In Pyaasa, Guru Dutt’s 1957 classic, the protagonist Vijay (He too is an anti-hero who takes on the establishment but his weapons unlike the edgy Vijay we saw in the 70s are poems, not punches) goes wandering in the lanes where young women are being bought and sold as objects of sexual gratification and sings,
”Madad chahti hai ye Hauwa ki beti
Yashoda ki hamjins.. Radha ki beti
Payambar ki ummat Zulekha ki beti
Zara is mulk ke rahbaro ko bulao
Ye kuche ye galiya ye manzar dikhao
Jinhe naaz hai hind par unko lao
Jinhe naaz hai hind par vo kahan hai
Kahan hai kahan hai kahan hai.”
**
Sahir Ludhiyanvi, who was and is one of the greatest poets in the subcontinent wrote these words. He saw in the woman arrayed for consumption, someone who could have been Yashoda in another lifetime, someone who could have been the daughter of Radha or Eve, or the follower of a prophet, or a beautiful woman with the light of the divine in her. Devastated by the human tragedy he sees unfolding in the brothels, he asks, ”Those who run this country..let them come and observe these lanes, this terrible spectacle. Those who are proud of this country..where are they? Where are they? Where are they?”
**
Pyaasa was a hit, the song deemed a classic and not one voice asked Sahir, ”How dare you shame the country that gave you everything? How dare you show us a side of our nationhood that is not shining? We worship goddesses and you compare them to sex workers? We will ban your songs, tear your poetry and make sure you never ever write another word against our glorious nation. Ours. Not yours.”
**
We did not do it in 1957 because this was a time when progressive Urdu writers like Sahir and Kaifi were part of our inner dialogue. They were writing film songs and stunning poetry to critique power centres that did not acknowledge the rights of the poor, of women and they were never called out and asked to take their words back. Because that was an era, where any artiste, regardless of his faith could critique his nation. Yes, his nation, because India was as much his as it is yours and mine. And when he pointed out its faultlines, he did so without the fear of being called out because of his religion, without being asked to prove his patriotism.This is still Sahir’s Hind but we have changed.
**
Today, truth matters less than perception. And so we have issues with writers returning their awards, with Leslee Udwin making India’s Daughter about a rape that did happen and continues to happen in different settings, with different victims. We had issues with Sania Mirza because she married a Pakistani, regardless of the fact that she alone has done more for this country than all the politicians put together, some of whom want to scan women for impure menstrual blood, justify rape, widen communal and gender divides and indulge in theatrics in foreign climes before adoring NRIs, all of whom have left the country for reasons far less important than intolerance and are still not called desh drohis.
**
We banished Husain from our country because his art hurt our religious sentiments. We had issues with writers who spoke for MM Kalburgi, a 70-year-old writer killed at his doorstep for speaking and writing against dogma. We cannot understand why FTII students are making a nuisance of themselves and not accepting Gajendra Chauhan as their thought leader. We have taken it in our stride that the current Censor Board chief, known for some of the most vulgar sequences in his films (Google Andaz, a film he made in 1994) chopped kissing sequences from Spectre without even watching the film and even made a cringeworthy eulogy for the powers-that-be, in all the free time he has on his hands.
**
We don’t think crimes against women, poverty, dalit atrocities, honour killings, environmental degradation et al undermine our nation but a statement by Aamir Khan does. Not just that, to prove his concerns about intolerance wrong, we will blacken his posters, ban apps featuring his branding, make comments about how his wife perhaps wants to be strip searched at the US airport and take out mock funerals.
**
So what if Aamir is related to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad after whom his son was named. Azadi meant something else in Kalam’s time. It means something else today. And we could not be bothered that today the freedom to express a thought can have far reaching implications. That the right to dissent peacefully can and should come without the diktat that the dissenter must leave the country.
**
We are too diverse as a nation to ever accept just one version of truth. We will always have multiple perspectives. We will always have more than one way of worshipping our gods, of loving this country, of interpreting our version of freedom and love and dissent. And we cannot ever be told to shut up. There are just too many of us who will speak our mind. And to say that a viewpoint is a bigger problem than the problem it is about, is really ironical. Can we just get used to the idea that as long as we have artists, writers, poets..we will always have them reacting to truths we would rather not see or acknowledge?
Sahir is gone but he was around, he would have said,
”Lab pe paabandii nahiin ehasaas pe paharaa to hai..
phir bhii ahal-e-dil ko ahavaal-e-bashar kahanaa to hai..”
”My lips may be free but my emotions, my thoughts are being watched…
yet…and yet..my heart must sing of the state of the world…of humankind.”
Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an artist, a former Urdu RJ and a mother. She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more, has exhibited her art in India and the US…and hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.