1857 : Looking for Things Misplaced
By Asad Zaidi
Translated from Hindi ('1857 : Saman Ki Talash')
by Rajesh Kumar Sharma
(This draft is being put online for the purpose of attracting comments and suggestions. The readers can read the original poem, written in Hindi, at http://pratilipi.in/?p=323)
The battles of 1857
that once upon a time
were far-off battles
are here and now.
In these times of shame
and of a sense of wrong
when every wrong
oppresses you as your own doing,
the ears catch
the rumble of war-drums
of the mutiny
and also the hubbub
that is so, so Indian
and the whispering
of frightened pimps and traitors
and the restive footfalls
of chance-mongers.
This could just be an effect
of fiction
and of commercial cinema
produced
since.
But this is certainly not the clamour
of those
150 crore rupees
which the Government of India
has sanctioned to celebrate
the 150th anniversary
of the First War of
sanctioned
with the pen of a Prime Minister
who is embarrassed
of every battle for freedom
and goes begging
around the world
for apologies,
a Prime Minister
who would sacrifice
all
for the national objective
of a better subjugation.
This is the reminder
of a fifty seven
erased
by a national elite,
by Bankims and Amichands and Harishchandras,
and by their offspring
installed in thrones,
who never wanted anything
better
than a better enslavement.
A fifty seven
for which there was nothing
but contempt
or reticence
in the minds of Moolshankars,
of Siva Prasads
and Narendranaths
and Ishwar Chandras
and Syed Ahmads
and Pratap Narains
and Maithili Sharans
and Ramchandras.
A fifty seven
that came to be remembered
in the exclusive literature
of Hindi
only by Subhadra
some seventy
or good eighty long years
later.
This is the reminder
of a process
that gets relived now
some 150 years too late
in suicides
of peasants and weavers
whom you cannot even call rioters
or protesters
and who go
their lonely way
-- as food of the national indexes
of development
and starvation --
from Special Economic Zones
towards collective graveyards
and cremation sites
like a melancholy
grime-faded
ungovernable procession.
Who has left them
so terribly
forsaken?
Back in 1857
the common people were probably meant to be
that soiled
and filthy,
fated perhaps
to be so,
with an irrevocability
that no one questioned.
Today
such appearance has become
an extreme crime.
Battles often remain
unconsummated,
only to be consummated
in times to come,
in other ages,
with other weapons.
At times it so happens
that the soil-laden corpses too rise
to give battle yet again,
mocking the living
that are deader than themselves.
And they want to know from them
which section of the infantry
or cavalry
they belong to,
which leader they follow.
Or
taking them to be sympathizers,
they happen to tell them
of their destination
that is Najafgarh,
or else
they pause to ask the way
to Bakhtawarpur.
The dead of 1857 speak.
Forget about our feudal leaders,
forget about the jagirs
they fought to repossess,
forget too the way we did die
for their sake.
Tell us something
of yourself.
Is the world now fully delivered
of injustice?
Or is it just
that you are blind,
that you only can’t see
any way out?
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