Nanak Singh (Originally in Punjabi)
Khooni Vaisakhi: A Poem from the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919
Poetry
Trans. into English: Navdeep Suri
Harper Collins: Noida. 2019
pp 152 | 499

‘Don’t ever despair, if things are bleak’
‘Our postcards of pain’

The literary response, whether immediate or delayed, to traumatic political events and mass slaughter, continues over a period of time and evolves its own traditions. Punjab  has been at the receiving end of  political conflicts throughout its history, including the incarceration of Guru Nanak and others by Babur in the 1520s, during his third and fourth invasions of India, the Mughal atrocities against the Sikh Gurus, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the Partition of India, the years of militancy in Punjab and the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. These traditions have grown and moved beyond their territorial representations and have been a part of the national tradition of dissent in larger humanistic and humanitarian contexts. The translation of Nanak Singh’s Khooni Vaisahki: A Poem from the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919, translated by his grandson Navdeep Suri in the centenary year of the carnage, needs to be placed in the context of its vast historical setting in order to appreciate its full significance.

The essentials first: Khooni Vaisakhi is a record of Nanak Singh’s first-hand, instantaneous experience of the events of 13 April 1919, when General Dyer ordered the indiscriminate killing at the spontaneous public gathering at Jallianwala Bagh. The writer was actually present at the Bagh and an eyewitness of the massive tragedy, as a 22-year-old. Within months, by 1920, he had written his stark and moving poem; and along with two other eyewitness accounts of the same event – Vidhata Singh Teer’s Teer Tarang and Firoz Din Sharaf’s Dukh de Kirne – it was promptly banned by the British Government. One of the very interesting aspects of this bilingual edition of the 1920 poem is the account of the long struggle to retrieve the original manuscript and the Cover Page of its first publication, so that the authentic text could be brought into the public realm. Navdeep Suri’s translation and commentary commemorates this journey of retrieving the manuscript, while highlighting the deeply humanistic concerns of both the poet and the translator. Apart from the poem itself, the book contains the Preface by Suri in which, among other things, he dwells upon the challenges of translating poetry. Integral to the text are the 25 sections of Khooni Vaisakhi, and the facsimile of the original Cover page of 1920. The historical and literary background is provided by Suri’s wide ranging essay ‘The Bagh, The Book and Our Bauji’ and Harbhajan Singh Bhatia’s ‘Khooni Vaisakhi: A Historical and Humanistic Perspective’. A tour de force of this book is the emotive and critical account by Justin Rowlatt, the great grandson of Sir Sidney Rowlatt, of the Black Rowlatt Act notoriety, which propelled the tragic events of 13 April 1919, and which is largely seen as ‘the first nail in the coffin of the empire’ in India.

The current edition of Khooni Vaisakhi is, therefore, clearly a labour of love and of great emotional significance, especially since it has been designed to evoke the memories of Jallianwala Bagh in its 100^th year. Its emotional energy also relates to the fact that this is the 550^th birth anniversary of the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak Devji. It resonates because of its association with Baburnama or Baburbani, the 4 poems of Guru Nanak, marking the resistance put up by him on behalf of the people of Saidpur (now Eimanabad), when the invading Moghul had imprisoned them. It also brings to mind Zafarnama, the epistle that Guru Gobind Singh wrote to his tormentor, Aurangzeb, in which he delivers a learned and perceptive discourse on religious freedom, the oppression of the Sikh panth, revenge, justice, forgiveness and divine grace. The essence of the poem has been caught in the memorable line of Baba Nanak at the assault on Lahore, by Babur in 1924: Lahore shehar, jahar, kahar, sawa pahar.

The poem, begins with an invocation to Guru Gobind Singh, the warrior, saint, poet and scholar, the tenth Guru of the Sikhs –

Let my pen fly across the pages,
To tell this tale, my Divine Guru.
Of innocent souls laying down their lives,
For our nation’s sake, my Divine Guru.

It reverberates with the cultural ethos of Vaisakhi as the spring festival which is celebrated enthusiastically in Punjab and the fact that Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa on Vaisakhi day in 1699.  Establishing the nationalistic and humanitarian credentials of the poet, himself a freedom fighter, the poem is remarkable because it shows the tremendous research that the young poet would have undertaken to get the accurate historical nuances of the event. Hardly is any detail missing: the rising unrest since Gandhiji’s call for a hartal on 6 April, the arrest of Dr Satya Pal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and the violent protests on 10 April 1919, the deputation of General Dyer to handle the situation, the actual shootings in the Bagh with its more than 1000 casualties, the aftermath of the shooting in which men and women braved the curfew to search for their loved ones, who they feared had been either killed or injured. The lingering pace of the poem brings alive the events leading to the ghallughara in slow motion, so that each part of the poem makes for a lived experience, while the agonised presence of the poet-witness pervades the narrative.

The Ram Navami festival on 9^th April sets the overall tone of communal harmony, symbolised by the friendship between Satya Pal and Saifuddin, the two influential leaders of Amritsar –

The seed of friendship between these faiths
Descended from heaven itself, my friends.
Discord and difference seemed to vanish
Each saw the other as brothers, my friends.
Shared the same glass to drink their water,
Sat down for meals together, my friends.
Like brothers separated since their birth
Stood united now by a miracle, my friends.

The theme of communal harmony runs like a thread through every single episode the poem talks about. So, after the telling description of the death and devastation wrought by Dyer, Nanak Singh goes on to add –

In minutes, the Bagh was strewn with corpses
None knew just who was who, my friends.
Many of them looked like Sikhs
Amid Hindus and Muslims plenty, my friends.
In the prime of their youth, our brave hearts lay
Gasping for one last breath, my friends.

There are poems which bring alive the pain of mothers, wives and sisters whose dear ones are either dead or wounded, followed by the ‘Poet’s Thoughts’ in which he laments –

Happily they left homes, the previous day,
Now gone, abandoned, their names unknown.
Like hermits, who leave their homes and kin
Just gone away, into some different zone.
Says Nanak Singh, Every one of them
Got a bullet that carried his name alone.

In the final sections of the poem, the martyrs – both living and dead – confront Dyer with a series of rhetorical questions, cursing him for his inhumanity and invoking divine punishment for the atrocities committed by him, and concludes with the poet himself asking –

… Which holy books allow
For innocents to be butchered like this, O Dyer?

The poem ends with the encapsulating of a comprehensive view of the tragedy, locating it within the larger context of British injustice, invoking the supportive role of Indians in the war effort, and underlying the ingratitude of the colonial ‘masters’ –

You asked and we sent our youth to die
Each order followed, no whats or whys
Just look at the rewards we gain,
Our postcards of pain.

Khooni Vaisakhi is, thus, certainly a lament; it is also an inspiring tale of the sacrifices of martyrs. But this must not prompt one to overlook the fact that it is a poem of the early 20^th century, when modern Punjabi poetry was coming into its own and Nanak Singh, is rightly regarded as one of its pioneers. The fact that he is known to be the first realistic novelist of the Punjabi language, - one who introduced political and social themes in his writing, is evident in this poem too, which remains a milestone political poem, relevant to its own time and also in the context of present day India.

Navdeep Suri has been a very conscientious translator, and he says in his Preface that it was a conscious decision to retain the Punjabi idiom of the original, with the re-creation of the rhythms of Punjabi in the translation. The incantatory nature of the poem is well preserved along with its focus on using oral traditions, like addressing the people who are the participants in the action (‘My Divine Guru’, ‘O Dyer’, ‘My friends’). The presence of the poet (‘Nanak Singh says’) is backed by the religious tradition of Sikh scriptures and the traditions of poetry in performance. While, non-initiated readers may find this a bit intrusive in English, the gentle lyricism, which emerges from these aural aspects of the poem, inspires a deep psychological connect across generations, languages and cultures; especially because these conventions are part of the Indian poetic traditions in various languages, including bhakti poetry.