kriticulture

Photo by Amarjit Chandan (This essay was written in 2008. A short version appeared in The Tribune in 2007 here https://m.tribuneindia.com/2007/20070909/spectrum/book5.htm) Pash would have been 58 now if, twenty years ago, his life had not been violently cut short by those who found his pen far deadlier than their automatic guns. The warrior-poet that he was, he would not have allowed his pen to rust either. Over the short period that he lived to write (1970-1988), he had matured so quickly that one can only speculate what all he would have accomplished had he survived those mean bullets. One thing is certain: the last two decades would have deeply troubled him and aroused in him even more of that lucid fury which so distinctively marks his poetry and thought. The world has greatly changed over the last two decades. What has been called a new world order has, beginning immediately after his death in 1988, overtaken the old. The complexity of this order is matched only by its sh...

On Daljit Ami’s translation of Amandeep Sandhu’s novel Roll of Honour By Rajesh Sharma  There are books with souls and there are books without souls. Amandeep Sandhu’s Roll of Honour is a book with a soul. What impregnates a book with a soul is the writer’s capacity to undergo the baptism of truth. To bear witness. To submit to the knowing that truth entails. The novel bears out that those who side with truth take no sides. Sandhu tells a very Punjabi story without succumbing to the baneful provincialism of today’s decadent cultural production. Ami’s decision to translate the novel’s title as Gawah de Phanah Hon ton Pahilan ( Before the Witness Ceases to Be ) could only have been made because he was able to peer into the novel’s soul. And that happened because the ways of the two witnesses, Ami and Sandhu, crossed. Ami saw himself in the novel, saw his own life, saw his own experience of history. As a historian and documentarist reading and translating a nov...