Silence Between the Notes: An Anthology of Partition Poetry |
Ed. Aftab Husain & Sarita Jenamani |
Dhauli Books, 2019 | ISBN-10: 8193963008 | ISBN-13: 978-819396300 | Pp xiii +178 | 395

‘Homeless in history’s graveyard’

Perhaps the most abiding metaphor which defines the Partition of the nation in 1947 is that of Silence. In spite of the constant stream of works about this defining moment in the history of three nations – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – the fact remains that for a long time, much of this writing remained at the level of what can at best be described as reportage and journalistic, even when it came in the form of novels and short stories; it is almost as if it was too painful to dwell upon the human aspects of the massive tragedy.  It is in this context that Aftab Husain and Sarita Jenamani – the Editors of this collection of Partition Poetry - evoke Adorno’s observation, ‘Writing Poetry after Auschwitz’ is barbaric’ – given the personalised and highly emotive nature of the almost blasphemous act of writing poetry in which the innermost secrets of the human mind are laid bare. This also indicates why poems about the Partition have not received the kind of attention that other genres have.

Much partition poetry is to be found in the journals and little magazines in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bangla and to a lesser extent, English, and scattered in the works of individual writers like Amrita Pritam, Kedarnath Singh, Agyeya, Agha Shahid Ali, to name a few. But as a specific genre, it is yet to come into its own, and this volume can be seen as a step in this direction. Long after Anju Makhija and Menka Shivdasani, along with Arjan Shad, edited Freedom and Fissures: An Anthology of Sindhi Partition Poetry in the 1998, we have a representative, if not comprehensive anthology on the subject now, with Silence Between the Notes: An Anthology of Partition Poems ,which within its pages, covers some of the finest partition poems from seven languages – English, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Kashmiri, Bangla and Sindhi – from the three countries most affected by the traumatic event. An internet search showed only one more publication in this area – Shamenaz Bano’s An Anthology of Poems on Partition Literature (2019), which she has compiled for MA students of Allahabad University.

When one thinks of Partition poetry, it is a handful of poems which come to mind immediately: Amrita Pritam’s ‘Today, I Invoke Waris Shah’; Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “The Dawn of Freedom’; Kedarnath Singh’s ‘Recalling 1947’; W H Auden’s ‘Partition’; and more recently, Fahmida Riaz’s ‘You Turned Out Just Like Us.’ The social media and YouTube, particularly have brought the renditions of these iconic poems into the public consciousness in a big way, and the rough translations available on various websites have contributed to the renewed interest in this kind of poetry. This makes Silence Between the Notes…  such a welcome addition in this area; bringing greater visibility to partition poetry, it also underscores the need that there are many more poems waiting to be discovered, translated and anthologised, so that the corpus of Partition poetry gains a definitive form and status.

Migration, leaving a homeland, growing roots in the host country, nostalgia for the lost motherland, the pain of separation from friends, family – these are some of themes of the poems featured in this anthology and they range from the frankly sentimental to the agonised philosophic ones:

Thus, we have Vimmi Sadaragnai’s lament in ‘My Sindhri’ –

Tell me, if I write to you,
will you bother to reply?
Ask me to meet you?

Tell me, oh my Sindhri,
tell me, oh my Sindhri!

to a victim’s cry in Agha Shaid Ali’s ‘Learning Urdu’

I only remember half the word
that was my village. The rest I forget.
My memory belongs to the line of blood
across which my friends dissolved
into bitter stanzas of some dead poet.

The sense of deep and irrevocable loss and quiet defiance of pain, is lyrically evoked in the following lines from Jibananda Das’s ‘Go Where You Will’ –

As if the fragrance of the quilt cover clings to her body,
As if she is born out of watercress in the pond’s nest –
Washes her feet silently – then goes far away, traceless
In the fog – yet I know I shall not lose her
In the crowd of the earth –
She is there on my Bengal’s shore.

And then, there is this gem of a poem by Imtiaz Dharkar ‘Gadddi Aa Gayi’ (The Train Has Arrived) which talks about nightmarish train journeys which ended in disaster and death for the people of the beleaguered times, in which women are among the worst sufferers, - women who take refuge in the ‘other’s’ country and wait for the train that will take them back ‘home’. The refrain juxtaposes the pain with the strain of romanticism inherent in Punjabi folk songs which sing of train journeys in happier times:

And a whole generation swallowed
the nightmare that sounded like trains.
Gaddi aa gayi tation te
Gaddi aa gayi tetaion te

The tales that remain silently buried in the hearts of people is well expressed in the same poem:

… One day when
my mother was planting potatoes in another
country, she dug up a fragment of china
and looked at it as if she remembered
something that had never been spoken.

The human tragedy that maps and other paper documents conceal is starkly depicted in ‘Demarcation’ by Naseer Ahmed Nasir:

Demarcation becomes easy on papers
with a few marks and lines
peaks, rivers, runnels, sloping terrains
pastures, hutments, jurisdictions and boroughs
passes and undisclosed alleys….
can be drawn;
but the shadows disobeying the walls
elongate to the doors, windows and patios
mark the remote recesses of the heart with silence; and
on the ground plan
the sun and rain change their tint!

It is not surprising that the voices of women and the sexual atrocities against women like rape and honour killings do not figure very prominently in the poems, because as Urvashi Butalia has emphasised in her path breaking The Other Side of Silence, families and communities sought to downplay this kind of trauma in order to maintain the semblance of honour which the violation of women’s bodies is seen to erode. However, in a rare poem like Surjit Patar’s ‘The Earth’ this kind of violence is presented directly and in all its horror –

Wails of thousands of women and belligerent roars of men
Who plunged their daggers in wombs to quench them.

And again, in the same poem,

A father strangled his pampered daughter
Putting her to sleep in the lap of death

A million thanks, O’ Almighty, for making death a
Safe place where even an alien breeze can’t touch

And Usha Kishore’s ‘Partition 1947,’ which brings the reader face to face with the brutality of

Its blaspheming men raping its women birthing a generation of bastards
Hacking a nation’s breast splitting open its womb….

All in all, Husain and Jenamani’s work can be seen as a kind of pioneering effort, bringing together 48 poems from India, 15 from Pakistan, 4 from Bangladesh and 1 from UK. With 22 English, 18 Urdu, 8 Bangla and Sindhi each, 4 Hindi and 1 Kashmiri poets being featured, it is clear that much groundwork remains to be done in Bangla, Sindhi, Hindi and Kashmiri and the field is wide open for anyone who wants to take this work further.

The stalwarts are all there: Agha Shahid Ali, Agyeya, Akhtur ul Iman, Ali Sardar Jafri, Amrita Pritam, Fahmida Riaz, Harbhajan Singh, Imtiaz Dharkar, Jibanannanda Das, Kaiser Haq, Kedarnath Singh, Keki Daruwala, Khumar Barabankvi, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Mohan Singh, Popati Hiranandani, Naseer Ahmed Nasir, Nida Fazli, Shamsur Rehman, Shankha Ghosh, among others. The younger generation which has not experienced partition directly is also well represented by including the poetry of Nirupama Dutt, Sukrita Kumar Paul, Taslima Nasreen etc and the new voices like Nabian Das, Aftab Husain, Manu Dash and Sarita Jenamani themselves are there to show that partition is well alive and a continuing presence in the minds of people. By and large the translations are commendable, especially in the hands of acclaimed translators like Baider Bakht, Leslie Lavigne, and Agha Shaid Ali, Nirupama Dutt, Menka Shivdasani and Anju Makhija. Many of the poems have been translated by the editors themselves, showing their commitment to the project they have undertaken. The correction of some misprints and greater editorial intervention in the final product will erase whatever lacunae remain, in the next edition.

From Popati Hirananadani’s ‘homeless in history’s graveyard’ to the searing indictment in Taslima Nasreen’s ‘Stands the man-made filth of religion, barbed wire’, to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s allurement, ‘Come, we must search for that promised land’ is a long journey from despair to hope to rebuilding, with Amrita Pritam’s reassertion of the human spirit through the power of Love, as the only force that can be the saviour in trying times:

Today, I invoke Waris Shah, Speak from your grave
And add a new page to the Book of Love.

Very much like Svetlana Alexievich, who has written extensively about the destruction wrought by the rigorous nuclearization of the world, and who concurs: “How did you make it out of there (Chernobyl) alive?” “My parents loved me a lot when I was little.” “We’re saved by the amount of love we get, it’s our safety net. Yes…only love can save us.” In many ways, this anthology is a reaffirmation of the unity of the subcontinental and South Asian ethos and unity.