Dear home: Letters from an NRB
Politics & Poetics of naïve sentimentalists at the grave of an Emperor
By Dev Nath Pathak
The LokSabha had it once again; the RajyaSabha was witnessing the same for another spell; the fog was thickening every night; and the sun fails to tear the veneer of confusing politics in the parliament. And of course, the streets are yet not free from the fleet of vehicles groping in the fogginess while honking the sense out of the city. That was the day, when I was lovesick again. I needed my best friend who was away to visit her mother. I needed my cats who were out most of the time to court the female cats on heat. That was when a sincere colleague of mine, who happens to be poetically spontaneous, broached the thought of going to the ruins again, as it were. Instead, we began with an exhibition at India habitat center, in the green-to be-envied Lodi road. The exhibition was the work of a megalomaniac individual, who evidently sells his relation with refusing-to-die Khushwant Singh, and had put together some random visuals with pretensions poetics to commemorate 100 years of Delhi. The sight of it nearly destroyed our sense of the city. Everything led to ruins of, in abstraction. The desire for a concrete ruin concretized over the lunch at Islamic Cultural Centre. And we were thus headed toward HauzKhas Village to be surrounded by images of ethnic village (rarely a village), fashionable crowd, art reproductions, craft on sale, and all of them eventuating into the graves at Haus-I-Alai in Huas-Khas. It was originally built between AD 1296-1316, housing a few graves, overlooking a sprawling green lake, with a madrasa and mosque complex in the precincts.
The Archeological Survey of India (ASI) has had a good part of it subjected to the so-called enhancement. And thus these parts had vulgar cements, like overdone lipstick, all around the old structure. The attempt to conceal the cracks in history was evidently illusive. But then, within the patched up cracks, stays the ruins, attracting us all- neophytes in smoking, early love birds, peers with/without fear, a few foreigners hitherto in search of exotic (unenhanced by ASI) India, and then some of us who indulge in politics with our poetics. Some of us- inundated by invisible ruins, of parliament, of street, of the city, inter alia, catered to us by mass media, politics, and poetics- seek for another way of poetry and politics.
Unsettling Cognition: A case for visual Anthropology
The Lonely window
of past, of present, of future
who knows!
perhaps, delivering every moment
a death of ‘waiting’
A demise of limbo
A rebirth of the same
As history repeats
Unfolds, thus, the same creatures…
You and I
The myriad passersby
Looking- overlooking
Out and in- zooming
Steering clear of the colours
Settle with a few features
We the same creatures…
As if this was not enough that there appeared, juxtaposed in our minds as well as out there, a Janus faced truth:
An open orifice of History
Whereupon past and present,
Over a moment of silence
Like that of chitchat over a cup of steaming tea,
Discuss the future
And that makes me jittery….
No wonder then,
Some of us resort to the absurd, and relish the art of absurdity, underlining its illuminated seams, like the one here:
The Resolve at the Emperor’s grave
No need to name; he has been named in the moth eaten pages of history umpteenth times; just a hint that he was an influential chain in the Delhi Sultanate ruling. And his grave, yet again, discloses the politics of locating graveyards. It’s serene, disarming and exquisite, when the golden beams of sun, every afternoon (except the clouded ones), stream through the ornate ventilator, to cast a visual poetry:
years gone
and years to go
you will come
cascading your beams
and i’ll hold you on my eyelids
touch you with my frozen fingertips
and as i lower on my knees
to kiss your myriad honey-beams
i repent,
‘my lips are gone to the creatures of netherworld’….
Inside the mausoleum, as I am on my knees in one damp corner, to rejoice the sight of sunbeams falling on the graves, a woman in yellow boots (not Kalki), with a fuming cigarette in her fingers, passes by. The moment of her exit renders the whole situation into black and white- the essential binaries of sight!
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Dev Pathak teaches Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi, is among our panel of columnists. He writes his column ‘Dear home: letters from an NRB’ exclusively for bihardays on Saturdays.
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