Late Poet Shamshur Rahman wrote this poem during the 1969 Gono Andholon (against President Ayub Khan) in which many people from all walks of life were killed by the army. We dedicate it to the memory of “Niloy Neel” (Niloy Chakraborty), Abhijit Roy, Ananta Bijoy Das, and Wahiqur Rahman, secular writers who were killed by Islamists in Bangladesh in 2015.

Where Shall We Keep this Body?

Where shall we put this body?

Where is its fitting grave?

Say the earth, or the mountain,

Or the deep-blue water of the sea–

All are tattered, only trifles.

That’s why we don’t put  this body in earth,  mountain or sea

But have kept it in our hearts.

–Shamshur Rahman (Trans. Chinmoy Banerjee)

From: “Gonojagoron Moncho”

এ লাশ আমরা রাখবো কোথায় ?

এ লাশ আমরা রাখবো কোথায় ?

তেমন যোগ্য সমাধি কই ?

মৃত্তিকা বলো, পর্বত বলো

অথবা সুনীল-সাগর-জল-

সব কিছু ছেঁদো, তুচ্ছ শুধুই !

তাইতো রাখি না এ লাশ

আজ মাটিতে পাহাড়ে কিম্বা সাগরে,

হৃদয়ে হৃদয়ে দিয়েছি ঠাঁই।

– কবি শামসুর রাহমান

Homeless

Chinmoy Banerjee

I cannot enter

Where he sits

On the freezing sidewalk

Beside the bank

With his head bent on his knees

The snow has gone

With the rain

But the man who sat

In his wheelchair

Where I cross the street to the coffee shop

Watching people go by

Talking with those who stopped

Is no longer there

Nor is the man in the baseball hat

Who weaved his way through the walkers

Passing and re-passing the window of the pizza shop

To be seen

The old man with the long white beard

Stands in the doorway

At the side of the barber shop

Conversing with a friend

Round the corner

Where the roses and potted plants

Light up the pavement

The man with the black beard

And denim jacket

Hails me as always

With wish for a nice day

The woman sometimes beside him

Is bent on the book in her lap

Crossing the street to the new tower

That I have made my home

I see the shopping cart

Covered in blue tarp

An umbrella protecting

Something I cannot see

Under the hoarding of

“Blue Sky” developers

A sign on the cart reads

“Blueberry Hotel”

Culture Supersedes Religion in  Establishing  National     Identity

By Promod Puri

Culture is a distinctive feature of one group of people comprising of several aspects. One of them is religion, and the others are language, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Obviously, one aspect of a culture does not represent the totality of it.

The expression “Hindu culture” is as vague as saying Hindu cuisine (except by airlines referring to “Hindu meal”). And it is as much blurred as trying to contrive a language, music, arts, customs, etc with suffix of Hindu. This applies to all other religions as well who try to create a culture exclusively linked to their faiths.

Culture in most cases is secular in nature.

When we talk about a cultural community, we mean an all inclusive explicit way of life. It represents all the group of people sharing common identities despite belonging to different religious denominations. But all speaking same language and sharing same social and cultural traits.

Often people of one cultural community have several religions. These sub differentiations are covered by conventions and customs. Together these are represented by the sanctified rituals on which Hindu tradition, Sikh, Muslim or Christian traditions establish their respective identities.

The unity of India lies in its cultural plurality. This factor was the basis of states’ reorganization at the time of India’s independence in 1947. Each state was constituted representing the cultural homogeneity of that region. And wherever there were more than one homogeneity states split respectively. Thus the cultural aspirations of people have been adequately addressed.

“India is a colorful country” mainly because of the exuberant nature of its diverse cultures. The cultural sameness in each Indian state along with the religious diversity is the accepted model for both political and administrative purposes.

Whereas each Indian state mostly represent one single cultural distinctiveness, it is the state of Jammu and Kashmir which within itself does carry more than one identity. The state has three regions, namely Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. And each one of them is culturally, religiously, geographically and even climatically different. Azad Kashmir under Pakistan domain has its own identity which is again quiet varied from rest of Jammu and Kashmir state.

The Kashmir problem has never been examined and tackled from its diversity aspect. The politics of the state has always been dominated, controlled and represented by the Muslim leadership of the Valley from the Kashmir region. The multi-facet and heterogeneous character of the state is the undetermined reality which otherwise can play a dominant role in resolving the Kashmir problem. Aligning the issue only on religious basis because about 64 percent of the state’s population is Muslim is a futile exercise to determine its fate. By not allowing the diversity factor in the Kashmir debate is suppression of its other identities as well.

In a democratic setup regions or nations which play only the religious factor in politics and governance, always have cultural identity crisis.

That has been the fate of Pakistan. It does not recognize and accept that the country’s cultural affinity lies with India which it can’t shake off. Both the political and military leaderships of the country in their hatred toward India try to establish a religious-based Arabic identity. Naturally, this is not working.

Pakistan must realize that cultural-based identities cut across religious-based identities. And the former can play more decisive and healthier roles in determining a cohesive and stable future for the country.

Pakistan may find some motivation from the Canadian society, not from its mostly racist governments, as how this multi- ethnic nation is establishing its national identity.

In a diverse Canadian society there are a multitude of cultures, traditions and religions, with lot more sub banners within each group. It is a myriad with a diversified web which gives Canada an image of acceptance and tolerance.

This evolutionary trend is being established despite the known retrogressive and discriminatory policies embraced by most Canadian governments over the years particularly toward the First Nation and visible minorities.

The Canadian cultural plurality is a unique experience in human social history which is trying to weave a frictionless social fabric from its distinct and assorted fibers. This multi-facet aspect gives Canada the color and character of being ever involving and exciting.

( Promod Puri is a former editor and publisher of South Asian Canadian weekly newspaper, The Link, retired and resides in Vancouver, Canada). The views expressed are those of the author.

From: Daily Times, Sunday, January 20, 2012

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\01\22\story_22-1-2012_pg3_3

  Saadat Hassan Manto and the partition of India

By Ishtiaq Ahmed



This year marks the centenary of one of the most remarkable Urdu short-story writers of the Indian subcontinent: Saadat Hassan Manto (May 11, 1912-January 18, 1955). His contemporary, Krishan Chander (1914-1977), himself a literary icon who some critics have described as the “the imam of the Urdu short-story” graciously wrote in his obituary on Manto that indeed he was the greatest short-story writer of his generation.

Manto had wanted inscribed on his gravestone that he wondered who the greater story-teller was: he or God. His sister was prescient enough to sense that in Pakistan it would sooner or later invite vandalism and much worse. So it was supplanted by a more modest claim: that Manto was aware of the fact that his was not the last word in this world.

Like many other youngsters initially I read Manto’s so-called sex stories primarily in search of salacious excitement, but sensed immediately that far from providing entertainment he was exposing in a shocking manner the misogynist culture and hypocrisy that pervaded South Asia. Some of his stories,  set in the background of the partition, on sexual violence against women are masterpieces.

Some biographical data is in order — Manto was born at Samrala in eastern Punjab in 1912 in a Muslim family of Kashmiri-Brahmin extraction. He grew up in Amritsar. He started his literary journey by translating Russian and French literature. According to some experts, the influence of Russian writers such as Chekov and the Frenchman Maupassant were the profoundest on his writings. He worked as a script, dialogue and story writer in Bombay, then joined All-India Radio, Delhi, but returned to Bombay some years before partition. He was well received and earned a good living. 

Manto penned sketches of Bombay film personalities in his usual irreverent and caustic style. The kindest words were reserved for legendary actor Ashok Kumar whom he described as a kind and caring friend, and a fellow Punjabi Shyam (died 1951), one of the handsomest actors in Bombay, who became his closest chum. The two were inseparable, but then the dagger and torch of mob fury unleashed during the partition riots in Bombay scared the life out of him. One day Ashok Kumar drove him to his home but they were caught up in the midst of a Muslim wedding procession. Manto was terrified. The people recognised Ashok Kumar but let them pass. At Bombay Talkies where Manto worked, the staff had changed and those Hindus who took over were hostile to his and other Muslims’ presence. His wife and daughter had already moved to Lahore.

He left for Lahore in January 1948.

It must be soon after he arrived in Pakistan that Manto composed an open letter to Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, reminding him that he too was a Kashmiri pandit, highborn and thus his equal. Therefore, since he, a Muslim, had left India, Nehru must vacate Muslim-majority Kashmir, asserted Manto. That was perhaps the only time he bluntly subscribed to the underlying logic of the Two-Nation Theory. 



Returning to Lahore, being among relatives and becoming a part of the Muslim nation understandably heightened his sense of physical security. His family were regular Sunnis, who had — along with thousands of other Muslims — shifted from nearby Amritsar to Lahore, spoke Punjabi — all the ethnic factors were positive. 

However, Manto was more than just a living entity of flesh and blood. His was a restless spirit. He would perish without the freedom of expression — a freedom he was in the habit of exercising without recourse to circumlocution, hitting the nail hard on its head. 

Such an attitude was not going to be treated kindly in Pakistan. Neither he nor the orthodox Communists had anticipated that far from becoming a welfare state based on Islamic social justice or a bourgeois democracy, the deep and virulent fundamentalist dimension in the Pakistani state project would cast a long shadow on the intellectual landscape. Manto came under that cloud rather quickly. He was put on trial for preaching obscenity in his short stories. The case went through different levels. Finally the Lahore High Court confirmed his guilt and fined him, but did not send him to prison. 

Such experience combined with difficulties in earning a decent living from his writing and a personal tragedy — his only son died in infancy leaving him traumatised. As the head of an impoverished family that included his wife and three small daughters, he found himself hopelessly in dire straits. Relatives and friends helped, but he could not cope with the cumulative pressures of poverty and sorrows. He began to drink more heavily, was sent to the mental asylum and on January 18, 1955 — when only 42 — he died a broken man.



Manto’s indictment of the senseless partition violence is proverbial. One can easily put together a long list of select short stories. His ‘Toba Tek Singh’ has been recognised as the most powerful satire of those events. The story is set some years after partition. The governments of India and Pakistan decide to exchange the Muslim, Sikh and Hindu mentally-challenged people who were still in the various mental asylums. Bishan Singh is an inmate of the Lahore mental hospital and part of the exchange programme. When he is told that his hometown, Toba Tek Singh, will remain in Pakistan, he refuses to go. The staff promise to send Toba Tek Singh to wherever he goes but fail to deceive him. The story ends with Bishan Singh lying down between the barbed wire that separates the two countries created through a bloody severance of a territory on which had evolved and flourished a composite culture hundreds of years old. He thus occupies a space with no name.



I will end by narrating one of my other favourites. In his, ‘Siyah Hashiye’ (Black Borders), Manto depicts an excited pro-Pakistan mob that attacks the statue on the Lahore Mall Road of the great Hindu philanthropist of Punjab, Sir Ganga Ram. One of them blackens its face with tar. Another collects old shoes, strung into a garland, and is about to put it around the statue’s neck, when the police shows up and begins firing. The man who is about to put the garland of shoes around the statue’s neck is injured. He is sent to the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital for treatment!



The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com

Bus Stop in Delhi

I

Suddenly a gust

Of wind brought spring

A murmur in Peepul leaves

Somewhere in darkness

The bus nowhere in sight

As usual

Spring was here

II

Jolting through fog and flitting ghosts

Silence inside the late night bus

At least there are seats

For some to fall asleep

The man beside me

Head covered in shawl nods

Wakes with a start as the bus lurches to stop

At Red Fort

Asks if we have come to Srinagar

As he stumbles to get out

The bus roars into the next patch of fog

III

Delhi must be somewhere here

Almost in Mehrauli

Where the lark sank on scrub

High-rises now flyovers

Packed with cars

Diesel fumes nested

In eucalyptus

Where dhaba

Free unlimited daal with roti orders

Offered dimly lit hospitality

Spanking Cafe Coffee Day

Smart baristas in low light serve

Cappuccino and latte and

Free WiFi

I sip and email Vancouver

Kutub Minar still stands

Woman from village in UP

Holds out necklace of beads

Urging support for small business

I bring out the wallet

Taking gifts for no one

In particular

Chinmoy Banerjee, Vancouver October 6, 2013

Vignettes

By Zahid Makhdoom

 Flowers

Remember that spring when the flowers’ dreams of blossoming got nipped in their own buds. And that water refused to trickle down. You were sobbing, the sky was electrified, our reflections ossified. Like always, the rhythm from the djembes disturbed the apple cart. Wasn’t that what those goddamned kids wanted in the first place?

Mouse

Remember the mouse that had not stirred many Christmas nights past and that the crazed werewolf had not stalked his unsuspecting admirers on those lush nights denuded by a trickster-like full moon. What happened then? That the creatures alive, dead or undead rose to walk all those miles on some faded Christmases and nondescript nights. It all got messed up, I couldn’t although I had intended and desired, to walk and to strum the notes enshrined in the score I had written to mark the end. Do you know what happened? Do you even remember those Christmases, those full-moon nights, and that score or even the end?

In the Beginning

Remember that last time we were perched high above the highest branch of that giant tree that everyone around us thought was forbidden, a no go area? I only remember something happened and then those mesmerizing contours of your countenance began to drift away, slowly brightening the Milky Way. I could still discern you and the highest branch of that tallest tree perched above the brightest star of that dazzling galaxy that still seemed so foreboding.

It’s been a long time, I couldn’t continue counting, the numbers have transcended my faculties. Memories are hapless cripples without any crutches. The ones I broke are yet to be replaced. And I know of no measure to discern the space between the time I last delved deep inside the depths of every pore of your body to now when even the Milky Way looks so distant, so faded. The times I still remember you rolling your naked body on the mountains of fallen flower petals until I could see a constellation of rainbows etched on your skin. We always gave in to those rainbows. Then those epochs would descend when we could no longer use silence as a canvas to paint those melodies that filled everything around us, made those rainbows dance, and the only refuge from surfeit was to be deeply ensconced within the layers of your scent. Are memories free yet? Has the time for venial liberties arrived? Your scent still wrapped around every part of my being. And silence has successfully subverted music. Let’s paint again. The pristine brightness has forever scared and scarred me.

By Promod Puri

Back in 1972, when I immigrated to Canada and made my first home in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, I happened to meet a very helpful and friendly
person by the name of CR Bector. He was a distinguished professor of
mathematics at the University of Manitoba. And out of respect, as he was my elder and held an academic professional status, I along with other close acquaintances addressed him as ‘Doctor Sahib’ or ‘Doctor Bector’. He was not a medical doctor but had a PhD degree in his extensive portfolio of
degrees.

CR Bector, although to most of us in the Indo-Canadian community sounded
like an English name, especially since the surname hails from Punjab and is typically Punjabi. He was a popular personality in Winnipeg simply because of his informal, lively and sociable temperament.

However for me, the enticing thing about him is that his real name is Chajju
Ram. It is really an old-fashioned North Indian name as we seldom come
across people with that name any longer. And his first name, Chajju, immediately strikes up memories of the famous Indian proverb “jo sukh chajju ke chobare, na balakh na bukhare.
Translation: East or West home is the best.

The name Chajju certainly resonates with the importance of home
as it is part of life’s triangle, rather I would say the most
sought-after trinity of “roti, kapadra aur Makaan”, meaning
food, clothing and shelter.

The fact is anybody with a home in reality owns his or her little sovereign
kingdom or queendom. It is one of those virtues of life which one aspires to have. Life begins and revolves around home and we also enjoy the pride of
having that possession.

Home is not merely a physical dwelling of walls, windows and doors; floors
and roofs. It is not just a rest spot either, but a cozy place of peace and
tranquility in the midst of family or friends’ lively togetherness and
entertainment. Home is the place of absolute independence within acceptable social norms.

Home sweet home is a simple expression carrying deep feelings of that warmth
and comfort which one yearns for.

If the home does not give all that is expected then it is a house, and for
that reason home sickness is better than being confined under a sort of house arrest.

Home is the place of everlasting nostalgia of living with parents,
brothers, sisters and dear ones, the childhood anecdotes of little fights and
laughs, the home-cooked food, books and beds, and a lot more. The physical
remembrance of each and every household item is also a somewhat nostalgic
reflection.

Home is where we accumulate our cultural values, connect with our heritage
and acquire our family’s social, linguistic and religious identities.

Home is that place of security and independence where with elated feelings
one can unwind, recline and relax.

As eighteenth century English poet James Thompson has exquisitely expressed:

“Home is the resort
Of love, of joy, of peace, and plenty; where
Supporting and supported, polished friends
and dear relations mingle into bliss.”

But that bliss is denied to millions of homeless people all over the world sheltering under the open sky at the mercy of Mother Nature. It is this sad aspect of humanity that is visibly invisible as life goes on in busy metropolises.

By Sabita Majid

The first coffee of my day is reassuring. Its strong, bold punch wakes me up to hope and possibilities until several hours and coffees later, it’s clear that nothing changes. However, I also cling to humdrum reality day after day because it’s very easy to lose the tenuous balance I’ve achieved. As an immigrant, I’ve got used to the endless cycles of hope, sadness and anxiety that have come from waiting patiently for the scattered bits of my life to become whole.

When I was young and lived in India, creating home and family as a post-university agenda seemed limited. I thought, with dismay, of my older sister who had babies right after getting married and willingly let herself slide into the abject gloom of a domesticated adult life. So while she nursed one baby after the other, I gallivanted around town partying, travelling and telling myself it was all about self-discovery.

After graduating, I left my more secure urban life in Delhi and travelled with a research team into rural India on the path of what we, euphemistically called, ‘development research’. We assumed that our focus on poor village artisans would bring their complex problems, and what turned out to be quite pretentious solutions, to the fore.

We were city bred Indians, snobbish in our attitudes and full of the wide eyed idealism that comes from formal education without real life experience while the farmers and artisans we met were quite the opposite. Most didn’t have formal education and clearly didn’t understand why they were being asked personal questions like how much money they made from weaving or how many cows they milked. Yet, intrusive youngsters like me felt we were entitled to answers from our unprepared interviewees’ who were often too tired to answer our academic queries with any specificity. Numbers, schedules, they’d never quantified or documented their lives in the way we were trying to.

Our research and knowledge led us down different paths all more materially successful than the poor Indians we thought needed rescuing in the many little Indias of which we clearly were not a part but were deriving solutions for.

In the sprawling and chaotic metropolis of Delhi, I had a place amongst my peer group and spent the evenings talking about film-making and social change while listening to Bob Dylan and juxtaposing our western-Indian sensibilities on a very uneven and un-western India. I was an angst-ridden youngster searching for meaning in a country of cruel contrasts. My own identity crisis came from not quite accepting what exactly it was that made me simultaneously Indian and western.

It was easier to know who I wasn’t like. In the process of defining the poorer Indian, I had learned that I wanted my creature comforts and knew I wouldn’t survive the bug-infested mattresses of tribal guest houses in rural India or be able to eat the watery lentil stew day after day in my efforts at uplifting the masses. Nor did I particularly want to converse with village Indians because there was so little common ground between us. While it was easier to describe those things that I was not a part of, it was more difficult to overcome my own self-loathing and guilt about being unwilling to sacrifice more for the greater good.

Time passed and I quickly became jaded when I saw that nothing in the lives of most Indians changed and I didn’t have the stamina to sustain the quest. I became an unsentimental newspaper journalist, got married and moved out of India to sojourn in Dubai for five sweet years of tax-free, carefree living, shopping and living abroad. I had swapped one home for another without batting an eyelid, or so it seemed. We were young and strong and adventurous.

Each year away from home made my husband and I feel more distanced from India until we decided to immigrate to Canada, which held the promise of opportunity although I was only vaguely aware of what that meant. We arrived in Vancouver in 1999, and a year later, our only child was born.

Then, as happy and as proud as I felt being a new mother, I suddenly felt more vulnerable than I’ve ever felt. Life changed dramatically from having been an egocentric newspaper reporter to becoming a jobless landed immigrant, a lonely stay-at-home mother seeking friendships that were hard to come by. More than anything else, I felt completely disconnected from the mainstream.

I was hopelessly out of synch with Canadian living and didn’t feel thrilled at the sight of Canucks hockey games or newspaper controversies about oil sands. Worse still, news reports about Indo Canadian gangs made me uncomfortable while sparse coverage of India disconnected me from my old home.

In many immigrant faces, I saw reflections of myself, but understood that we now lived with a code of silence as it was often too painful to admit to isolation or a sense of despair about the future. Besides, we were the skilled immigrants who had succeeded in making it through the hoops. We had no choice but to try harder. So, despite the loneliness and hard realities, we soldiered on.

I joined job clubs, networked, made polite conversation hoping that I would stop feeling alien, that I could have a circle of friends and start feeling more rooted. But when I was asked questions such as ‘how hard I worked on my accent’ I realized that I had basically lost all the power I once possessed.

Here, I was brown, South Asian and claiming an English language culture derived from India – land of the poor teeming millions with funny English accents. And no, I had no credibility among few of the gentry I met who, probably, patronizingly saw me as a nice enough Indian woman with oversized aspirations. Neither was it possible to melt into the South Asian community as apart from the common ethnicity, often, not much else held us together.

Suddenly, though, I felt more empathy with all the dispossessed groups I had encountered in India. Whether they were poor artisans or regular groups of migrants coming to Indian cities they were desperate to rise socially but disconnected from power in contrast to my peer group. We spoke better English, relatively speaking, and arrogated power to ourselves, which I now see we hadn’t really earned. It had all been a matter of the homes we’d been born into and the networks we had inherited. Much like it is over here.

And so emigrating from India and settling several oceans away has most of all been a humbling experience. I’ve had to reassess social values, re-invent myself professionally and ask the writer in me soul searching questions about who I have become. I have also realized that human nature is much the same anywhere and that I do belong in one of many littler Canadas and that home, in fact, is wherever you decide it is.

I left the familiarity of my old home to enter the spectacular but cruel landscape of this country where I have simultaneously experienced the beauty of changing seasons and harsh truths about earning power and status without helpful relatives or a network. It’s been terribly hard, each rejection causing deep pain, but also firming up my resolve to succeed – this is what immigrants do. I have realized though that my success will be small and limited in scope.

So, I now see myself as a wife, mother and employee whose sense of fulfillment is derived from all three personas I embody — not much of a departure from my own mother whom I really didn’t want to be like.

For me, home is still a work in progress…

I think it’s really become a state of mind, an idea. Family is an integral part of that home, but I’m finding that I really just want to feel at home within my own being. Home is about the family I ‘m part of, the house we live in and Vancouver where we’ve spent hundreds of hours working, eating, sleeping, shopping and hoping. Home is still also where I was born and faced painful realities as I grew up. Maybe, it is also where I have the happiest memories of. Delhi, Dubai, Vancouver, Burnaby. I suspect there are no right answers.

I have staked a claim to all of these places and homes and belong in none of them entirely.

And so, if you see a brown South Asian sipping her coffee slowly, it could be me creating home in my head. It is a plodding journey, but I think I’m almost there…