Ladyz, gentlemen, mitron, lend me your ears... (With apologies to the Bard)

Ladyz, gentlemen, mitron, lend me your ears (arrey, kaan nahin kaatiye, bus suniye — I know we’ve got mighty handy with cutting of late)

I come to bury the Idea of India (which Indira put on ventilation many years back, and now Shri PMji is putting to permanent sleep), not to praise it.

The grandiose idea (secular amidst multiple ancient religions) birthed by the likes of Gandhi-Nehru, 

was a stillbirth when Gandhi was assassinated within the first year of independent India (achhe din version 1.1)  

But Nehru slapped it into some semblance of life, and let it be. Siri PMji 

has told you the Idea of India was bogus:

A Hindu land, Hindu from the golden age of the Vedas, what you mean sickular?

And grievously has India answered it.

Here, under leave of Shri PMji and the rest —

For he is Hindu, Bharat varsha is Hindu;

As is his party of all Hindu men and some (Hindu) women —

Come I to speak in ‘Idea of India’s’ funeral.

I learnt of the Idea of India in my Civics class when I by-hearted the Preamble to our Constitution;

But Shri PMji and his Godse-loving party insists it is an invalid idea;

And Shri PMji has a vision for achhedin and an army of bhakts (so stay in line, I must.)

The idea of India brought many glories to our nation:

An ancient civilization! the world’s largest democracy!

Home to all world religions! Home of non violence!

Did this seem invalid?

Yet Shri PMji says India is for Indians (and Babur-ki-aulad types shush!),

Cent percent Hindu, if Brahmin, better, 

If male, even more so.

I speak not to disprove what Shri PMji and his Bhajapa speak (and promise and trump about Make in India and the din of achhedin)

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love the Idea of India once, not without cause:

(You rioted at regular intervals — 1984, 1992, 2002 — but regained sanity, as if realizing that the good of India lay in a collective good)

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for the Idea of India?

Which Tagore described as ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,’

Which the Preamble (yes, that dusty old tarp that refuses to die, for me at least, a minority twice over: woman and Sikh) promised?

O judgement! thou art fled to an army of trolls,

And men who will protest the plight of fictional women,

And behead, burn and film a poor laborer because he’s Babur-ki-aulad, 

(Never mind that there are 500 years between the two, and hey, in the meantime we had the English too!) Bear with me;

My heart is there in the coffin with the Idea of India,

With Tegh Bahadur who gave his life for the Kashmiri Brahmins,

With the widows and children of ’84 who are still awaiting justice at the hands of their Hindu brethren,

With the women of India who must endure because they are not fictional or mythological but all too real,

With the Muslim woman who raised me, the Catholic nuns who taught me, my Hindu and Sikh family,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

And here, Mr Shakespeare, I must take your leave and recall one of my favorite poets, 

Bahadur Shah Zafar, beleaguered in Burma, who recalling his motherland India, waxed:

Bahut lambi hain raahein pyaar ki, aur zindagi kum hai …

So long are the paths of love and hope, they oft outrun our lives. 

So hope I must, even as I mourn…

© Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Down But Not Out

December 1, 2016

Like the Queen once admitted, I too feel that this might go down as annus horribilis. I am looking forward to my India vacation but the eagerly-awaited viewing of Aamir Khan's film, Dangal, in cinema hall will have to be forfeited - I fail the test of showing duty-bound respect. So cinema is out but hey, hubby reminds me, standing in long queues is not. Seems my country folks have finally learnt to stand in line and I shall be joining them soon. What joys await me!

But it is December, the first day of the last month of 2016 and I have much to be thankful for. Even though I have spent last six months being repeatedly assailed by an orange blob. I have also spent that same time immersed in trauma literature. You could commend my prescience - believe me, I surprise myself at times.

But as I have plowed through some of those texts, on Auschwitz, on the South African TRC, on slavery in America and its legacy, on the Indo-Pak conflict, I have concluded that the ability of homo sapiens to dig themselves repeatedly into holes is really quite phenomenal. Keynes be damned, we aren't even getting paid for that. (To be fair to Mr Keynes, he said, dig holes, not get into them.)

So what is the way forward? What do I look to do in the soon-to-be New Year 2017? Besides the same ole same ole, because hey, nobody transforms overnight at the flick of new year's eve - we are humans not pumpkins. (Though we would all like a magic wand-waving fairy godmother.)

When I am lost, I turn to stories. I am still a child that way, you could say, but stories and the telling of them is the one true gift of homo sapiens. So let me tell you one.

In 1705, after the historic Battle of Chamkaur, the tenth Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, found himself in the woods of Machhiwara. Alone, having lost his family and his army through Mughal treachery, he wrote a letter to the mighty Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Zafarnama, he called it, the epistle of victory. (Gotta love his spirit!) Openly defiant, its 111 stanzas of Persian poetry hold a mirror to Aurangzeb, his lack of morality and sound the death knell of his empire.

The most quoted couplet from Zafarnamah is:

Chun kar az hameh heelate dar guzasht,

Halal ast burdan bi shamsher dast.

When all else failed, it was right to resist.

Growing up on stories of the Sikh gurus, the most riveting invariably belonged to the tenth. Only as a grown up, have I learnt the love of literature that he married with his martial spirit. To put a contemporary twist on the poetic Zafarnamah, its essential message remains: Down but not out.

Come 2017, that’s what I intend. Stand my ground. Stay the course. Do my duty.

Down but not out.

O Jatta Aayi Vaisakhi!

Of soldier-saints and French hijabs

Happy Vaisakhi folks!

For those of you unfamiliar with this festival, a primer. Vaisakhi, or Baisakhi, is a harvest festival celebrated in Punjab over the ages. It also marks the beginning of a new solar year, an event that is concomitantly marked across India in its various avatars: Ugadi in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Pohela Boishakh in Bengal, Navreh in Kashmir ...

Since a large number of Indians have switched from agrarian to urban lifestyle, the festival today has got reduced to a public holiday and a desultory greeting. Some folks, not all Sikhs, do venture forth to a Gurudwara, the Sikh place of worship, to celebrate. That is because Vaisakhi holds a special place in the Sikh faith.

In 1699, it was on this day that the tenth Guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh, created a casteless community, the Khalsa or the pure. He prescribed five emblems for them. They were to wear their hair and beard unshorn (kes); carry a comb (kangha) in the hair to keep it tidy; wear a knee-length pair of breeches (kach) worn by soldiers of the times; wear a steel bracelet (kara) on their right wrist; and they were to be armed with a sabre (kirpan). The Guru, in turn, submitted to the Khalsa - each was beholden to the other, there was no superior in this relationship.

With that baptismal ceremony the Guru changed the complexion of the Sikh faith from the pacifist one initiated by Nanak to one of soldier-saints who would wield arms only in a righteous cause. The emblems were complimentary to the new vocation. Ascetics in India have a long tradition of unshorn hair while the other four emblems were drawn from soldiering.

Early eighteenth century was a time of turbulence in India: Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was a bigot who had overturned the relatively peaceful relationship with his subjects by imposing a tax on the infidels which was called jaziya. A young Gobind’s acquaintance, however, was more personal – as a nine-year-old he had witnessed his father’s execution by the Mughal emperor. The creation of the Khalsa was an attempt to fight religious persecution, to “take the broom of divine knowledge and sweep away the filth of timidity”.

A visit to the Gurudwara therefore is a time to reflect on the values of Khalsa and what they mean today. There is an interesting debate currently on in France where a ban on the hijab has become effective. In a twist of irony, in the land of liberte, egalite, fraternite, women are being told how to dress. The country that birthed that rallying cry has on previous occasions banned the Sikh turban as well.    

Which brings me to the central question of what it means to be a Sikh today, what Khalsa stands for in the current environment, and where the five K’s fit within the contemporary challenges.

Typically over the years there is one K – Kara, the steel bracelet – that Sikhs have adhered to, even as they’ve shed the others. While most Sikh men continue to be distinguished by their turbans, a steady number have shorn their hair. Suspicions cast on Sikhs post 9/11 have not helped – the Sikh diaspora has had to challenge assumptions that they’re Muslims. 

I remember the time when my younger brother cut his hair. He was studying medicine and my mother refused to talk to him for days. What surprised me, however, was my father’s reaction. He was a liberal, a scotch-imbibing secular, the type derided by fundamentalists who had become rather vocal in Punjab during a tumultuous period in the eighties. A criminal lawyer, he worked pro bono on the cases of young men accused of being militants and was simultaneously vociferous in his denunciation of Bhindranwale– a rabid preacher leading the Sikh communal charge.

Religion to him was incidental, and yet, I saw him distressed with my brother’s behaviour. What difference does it make, I quizzed him? He patted my head, his brown eyes mellow as he probed his carefully-trimmed beard: Faith comes to us via nurture and becomes nature. Which is why battling it so tough. My father never took scissors to his beard, I never though of cutting my hair … my son has gone a step further.

In the least, faith is a complicated thing, I learnt from my father. And as we tussle with its multiple strands in one lifetime, there are days when we need to be reminded of what it stood for when it started. Those values are the beacon – everything else comes second.

In the evening we’ll go the Gurudwara that is a short walk from our home. The low-slung blue-painted century-old house of worship will be strung with lights and the waft of karha parshad will snuff traffic fumes as we wait at the traffic signal across. My eight-year-old will relish the semolina halva and we’ll enjoy listening to the shabad. I’ll hope to catch one of my favourite prayers, Khalsa mero roop hai Khaas, which celebrates our essential humanity.

And as always I will ignore the framed portrait of Bhindranwale at its entrance. Friends have asked me what I feel about it. I have no truck with those who have declared him a martyr.

We have a Punjabi phrase – jey aapan donve rus gaye ta, manau kaun vey – oft used in a tiff, the idea being that both people cannot afford to sulk if the argument is to be resolved.

These are questions that the faithful must wrestle with and answer as the faith evolves. Meanwhile, in order to continue the debate one has to stay seated at the table.

And to get you into the spirit, here's a song that celebrates Vaisakhi in true Hindi film ishtyle: O Jatta aayi Vaisakhi!

Call of the Soil: The Long Walk Home in The Asian Age

Keeping the history alive : The Long Walk Home in Sakaal Times, Pune

Bangalore reading - The Long Walk Home

Jacaranda in association with Olive Beach is pleased to invite you to meet Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, the critically acclaimed and award winning author of THE LONG WALK HOME, published by HarperCollins India.

Manreet has been hailed as the new literary star on the horizon by Khushwant Singh. Manreet lives in Hong Kong with her husband and daughter and is currently on a book tour for The Long Walk Home.

The event is scheduled for July 20, 2009 between 7 and 9 pm at the Olive Beach, 16 Wood Street, Ashok Nagar, Bangalore 560025, contact: 080 41128400 or +91 9945565483. Manreet’s book will be available for signing at this event.

Please RSVP: Priya (Jacaranda) 95351 58048
or Vinay (HarperCollins India) 98803 57700

About the book
Set against the backdrop of twentieth-century India, The Long Walk Home illuminates history — partition, two Indo-Pak wars, the rise of religious fundamentalism — through the life of one man.
A story of faith and fundamentalism, misguided passions and accidental heroism, it is woven through a narrative of love, murder, vendetta, and greed. In the gathering extremism — the city is put under curfew; Hit Lists are drawn; his wife subscribes to a rabid preacher; his Hindu friend flees — the protagonist makes a terrible error. As he nears the end of his life, he wonders: will there be a chance for redemption?

The Long Walk Home hits bestseller list again!

http://www.thehindu.com/mp/2009/07/11/stories/2009071150420200.htm


Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 11, 2009

Bestsellers

Fiction

1. Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer – Macmillan Rs. 277

2. Extreme Measures by Vince Flynn- Pocket Books Rs. 290

3. The Long Walk Home by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar – Harpercollins Rs. 295

4. Foreign Body by Robin Cook – Pan Rs. 277

5. The Associate by John Grisham – Arrow Rs. 233

Non-fiction

1. A Better India A Better World by N. R. Narayana Murthy – Penguin Allen Lane Rs. 499

2. Imagining India – Ideas for the New Century by Nandan Nilekani – Penguin Allen Lane Rs. 699

3. The Royal Palaces Of The Nizams by Dr. M.A. Nayeem Rs. 2000

4. A.R. Rahman – The Musical Storm by Kamini Mathai – Penguin Viking Rs. 499

5. Ecological Intelligence – Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy by Daniel Goleman – Allen Lane Rs. 399

Urvashi Butalia on The Long Walk Home: In search of the lost milestone

Urvashi Butalia is the author of the award-winning oral history of Partition, The Other Side of Silence:Voices from the Partition of India. It is a book I read as part of my research into understanding the 20th century history of Punjab. It is particularly gratifying therefore to have her review the book, and like it :-)

Khushwant Singh on The Long Walk Home: Literary star on the horizon

This, coming from the man of letters himself, is both overwhelming and exhilarating. I can truly claim I know now what it means to float mid-air :-)