Repression and Resistance, Delhi 2016: Through the Prism of Urdu Poetry

 
Mir, in his characteristic style, had described Delhi as a wrecked and ruined city, which was once home to only a chosen few :
 

 
Little did we know that the democratic ethos of the city would again, after 200 years be wrecked and ruined, first by authoritarian and indiscriminate police excesses in the campus of one of its most celebrated Universities, and then by hooliganism, violence and vandalism, orchestrated by political hoodlums and lawyers inside the complex of its central Sessions Court. It was, perhaps, for a similar tyrannical era that Ahmed Faraz had said :
 

 
Much as Delhi has always prided itself for being the cultural, literary and Constitutional capital of the country, it has also consistently been witness to wrecks and ruins of democratic spaces, of literature and art and culture at the hands of despots. As we, yet again, prepare to fight for a democratic and free Delhi, let us take a short poetic journey to see Delhi’s cultural desolation which had started long ago and which resonates in the poetry of almost every age.
 
While Mir in the eighteenth century, described himself as a citizen of a deserted and wrecked Delhi, Ghalib, in the next century lamented that the city had become bereft of love and no longer offered bread and butter to thinkers and poets   :
 

 
          This city is now deprived of the sorrow of love, ‘Asad’         
          We’ll live in Delhi, all right, but what will we eat ?
 
His contemporary, Zauq, though he admitted that poetry was no longer appreciated in Delhi, refused to leave in search of greener pastures as he was far too attached to the city’s lanes :
 

 
And their Royal benefactor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, imprisoned to die in Rangoon, calling Delhi his beloved, yearned to be buried here :
 

 
In the next generation, Altaf Husain Haali beseeched his friends not to cause him insufferable pain by talking to him about “The Late Delhi”:
 

          You will come back with a hundred wounds on your chest, Oh Traveller / beware, never go to the ruins of this city
 
Soon after independence, the Keats of Urdu poetry, Majaz, bid a tearful farewell to the city when he was forced to return to Lucknow :
 

 
          Goodbye, oh Delhi, I now go away from your gatherings / crying I go, wailing on my lips I go

 
In the mid eighties, faced with the hostile and ill-mannered attitude of the highbrowed citizens of the First City, Bashir Badr quipped :

 
Fed up of the soaring inflation in the Capital in the nineties, Asrar Jaameyi, a gifted satirist living in penury in the lanes of one of the many unauthorized colonies of Delhi, advised Emperor Zafar to remain in his grave in Rangoon and not yearn for his two yards of land in Delhi :
 

 
And recently Anwar Jalalpuri penned a beautiful obituary to the death of culture and civilization in Ghalib’sDelhi :
 

 
Faiz’s oft-quoted advice to his ‘fellow-lovers’ from Lahore Jail in 1959 seems so apt for the Capital today :
 

 
Equally relevant is Sahir’s‘zulm phir zulm hai' penned by him on the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 but, as literary historian Rakhshanda Jalil puts it, “just as chillingly fitting today” :
 

 
         Oppression is but oppression, when it rises, it washes out
         Blood is but blood, if it spills, it will clot
 
         What do we say about oppression?
         How tall can it stand?
         Oppression is only oppression – from the beginning to the end
         Blood is still blood, it can assume a hundred forms
         Such forms which, even if one tries, do not get erased
         Such embers which, even if one tries, do not get extinguished
         Such slogans which, even if one tries, do not get suppressed
           
 
Let us hope that this ‘zulm’ will stop before too late and that Delhiites will reclaim their democratic, cultural and educational spaces – like Majaz, who when forced to leave Delhi, promised to soon return with vehemence and fervour :