[Reader-list] Abir Bazaz on Rahman Rahi, a noted Kashmiri poet

[Inder Salim]

Learning to read Rahi: A note on the Preface to Siyah Rude Jaren Manz


To read the work of the Kashmiri poet, Rahman Rahi, is to return to
the question of what is one’s own. To read Rahi is to begin
understanding solitude. But not solitude as isolation, detachment or
loneliness but solitude as an ancient virtue, as freedom. To read Rahi
is also to read the Kashmiri self and the problem of its sovereignty.
One might ask what Rahi’s solitude has to do with the question of
sovereignty, or even what exactly we mean by the Kashmiri self. But we
have not as yet learned to read Rahi.


Rahi is a poet of silence, of longings and distances, of essential
Kashmiri meanings (I use essential here in the sense the word
‘essence’ carries of a relation with the historical past). Rahi’s
words speak of the difficulty of determining the Self. Rahi reveals
the Kashmiri language as a sehra (desert), gulzar (garden) and a
samsara (world). Sometimes I approach Rahi from his nearness and
distance to Akhtar Mohiudeen. I visited Akhtar Mohiudeen in 1997.
Mohiudeen had lost his son and son-in-law to the violence in the
1990s. Many children were freely running about his house. Freely. He
said to me: “These are the children of my son and my daughter. As long
as I am alive, I am going to take care of them. But that does not mean
that I will give up. I will keep fighting for justice.” Soon the
conversation turned to poetry and to Rahman Rahi. He said with great
pain: “Rahi wrote: Zinda rozan bapath chhi maran lukh, che marakh na/
Loti paeth chekha pyaale kyuho uff ti karakh na (To live, people
die:won’t you die/Will you drink this cup in silence, won’t you even
cry?). But when people were ready to die, Rahi was nowhere to be
found.” The tone, I remember, was not accusatory but sad. It is as if
Mohiudeen demanded a word, an answer, a poem or a prayer from Rahi.


How must we begin to understand Rahi’s silence in the early 1990s? As
we know, there are many silences we speak of when we speak of Rahi’s
silence. And we are also speaking of silence. Let us turn to the poem
quoted by Mohiudeen: Zinda rozan bapath chhi maran lukh, che marakh
na/ Loti paeth chekha pyaale kyuho uff ti karakh na (To live, people
die:won’t you die/Will you drink this cup in silence, won’t you even
cry?). Rahi appears to protest the silence with which a Kashmiri
drinks his cup of poison. But the cup of poison here is also the cup
that ended the life of Socrates (Rahi, as we know, is also a
translator of ancient Greek thought). To drink this cup of poison is
to die for speaking the truth. On a different reading, the Kashmiri
who drinks the cup of poison in silence is also dying for speaking the
truth. This dying in life, the patience of the Kashmiri, is a dying
for the truth. This dying in life is also a waiting for justice. Here
I am tempted to recall Socrates’ advice to Athenians for which he is
condemned to death: “Dear friend, you are an Athenian, citizen of the
greatest city, more famous than any other for its knowledge and might,
yet are you not ashamed for devoting all your care to increasing your
wealth, reputation and honors while not caring for or even considering
your reason, truth, and the constant improvement of your soul?” The
silence which is a question for Rahi in the poem Zinda rozan bapath
then is also a question for Akhtar Mohiudeen. But Rahi’s silence is
the silence of a speaking, a speaking of the truth. But that leaves
the reader of Rahi with a difficult question: Can the speaking of
truth be a speaking of justice?


Rahi published a collection of poems in 1997 called Siyah Rude Jaren
Manz. A difficult to translate title, Rahi himself offered the
following English translation: Under the Dark Downpours. Yet the
English “dark” fails to capture the anxiety of the Persian “Siyah.”
The title is difficult to translate into English because it brings
together Siyah (the self, the night of the self), rud (rain, the
event, the gift) and manz (history) together in a way which is
difficult to express in English. The manz which I translate here as
history is “between” in Kashmiri. To be in the Between is what it
means to exist. Who is in this region of the Between? What is the
phenomenon which is the Siyah Rude Jare (the ropes of black rain)? The
Between is the journey and Rahi explicitly invokes the metaphor of the
journey in the Preface to Siyah Rude Jaren Manz. To exist is to be in
the middle (yet another meaning of manz) of the Between. The poet is
in the Between a stranger, homeless in language. But fundamental
decisions about belonging take place in the Between. Rahi finds
himself in the Between, a certain region of darkness, a darkness which
is also a bridge (a rope-bridge of the rain between the earth and the
sky). “Rud-e-Jari” (ropes of rain) in a sense is a gift from the sky,
an event in the Between. Yet the melancholy of the Siyah turns the
event of the Siyah Rude Jaren Manz also into a mourning. There is a
sense of foreboding in the Siyah.


I would like here to speak of the Preface to Siyah Rude Jaren Manz.
But before we do so I would like to speak of Rahi’s language as
unfolding something essential which we encounter in Rahi and his
poetry. Humility. The way Rahi uses the Kashmiri language in this
Preface is a moral lesson. Rahi begins the Preface to Siyah Rude Jaren
Manz with an intimation that he had to wait for a very long time
before he could publish this collection of poems and that much of his
poetry still remains unpublished. Rahi published Siyah Rude Jaren Manz
in 1997. His previous major collection of poems was published in 1958.
That Kashmir’s leading poet had to wait for almost four decades to
publish a new collection of poems is a truth we must have the courage
to understand. Turning Kashmiri melodies into anthems of national
longing is no substitute to the freedom of a poet. We must think
seriously about why Kashmir’s leading writers like Rahman Rahi and
Akhtar Mohiudeen struggled to publish their work even as we encounter
a deluge of publications in Kashmiri.


Rahi says in this Preface that he offers his poems chronologically to
give his reader a sense of his journey. Rahi urges us to read his
poetry historically: “…banan chu tami tale lagiy myani kuni fiqri ya
ehsaasi safruk baas (…maybe the reader will get some sense of my
journey in thought and feeling).” As Rahi puts it himself at the end
of the Preface: Maaney parvar aasi kath mulnavnas/ Taari hargah na
khasyekh mansavnas (If they find meaning in the thought, they will
preserve it/ But if it has no worth for them, they will forget it).
The feeling as much as thought. Feeling is a poor translation for
ehsaas (which could also mean sense, intuition or perception). But
feeling here is also a style of thought, a relation to the world.
Ehsaas is what we could describe as the primordial: a structure of
existence which cannot but be historical. The relation to Kashmir and
Kashmiri remains for Rahi an ethical difficulty (in the Kashmiri sense
of the word mushkil) and right at the beginning of Siyah Rude Jaren
Manz he appears to retreat into this metaphor of a journey. Rahi
writes in the Preface about why he ends the nazm section with the poem
Naet Nabi (a poem about his spiritual journey): “…mye chhu biheth zi
kathi vaatan vael hazraath paraznaavan ath manz mazkoore safruk akh
laeeqi twajah manzil (I believe that those who care for the essential
matter would recognize a proper destiny here for the said journey). We
can attempt a synoptic reading of the passage, as suggested by Rahi,
from the first poem Jalvae tae Zabur (The Song of Revelation) to the
last poem of the nazm section Naet Nabi as a crossing. Perhaps it is
where Rahi breaks from the chronology that we can begin to read the
meanings of the event, the manz, in his own journey. The Manz is
inescapable: it is the destiny of the word and the world. This emerges
more clearly in Rahi’s readings of Kashmiri Sufi poetry scattered
across different books and journals.


We might wonder why we are spending so much time on a Preface which
appears to us as rather casual and straightforward. That returns me to
the point that we have not as yet learned to read Rahi. I mean the
text, the work and the ethic that is Rahi. Rahi’s world recedes into
the future. And perhaps even approaches a national desire (I apologize
for using a word as vulgar as the ‘national’ but at certain moments of
a people’s history such words provide a temporary shelter). Yet Rahi
is no cultural nationalist even though he often turns to a benign form
of cultural nationalism when pushed to articulate a political
position. The politics that hides in his poetry emerges as the
question of singularities, of a Kashmiri nation without nationalism,
of a politics without enemies. To read Rahi, we must not only
understand his relationship to the history of Kashmiri thought but
also his relationship to ancient Greek and classical Persian thought.
Rahi not only searches for openings in the Kashmiri language but
attempts to arrive at a future in it. He appropriates Persian, Urdu,
Sanskrit and Hindi for his purposes as a poet. I write this note as a
footnote to Rahi’s Preface out of a deep sense of love and respect for
the poet who is forever concerned with the question of what is
Kashmiri. The lesson we learn from Rahi is that without our attempts
and failures to appropriate the Kashmiri language for ourselves (all
such attempts end in failures but remain necessary), we cannot even
begin to pose the question of the Kashmiri self and the problem of its
sovereignty. This is I understand a provocative statement but its
provocation is only intended to provoke to thought. Rahi would agree
that what is own’s own cannot be appropriated but can perhaps be
conserved.


Right at the beginning we discussed Akhtar Mohiudeen’s demand for a
word, an answer, a poem or a prayer from Rahi. Rahi begins his
collection of poems with a poem addressed to the Kashmiri language,
Jalvae te Zabur (The Song of Revelation) and ends it with a poem, Naet
Nabi, about his spiritual journey. Both poems explicity connect poetry
and language to revelation. Rahi writes in Jalvae te Zabur that if we
had not encountered language Moosa maryehe deedare varaai (Moses would
have died without encountering God). Rahi offers us first of all a
song of revelation and then a prayer. But between the covers of Siyah
Rude Jaren Manz is a waiting. The Between of the manz is in the end a
waiting.


Here we essentially attempted to begin to read the Preface to Siyah
Rude Jaren Manz. Preface in Kashmiri means Gode Kath. The Kath (or the
thinking) which comes before (gode) everything: the essential matter.
Gode Kath could also be translated (and I risk this translation) as
pre-Occupation, or preoccupation. What is, as Kashmiris, our
pre-Occupation or preoccupation? What do we recognize in the invisible
flag, the absent sign which the Alamdar (flag-bearer, or sign-bearer)
of Kashmir holds out to the future as the Kashmiri past? What is the
meaning of the Kashmiri journey which we find between the covers of
Siyah Rude Jaren Manz?

Poetry and philosophy teach us that spirituality is a preparation for
death. We are not far from the Greek structure of spirituality when we
attempt to understand Rahi as a poet, teacher and thinker. Rahi’s
poetry can also be approached as an encounter between Greek and
Islamic structures of spirituality. In both ancient Greek and Islamic
thought, learning how to die is a spiritual exercise. But learning how
to read is also a spiritual exercise. Pierre Hadot, in Philosophy as a
Way of Life, describes the idea of reading as a spiritual exercise in
ancient Greek thought in a language of loss: “And yet we have
forgotten how to read: how to pause, liberate ourselves from our
worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for
subtlety and originality, in order to meditate calmly, ruminate and
let the texts speak to us. This, too, is a spiritual exercise, and one
of the most difficult.” Perhaps it is with this lesson about reading
in mind that we can best approach the work of Rahman Rahi.