|
Literary Review
No to war
AFP
The London anti-war demonstration.
IT was just coincidence that I was in London when the biggest anti-war demonstration took place on February 15 this year. My plane had landed late and I had reached my friend's place only around 12.30. It was freezing cold. But when my friend asked me if I would like to go and join the demonstration for a while, I agreed. She immediately began planning how to go and what tube station to get off and I wondered why such elaborate planning was needed. I realised when we got off the train and came out of the underground station. The road was filled with people marching and they were walking from 11 in the morning to reach Hyde Park where there were going to be speeches. It seemed as if the entire world was there. We joined the marchers and walked up to Hyde Park but Hyde Park was so full that we could not enter Hyde Park. We got to know later that there were more than a million people there saying no to war. There were old and young people, little boys and girls, teenagers and babies in prams. There were people in wheel chairs, people with walking sticks and crutches and people with guide dogs. They were all there protesting against war.
Growing up in the south of India and with Tamil literature, one has known wars only as glorious affairs. The Purananuru mother who sent her only son who was barely a boy, to the battlefield and who went looking for his body to find out if he had died with an arrow on his chest, and who swore that if the arrow was on his back, which would prove that he had turned his back, she would cut off the breasts that gave him suck, is an image dominant in the mind. It is an image that people have not given up referring to even to this day. Women apply kumkum on the foreheads of their sons and husbands and send them to fight battles. They do so even today in ads. It is as if women have been ever willing to send their sons and their husbands to war for the sake of the country. The woman who stops her husband from going to battle is symbolised for the Tamils by the song "Pogathae pogathae en kanava, pollatha soppanam nanum kandaen". The woman does not want her husband to go because she is afraid he would not return alive. This woman would never be the model for a growing girl, for, she is afraid. It is the Purananuru woman who is held up as the model for her to follow, for taking up and forsaking wars is the prerogative of men. When a man forsakes wars, he can be Asoka the Great. A woman can only plead or she can fight like a man and be Jhansi ki Rani. There is not much of a choice for a woman when it comes to the question of deciding what she should do for the country.
Growing up in the cool city of Bangalore, when one imagined wars, they had dream-like images. One associated it with films, the sentimental ones, where the spies always look like people belonging elsewhere and the adventurous and thrilling ones were of the Hollywood variety. War was the poem "Home they brought her warrior dead" one read in school. War was Latha Mangeshkar's song "Yeh mere watan ke logon", which was supposed to have brought tears to the eyes of Pandit Nehru. One had cried too hearing that song and thinking one should be a Florence Nightingale nursing wounded soldiers. The war was always fought out there somewhere, so far away that one couldn't see the gore and the blood. Even after growing up, war was only curfew in the city for a while and black-papered windows. It was a romantic event in which one was participating for the sake of the nation.
War is no more a distant affair. Nor is it romantic anymore. It is real and ominous. It is not a song or Sangam poetry. War means the death of innocents. War means hatred and violence. And war means losing the quality of the life you have managed to live so far. And war definitely means keeping the world unsafe for our children. It is time to think of other kinds of poetry. A poem written by Sibani Raychaudhuri for the Asian Women's Workshop in 1983 and published in 1988 in the book Right of Way entitled "The Law of Market-place" puts it all in a nutshell:
In the back street
of the capital city,
stalls and shops stretch out
on to the pavement.
Passers-by stop to examine
crates, baskets, sacks
and jars
filled with colour and abundance.
Fragrant rice
and freshwater fish
from Bangladesh,
cloves and cinnamon sticks
from Tangiers,
marrows and chillies
from East Africa stimulate
the palates of the rich and the exiled.
Surprise and curiosity of some—
nostalgia for others
who've left behind
a piece of land
where golden hopes were planted.
They till the land
and harvest the crops
but don't taste them.
They pack them, load them on to
ships to the West.
Arms, ammunition, come back in return.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
