Reclaiming the spirit, relieving the pain: Two poems for an independent India

New Indian Express

2 days ago

India has historically had more than one Independence Day. The first among them is 11 May 1857, the day on which the revolutionaries of 1857 declared Bahadur Shah Zafar as the Emperor of India. 'Against this background […] the Mughal court, for all its weakness, assumed a centrality and a political importance it had not had for a century. The daily audience, or darbars, were resumed for the first time since the Persians sacked the city in 1739, and the Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was hailed again throughout Hindustan as Mightiest King of Kings, Emperor son of Emperor, Sultan son of Sultan,' writes William Dalrymple in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (2007).
Yet the remarkable social significance of this turbulent day lay in its revitalising air of communal harmony. The flag song of the revolution, Hindustan Hamara, penned by the polyglot ideologue Azimullah Khan from Kanpur, proclaimed the fraternity of Hindus and Muslims:
Hum haen iss ke malik, Hindoostan hamaaraa
Paak watan hae qaum kaa Jannat se bhee piyaaraa.
(We are its owners, Hindustan belongs to us.
It is our holy land, lovelier than paradise.)
Aaj shabidon ne tumko, ahl-e-watan lalkaaraa
Todo ghulamee kee zanjeeren, barsaao angaaraa.
(Martyrs are calling you, compatriots!
Break the shackles of slavery, rain down fire.)
Hindoo–Mussalmaan–Sikh hamaaraa bhai piyaaraa–piyaaraa
Yeh hae azaadi kaa jhanda, isse salaam hamaaraa!
(Hindu, Muslim, Sikh are our dear brothers.
This is the flag of independence, salute to it.)
The Muslim Diwan of a Hindu Peshwa
Azimullah Khan's life was itself a testament to India's syncretic spirit. Born in the early decades of the 19th century, he was proficient in English and French, a scholar, poet, and political strategist. Azimullah served Peshwa Nana Sahib II as a minister, and could recite Persian ghazals as easily as he could quote from Sanskrit scriptures.
He had a keen interest in international politics and travelled to Constantinople to study the military capabilities of Russia. Later, he visited France and the Crimea, observing the politics and war strategies of their rulers. The struggles of those nations for their own freedom inspired him to work for India's liberation.
Azimullah sought to build friendly ties with countries willing to aid in the fight against British rule. After returning to India, he advised Nana Sahib to
rally native rulers and wrote to them about the urgency of coordinated revolt. To mould public opinion, he launched a newspaper, 'Payaam-e-Azadi', in both Hindi and Urdu.
He assisted leaders such as Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh, Moulvi Ahmadullah Shah, Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, Mughal Prince Firoz Shah, and Tantia Tope, formulating strategies against the British. When the flames of the 1857 revolt spread from Meerut to Delhi, Azimullah took up not only political and military roles but also the pen — crafting verses that united communities against a common oppressor.
Though the British crushed the revolt, his war song survived in oral memory — a relic of a time when the dream of freedom was inseparable from the dream of togetherness. Azimullah escaped to Nepal, where he breathed his last, but his message outlived him.
The Clouded Dawn
On 15 August 1947, the soil of India was red with the blood of communal riots triggered by Partition. If Azimullah Khan's song was the music of an unbroken dream, renowned Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Subah-e-Azadi (The Dawn of Freedom) was the dirge for a dream torn apart.
As the subcontinent celebrated its liberation, Faiz's words refused to join the official chorus of jubilation; he was consumed by anguish at the scourge of Partition.
Ye daagh ujala, ye shab gazeeda seher
Wo intezaar tha jiska, ye wo seher tau nahi
Ye wo seher tau nahin, jis ki arzu le kar
Chaley thay yaar ke mil jaye gi kahin na kahin
Falak ke dasht mein taaron ki aakhri manzil
Kahin tau hoga shab-e-sust mauj ka saahil
Kahin tau ja ke rukay ga safeena-e gham-e dil.
(This stained light, this night-bitten dawn;
This is not that long-awaited daybreak;
This is not the dawn in whose longing
We set out believing we would find, somewhere,
In heaven's wide void,
The stars' final resting place;
Somewhere the shore of night's slow-washing tide;
Somewhere, an anchor for the ship of heartache.)
Faiz concluded with:
Abhi giraani-e-shab mein kami nahin aai
Nijaat-e-deeda o dil ki ghadi nahin aai
Chaley chalo ke wo manzil abhi nahin aai.
(Night's heaviness is not yet lessened;
The hour of the heart and spirit's deliverance has not yet arrived;
Let us go on, that goal has not yet arrived.)
Faiz had witnessed the terrible price of freedom: trains arriving filled not with passengers but with corpses; refugee caravans stretching for miles; homes abandoned in haste; neighbours turned strangers. Independence had come at the cost of unity — the unity Azimullah's song had once so passionately proclaimed.
His refusal to romanticise 1947 was not cynicism but a moral stance. Freedom, Faiz insisted, could not be celebrated without confronting its cost — millions displaced, bereaved, and permanently scarred.
Today, India stands at a crossroads where the spirit of Azimullah Khan's song is more necessary than ever. His call to embrace our shared heritage and see one another as brothers is the antidote to the polarisation that gnaws at our social fabric. At the same time, we must free ourselves from the lingering pain that Faiz so eloquently captured — the divisions, prejudices, and unfinished reconciliations that bind us to the traumas of the past.
To reclaim the spirit of the former is to make unity not a slogan but a lived reality. To relieve ourselves of the pain of the latter is to dare to imagine a freedom that is whole — not fractured, not conditional, not partial.
The Fading Colours of the Rainbow
A rainbow — a thing of beauty — is a joy to every poetic mind. When the first public flag hoisting took place at Princess Park near India Gate in the afternoon of 15 August 1947, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled the Tiranga, and at that very moment, a rainbow appeared in the sky — as if nature itself blessed the tricolour with its full spectrum of promise.
Seventy-nine years later, those colours are fading. The saffron of courage pales when we are afraid to stand for what is right. The white of truth dims when falsehood becomes currency. The green of hope withers when cynicism takes root.
As Ali Madeeh Hashmi concludes his biography Love and Revolution: Faiz Ahmed Faiz (2016): 'Faiz is gone but his voice is still with us in his poetry, and so are those things in the world that so rankled and infuriated him: exploitation, injustice, tyranny, oppression. If we can remember that the best tribute we can pay him is to dedicate ourselves, in whatever small way we can, to ending these cruelties, Faiz would be happy that he had succeeded in his mission.'
This Independence Day, let us reclaim the colours of that rainbow. Let us bind ourselves, as Azimullah Khan once urged, in the fraternity of a common flag. Let us dry the tears Faiz wept for a fractured freedom. And let us dedicate ourselves to harmony, peace, and justice — so that future generations may inherit a rainbow that shines in full, undimmed glory.
(The author is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Email: [e-mail])