kriticulture

  Translated from Punjabi by Rajesh Sharma you don ’ t know how I ’ m counted in poetry: like some carcass-eating dog that has strayed into a full-blown mujra   perhaps you wonder what I write late into the nights in the light of a lamp for some party engaged in dangerous things   you don ’ t know how I go to poetry: like a rustic woman in new clothes of outworn fashion who steps, bewildered, into city shops   I ask of poetry nail polish for you coloured embroidery thread for my younger sister bitter medicine to treat father ’ s cataract   poetry sees mischief in such demands   every month night after night it sends for me its sentinels carrying batons of cane and guns with polished butts they take away my beloved books my childhood picture from the shelf and my first love ’ s cry that slipped on the stairs and, hurt, was broken into a disconsolate rainbow   you don ’ t know...

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...

  Editor’s Note A lot of good South Asian writing is taking place outside the dominant circuits of recognition. It was our assumption when we started SAE . Five years down the road, it is a conclusion. Leafing through pages from the past, we see many installed stereotypes crumbling. Yet much survives that seems to identify us.             What is still awaited is a radical mobilization of the elements of the ensemble that is us and our experience, a mobilization that dislocates, disassembles and creates afresh beyond merely reproducing. This would require infusion of energies from outside the ensemble’s boundaries. But haven’t cultures always outsourced? Isn’t imagination the great outsourcing machine? Isn’t literature always in another place, always already elsewhere?             South Asia is a horizon that must be transcended. Only when it begins to...