I COULD hardly imagine that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat would provide me with a pretext to write about Wali Dakhani, who is regarded as the father of Urdu poetry and who, according to one version, was buried in Ahmadabad. The grave commonly known to be the grave of Wali has now been vandalized by the rioters.
This blatant vandalism provides me with a justification to talk about the celebrated post and his historic role in the evolution and development of Urdu poetry. And yet it appears odd to me that to talk about the poet and his achievements at a time when the Muslims in Gujarat are being butchered and burnt alive, and their houses, their shops, their mohallas are being razed to the ground.
In fact, the literary figures in Pakistan were worried about the welfare of some other writers living in Ahmadabad. Two eminent writers of Urdu, Waris Alvi and Mohammad Alvi, belong to the affected land. Waris Alvi is among the most prominent critics and commands great respect in our literary world. Mohammad Alvi belongs to the post-partition generation of poets and has an individuality all his own.
I may add one more name to this brief list, a painter who belongs to Ahmedabad. Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh and his wife, Neelma, who is also an artist in her own right.
If I am talking about them and feel worried about their welfare, is it because of our literary relationship with them? For me however, it is more than that. It is through the feeling of a warm personal relationship with them that I, and so many of their contemporaries in Pakistan, feel in these crucial moments a living relationship with the affected Gujarati Muslims, who now are caught in a death trap.
Here I am reminded of Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh speaking at a seminar about his position as an artist and as a Muslim in the post-Babri Masjid situation. The seminar was held in Kathmandu. Writers, artists and intellectuals participating in it remained engaged for three days in discussing things in the context of the Masjid’s demolition. Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh kept mum throughout the whole discussion, content to listen to what the others were saying. When asked to speak, he presented a short paper, in which he recalled a tree in his town. “I was attached to that tree and had painted it with great fervour and with a sense of oneness, with it. In those days, I had the overwhelming feeling of being an artist and cared little for anything else,” Sheikh said.
“But after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, I found myself in a different world and was awakened to the bitter reality that I belong to a minority group. The world around me had changed altogether,” Sheikh continued. He added with a tinge as sorrow that he would not be able to paint that tree in his town the same way and with the same fervour. The tree, too, was no more the same it once was.
Once more, the world around Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh and the unfortunate minority he belongs to has changed altogether. This time it has grown bleaker and become more sinister.
A film on communal riots as conceived and painted by Shaikh was shown to us on the occasion. The images of violence painted by him made one shudder from head to foot. Once again those images of violence have been revived in me. The whole of Gujarat appears, to my horror, soaked in those terrifying images. However, as far as I remember, those images of violence did not include one of a man or a woman soaked in kerosene oil and burnt alive. Sheikh had not been able to observe and conceive violence to that inhuman extent.
In fact, violence once perpetrated has no end to it and its perpetrators know no satiety. Every act of violence leaves them a little more thirsty. So the next time around, they stand in need of more violence and more cruel methods and hence grow more inhuman. The Savak Sanghis are the old perpetrators of violence. In their ever-growing lust for blood they could not be expected to stick to the same old methods they had employed in the holocaust of 1947 or in the riots breaking out in consequence of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. They had to be more cruel and more inhuman as is evident from the reportage of Harsh Nandar.
But equally callous is the response coming from a Pakistani diplomat in New York as reported by Khalid Hasan in the same column. He disposed of this great tragedy by cursorily saying that it was a domestic affair of India. This statement coming from a Pakistani diplomat may serve as an ironic comment on the Pakistan Movement.
Coming back to Wali Dakhani, researchers say that he originally belonged to Gujarat and had turned Dakhani the same way Ghalib had turned Dehlavi after shifting from Akbarabad to that city. If so, the poet’s soul can gain satisfaction from what has happened to his grave. He has shared the affliction of his compatriots to the extent a dead person can share the afflictions of the living.
I COULD hardly imagine that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat would provide me with a pretext to write about Wali Dakhani, who is regarded as the father of Urdu poetry and who, according to one version, was buried in Ahmadabad. The grave commonly known to be the grave of Wali has now been vandalized by the rioters.
