WHILE writing this column, I am trying to come out of the hangover of the emotional fervour generated by the demonstration of warm feelings on the part of Indian and Pakistani writers for one another.
Ajeet Kaur, chairman of the foundation of Saarc writers, reached here along with a delegation of Indian writers and found Kishwar Naheed as her counterpart in Pakistan, who organized an Indo-Pak writers conference in Islamabad, and made it a success.
The delegation from India included writers of different languages, including Urdu, though the representation of Urdu writers was a bit disappointing. A few eminent Urdu writers, who were expected to grace the occasion, could not reach here.
Perhaps, most eminent among the guests was Indira Goswami, who writes in Assamese and is the winner of the prestigious national award known as Giyan Peet.
The publication of the Urdu translation of her novel, Saga of South Kamroop coincided with her arrival in Pakistan. The translation titled Kamroop ki Kahani has been published by Mashal, Lahore.
Manohar Shyam Joshi is more known, in Pakistan for his TV serial Buniyad, than for his literary writings. As for Chitra Mudgal, she has not distinguished herself merely as a Hindi fiction writer, but also as a staunch activist of women’s cause.
In fact, this conference teemed with activists of women’s cause both from India and Pakistan. A whole session was devoted to female literature and similar other writings. I was told to see Chitra Mudgal, singling out the poet who had paid tribute to Rani Jhansi in these words:
Khoob lari mardani woh to Jhansi wali Rani thi
The word mardani, as used here, appeared obnoxious to her. Why should, she argued, bravery be associated with the male gender alone, she asked.
Female activists are well known for making amusing statements of this kind. But I should seriously refer to the report on the suffering of women in the Gujarat riots presented here in brief by Dr Syeda Hameed.
Dr Syeda Hameed is the daughter of the celebrated scholar, the late Khwaja Ghulamus Sayedain. She is an activist working for the uplift of Muslim women in India. Soon after the Muslim carnage in Gujarat, she went to that place and probed into what happened during those days. She read out a few excerpts from her report so as to give us an idea of the atrocities perpetrated there.
It was pointed out during the discussion that in every such situation, women were targeted.
Next on the agenda was the problem of fundamentalism. But I don’t think that any serious effort was made to go into the depth of the problem. Of course, some symptoms of the malady were brought out, for instance, lack of tolerance, refusal to listen to others’ point of view, rejection of reason and reasoning, faith in the effectiveness of violence instead of reason. Manohar Shyam Joshi traced in a lighter vein all these tendencies in the behaviour of the writers. So the writers and intellectuals were, according to him, fundamentalists. And so they should first of all take care of themselves.
But the opening session concentrated on the role of the writer in troubled times like that of ours. That brings us to the purpose of the conference, which opened with the title, Pen and Peace. And it was with special reference to peace between India and Pakistan.
I have a feeling that in discussions such as this, there is an overplay of the role of the writer. We, so often, in the heat of discussion, tend to forget our limitations. And yet, I daresay that of all the sections of society in India and Pakistan, writers are morally in a better position to plead for peace between the two countries. The reason is not far to seek. In fact, even during the worst periods of strained relations, literary ties between the two countries remained unpoisoned. Though there was no book trade between the two, literary books and periodicals reached from one country to the other. Along with this, many poems and stories picked up from these journals and books were transliterated from Urdu into Hindi, and other Indian languages and were published in India and vice-versa. So we had a little bridge built on the literary level between the two countries, which otherwise were hostile to each other.
In fact, a genuine piece of literature is an invitation to all its readers, irrespective of their caste, creed and nationality, to share the joy or the pain of human life a writer has portrayed. In that way, it brings fellow beings closer to each other. But the difficulty is that the moment the writer comes on the stage and expresses the same feelings in current political jargon, it undergoes a kind of change, which in the present case has been classified by Asghar Nadeem Syed as track-2 diplomacy. How ironic that a poem, when written, is a creative piece of literature. But when recited from the stage in the name of peace, is branded a diplomatic act.
But one may say that this kind of risk is worth taking for the sake of peace. The present Indo-Pak writers conference was a risk of this kind on the part of the writers participating in it.
WHILE writing this column, I am trying to come out of the hangover of the emotional fervour generated by the demonstration of warm feelings on the part of Indian and Pakistani writers for one another.
