June 15, 2003

BEFORE me is a literary journal coming from India. It appears so different from the literary journals we are accustomed to. It opens with a Hadith followed by a quotation from Nahjulbalagha. Hazrat Ali warns us of a great disaster which may end in the Day of Judgment. And this warning is quickly followed by a scene picked out from Gita. The trumpets and the Shankhs are being blown at the highest pitch, and the two armies arrayed against each other are on the brink of a great battle. Then we are initiated into the eighteen-day battle between the Kurus and the Pandavs as depicted in the Mahabharata.

The journal I am talking about is Isteara, a purely literary journal edited by Salahuddin Pervez, who is known to us as a poet with a peculiar vision of his own. In fact only a poet with the kind of vision he possesses could conceive of, a literary journal of this kind, Salahuddin Pervez possesses a poetic sensibility steeped in religious tradition. But which religious tradition? His different poems speak of his deep devotion to the personality of the Holy Prophet, (peace be upon him). He will also be seen devoted to the great Muslim mystics, most of all to Hazrat Ali. But at the same time, he seems to have nurtured deep devotion for Sri Krishnji and is enamoured of the cult of Radha and Krishna. In fact the two religious traditions, the Islamic and the ancient Hindu tradition are seen in his poetry balancing each other harmoniously.

At the moment I have one collection of his poems before me, poems in the form of letters addressed to personalities with whom he feels devoted, the Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him), Hazrat Ali, Hazrat Omar, Hazrat Zainab and different saints. One letter is addressed to Ramchandra Ji, the other to Sri Krishn. They are mostly devotional poems. But the letter addressed to Sri Krishn has in addition a layer of meanings relevant to our times. Here the poet just like Arjun in Gita imploringly says:

O Maddhau, I have no wish to fight. I just want to live in my own Kurukushetra without resort to fighting.

This poem has been reproduced in the present issue of the journal. And then Salahuddin begins depicting the war, as it began and raged for eighteen days.

However, it is worth mentioning that the contents I am talking about form only a tiny part of the issue, which is spread in more than four hundred pages. It is a kind of miscellany containing a number of poems, ghazals, critical writings, book reviews, and obituaries.

A number of articles included here are thought-provoking. They mostly deal with the contemporary situation and tempt us to come out with what we have to say on issues discussed here. From blood-stained Gujarat to devastated Baghdad is a long journey but it tells us how the creative minds in the Urdu world of India are absorbing the shocks of the terrible happenings around them and turning them into a new awareness, which informs their contemporary literature. So I revert to those few pages which chiefly speak of this awareness and which have set the tone of this journal.

If a creative soul in India has reverted to the ancient epic, Mahabharata, he has a justification for it. What we see now is, according to him, the same old scenario of the eighteen days battle of Mahabharata. “Had the Mahabharata fought between the Kurus and the Pandavs come to an end?” he asks. No, he says, it had not come to an end. The Mahabharata is continuing. It knows no end.

Does he mean to say that the Indian people have not cared to learn from the ancient wisdom enshrined in their great epics and in the inspired sermons and kathas delivered and told by their rishis?

Interestingly, Salahuddin was never seen rubbing shoulders with the Indo-Pak peaceniks. He has no slogan of peace to cash in. But with his poetic sense, he has been able to pick out an extraordinarily significant moment from the Muhabharata when Arjun, the great hero, refuses to fight. “Hai Kaishaur, the bow Gaandeva slips from my hand, and my skin burns. My mind is in a tumult,” and asks, “What good can come from the slaughter of my people on this battlefield?”

The Mahabharata is a long tale running in eighteen parts, each of which constitutes a big volume. Each of the eighteen days of war has been detained here. Salahuddin’s depiction may be seen as a capsule of that eighteen-day narration. The prose style he has tried to evolve for this narration amused me. And yet I have a word of praise for it. It is an odd mixture of Sanskritized Hindi and Arbo-Persianized Urdu. To add to this oddity are the words he has coined in his peculiar way. The narration of each day has been summed up in a caption written in the Arabic of the Quranic style.

He is undoubtedly very right in his perception that the experience of this great war of ancient India cannot be adequately narrated in current Urdu. His attempt to evolve a different diction for this purpose is praiseworthy. His prose appears odd simply because he is yet in the process of evolving a diction suited for this narration.

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