1857: Looking For Things Misplaced Poem by Asad Zaidi

The battles of 1857
that once upon a time were far-off battles
are here and now.

In these times of shame and of a sense of wrong
when any wrong done oppresses you as your own doing,
the ears catch the rumble of war-drums of the mutiny
and also the hubbub that is so, so Indian
and the whispering of frightened pimps and traitors
and the restive footfalls of chance-mongers.

This could just be an effect of fiction and of commercial cinema produced since.

But this is certainly not the clamour of those 150 crore rupees
which the Government of India has sanctioned
to celebrate/mark the 150th anniversary of the First War of Independence,
sanctioned with the pen of a Prime Minister
who is embarrassed over every battle for freedom
and who goes begging around the world for apologies,
a Prime Minister who would sacrifice all for the national objective
of a better subjugation.

This is the reminder of a fifty seven erased by national elite,
by Bankims and Amichands and Harishchandras,
and by their offspring installed in their thrones,
who never wanted anything better than a better enslavement.

A fifty seven for which there was nothing,
except cold indifference or silence,
in Moolshankars, Siva Prasads, Narendranaths and Ishwar Chandras,
and in Syed Ahmads, Pratap Narains, Maithili Sharans and Ramchandras.

A fifty seven that came to be remembered in the exclusive literature of Hindi
only by Subhadra
some seventy or good eighty long years later.

This is the reminder of a process
that now gets relived some 150 years too late
in suicides of peasants and weavers
whom you cannot even call rioters or protestors and who go their lonely way
- as input of national indexes of development and starvation -
from SEZs towards collective graveyards and cremation sites
like a melancholy, grime-faded, ungovernable procession.

Who has left them so terribly forsaken?

Back in 1857
the common people were probably meant to be that soiled and filthy,
fated perhaps to be so,
with an irrevocability that no one questioned.

Today such appearance has become an extreme crime.

Battles often remain unconsummated,
only to be consummated in times to come, in other ages, with other weapons.

At times it so happens
that the soil-laden corpses too rise to give battle yet again,
mocking the living that are deader than themselves.

And they want to know from them
which section of the infantry or cavalry they belong to,
which leader they follow; or, taking them to be sympathizers,
they happen to tell them of their destination that is Najafgarh,
or else they pause to ask the way to Bakhtawarpur.



The dead of 1857 speak.

Well, forget about our feudal leaders.
Why mention what jagirs they fought to take again!
And don’t ask how we died for them.

Tell us something of yourselves.

Is the world now fully delivered of injustice?
Or is it just that you are blind,
that you just can’t see any way out?

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