Aj Akhan Waris Shah Nu - When Amrita Pritam Penned Her Iconic Poem And Its Context
The immortal story of Heer and Ranjha is close to six centuries old now. Heer was a charming woman, born into a wealthy family. Ranjha was the youngest of four brothers and lived in the village of Takht Hazara by the river Chenab in Punjab, Pakistan. Being his father's favourite son, unlike his brothers who had to toil in the lands, he led a life of ease, playing the flute ('Wanjhli'/'Bansuri'). After the death of Ranjha's father, his brothers' wives start to refuse to give and serve him food. He also has a quarrel with his brothers over land, and one thing leads to another, leading finally to him leaving home. Eventually, he arrives in Heer's village and falls in love with her. Heer's father offers Ranjha a job herding his cattle. Heer becomes mesmerised by the way Ranjha plays his flute and eventually falls in love with him. They meet each other secretly for many years until they are caught by Heer's jealous uncle and her parents. Heer is forced by her family and the local priest or 'Maulvi' to marry another man from a prosperous family. Ranjha is heartbroken. He wanders the countryside alone until eventually, he meets a Shaiva Jogi (ascetic). After meeting Gorakhnath, the founder of the "Kanphata" (pierced ear) sect of jogis at Tilla Jogian, Ranjha becomes a jogi himself, piercing his ears and renouncing the material world. While reciting the name of the Lord, he wanders all over Punjab, eventually finding the village where Heer now lives. The two return to Heer's village, where Heer's parents agree to their marriage - though some versions of the story state that the parents' agreement is only a deception. On the wedding day, her uncle Kaido poisons her food so that the wedding will not take place, in order to punish the girl for her behaviour. Hearing this news, Ranjha rushes to aid Heer, but is too late, as she has already eaten the poison and has died. Brokenhearted once again, Ranjha eats the remaining poisoned food and dies by her side. Heer and Ranjha are buried in Heer's hometown, Jhang. Love-smitten couples and others often pay visits to their mausoleum.
It is said that Heer and Ranjha lived during Mughal Emperor Akbar’s reign. Damodar Das Arora, from the same period, chronicled the story as he saw it. But it was Waris Shah who immortalised their story through his verses. Waris lived through the invasions of Nadir Shah (1739) and Ahmed Shah (1761). This was when the Mughal empire was in its absolute decline. What Waris ‘created wonderfully new was a fresh historical context in which he placed his narrative where we find a different Punjab, a society much changed from that of the sixteenth century defined by Emperor Akbar’s liberal and inclusive vision that accepted diversity as the historical reality of subcontinental society.’
After Akbar’s death, his progressive policies were gradually reversed. “Akbar’s successors turned the compass around and Islam came back in full strength of its rigid orthodoxy. Jahangir and Shah Jahan ruled sternly to the Islamic tenets…The steady progress of Islam was probably fatal to the Mughal Empire. Aurangzeb, the last great emperor attempted a full scale retreat from the conciliatory policy of his predecessors and wrecked the empire in the process. Stern and austere, fanatically convinced that Islam was the only true faith, he forgot that the Mughal Empire was, in fact, just as much Hindu as Muslim. He forgot that if Akbar had not made friends with the powerful Rajputs and had not enlisted the services of countless Hindus, the empire would never have survived his reign…,” writes Amaury De Riencourt in his ‘The Soul of India’.
There are references in Waris’s Heer-Ranjha about these invasions and the devastation they wrought in Punjab. And it is his version that is sung and revered across both sides of Punjab even today. In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that the story of Heer-Ranjha is sung and found anywhere where there are Punjabis and the Punjabi language. There have been numerous movies, plays and songs written using Waris’s tale. And with it, Waris’s name has travelled too. Waris’s name is invoked whenever lovers have needed someone to tell their story. The Sufi poet Waris Shah is longed for by lovers.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, when India and Pakistan were celebrating their respective independence days, it was also partition remembrance day in both countries. And Punjab of both Pakistan and India have borne the unequal burden of partition.
And there is one poet who both Pakistan and India dearly admire - Amrita Pritam. Regarded as the pioneer of modern Punjabi poetry and literature, Amrita Pritam got immediate fame when she wrote the poignant poem ‘Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nuu’(Today I invoke Waris Shah – "Ode to Waris Shah"). Written on a piece of paper during her train journey from Dehradun, in the poem, she expressed her anguish on the massacre of about one million people in Punjab in communal violence following the partition of British India in 1947. The poem was addressed to the Punjabi Sufi Poet Waris Shah. The following are the three opening verses of the poem in Punjabi and their translation in English:
Aj akhan Waris Shah nu ki tun kabran vichchon bol,
Te aj kitab-e-ishq da koi agla varka phol.
Ik roi si dhee Punjab di, tun likh likh maare vain,
Aj lakhan dheean rondian tainu Waris Shah nu kahen.
Uth dardmandaan dia dardiaa, uth takk apnaa Punjab,
Aj bele lashan bichhian te lahu di bhari ChenabI say to Waris Shah today, speak out from your tomb
And let a fresh page unfurl from the Book of Love’s womb.
Just one daughter of Punjab’s woes caused your laments to flow
Today a million daughters weep, and you they do implore
Arise you chronicler of pain and witness your Punjab
Where corpses sprout in the fields and blood flows down the Chenab.
Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was born in Gujranwala and brought up in Lahore, the city she had to flee literally in the clothes she was wearing when communal rioting broke out at the time of Partition in the blood-soaked August of 1947.
In her autobiography, The Revenue Stamp, she recalls the train journey thus:
“Uprooted from Lahore, I had rehabilitated myself at Dehradun for some time. I went to Delhi looking for work and a place to live. On my return journey in the train, I felt the wind was piercing the dark night and wailing at the sorrows the Partition had brought. I had come away from Lahore with just one red shawl and I had torn it into two to cover both my babies. Everything had been torn apart. The words of Waris Shah about how the dead and parted would meet, echoed in my mind. And my poem took shape.”
Pritam says in her autobiography:“The most gruesome accounts of marauding invaders in all mythologies and chronicles put together will not, I believe, compare with the blood curling horrors of this historic year. Tale after tale, each more hair-raising than the last, would take a lifetime to retell.”
Unpublished, the poem reached Pakistan and was translated into English and published. Faiz Ahmad Faiz read it in jail. When he came out, he found many people had a copy and wept on reading it. Sadly, in India, Pritam had to face the ire of her community on why her poem was not addressed to Guru Nanak, while Left-wing writers felt it should have been addressed to Lenin or Stalin!
— Scroll.in
You can listen to Amrita Pritam reciting her immortal poem. Below is the whole poem recited by Gulzar Sahab with English translation:
And a documentary on Amrita Pritam:
DID YOU KNOW the smallpox vaccine—now also being deployed against monkeypox—contains a live virus that confers immunity against multiple poxviruses. But it is not smallpox or a weakened version thereof. Nor is it monkeypox. Nor is it cowpox, as suggested by the vaccine’s famous origin story involving pus taken from an infected milkmaid to immunize an 8-year-old boy.
It is something else entirely: a unique poxvirus whose origins have been lost or perhaps never known at all. Scientists call it vaccinia, and it is pretty much found only in vaccines. No one knows where vaccinia came from in nature. No one has ever found its animal reservoir. No one knows quite what vaccinia is—even as it has been used to inoculate billions of people and saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is a ghost of a virus that has survived by being turned into a vaccine.
DID YOU ALSO KNOW that nineteenth-century vaccines were a far cry from the standardized pharmaceutical products we’re used to today. Preservation of the material on glass or thread was unreliable, so the smallpox vaccine was maintained in the bodies of young children: Liquid from a pox on one child would be transferred into the arm of another, resulting in a pox whose contents could be transferred to another, and so on. And it had to be children because adults tended to already have immunity to smallpox. In 1803, Spain sent 22 orphan boys on a Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition to bring the smallpox vaccine to its colonies. The number of boys was chosen precisely to span the length of the transatlantic voyage: Every nine or 10 days at sea, doctors would transfer the vaccine to the arms of two new boys—two in case one did not take, so that the ship would arrive in the Americas with the last set of boys still having sores.
— No One Knows What’s Inside the Smallpox Vaccine
Now you want to read this next one very carefully…
India, until recently, declared drugs failing quality testing as Not of Standard Quality (NSQ), making the manufacturer liable for minimum imprisonment of one year and maximum imprisonment of two years and a fine of Rs 20,000 with special exceptions. The rationale for criminal punishment in cases of drug quality is simple: Unlike other products, quality issues in the manufacture of drugs have direct implications on the health of citizens.
Seems minimum right? After all, if medicines we take are faulty then manufacturers obviously should be punished for their crimes.
Well, our Modi government does not think so. So it has now relaxed this law. The criminalisation clause has been removed at best. Pharmaceutical companies can now just pay fines and get away. And you know how much this fine is. The big pharma companies have too deep pockets to be bothered by fines. And get away with what exactly?
Indian Pharmacopoeia (IP) is where medicine standards are published in India. Now either a drug passes all quality standards laid down by a government body called the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC), as per IP, or else the drug fails in treating patients. There's no middle ground. IP allows a drug to be declared of standard quality as long as the amount of active ingredient is between 90 per cent to 110 per cent of that advertised on the label. However, entry 4 of the fourth schedule now states that as long as the drug contains at least 70 per cent of the advertised amount, the manufacturer will be subject to lower punishments. This makes no sense because any drug that has only 70 per cent of the active ingredient can result in adverse treatment outcomes. For example, if in a strip of 10 antibiotic tablets each tablet has only 70 mg of active ingredient instead of the 100 mg of active ingredient as listed on the label, at the end of a 10-day course of treatment, the patient would have received only 700 mg of the antibiotic instead of the 1,000 mg that the doctor prescribed. Not only would the patient not recover completely from the infection, but chances are she is now a carrier of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The treatment outcomes will be several times worse in the case of drugs like Levothyroxine or Budeprion, which have “narrow therapeutic index” (NTI), where even minor changes in the dosage can lead to a significant difference in treatment outcomes.
Other defects included in the fourth schedule are the presence of “particulate contamination/foreign matter” and “heavy metals”. Thus, even if a drug is found to be contaminated with glass particles, fungus or heavy metals, the manufacturer will get reduced or no prison time.
Outrageous right? But where is the outrage? All this was published in Indian Express, a national daily. So this is not a secret that I’m revealing to you. You can understand news channels not carrying this, after all, they get ad money from these companies. But what about people? Are we all this much okay with this government? I can understand people being fine with corruption (and this government has indulged in far greater sums of scams than last), crony capitalism (you know the lengths Modi govt goes to benefit Adani and Ambani), rapes, arrest of journalists and a lot worse but even this? Seriously?
The larger takeaway from this episode is that much of India’s drug regulatory apparatus continues to serve the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and not public health. And more importantly, we do not care, at least not enough.
If you are tired of the news and wanted something soothing, can I suggest you watch this ten-year-old interview of Ravish Kumar by Madhu Trehan? I know I know. Ravish and Madhu means news but here they talk in leisure. Their conversation is calming. Just play and check for yourself.
Have you seen the show After Life? I don’t know how to explain this show. It’s beautiful, especially those conversations on benches (Netflix also installed some 25 benches across the UK wherever they were pictured in the show). Just check at least two episodes if you haven’t already.
Oh, I hope you have already seen Sandman. If not, just do.
Sandman is written and conceptualised by Neil Gaiman who I first discovered through his book Coraline which is one of my favourites. It’s a children’s book but also not one given the elements of dark rooms and dialogues. Please check it out if you were looking for a small book with a good story.
“What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?'
'Cats don't have names,' it said.
'No?' said Coraline.
'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
If you have been reading this newsletter, I’m aware that some of the things that I have been sharing might give you an impression that India is intolerant and that Indians don’t like being questioned. But you know what? That’s not the right assessment. Read the below excerpt from The Wire.
This approach is alien to common sense, modern pedagogy and also India’s own tradition of philosophical, ideological and intellectual debate and argumentation which had well laid down rules of engagement. The earliest terms for these debates are brahmodya, as mentioned in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and vada. Siddhartha, before he attained enlightenment and came to be known as the Buddha, engaged in vada with whomsoever he met. The great Sanskrit poet Ashvaghosha describes in detail in Buddhacharita how Magadh’s king Bimbisara questions the Buddha on every aspect of his doctrine. Shankaracharya’s shaastraartha with his philosophical opponents are well known. In a vada or shaastraartha a person would first state the philosophical or ideological position of his opponent clearly and cogently. This was known as Poorvapaksha. After making an authentic presentation of the opponents’ views, he or she would begin to offer counter-arguments to demolish the opposite viewpoint. It is obvious that a deep and thorough study of the opponent’s views was mandatory before one proceeded to argue one’s own case against them. And, how would one do this if the texts containing the opponent’s views are not available because they have been suppressed?
So, shaastraartha was meant to be a transparent public debate between two intellectual adversaries who were well versed in the views of the opponent. As the Upanishadic dialogues show, disciples freely questioned their gurus and these free discussions often resulted in achieving greater clarity on philosophical, metaphysical and theological issues. There is a well known Sanskrit saying: “Vade vade jaayate tatvabodhah (Truth is born out of interaction among different viewpoints)”. Al-Biruni, who described India of the 11th century, wrote that a unique trait of the Indians was they were engaged in discussing something or the other among themselves all the time. So, a spirit of enquiry distinguished Indians from others and argumentation was the norm in their day-to-day life. It was not viewed with suspicion and no lack of respect was attributed to it. We have accounts of the Mughal emperor Akbar inviting Jain scholars and Jesuit priests to his court for philosophical debates and discussions.
Against this historical background, it is very difficult to understand how a culture of intolerance for differing opinions and viewpoints grew so rapidly in modern India and succeeded in vitiating the intellectual atmosphere so thoroughly.
That’s all for this one.
I hope I was able to add some value to your understanding of the world. And something of this interested you. Do write back and suggest things to read, listen to and watch.
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