VG Kiernan

For those of us in South Asia, Victor Kiernan was known primarily as the translator of Mohammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. His works as a historian are relatively unknown. Even his translations, for that matter, are not so much read as they are appreciated, mainly because few need to when they can read the original in Urdu. His relative ignorance in India is also difficult to understand because he was one of the few of the British Marxist Historians who actually spent some time in India. In Kiernan’s case, he was even married to an Indian lady, though for a short time. For all this, however, India (and Pakistan) seems to have been a passing interest for him and his personal and intellectual association ended pretty much around 1950. He lived to the ripe age of 95, and passed on earlier this week on 18th February.

A google search yesterday led to a tract ‘Marxism and Gramsci‘ (pdf), written by Kiernan  in 1972 when Gramsci’s works were being introduced to English readers. Besides a number of insightful and critical comments on both Marxism and Gramsci, he provides a comment on the state of Marxism in India as well:

Links

Dr Chamal Lal has a collection of some of the favourite Urdu couplets of Bhagat Singh, including a picture of the original in the young revolutionary’s own handwriting (right). Dr Lal reproduces the couplets in the nagari script as well.

achcha hai dil ke saath rahe paasbaan-e-akl
lekin kabhi- kabhi ise tanha bhi chod de

auron ka payam aur mera payam aur hai
ishk ke dard- mandon ka tarz e kalaam aur hai

akl kya cheez hai aik waza ki pabandi hai
dil ko muddat hui is kaid se azad kiya

Dr Manzur Ejaz, writing a series on People’s History of the Punjab, on the life and work of Shiekh Farid, considered to be the first poet of the Punjabi language.

Ralph Russell is no more

Ralph Russell, the British Urdu scholar in the tradition of VG Kiernan and who is well known, among other things, for his perceptive writings on Mirza Ghalib, has moved on (source).

A self- description from his website:

I was born in 1918. I became a communist at the age of 16 and am still content to call myself one despite the traumatic experiences from 1946 onwards of the corruption and eventual collapse of the communist movement and the Soviet Union, because I still hold to the humanist values which made me a communist. I believe that true communism is not only consistent with these values but is a logical development from them.

Ghalib in the 21st Century and other links

Amit Basole has a fascinating series of posts analyzing Mirza Ghalib’s couplets where he not so much dissects them as use them as a starting point to pose contemporary questions, on the question of faith, for example, and what it means to be human.

One thing sometimes does lead to another. Our post on Milton and Ghalib has culminated in a partnership with the blog Mehr-i-Niimroz (the noonday sun). Every week or so we will together select a couplet from Ghalib: Mehr-i-Niimroz will provide a translation and commentary; The South Asian Idea will use the couplet to pose questions and start a discussion. The objective will be to explore how much we can learn from Ghalib about the world we live in.

Justice Markanday Katju of the Supreme Court of India explains why Urdu is part of his ancestry and offers a number of insights into the state and fate of the Urdu language in India today.

Much Before Ghalib: A documentary on Sahir

This documentary brings out some very interesting facts about the umero uno of Indian lyricists, the great Sahir Ludhianvi. One fact that I was not aware of till this short film was that Sahir was named after one of his father’s bitter rivals- a neighbour named Abdul Hayee with whom he was engaged in a legal wrangle and and used to call him by expletives when Abdul Hayee, the son, was a child. I will write sometime on how Sahir’s lyrics were my inspiration for diving deeper into Urdu poetry and how, much before Ghalib and Faiz, it was Sahir’s lyrics for Hamraaz and Gumrah that seduced me towards Urdu poetry.

YouTube – Sahir Ludhianvi

Now, will someone take the hint and get started on a documentary on The Other Ludhianvi?

An Interview with Alys Faiz

(Reproduced from The Dawn)

Alys Faiz’s story is the story of a lifetime of commitment. From being a young woman who wanted to fight alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, she became the woman behind revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz; Alys now finds herself still angry at the social injustice in the world, still fighting on behalf of the oppressed in her regular columns for Viewpoint and She, as well as in her work with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and other organisations.

Alys campaigned for the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance in 1961 and for peace in the Gulf thirty years later, in 1991; Alys collected signatures for peace in 1952 and again for peace in Afghanistan in 1988.

A single interview cannot possibly do justice to her extraordinary, varied and active life. Hers has above all been a challenging life, involving adaptation to an alien culture and society; living with a man whose greatness and political commitment led her to make huge personal sacrifices; carrying on his work in the loneliness of bereavement.

Yet Alys Faiz has no regrets and prefers to tell of the difficult times via hilarious anecdotes, using her acting training to further liven up the store with mime and mimickery. The white hair and Alys’ claims that she is now ‘tired’ are deceptive: there is a quickness of eye and hand that betrays a wicked sense of humour, an eternally youthful streak and an obvious powerful personality. Undoubtedly, these were the characteristics, which have made her a survivor.

Q. You’ve always been politically active. Was your family interested in politics?
A. They were Conservatives.

Q. So how did you end up a Communist?
A. I didn’t end up; I began! I was always a bit of a loner. I used to like to go out for walks on my own on the weekends. And one fine day I found myself in Clerkenwell, where I saw Marx’s house. I went in and John Stratchey was lecturing on socialism or something. I sat down and listened. That was the beginning.

Q. How old were you at the time?
A. About 18. And then I joined the Party.

Introducing Occasional Links: Mayawati, Kafka, Urdu Poetry, Books, Publishing

I plan to have an occasional post with a round up of what I have been reading, will try and make it once a week, else it will appear, well, occasionally. The continuity will be determined to a large extent by your response, of course.

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Tehelka has an excerpt from Indian Dalit leader Mayawati’s forthcoming biography, exploring her relationships with the men in her life- her grandfather, father and Kanshi Ram. A Miracle of Democracy

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In his short story A Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka examined the life of a hunger artist that audiences would pay for the tickets to watch him go without food day after day, especially during the last days of the 40 day show. This 40 day duration was determined not because it was a reasonable number of days for a person to survive without food, but because the owner of the show calculated that to be the attention span of the audience- anything beyond forty days, the audience would dwindle and it was no longer lucrative to keep the show going. A magnificent story of the decline and marginalization of the artist as well as the poor. A Hunger Artist

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Ghazala has the original nazm in Romanized Urdu as well as the translation of hum gunahgaar auratein hein (We are the sinful women), a poem by Pakistani poet Kishwar Naheed. We, Sinful Women

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

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The NYT has an article on the explosion in the number of books published: “In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006.” This has happened partly because of self- publishing but paradoxically also at a time when reading is in decline. Are you an Author? Me, too! (link via John Baker)

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Andrew Gallix, in the Guardian writes on why some feel that while what is written is good, what is not written is still better. Besides, it saves on paper. A reader’s guide to the unwritten