WHILE talking about the SAARC writers’ conference held in the Maldives, I think I should be content to talk about the writers, poets and fiction writers I met there, leaving the rest of the affair to Munnoo Bhai. He is better equipped to understand and talk about the political intricacies such conferences bring in their wake.
Foremost among the writers was Kamleshwar, known as a distinguished Hindi fiction writer. But for me, he is an Urdu writer who writes his Urdu in the Nagri script. His recent work is a novel titled Kitney Pakistan (How many Pakistans?), now transliterated in the Urdu script.
I will talk about Kamleshwar and his novel later on. At the movement, I am in the grip of Dr Indira Goswami’s Pages stained with Blood.
Writing in Assamese, Indira has won recognition on an all-India level. She also enjoys the status of a scholar. Her research work on the Ramayana has been published under the title Ramayana from Ganga to Brahmaputra. At present, she is associated with the Delhi University as head of the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies.
Her volume Pages stained with Blood had initially appeared to me as an innocent portrayal of the city of Delhi, where she appeared intending to paint Delhi “in broad swathes of colour the days and lives of the Mughals and the British Raj.” What a lively description of the city in the form of a diary. I least expected that soon this description of the city will turn into pages stained with blood.
But here, let me make an interjection and refer to the story read by Ajeet Cour in the fiction session of the conference. No, it was not fiction. She was narrating in a factual way the harrowing experience she, along with her daughter, had undergone during the days of the Sikh carnage that had come in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
While listening to her, I recalled the series of bloodbaths Indian Muslims have had to pass after Partition, the latest being the Gujarat carnage. I was reminded of a line from Ghalib:
Woh hum sai bhi ziyada kushtai taigh-al-sitam nikley.
When, after the session, I communicated this feeling of mine to Cour, she narrated to me her encounter with a Sikh lady from Jamia. She told me that her Hindu landlord drove her out under the fear that if a Hindu mole comes to know that here lives a Sikh lady, they will attack the house and burn down the whole building.
She then made a hectic search for some new accommodation. No Hindu landlord agreed to accommodate her for fear of the rioters. Then she went to Jamia Nagar. A Jamia lady listened to her woeful tale and agreed to give her house on rent to her. Then, she added: “It is now that you have come to face this situation. We are faced with this situation since the day India won freedom.”
Now I come to Indira Goswami’s Pages stained with Blood. It has been presented in the form of a diary written during the year 1984. The writer is seen roaming the city and recording in her diary what she witnessed and what she heard from the people she met during her wanderings. But slowly, she feels drawn to some queer character who are Sikhs living in slums and leading a wretched life. Her concern for them makes her actually aware of the unhappy situation Sikhs in the city find themselves in because of the events in East Punjab. The Golden Temple had been ransacked and the Sikhs were troubled.
The situation culminates in the assassination of Indira Gandhi. It leads to the carnage of Sikhs and the writer is a witness to terrible scenes.
“Some twenty-four Sikhs have tyres put round their necks and are burnt to death in broad daylight. Many are killed in police firing.... There is no true account of those deaths and bodies are lying about in roads and gutters.”
“My eyes fill with tears as I stand in front of the gurudwara.... The gurudwara has been reduced to ashes. The granthi pierced with a trident and the half-burnt copy of the Granth Sahib lies in a corner of the veranda.”
The writer witnesses harrowing scenes of this kind and turns back. “I come back home and scrub the bloodstains on my floor. In fact, there are no stains, but I keep seeing them all the time. And, at times, I feel I am standing on a chunk of burnt flesh.”
Most of what has been recorded here may be seen as an eyewitness account of the happenings which came as an aftermath of the murder of Indira Gandhi. But, on other occasions, we are not very sure as to how far it is factual. The writer may not be factual all the time. But she is truthful throughout. If there is fiction, it has been fused in with a subtlety that we can hardly draw a line between the factual and the fiction. That is what goes to make it a novel, a genuine piece of literature.
Indira Goswami portrays her real Sikh characters with the pen of a novelist. These characters, the insulted and the injured, appear symbolizing the sad plight of the Sikh community. Indira Goswami in depicting this plight is genuine, without being sentimental.
From this account, one may draw conclusions about the fate of minorities in India. But we need not gloat over it. Rather, the situation invites us to a self-examination. After all, in Pakistan, too, minorities are not in a happy position. With the rise of terrorism, their situation has gone from bad to worse. The only difference is that this sad situation has failed to find an Indira Goswami to probe and record it.
On taxing my memory, I could remember only one novel by Muzaffar Iqbal titled Inqita, which centres round a persecuted Ahmadi character. But it could not attract the attention of the critics. The novel went almost unnoticed.
WHILE talking about the SAARC writers’ conference held in the Maldives, I think I should be content to talk about the writers, poets and fiction writers I met there, leaving the rest of the affair to Munnoo Bhai. He is better equipped to understand and talk about the political intricacies such conferences bring in their wake.
