Lal Singh Dil and the Poetics of Disjunction

SPECIAL ARTICLEfebruary 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 64 Lal Singh Dil and the Poetics of Disjunction The Poet as a Political Cartographer Rajesh Sharma Rajesh Sharma ([email protected]) teaches English at the Punjabi University, Patiala. Lal Singh Dil was a revolutionary poet born into a dalit family. He is among the most significant modern Punjabi poets for his political vision and aesthetic practice. Arguably the only contemporary Punjabi poet who deals comprehensively and fearlessly with capitalism’s historical geography in this part of the world, he had a lucid grasp of the ways of the neo-liberal economic order and its investments in an unequal and oppressive social order. The article argues that Dil invented a peculiar poetics of disjunction to deal with a world that called him to battle again and again. an enormous enclosure as far as the eye can see – a wall an immense pond all dried up – Dil 2009: 89 L al Singh Dil (1943-2007) is, quite markedly, a poet of the contemporary historical geography of east Punjab. His poetry makes the reader acutely aware of the transfor- mation of the Punjab’s lived spaces through time. These are fraught spaces, traversed by figures of the dispossessed and the precariat. 1 The figures are often minimally drawn, and drift in anonymity. Sometimes, though, Dil touches them with a memorable detail: you cannot forget Billa, the protagonist of Ajj Billa Phir Aaya (“Billa Came Again Today”), with his per- petually oiled long black hair, bright eyes, chain around the neck with a goddess framed in silver, and rings on several fin- gers (2009: 34-35). Beginning in the 1960s, Dil’s poetry documents four decades of the history of post-partition Indian Punjab. He began writ- ing in the rebellious and dreamy 1960s and 1970s, and contin- ued into the cynical 2000s. The continuity is more than tem- poral; it is also symbolic and substantial, in that it answers to deeper correspondences between then and now, which histo- rians of the present are also beginning to map. After all, the neo-liberal world order of today was born in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly with the realpolitik of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan met the economic theories of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago Boys. Dil’s poetry cannot, hence, be confined to the world of the 1960s and 1970s. He is equally a poet of our times. In fact, his poetry is capable of re-disclosing the earlier decades in the light of our day, revealing thereby the lineages of the present. He was not a trained historian, nor a geographer, yet he grasped capitalism’s historical geography in this part of the world in a way that no contemporary Punjabi poet writing in the neo-liberal 1990s and 2000s has arguably done. 2 As a result, he remains among the most alert and insightful wit- nesses to the dim-lit drama of ordinary lives, affected by the transforming spaces of the Punjab, as seen through the hour glass of recent history. Karl Marx and Modern Capitalism In volume I of Capital, Marx unravels “the economic original sin” of the “primitive accumulation of capital” (1990: 873). In his broadly linear narrative, the barbarities of the founding SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 65 period of capitalism are gradually replaced by sophisticated, less obvious methods of capital accumulation. Rosa Luxem- burg, however, was to note that capital accumulation in the periods since has actually proceeded simultaneously through expanded reproduction and primitive accumulation. Accord- ing to her, “force, fraud, oppression, looting”, which character- ised the early phase of capital accumulation, have not been abandoned, but are frequently resorted to whenever the capi- talist order brushes against non-capitalist modes of production, particularly when it is looking to expand into new territories, domestic, colonial, or neocolonial (2003: 432). Marx’s term (“primitive” or “original” accumulation) carries, in our day, a shade of obsolescence that may hinder a clear view of the present, which is actually shaped by a dual process of capital accumulation. For this reason, as David Harvey suggests, it would be better if we used the term “accumulation by dispossession” (2003: 144). As he points out, the process includes more than plain robbery and possession by force: A closer look at Marx’s description of primitive accumulation reveals a wide range of processes. These include the commodification and pri- vatisation of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; the conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collec- tive, state, etc) into exclusive private property rights; the suppression of rights to the commons; the commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial processes of appro- priation of assets (including natural resources); the monetisation of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade and usury, the national debt, and ultimately the credit system as radical means of primitive accumulation (ibid: 145). Harvey goes on to observe, and then substantiate with instances, that “[a]ll the features of primitive accumulation that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present within capitalism’s historical geography up until now” (2003: 145). The instances Harvey cites have a global provenance, and some are expectedly from contemporary India. Marx defines “primitive accumulation” as “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of produc- tion”. The history of this process, he adds, “is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (1990: 875). This is so because “great masses of men (sic) are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletari- ans” (ibid: 876). Along with the peasants, agricultural wage labourers, too, lose access to “the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, and furnished them with timber, fire- wood, turf, etc” (ibid: 877). Marx traces the gruesome history of this process of expropriation “under circumstances of ruth- less terrorism” (ibid: 895) in England back to the 15th century. Resources such as land, which until then had been the com- mon property of people, were forcibly and sometimes under cover of (cunningly fabricated) law snatched from them, be- coming the private property of the emerging capitalist class (ibid: 879-83). This did not end here; the wealthy class “practice[s] on a colossal scale the thefts of state lands” as these “estates are given away, sold at ridiculous prices, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure” (ibid: 884). 3 Marx notes that “the law itself now becomes the instrument by which the people’s land is stolen”; he refers to “[t]he Parlia- mentary form of the robbery” embodied in “Bills for In closure of Commons” (ibid: 885). The very use of “a parliamentary coup d’état”, he observes, to transform the commons into pri- vate property, proves the illegality and illegitimacy of the process (ibid: 886). The dispossessed are then branded as “‘voluntary’ criminals” through “legislation against vagabondage” (ibid: 896). Marx’s words resonate, with an unmistakable measure of irony, in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s warning, issued on 27 December 2012, against the menace of “footloose mi- grants” who leave their villages and descend on cities in search of work (Hindustan Times 2012). Singh was alluding to the rising graph of crime in the country’s capital, brought into sharp focus after the gang rape of a girl a few days earlier. As one of those neo-liberal economic policymakers who cannot wait to study history because they are in a hurry to make it, he expectedly displayed no inclination to reflect historically on the forces which the policies of successive Indian governments have unleashed since the early 1990s. The execution of these policies has removed enormous numbers of the poor from their land and hearth and flung them into big cities, where they are compelled to sleep under flyovers or in impromptu shelters in the country’s many teeming slums. 4 Ajj Billa Phir Aaya: The Historical Geography of Capitalism in Punjab Dil’s figures do not inhabit either metropolitan spaces or their peripheries. At best, they live in small towns (that is, when they are not moving from one place to another), such as Sam- rala, Dil’s home town. This renders their lives more precarious, as opportunities for work are even fewer there. So they remain perennially insecure. What is called “development” flickers like a fitful dream: Billa is an artisan who came to the town in search of work. He found work for a while, but no longer has any: the buildings have already been built (2009: 37). In this place, at least for now, “development” has exhausted itself. In Ajj Billa Phir Aaya, his longest and probably his last poem, Dil addresses global capitalism’s historical geography in the east Punjab from the point of view of a poet-chronicler, in the role of witness. It is obviously a formidable task, 5 considering the sweep and complexity of the historical processes confront- ing him, and it demands that he forge a narrative that can accommodate fragments as much as coherent wholes at vari- ous levels. He responds to the demand by devising a poetics that is at once hallucinatory, anecdotal, oneiric and reportage. He is obviously guided by the conviction that art, everyday life, dreaming and politics cannot be separated. And so he cannot but conjoin them, but without seamlessly melding them: the seams must show. Dil’s poetics is, thus, a poetics of disjunction: he deploys the logic of disjunction to capture a reality that is, to recall Hamlet’s anguished cry, “out of joint” (Shakespeare 1.5.188). It is a disjointed reality that needs nothing short of a disjunctive aesthetic with its characteristic shock of what, in the language of cinema, is called the jump cut. It may SPECIAL ARTICLE february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 66 be added that Dil’s poetics of disjunction operates at the levels of the narrative, the image and the myth. To appreciate the significance of Dil’s efforts to achieve the necessary form through the poetics of disjunction, we may recall Adorno’s observations on the problematic relationship between form and reality: “The unsolved antagonisms of rea- lity return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society” (2004: 7). And yet there is also, in addition to the antagonisms of reality, the challenge posed by the sheer abnormity of a “developing” 6 reality which compels art to self- reflect. Regarding this, Adorno says: In the face of the abnormity into which reality is developing, art’s ines- capable affirmative essence has become insufferable. Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become un- certain of itself right into its innermost fiber (ibid: 2). Dil unflinchingly faces the specific abnormity of his times, which consists as much of capitalism’s “dispossessive” brutali- ties executed on an unimaginable scale as of the seductions of its spectacle, and he strives to create a poetic form that might be able to answer adequately the impossible demands of the times. He does not renounce affirmation, using it instead to defy the insufferable. Sometimes, of course, the abnormity of the present lends a peculiar poignancy to the affirmation – which occasionally blooms into celebration – of life, however tenuously lived. Sometimes it prompts from him a whisper of irony. But sometimes it arouses his wrath, particularly when he contemplates the brutalities running through history to the present. Yet he does not allow the abnormity, however insufferable, to destroy his capacity to embrace life joyously. Once again, the use of the hallucinatory is part of Dil’s effort to devise a form to answer the demands of the contemporary reality of capitalism’s historical geography. I use the term “hal- lucinatory” in G N Devy’s sense. He employs it to explain a key trait of adivasi art – “its peculiar manner of constructing space and imagery”: Whether it is the oral and literary form of representation, or the visual and pictorial form, adivasi artists seem to interpret verbal and pictori- al space as demarcated by an extremely flexible ‘framing’. The bound- aries, therefore, between art and non-art are highly porous. An adivasi epic can commence its narration almost out of a trivial everyday event. Adivasi paintings merge with their own living space as if the two are no different at all. And within the narrative itself, or within the paint- ed imagery, there is no deliberate attempt made to follow a sequence. The episodes retold and the images created take on the apparently chaotic shapes of dreams... Yet, one would be wrong in assuming that adivasi arts do not employ any ordering principles (2011: 71). The ‘Hallucinatory’ in Dil’s Poetry In Dil’s case, the hallucinatory is used in response to the chaos let loose by the neo-liberal economic order. His “flexi- ble ‘framing’” is a rejection of the nostalgia for a seamless narrative which, in any case, cannot accommodate and report the fractured and fracturing reality of the present. Be- sides, poetry and reportage cannot strategically be kept sep- arate in a world in which the discourses of revolt always risk being promptly absorbed and co-opted by the market. And while the hallucinatory functions as an ordering device in the face of a systemic chaos and makes that chaos somewhat com- prehensible, reportage can act as a device to tell the bare, mundane truths of lived everyday reality. There is, as Dil’s poetry frequently demonstrates, an order of truths that poetry can access only through reporting. Discussing the question of intellectual honesty in the face of truth, George Orwell writes: What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truth- fully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self- deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that straightforward ‘reportage’ is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that at every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less subtilised forms (2008: 24). Intellectual freedom is “the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imagi- nary facts and feelings” (ibid: 25). To report is part of the obli- gation to bear witness to what is. It thus reinforces the uses of the hallucinatory which, as we have noted, is not an escape from a difficult truth, but a commitment to seeing in spite of, and beyond, frames and fragments. The anecdotal, embodied in the many anecdotes which the narrator of Ajj Billa Phir Aaya tells, as well as those which his characters relate, adds to the work a dimension of oral histo- ries of the present. The live resonance of anecdotes as personal testimonies emanates from the authority of their sources, which, in the poem, are historical as much as fictional. The oneiric apparently brings the element of dream into the narrative. However, its real significance lies in extending the geographies of reality by making possible an encounter with the impossible as a constitutive element of contemporary reality. Using the oneiric, the hallucinatory, the anecdotal, and repor tage, Dil creates a mobile montage whose organising force is supplied by movements of wandering and drifting – which recapture at another level the enforced nomadism of the dispossessed. The Poem as a Cartographic Project Dil dedicates Ajj Billa Phir Aaya to “the new Marx”. To read the present, one has to renew Marx, renew one’s reading of Marx, renew one’s understanding of the contemporary world in the light of Marx’s interpretation of history. One has to acknowl- edge – as Derrida would wish – the presence of Marx’s spectres that keep us company. The spectres are no mere ghostly shades, but presences that lurk at the edge of the visible and the comprehensible, suggesting, besides crises of articulation and communication, unfinished projects: “No, no, I am not a ghost”, the spectre of the poet’s mother tells him (2006: 21). The poem opens with the identification of an amorphous fear and the obligation to confront it by writing it down, and goes on to acknowledge that this undertaking entails a pas- sage through fear. By the time the poem ends, the poet has figured out the “monster” – the “beast”, as Arundhati Roy (2008: 128) calls it – that is the source of the fear. As a kind of performative project, the poem thus works itself out as a carto- graphic project that maps the monstrosity, the abnormity, of capitalism’s historical geography. The old river, aged and SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 67 deserted, recalls the Satluj of the first poem in the poet’s first book, Satluj di Hawa (“Winds from the Satluj”) (1971), a poem in which the theme of the robbery of land makes its maiden appearance. Confronting the obscure fear is like crossing the river, he writes. The fear dehumanises people; like dogs, they wag their tails and lick plates for leftovers of falsehood (2009: 21). Against this, the poem offers – to the reader as to the poet – a baptism of fear, so that the monster is seen, sized up, and confronted. Two deeply perturbing images in the poem overshadow all others. Both are “monstrous” images. The first is of women making rotis: the food smells of flesh; on food plates in every home, flesh shines (2009: 24). The second image is of the poet- narrator’s mind rising up after he has had some dreams. It has risen, he says, like the head of a child rises in a thousand boils: an insurrection of boils exploding through tender skin. Reality and the Lacanian real dissolve in these images to report the unsayable, making the images the key sites of the poem’s activity. Ajj Billa Phir Aaya is simultaneously a document inter- spersed with critique and a sustained reflection on the ques- tion of poetic form. The document, significantly, accommo- dates several dreams. It is also a dream that prompts the poet to write (2009: 21). The unreality of dreams, stitched into reportage, works to disclose the impossible geographies of reality. In fact, the failure of the numerous impracticable “schemes” which a worried Billa makes for his livelihood points to his inability to grasp the “impossible” reality around him, the reality which affords him no opening (ibid: 36). Neither does it afford any to Bhatti, a scooter mechanic with a diploma in technical training. His small workshop received no work after municipal authorities dug up the road to lay sewerage pipes. The local “development” project pushed him to seek an escape from his worries in drugs in the company of an addict, a brahmin who sold milk for a living. With reality over- whelming and eluding them, these young men seek escape in daydreams and drug-induced fantasy. Sukhu’s son, who sells tea and milk from a rehri in the grain market, also reports a failing business (ibid: 51-52). Maybe he too would find solace in some escape. Meanwhile, what is the reality that these persons are unable to understand and that is driving them to despair? It is, to use Harvey’s words, the global neo-liberal project for “the restora- tion of class power” by means of a widespread process of dis- possession through which the means of production, on which the poor survive, are transferred to the global elite on a mas- sive scale (Harvey 2005: 7-52). Increasingly, people are being denied any right to the commons. The commons are being “enclosed” and transformed into private property, and some- times “state” property – before that property, too, is stolen away and turned surreptitiously into private property. The his- tory that Marx witnessed is being re-enacted, under his spec- tre’s lingering gaze. Dil dwells extensively and repeatedly on the expropriation of the commons in the Punjab. He notes that pastures, ponds, graveyards, and other common lands are being occupied by the wealthy and powerful, who also control the political parties. The poet literally reports several illegal occupations, giving specific details, including those involving lands taken for social and charitable purposes. The cattle of the poor are attacked, and sometimes slaughtered or set on fire with a tyre around the neck to eliminate the threat they pose to the expro- priated commons. The poor, the overwhelming majority of whom are dalits, are thus violently robbed of the barest means of survival (2009: 66, 71-72, 76, 83, 86, 91, 102-04, 106-07, 112-13). Unable to find sustenance in their villages, they rush to the cities, where they are again disappointed. The cities have no work for them either (ibid: 67). In this situation, drugs serve different purposes. They offer an escape to those who turn to the false solace they provide, and an excuse to the expropriators, who can “correctly” blame their victims from a moral high ground. Dil views the easily available drugs as weapons of mass destruction in a class war (in which caste, too, is necessarily implicated). In his view, iterated more than once in the poem, drugs are instruments of the “genocide” of poor dalits, although they kill others too now and then (2009: 67, 71, 78, 81). Some of the most terrifying images in the poem are thus of the victims of drugs: they are seen dying on the roads and in deserted cremation grounds, sometimes eaten by packs of dogs (ibid: 34). Parveen, one of them, tells Billa: Look at our condition, worse than a dog’s. Even a dog doesn’t let worms infest it. But we are being eaten by worms 7 (ibid: 60). The poet’s bitterness is part of a larger structure of response, which addresses the logic of the postcolonial state. That larger, inhuman logic has to be talked about, understood and exposed: Those tyrants who, after the British had left, invented new forms of tyranny must be talked about. Their ways must be discussed (2009: 99). What follows is a rambling report on, among other things, the disappearance of the historic forests of Machhiwara where Guru Gobind Singh had once walked: the marauding land- grabbers have erased all signs of that history, including the well where the Guru had probably quenched his thirst (2009: 104). This is followed by pointed remarks on what Dil sees as a calculated extermination of the small peasantry, symbolised in the way urbanisation is pushing the poor villager’s bullock cart off the road with seeming inevitability – a reality that is simultaneously a grim symbol of capitalism’s historical geography (ibid: 110). Dil’s Poetry and the ‘Problem of Form’ Something of this “doubling” – as between reality and the symbol – occurs when Dil reflects aloud, in the body of the poem itself, on the problem of form. The reflection is under- taken with extreme self-consciousness – clearly not because the poet is awed by the norms of poetic propriety, but because SPECIAL ARTICLE february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 68 he would not conceal his purpose, which is to capture an elusive reality: I want to catch something in poetry, something that has been lost. It’s like shooting an arrow in the dark. If the poem fails to catch the thing, it will have failed like a vine that bears no fruit (2009: 29). So, once again, after more than a century, poetry has the obligation to mirror reality. The difference, though, is that reality today has melted all existing frames, and not just the binaries. It has become a monstrosity, an abnormity: it has become a Narasingha (the Puranic figure of the half human and half lion) (ibid: 31). Must not, then, poetry too become monstrous, if only to get hold of reality and bring it to justice? Such poetry is “something” that grows in the mind like a harvest of mushrooms, the poet writes. He wonders how to label it. Is it a poem, a story, a novel, or an essay? One thing is certain: a poem takes place only when the poet stands apart from the world – even when the poem happens to be about the world itself (2009: 46). The poet then has, one might add, a spectral relation to the world. At times, of course, poetry seems to be “mere words”, a des- perate effort to avoid being drowned (2009: 91-92). But then there is the promise it holds out, the promise to fly free “towards real skies” (ibid: 118). When the promise is realised, the poem takes over from the poet. He no longer holds its reins (ibid: 127). In a curious inversion lit with irony, Dil dubs reality as “poetic” when the real, historical characters of the poem are unable to understand what is really going on around them, and so retreat into some fictional world that exists only inside their heads. This, too, he sardonically remarks, makes his poem “poetic” (2009: 60). The hallucinatory and reportage fuse as the long poem draws to its end. The poet-narrator asks: How shall we deal with the monster that has swallowed everything? And “every- thing” here is not just another word. It is a whole lived world, with its donkeys, camels, horses, bullocks, pastures, lands, ponds, peasants, rehris, people’s ways of life, songs, freedom, forests, state properties, honest officials, etc (2009: 128). This is the poet’s apocalyptic vision of the monster of global capita- lism crunching up everything: a historically situated bizarre replay of the potent old myth of the dark god Krishna’s cosmic form, his vishvarupa, witnessed by an indecisive, bewildered, and fear-stricken Arjuna in the Mahabharata. The poem opened with dreams and apprehensions. In end- ing the way it does – by historicising a myth in a way that also draws a map of global capitalism’s historical geography – it points the way, past a baptism of fear, to the freedom of “real skies”. The oneiric, the hallucinatory, the anecdotal, and reportage converge in the apocalyptic in a tense fusion in which is realised a specific poetics of disjunction appropriate to the Punjab, whose landscapes and lifeworlds are today being feverishly overwritten by global capitalism’s cognitively challenging cartography. Satluj di Hawa: A Critique of Global Capitalism Dil came to the writing of this miniature critical epic of global capitalism after a long journey, which apparently began with the poems that first appeared in Satluj di Hawa. The collection is dedicated to “the treasures of the human spirit”, in an absolute affirmation of the kind Pablo Neruda loved and lived, as Mario Vargas Llosa reminisces, in defiance of any life-destroying oppressions (http://www.theparisreview. org/interviews/2280/the-art-of-fiction-no-120-mario-vargas- llosa). In this affirmation, there is no room for what Nietzsche terms ressentiment: the poet refuses to bite the dominant order’s bait to play according to a given script. He would not play the victim as a rebel defined by the order against which he is rebelling, but would rather redefine, in his own way, the terms and categories of that order. Neither would he found a separate, exclusive world in retaliation to his exclusion. Satluj di Hawa, in this sense, marks an important point of departure in the politics of literary aesthetics. Unlike Pash who, in a sense, tries to construct alternative, or counter, liter- ary aesthetics, Dil reworks the available aesthetics to make them speak other truths and thus subvert the given order. Dil’s undertaking has a significance which will only deepen as late capitalism reincarnates itself in newer avatars, absorbing, co-opting and commodifying the various resistances that arise to challenge its plastic regime. Like Hamlet, the poet chooses to “delve one yard below their mines/and blow them at the moon” (Shakespeare 3.4.208-09). Blending sadness, anger and joy, the opening poem, Satluj di Hawa, addresses the river Satluj as a witness to the subcon- tinent’s history of dispossession and dishonour: You look far, even to where the Cauvery flows, and see the land being robbed, the harvest of wheat dishonoured, the paddy set on fire under laughter. You look far, to where their palaces stand, the palaces that still cherish the hanging noose used by those white rulers (2007: 36). 8 The postcolonial state, as a continuation in many ways of the colonial state, is a site of concern that Dil visits again and again. But it is in Sham da Rang (“The Colour of the Evening”; ibid: 39-40), arguably Dil’s best-known poem, that the rework- ing of the available aesthetics is first accomplished. The pro- tagonists of the poem are itinerant agricultural workers, other daily wage earners, and the unemployed. Through a process that may be called alchemical, they enter the poem’s images as living raw materials, and abide there as spectral presences in some bizarre fairyland. The alchemy of suffer- ing and beauty is set to work in the very first line of the poem, which evokes time through a hint of immemorial histories: “The evening, again, has an old colour”. People lurk as spec- tral remainders in the disjunctive images of the “footpath” and the “lake”, even as the two apparently stand for and “reflect” those very people. The “city” going towards “some villages” weaves a circle of irony, sending off sparks of aliena- tion and sheer numerical friction. The agricultural workers’ SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 69 perpetual, forced nomadism stands out sharply against the en- during reality of “another’s land”, on which they have worked. The procession of the perennially dispossessed carries a curi- ous baggage: the abuses and admonitions hurled at them. These “hunger-stricken Aryans” are the disenfranchised of their country; if they unload anywhere for a short stay, they are treated as menacing encroachers. Only the trees, under which they have halted to snatch a rest and in whose shade they have tied their cattle, want them to stay and not leave. In their own country, these people have been reduced to the hopeless mem- ory of a promise, which six decades of independence have done little to redeem. Beruzgar (“The Unemployed”; ibid: 41) reads like an accom- panying poem. The vulnerability and precariousness of the unemployed, trying to conceal their humiliating poverty, are captured in the gestures of the faceless figures. They have re- fined the art of hiding their frayed cuffs and tattered footwear. Their eyelids carry shrouds beneath: an image that transcends the metaphorical to communicate a truth which reality can carry only on the breath of poetry. What Gaston Bachelard terms the “absolute imagination” (1964: 33) in the creation of images is at work in the short poem Nach (“Dance”; 2007: 53). 9 The poem bears witness to impossible celebration – the celebration of (mere) living – crystallised in the scene of an anonymous woman labourer “cooking her heart” over the hearth, the moon laughing through the branches of a tree, her husband keeping their two children entertained, and the older child breaking into a dance to the impromptu jugalbandi of a bowl and waist-cord bells. The image conjured is of an absent house, yet with all its essential affective furniture. John Berger writes: “The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with ex- actitude and without pity” (2003: 450). Dil’s poem handles tenderness without “tenderness” and “without pity”, even as it draws the absent house “with exactitude”. Ik Soch (“A Way of Thinking”; 2007: 68) achieves its fusion of thought and image with minimal architecture, in just three lines. Paradoxically, the dry, rough thoughts receive their nourishment from the well-nourished, well-oiled hair, whose illusory gift of liberation is regretted and renounced with the first light of a dawning “wisdom”. Lal Purab (“The Red East”; 2007: 92-95) is another poem in which thought and image flare up and fuse remarkably, in spite of the insistent note of revolutionary propaganda that somewhat impairs the poem’s overall artistic merit. The rising sun is seen against a pageant of struggling and despairing people. Famished “buds” go barefoot, carrying great loads on their young heads; starving women quarrel loudly to forget their hunger; grieving men’s eyes swim with rain clouds; aged heads and dry white beards tremble with strokes of the hammer; lives burn out with lamps late into the nights; and peasants, consumed by worries over their mortgaged little land, eat the bread of insults while the rafters in a shaky ceiling threaten to crash over their dis- tressed heads. It is a whole lifeworld of hopeless anxiety visualised in colours – the grey and brown of dust, the black of rotting old moss, the red of the sun. The murky gloom is lit only with hope. There is, however, no hope in Raat (“Night”; 2007: 113), an indebted peasant’s autobiographical narrative, in which dream and reportage are interwoven to yield glimpses into a tor- mented life: he watches empty cooking vessels fly away, and pokes the hearth but finds no fire. “I was sold/like all who are sold”, he cries: the consciousness of a condition in which he is not alone lends an ironic measure of dignity to his lament. Dil was to again create a procession of fraught images in Kupp (“Haystacks”; 2007: 123), which appeared in his second collection of poems, Bahut Sare Suraj (“So Many Suns”, 1982). Here you have a farmer, a jatt, barely managing to save his honour from the hands of his exploiters in the mandi; a father hounded by men in “spotless whites”, who loom outside his door to get his – or his daughter’s – thumb impression on a paper; and officers of the government reclining royally on his cot and leering at his daughter, amusing themselves at the “dance” – the frenzied panic – of father and daughter. Then you have the image of a young son bolting from school after smashing a window pane with a hockey stick. This is followed by another image, in which the haystacks of “hope” (as they appear when the poem opens) become sites of violent revolt as policemen go berserk, scattering the chaff in search of two men suspected to be hiding there. Bearing Witness to a Precarious State of Living The relationship between peasantry and patriotism is prob- lematised in Khat (“Letter”; 2007: 108) and Fauji Gaddi vich Baithe Dost (“Friends Sitting in a Military Vehicle”; ibid: 109). In the first, a soldier’s wife writes to him of love, debt and death. The poem is at once her letter and the poet’s dream of her consciousness. The first image is of bricks in a falling wall, an image simultaneously menacing and romantic: she sees in the bricks tentative images of their conjugal love. This is fol- lowed by the image of moneylenders, whom the soldier’s just deceased father owed money; they come daily with demands for recovery, knocking on their house which is still in mourn- ing. The lamp burns all night: is the lamp, lit beside the dead during the last vigil, spilling its light beyond the dread night? The nights, in the last extended image, settle down like sleep- ing vultures, to wail in the woman’s intermittent sleep. In the second poem, the narrator unravels the conditions at home that have probably forced the young men to join military service. Their fathers are perhaps desperately chasing the dream of a full stomach; their mothers, timid and fearful like vulnerable birds, are probably trudging the long road to work. Perhaps their small patches of land have been sold off; per- haps the police have scattered the contents of a brother’s chhabri on the road. 10 In Nahma (2007: 119-20), one can discern the seed of Ajj Billa Phir Aaya. This short poem foreshadows the precariat’s state of living, which received elaborate treatment at the hands of the poet years later. It quickly runs the whole gamut – from the poet-narrator’s innocent boyhood pranks, to the unspeak- able grief of a father who helplessly watches his young son lose SPECIAL ARTICLE february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 70 his sanity, to the shock of finding himself useless because he can find no work. The poem is narrated like an anecdote, capturing a historical condition incomprehensible to the young man. His insanity comes alive in the strange “dialogue” with which the poem ends: Nahma and the son sit facing each other beside a fire pit, over which sugar cane juice boils in a caul- dron. The son speaks of the fateful cycle of birth and death in which sons and fathers might even exchange places. Then, he abruptly threatens to jump into the cauldron. The people standing nearby take him away. The father utters no word throughout the “dialogue”, yet his silent presence oozes from the image and articulates his unspeakable grief. The poem derives its peculiar force not only from its anecdotal spont- aneity, initial humour and understatement, but also from the dual structure of witness-bearing: the narrator bears witness to a father’s sorrow; the father, in turn, helplessly watches his son’s insanity. Bholiyan (“Innocent Girls”; 2007: 115-16) appears to make an overstatement towards the end, yet the poem absorbs it natu- rally after the definitive touches with which the destitute young girls going to earn their daily wages are sketched. The abnormity of their dehumanising condition compels a response of mythical proportions: Should this be made known to the inhabitants of another planet, they would be stunned, would become stones, would never arise and move again. Should the beasts realise this, they would flee mankind and, terrified, rush screaming back to forests (ibid: 116). The talent that allows Dil to give oddness a home, the basis of his poetics of disjunction, appears with characteristic faci- lity in Babal Tere Khetan Vich (“In Your Fields, Father”; 2007: 122). The daughter of a dispossessed tiller acknowledges that her family has lost their claim to land in the court of law, yet refuses to renounce dreaming. She visualises the tractors “dancing” in her father’s fields one day. She can be dispos- sessed of land, but not of the freedom to dream. The girl’s “naïve” refusal transports the oneiric and the hallucinatory into the geography of the reported. Ajooba (“Wonder”; 2007: 139) demonstrates the capacity of myth to accommodate the disjunctive. Elsewhere, Dil invokes or recreates myth; here, he creates myth, something that may not be possible unless a poet comes to embody a people and their culture, and becomes, in his blazing singularity, the voice of a collective consciousness. The poem advances like a vine with its many surprising turns; the moods shift. The stark opening statement – that woman is a wonder of the earth – quickly gives way to the declaration of an article of faith: that woman holds and bears the earth on her palm. The sensory testimony elevates the declaration to the realm of the sublime: the earth has the fragrance of a woman’s body, the crops sway like her flowing garment, the flowers receive their inno- cence from her lips. Unexpectedly, the poem then turns to fathom the anguish of being earth and being a woman: hunger is the lot of both; the seas are salty because women’s eyes have tears. The poem turns again: she loves honour and nobi- lity, so the stars abide in her vicinity. By the time the poem reaches this point, she has become ambivalent – she is both earth and woman. It can be argued that for Dil, poetry itself has the immense capaciousness of myth, for only then can it accommodate the vast and disparate reality. His poem Kavita (“Poetry”; 2007: 105-06) is a manifesto of what may constitute the poetic. The crops dying for want of fertilisers are poetry; the mills are poems; the forest in flames is a poem; the laughter of the poet’s father is poetry; there is poetry in stones and steel; the donkey herds and snake charmers are poems. This power to un-see the borders enables Dil, a firmly rooted poet of his people and region, to grasp the human condition without inhibition or bias. In Punjab (2007: 103), he sees Pun- jab everywhere. All workers with unshaved faces and cracked bare feet, be they in Bengal or Kerala, are Punjabis to him. The whole world is Machhiwara, he says: at once exile and home. In fact, the passion for universal self-identification introduces itself in Dil’s first book, in Desh (“Country”; 2007: 47) and Belachak (“Inflexible”; ibid: 60-61). It is a humane, generous rebuke, so typical of Dil, to the ethnocentric proclivities often placed on mindless display in Punjab and elsewhere. Caste, too, re- ceives its share of the poet’s bitter attention: more often it informs his observation, although it is treated with uncon- cealed and raw irony in the short poem Jaat (“Caste”; ibid: 64), which appeared in his first book. The poet tells the girl who loves him, and who comes from another caste, that their families have separate places to even cremate their dead. Beyond this the poem says nothing, allowing silence to take over. How can the living unite in love when even the dead are not permitted to mix? Sathhar, Dil’s third collection of poems, published in 1997, is, as the title indicates, largely a work of mourning. But it is mourning with a sting of satire, verging at times on ridicule. The castrated bull, whose horns have now lost their itch and who has learnt to quietly submit, becomes almost a symbol of the renegade revolutionary Saahn (“Bull”; 1997: 149). Ulat Inqalab de Pair (“Revolution Reversed”; ibid: 150), Gair Vidrohi Nazm di Talaash (“Search for a Non-Rebellious Poem”; ibid: 152), Sawariyan (“Passengers”; ibid: 183), Comradan da Geet (“Song of the Comrades”; ibid: 188), Hiloona (“Jolt”; ibid: 190) and Akkhan Wala (“The One Who Could See”; ibid: 199), all are a revolutionary’s angry outpourings. The reader feels that the once-glowing embers of the poet’s imagination are now barely breathing under the ashes. But the fire would return with Ajj Billa Phir Aaya, and become a conflagration. Conclusion Although a good deal of Dil’s work is yet to be published (as the note appended to Naag Lok indicates), it can nevertheless be argued that his protean talent had the potential to be a real match for the protean cunning of capital, which Harvey and Jameson, among others, have so meticulously mapped in our day. Dil had the sense and the pride to suspect the appro- priative attempts at representation that the subaltern studies SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 71 group was to question in its own way: “You just tell us who you are to do something/for our sake” (Sheeshe di Qaid [“Imprisonment in Glass”]; 1997: 67). The poem Sanskriti (“Culture”; ibid: 48), “brush[ing] history against the grain”, to use Walter Benjamin’s words, recalls the reader to Benjamin’s seventh thesis on the philosophy of history (2007: 256-57). Vishav Sundari (“Miss World”; Dil 2007: 77) critiques the global capitalist spectacle and simulacrum which are fabri- cated out of, and conceal, the unacknowledged labour of anonymous people. And in one of the “ghazals”, Dil speaks of the commodification of courage and intellect through co-option by the market (ibid: 80). In a sense, then, Dil’s oeuvre is radically unfinished. But that also means it bristles with potentialities for us, his readers, who shall be measured beside them and judged by our ability to fathom and develop them. By challenging us from his grave that was never to be, 11 Dil continues to haunt us like the undead Marx. Notes 1 According to Guy Standing, the precariat is “A Class-in-the-Making”, a historically specific for- mation of the period of neo-liberal globalisation, characterised by “precariousness of resi dency, of labour and work, and of social protection” (2011: vii, 4). Judith Butler notes: “Precarious life characterises such lives who do not qualify as recognisable, readable, or grievable” (2013: xiii). 2 My understanding of capitalism’s historical geography is based on David Harvey (2003, 2005) and Fredric Jameson’s (1991) work. 3 History repeats itself. Among innumerable instances of this kind in the recent history of India was a case in Patiala, registered by inves- tigating agencies in 2012, in which a former collector/deputy commissioner was named as one of the accused. 4 “The flyover is indeed the metaphor of our growth trajectory, enabling the successful Indian to sweep over the heads of the huddled masses”, writes Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former bureaucrat and minister in the Indian govern- ment, in his preface to Badri Raina’s book, The Underside of Things (2012: xx). 5 Fredric Jameson, addressing the challenge of late (global/multinational) capitalism’s formi- dable complexity, proposes cognitive mapping as an initial step towards resistance. Dil’s poe- tics of disjunction can be seen as a specific attempt at cognitive mapping. At the same time, it must be underlined that it does more than cognitive mapping (Jameson 1991). 6 A pun is intended here to span the distance between Adorno’s “Developing Reality” and “the reality of development” in our times. The reality of development under the neo-liberal regime, which gives primacy to the freedom of the market over the individual’s freedom to lead a dignified life, should refer as much to the gathering human and ecological crisis as to the accelerated development that impels the crisis (and which “Developmentalism”, as the ideo- logical façade of neo-liberalism, conceals). 7 This, and subsequent translations of Dil’s poetry are by the author of this article. 8 Naag Lok (2007) carries in one volume Dil’s three books of poetry: Satluj di Hawa (1971), Bahut Sare Suraj (1982) and Sathhar (1997). Hence this and subsequent references are to the page numbers of Naag Lok. 9 Dil’s images are quintessential poetic images in Bachelard’s sense. For Bachelard, the poetic image begins to find its form at the limits of visualisation, conceived as imaging or reflec- tion. It is a work of imagination at the limits, a limit experience, from which the lineaments of another world can be dimly sighted. 10 A hawker’s basket. 11 His wish that his dead body should be buried could somehow not be fulfilled. The body was cremated. References Adorno, Theodore W (2004): Aesthetic Theory (Robert Hullot-Kentor trans) (London and New York: Continuum). Bachelard, Gaston (1964): The Poetics of Space (Maria Jolas trans) (Boston: Beacon). Benjamin, Walter (2007): Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Harry Zohn trans) (New York: Schocken, Random House). Berger, John (2003): “The Hour of Poetry” in Geoff Dyer (ed.), Selected Essays (New York: Vintage international), 445-52. Butler, Judith (2013): “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics”, AIBR, 4(3): i–xiii available at http://www.aibr.org /antropologia/04v03/ crit- icos/ 040301b.pdf, accessed on 7 March 2013). Derrida, Jacques (2006): Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Peggy Kamuf trans) (New York and London: Routledge). Devy, G N (2011): A Nomad Called Thief: Reflec- tions on Adivasi Silence (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan). Dil, Lal Singh (2007): Naag Lok (“Serpent World”) (Ludhiana: Chetna). – (2009): Ajj Billa Phir Aya (“Billa Came Again Today”) (Chandigarh: Lokgeet). Harvey, David (2003): The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). – (2005): Spaces of Neoliberalisation: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). Hindustan Times (2012): “PM Warns of ‘Footloose Migrants’ from Rural Areas”, 28 December. Jameson, Fredric (1991): Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press). Luxemburg, Rosa (2003): The Accumulation of Cap- ital (Agnes Schwarzschild trans) (London and New York: Routledge). Marx, Karl (1990): Capital: A Critique of Political Econo- my, Vol 1 (Ben Fowkes trans) (London: Penguin). Nietzsche, Friedrich W (1989): On the Genealogy of Morals (Walter Kaufmann trans and ed.) (New York: Vintage). Orwell, George (2008): Books vs Cigarettes (London: Penguin). Raina, Badri (2012): The Underside of Things: India and the World: A Citizen’s Miscellany, 2006-11 (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective). Roy, Arundhati (2008): The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy (New Delhi: Viking Penguin). Shakespeare, William (nd): Hamlet. Standing, Guy (2011): The Precariat: The New Danger- ous Class (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic). REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS November 30, 2013 Moving around in Indian Cities – Dinesh Mohan Review of Twelfth Plan Proposals for Urban Transport – Ranjit Gadgil Ahmedabad’s BRT System: A Sustainable Urban Transport Panacea? – Darshini Mahadevia, Rutul Joshi, Abhijit Datey Metro Rail and the City: Derailing Public Transport – Geetam Tiwari Accidents and Road Safety: Not High on the Government’s Agenda – S Sundar, Akshima T Ghate Is Public Interest Litigation an Appropriate Vehicle for Advancing Road Safety? – Girish Agrawal Car Sewa: The Iconography of Idle Worship – Dunu Roy Analysing the Urban Public Transport Policy Regime in India – P S Kharola For copies write to: Circulation Manager, Economic and Political Weekly, 320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013. email: [email protected]