workers and their role in the conquest of nature:

Once our arms learned the craft however, how could they stop?
Design after design took shape through our work.
And then we built the walls higher and higher,
Lovingly decorated the ceilings and doors
Storms used to extinguish the flames of our lamps
So we brightened our skies with stars made of electricity.

Kaifi then goes on to lament how the actual creators of this wealth, thelabourers themselves, were deprived of the fruits of their own creation. Ofcourse, this inequality was an artifact of the premodern past, and needed to beremedied by the conscious action of workers, through organised moblilisation.Kaifi poetically exhorts the construction workers to revolt, to create arevolution in which he, the poet will also participate:

Ban gaya qasr, to pehre pe koi baith gaya
So rahe qaak pe hum shorish e taameer liye
Apni nas nas mein liye mehnat e paiham ki thhakan
Band aankhon mein usi qasr ki tasveer liye
Din pighalta hai usi tarha saron par ab bhi
Raat aankhon mein khatakti hai siyah teer liye
Aaj ki raat bahut garm hawaa chalti hai
Aaj ki raat na footpath pe neend aayegi
Sab utho, main bhi uthoon, tum bhi utho, tum bhi utho
Koi khidki isi deewaar mein khul jaayegi

Once the palace was built, they hired a guard
And we slept in the dirt, with our screaming craft,
Our pulses pounding with exhaustion
Bearing the picture of that very palace in our tightly shut eyes.
The day still melts on our bodies like before
The night hits our eyes with black arrows,
A hot air blows tonight
It will be impossible to sleep on the pavement
Arise everyone! I will rise too. And you. And yourself too
That a window may open in these very walls.

The poem is remarkable because it not only represents the power of labour inachieving mastery over nature (through walls and stars of electricity), but alsodepicts the ultimate potential failure of modernity from the point of view ofthe socialist; that it does not automatically ensure a just and egalitariansociety. Modernity sometimes fails the very subjects who were promised freedomfrom the feudal system they had laboured under in earlier eras. This brings usto an important issue, of how progressive Urdu poets dealt with the immediatefailure of the modernist promise. How did they deal with the fact that theconquest of nature never really lived up to its potential, and sometimes evenproved to be more venal and repressive than the traditions it displaced? Afterall, the independence of the country brought partition, the cobwebs ofreligiousity never could be swept away, and the post-independence era saw theincreased marginalisation and devaluation of the progressive cause and the poetsthemselves.

For one, the poets sought refuge in a different form of modernist logic. Forexample, they blamed the failure of modernity's promise on the incompleteness ofthe modernist project, on its failure to vanquish some of the traditionalistdemons that it was supposed to replace. In other words, the problem withmodernity was seen as related to the fact that we did not have enough ofit. 

In his characteristically direct poem, Mera Maazi Mere Kaandhe Pe (MyPast On My Shoulders), Kaifi wondered at the persistence of sectarian violencein the subcontinent, despite the tremendous progress that had been achieved inyears past. He concluded:

Ab tamaddun ki ho ye jeet ke haar
Mera maazi hai abhi tak mere kaandhe pe sawaar
Mal liyaa maathe pe tehzeeb ka ghaala lekin
Barbariyat ka hai jo daagh, wo chhoota hi nahin
Gaaon aabaad kiye, shehr basaaye hum ne
Rishta jangal se jo apna thha, wo toota hi nahin

Be it the victory or the loss of culture
My past is still seated on my shoulders.
I have painted civility on my face
But it is still pockmarked by barbarity
I have populated villages, moved to cities
But never severed my relationship with the jungle.

As is clear from this poem, 'culture' (or the 'past') stands in as theculprit that prevents the liberation and evolution of the human being from thesurvival of bestial origins. This is entirely consistent with the project ofmodernity to create a "pure present", that would wipe out whatevercame earlier, so as to achieve a radically new departure. This is not to suggestthat the progressives did not acknowledge that something was quite wrong withthe object of modernity, especially in light of the horrors of urban violencethat visited the subcontinent after independence. For instance, Kaifi begins alater poem Saanp (Snake) in defensive terms. He deploys the snake as asymbol of the fundamentalism that one had hoped technological progress hadeliminated:

This snake that blocks my way, poised to strike
I had killed it the day I set foot on the moon.

Modernity, Kaifi asserts, had initially vanquished thehuman tendency to engage in sectarian violence, which stood in his mind as themost egregious example of premodern barbarity. However, he describes how thewounded snake ran into a temple, a mosque and a church, where it was treated andmade stronger by a variety of religious fundamentalists. So far, the poemappears quite conventional, blaming the failure of modernity on the survival ofpremodern atavisms. But by the end of the poem, Kaifi does a turnaround, andfurther theorizes the rise of fundamentalism in relatively unconventional terms:

Hui jab se science zar ki ghulam
Jo thha ilm ka aitbaar uth gaya
Aur is saanp ko zindagi mil gayi

Ever since science has become capitalism’s slave
Knowledge has been proven untrustworthy
And this snake has found life.

Despite its defensive tone, one can read in Kaifi’s poem a sense ofdisquiet that the elite can hold the liberatory powers of science slave. Therelationship between this enslavement and the rise of sectarian violence is notexplained, but the disquiet with modernity is quite apparent in the tentativetone of Kaifi’s assertions.

One of most cruel blows on the modernist and internationalist spirit of theprogressives was dealt by the partition of the subcontinent, which had beenexpressed eloquently, if wistfully, by Faiz’s phrase ye daagh daagh ujaala (thisashen dawn). In a poem titled 26 January, Sahir acerbically lays out thefailed promises of the nation-state, and of the whole promise of a liberatedmodernity that undergirded the socialist experience:

Come, and let us ponder on the question
Those beautiful dreams we had dreamt, what came of them?
Helpless nakedness does not even merit a shroud
What happened to those promises of silk and satin?
Democrat, humanist, pacifist
What happened to all those self-conferred titles?

This despair mirrored the plight of communists all over Europe, who had hopedthat the Bolshevik revolution would be contagious, but instead found themselvestethered to the cruel yoke of Fascism and Nazism. But in spite of these hiccups,the modernist dream appeared to acquire its own agency over time, becoming asimportant in its own right as the dream of an equal society. To that end, thePWA poets venerated artifacts of the industrial revolution: rockets,electricity, mills, and trains. Trains were especially popular, for theirstraight path, their piercing whistles, and their single minded teleologicaljourneys. In his elegy to the train, Raat Aur Rel (The night and thetrain), Majaaz offers a veritable inventory of its desirable attributes:

Phir chali hai rel, istayshan se lehraati hui
Neem shab ki khamushi mein zer e lab gaati hui
Daaman e taariki e shab ki udaati dhajjiyaan
Qasr e zulmat par musalsal teer barsaati hui

Zad mein koi cheez aa jaaye to us ko pees kar
Irteqaa e zindagi ke raaz batlaati hui
Al-garaz, badhti chali jaati hai, be qauf o qatar
Shaayar e aatish-nafas ka qoon khaulaati hui

Once again, the train jauntily leaves the station
Breaking the silence of the night with its whispered song.
Tearing a hole through the black fabric of the night
Shooting constant arrows of sparks at the palace of darkness.

Crushing anything that comes in its way
Revealing the secrets of the evolution of life.
Ultimately it flies, fearlessly,
Roiling the blood of the fire-souled poet.

Ultimately then, in spite of the discouraging lessonsof history, the progressives cheerfully and defiantly pushed the cause ofmodernity with such optimism, that when the backlashes emerged, they were leftdesperately holding on to their fragmented thoughts. Modernity cruelly announcedits failure to the optimist progressives in several ways. The abject failure ofthe moment of freedom and decolonisation, the rampant and ugly sectarianconflict in urban South Asia, and above all, the failure to secure a decent anddignified life for the masses, weighed heavily on the progressive poets. 

And when this failure sometimes looked deeply into their eyes, the PWA poetswrote their best poems, poems of anguish and rage. While they were unable toprovide a viable internal critique of modernity, they produced severalheartbreakers that may only be described as modernity’s laments, its dirges.Majaaz’s poem Aawara (Vagabond), while written in the earliest days ofthe movement, captures this sense of modernity’s ugly betrayal of theprogressive cause. The poem was written to highlight the deep sense ofalienation that the progressives felt with feudal Indian society, but can alsobe read as the ravaged cultural landscape that greeted them at the end of theirseven-decade quest.

The poem is written from the point of view of an intensely alienatedprotagonist who walks the streets at night, and gives voice to his feelings ofutter despair. This estrangement is derived from a sense of abject poverty thatthe protagonist experiences as he walks past the gay streets where the elitehave constructed a landscape designed to pretend that all is well. It also comesfrom his knowledge that all this wealth and this gaiety could be his if he madea series of compromises. He is however held back by his ‘worthless’commitments to honesty and fealty. His alienation takes several forms, sometimesof religious exploitation (a mullah’s turban), sometimes of penury (amoney-lender’s ledger). 

Older platitudes about the beauty of stars themselves become the cause ofgreat anguish, which turns into a sense of rage at the end of the poem. However,in the new century, we can read it not as rage of the programmatic socialistseeking to channel this anger into revolution, but the inchoate, ineffable andthe tragic rage of the human being who is caught in an Oedipal dilemma against aworld that is neither comprehensible nor changeable. It is the rage of theutterly helpless, and mirrors the condition of the PWA poets waking up fromtheir socialist-modernist dream.

Phir vo toota ek sitara, phir vo chhooti phuljhadi
Jaane kiski god mein aayi hai moti ki ladi
Hook si seene mein uthi, chot si dil par padi
Ai gham e dil kya karun, ai vahshat e dil, kya karun

Raaste mein ruk ke dam le loon meri aadat nahin
Laut kar vaapas chalaa jaoon, meri fitrat nahin
Aur koi ham-navaa mil jaaye ye qismat nahin
Ai gham e dil kya karun, ai vahshat e dil, kya karun

Ek mahal ki aad se niklaa vo peela maahtab
Jaise mulla kaa amaama, jaise baniye ki kitab
Jaise muflis ki javaani, jaise bevaa ka shabab
Ai gham e dil kya karun, ai vahshat e dil, kya karun

Jee mein aata hai, ye murda chand taare noch loon
Is kinaare noch loon, aur us kinaare noch loon
Ek do ki qadr kya, saare ke saare noch loon
Ai gham e dil kya karun, ai vahshat e dil, kya karun

There falls a shooting star, like a sparkler
A string of pearls fell in somebody’s hand, perhaps?
Desolation rises in my chest, like a blow
Anguished heart, desperate heart, what should I do?

To stop and rest on the way is not my habit
To admit defeat and return is not my nature
But to find a companion, alas, is not my fate
Anguished heart, desperate heart, what should I do?

From behind a palace, emerged the yellow moon
Like a mullah’s turban, like a money lender’s ledger
Like a poor man’s youth, a widow’s beauty
Anguished heart, desperate heart, what should I do?

I want to pluck this dead moon, these dead stars from the sky
Pluck them from this end of the horizon and from that corner
What is one or two, I want to pluck them all out
Anguished heart, desperate heart, what should I do?

Mir Ali Raza helps edit Samar, the South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection.