One hundred years of Kaifi Azmi

 

Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms is an homage to Kaifi Azmi’s centenary birth year. The book, edited by Sudeep Sen, is a specially curated volume that contains 50 billingual — Hindi and English — poems. The contributors to the book are Husain Mir Ali, Baidar Bakht, Sumantra Ghosal, Pritish Nandy and Sudeep Sen. The book also contains archival photographs of the life and times of Kaifi Azmi.

The following are two poems by Azmi and their translations into English by Husain Mir Ali, along with a note from the translator.

Note on the translations

Kaifi Azmi begins Main Aur Meri Shaayeri, a reflective essay on his poetry, with the following words: ‘When was I born? I can’t remember. When  will I die? I don’t know. All I can say with any certainty about myself is that I was born in an enslaved Hindustan, grew old in a free Hindustan, and will die in a socialist Hindustan. This isn’t the babbling of a mad man or the pipe dream of a fool. This belief is born from the deep connection that has always existed between my poetry and the great struggles for socialism being waged across the world and in my own country.’

Kaifi’s beliefs didn’t emerge from barren soil. He was politicised at an early age, having inherited his anti-colonial sensibilities from his grandfather, who had tried to thwart the British effort to grow indigo in his village by persuading his fellow farmers to roast the seeds before sowing them. A 10-year-old Kaifi once sought to organise an aborted black flag protest against a visiting British Collector. He also courted arrest, succeeding once only to be let off with a light caning by the police because of his age. Disappointed and eager to ensure that he would be detained the next time, he tried his hand at bomb-making with friends, but their childish effort literally fizzled out.

While the rest of his brothers received a modern education, Kaifi, the youngest, was sent to a madrasa in Lucknow for religious schooling. According to one commentator (who Kaifi himself approvingly quotes), ‘Kaifi was sent to a madrasa so that he could learn to perform the last rites of his parents, but instead, he came out having performed the last rites of religion itself.’ In an interesting twist of fate, it was at the madrasa that Kaifi came across Angaare,  a scandalous collection of short stories written by four rebellious youth who would go on to create the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), a trail-blazing literary group that spearheaded a hegemonic movement in Urdu literature for decades. Kaifi was to become one of the leading lights of the movement.

While in Lucknow, Kaifi was surrounded by and soaked up the energy of the anti-colonial movement. His rebellious spirit led him to organise a strike at the madrasa, during which he kept up the spirits of his comrades by writing and reciting fiery verse. His eagerness to join the struggle waging across the country meant that he never completed his formal education. His political journey took him to Kanpur as a young man where he became involved with the Mazdoor Sabha and was introduced to communist literature. He soon started working for the Communist Party of India and began living in its commune in Bombay, where he was joined by Shaukat Azmi, who he had met, and fallen in love with, in Hyderabad. Shaukat, who made the decision to eschew a life of relative comfort to marry and join Kaifi at the commune, would go on to become a comrade in the struggle and an important part of the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association in her own right.

The PWA soon became a dominant force in Urdu literature and Kaifi made his mark in the movement as a quintessential progressive poet. The direct, powerful and unabashed poems in this selection mostly reflect Kaifi’s progressive politics. ‘Aadat’ is a dystopian view of a superficial world ruled by commerce, inhospitable to any thinking person. ‘Ibn-e- Maryam’ begins as a critique of the state of affairs in post-colonial India and ends with Kaifi exhorting Jesus to head to Vietnam instead, to save its people from the war being waged on them by Bible worshippers. ‘Bekaari’ is a strident critique of the exploitation of labour by capital, and builds up to a powerful climax, in which the discarded and marginalised worker seeks to rise up in revolt. ‘Telangana’ was written in support of the armed insurrection and peasant uprising of the 1940s against the ruling caste feudal landlords and the princely state. In ‘Taj Mahal’, Kaifi sees the iconic monument not as a beautiful mausoleum, but as a grotesque display of the world’s inequalities. ‘Saanp’ is both a lament on the subversion of science and progress by the power of money and capital, and a cautionary tale of how irrational sentiments embodied within organised religion suppressed true knowledge and promoted sectarianism. ‘Peer-e Tasma Pa’ is a sarcastic and despairing take on a similar theme. ‘Doosra Banwaas’ mourns the bloodshed during the resurgent communalism of the early 1990s. ‘Taj’ offers a harsh critique of monarchy and of the concentration of power. ‘Charaaghaan’ holds out hope for the future even as it bemoans the broken promises of Independence.

Kaifi ends his essay about his poetry on a less certain note than the one on which he begins it. He writes about how his early encounter with radical literature inaugurated the journey along a path that he faithfully and unwaveringly walked upon (despite my paralysis, he says). ‘One day’, Kaifi writes, ‘I will fall on this very path and my journey will end, at my destination, or at least, close to it.’

Kaifi and his comrades worked tirelessly, first for independence from colonial rule, and then later for an egalitarian and non-sectarian society, but his dream remains a work in progress. His poem ‘Inteshar’ ends with a demand: koi to sood chukaaye, koi to zimma le, us inquilaab ka jo aaj tak udhaar sa hai.

For Kaifi, the revolution is a debt that is still owed to him.