Women's ways of seeing history & penning poetry

Hindustan Times

17 hours ago

Strap: Two interesting books by city writers of a forgotten struggle & singing over bones
I belong to the times when women were far and few to find in the literary world, heavily populated by men. Of course, there were the prominent ones who had made their way despite the pride and prejudice of the male dominated society across the many Indian languages. To name just a few of the daredevils of the 70s: Kamala Das in Malayalam, Maha Shveta Devi in Bengali, Ismat Chughtai and Quratulain Hyder in Urdu, Krishna Sobti in Hindi and of course our very own Amrita Pritam to name just a few. Of course women writers were always there and invariably since mythical times they were iconoclasts. But here in these 800 or so words, I speak only of the times of which I was 'sakshi'(witness). But by and large literature was a man's world. Interestingly, those were times of mushairas and kavi sammelans which called for poets to sit on the stage and recite their verses one by one. In a gathering of some three dozen poets competing to loot the show with their art, one would find one or two women, pretty to look at, but not yet evolved into being a challenge to the loud male voices swinging in tarannum or otherwise. But given a chance, the second sex had it in them to cast a spell. Many recall that after a few years of the cruel Partition of India in 1947, an Indo-Pak mushiara was held in Karachi and a young woman was there in the lineage of stalwart male poets of the two countries of the greatest and bloodiest parting ever in the world. When this young woman got the mic, she spoke just one couplet, everyone was stunned and soon tears were running down the eyes of the audience, both men and women as well as seasoned poets on the stage. The two liner just said: 'Ashiyane ki baat karte ho/ Kis zamane ki baat karte ho!'( You talk of your abode do you/ What era are you referring to) and the young woman was none other than the celebrated Zehra Nigah, now aged 90, who had migrated with her family from Hyderabad in India to Karachi at age 12, but her young eyes had seen it all and her tender heart had felt what it was to be forced out of your own home. And now onto the daughters of Zehra...
Holiday in Andaman started it all
How did Rana Preet Gill, a veterinary doctor with a flair for letters, penning light middles and soft fiction, become a chronicler of the failed Ghadarite movement of Punjab? The answer to this is to be found in a family holiday she made to the Andaman islands in the winter of 2013. Gill recounts that her senior colleague Rajiv Bali took her to take look at the statue there of his ghadarite brother Ram Rakha Bali installed in the park facing the cellular Jail. So she did, posing with the statue of the patriot and sending it to Bali. The matter ended there but seeds of curiosity were sown in her mind. She recalls: 'Bali was a Ghadar revolutionary from Hoshiarpur, where I had been living for since 2013 but busy with my work I knew little about the rich past of the Doaba region. So I started exploring'. Well, her explorations took her to the right address and soon she was in the company of Harish K Puri, renowned scholar who had received a Fullbright scholarship in the early 90s and deeply researched the Ghadar movement at the University of California, Berkeley. Author of the 'Ghadar Movement A Short History', Puri says of Gill's book: 'Based largely on the study of the many published accounts of the struggle available to her, this book includes her own retelling of the self-sacrificing actions.' Scholars have held that although the movement was dismissed as a failed movement, yet it had a deep impact on the freedom movement in India.It raised many questions in the minds of the Indian labour abroad and gradually and the dream of an Independent India took root. Gill adds: 'Women write from a different perspective. They view through the prism of a woman's heart. What would other women feel? Like in my book, I have mentioned towards the end the pain of loss felt by women in the lives of Ghadarites. Men become martyrs so do women...they bear the burden of a painful life.' She adds, 'Women tend to write from the perspective of the oppressed and they always acknowledge the role of other women. They do not negate other women.'
Singing over bones
The past decade has seen Amy Singh active in organising poetic symposia, open mic, poetry symposia in the city gardens, her famous letters to Lahore have made this pretty girl well-known here and across the border too as she started a letter writing mission to keep the dialogue open. She was at the forefront of the women's protest at the road near the Leisure valley being christened the Gerhi Route in which young men took pride in chasing girls or in the old usage, eve-teasing them. The brave young girls of the city got together to protest against this and calling out to put an end to the chase and Amy was one of then. And lo, the city administration had to bow to the brave new girls and the nomenclature of the route changed from Gerhi Route to Azadi Route, spelling freedom for women after a stalking incident in 1917. Chirpy and full of beans, our young friend has starred in many litfests at different destinations in the country and is also a favourite at Lahore. But all this was accompanied by struggle and loss of her dear ones, I resurrected myself in words which came to her putting balm on many sores and a lighting her eyes with a twinkle. She says: 'I turned to paper like one turns to God. Not for the sake of poetry but for self-preservation.' She dabbled in the poetic across languages, sometimes in Hindi, sometimes in Punjabi and English too. A book that influenced her was 'Women Who Run with the Wolves' by Caressa Pinkola Estes, an American psychiatrist. The role model before her was that of La Loba, the mythic folkloric woman, who gathers the bones of dead wolves and sings over the skeleton of dead wolves, raises her arms and starts singing until the wolf comes alive and runs into the canyons. Amy says the metaphor touched her deeply and thus we have a collection of poems across the three languages: Hindi, Punjabi and English all in the Roman script. So here is as teaser from one of her feisty poems: 'In our home, things often break/ vase from the side table/ my mother's jewellery, vermillion vows/ I pick up the wreckage after you/ but I leave my own pieces on the floor'.
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