[Reader-list] Book Review - K.L. Choudhary's 'Of Gods, men and militants'

[Pawan Durani]

Dr. Kundan Lal Chowdhury

http://ikashmir.net/poets/klchowdhury.html



Kundan Lal Chowdhury was born in Srinagar, the geographical ,
administrative and political heart of the valley of Kashmir, a few
years before India gained its independence from the British and thus
grew up in an era of optimism, constructive planning and hope. His
parental home in Srinagar was in a locality which is 99.9% Muslim,
where his family was one of the few Hindu families. He grew up amongst
Muslim childhood friends from families ranging in circumstances from
poor to the well connected, the politically savvy and the financially
well off. He studied in mixed, secular schools like his siblings.
Prejudice was largely absent and both mother and father were accepted
by all and sundry in the Muslim community as friends and advisors on a
wide range of issues.

Dr. K. L. Chowdhury

As a poet Kundan Lal Chowdhury is concerned with the universal human
concerns in a world dominated by big power, big money and big guns.
The book must be read in a universal context of our times embracing
the historical mistakes which are being repeated again as well as new
problems unique to these times . The anguished cry of the oppressed
and the exiled is as relevant in Africa or Europe or North America or
the middle East as it is in Kashmir. It speaks both for the oppressed
and the oppressor communities. For there are many in both who lament
the destruction of their universe.

Featured Collections

Of Gods, Men & Militants
This book of poetry gives expression to the intense hurt, sadness,
disappointment, shock and disillusionment of a whole community. Only a
son of the soil like Kundan Lal Chowdhury, could provide the right
voice for these emotions and thoughts.  >>>

http://ikashmir.net/godsmenmilitants/index.html
K.L. Choudhary's 'Of Gods, men and militants'
By Dwarkanath Munshi
So much has been said , written, discussed and debated about Kashmir
over the last decade and more that one might mistake this volume as
one more of the same. But it takes just a casual first glance over the
anthology of poems to realise that nothing could be farther from the
truth. And as one proceeds one gets hooked to the narration which is
straight, sincere and intense, raising  poignant images before your
eyes.
Picture that night, dark and still, and cold as never before. That
silence was eerie, piercing like in a graveyard in the wilderness. The
air was filled with foreboding. The instinct was ill at ease fearing
the unseen and the unknown like ghosts around breathing and whispering
and whistling. Then all of a sudden, doom descended . Some eighty
thousand loud speakers came alive at a single blaring across the
valley the first message of doom in stern and steady tone. “Leave your
 home O’ Kafir  leave your young women behind and run for your life’’.
That night changed the world.
Kashmir can never get over that night -like a house burnt, a garden
uprooted , a virgin defiled ,a limb sundered , a friend betrayed. It
can never be the same again.
Time moves, mollifies, but the pain remains, and in a sensitive mind
it grows. Dr. Chowdhary’s poems are the outpourings of that pain, that
indelible impress which assails the author, from time to time, from
place to place, and flows out through his pen. This has gone on for a
whole ten years till he feels overwhelmed by nostalgia and is
alternately hopeful and prayerful for return to his sacred loved soil
of beauty and peace, brotherhood and cultural synthesis as it was and
is no more
This is the essence of the Anthology, presented in three sections,
each within its chronology. Thus you open with the Gathering Storm,
move to the most heart rending and tragic phase of  Exodus and Exile
and conclude with the deep longing, in the third section, for return
from rootlessness to Mother Kasheer.
Within this compass are the poems that spread before the reader the
beauty and enchantment of Kashmir and alongside powerfully moving
dirges on the tempests which have shaken our age, the desolation and
destruction wrought by the mindless ‘jehadis’ and ‘fidayeen’ the
terrorists who ironically are deluded to believe they are working for
bringing the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ down on earth.
The beauty and the pathos seize the reader from the very first poem. I quote:
‘’The mists dance around you lord Siva four seasons through.........
ensconced on top of the Shankaracharya hill’’.
A few stanzas later ‘’The mists gently glide and slide as they deftly
seek to hide the ravages .......... littering , Phelgam, excreta’’ and
elsewhere again
‘’O where is the lingering mist that your feet did kiss where the cool
breeze that fanned your brow’’.
Such quiet cries of anguish are eloquent in effect and even assume a
shrillness by the nature of the trauma. Of bestiality at the Wandahama
massacre of the whole Pandit population, the poet grieves with tearful
irony: the occasion was the fanatics ‘ holy Shaba Qadar, of night long
prayers for peace and piety. They marked it with butchering the entire
23 Pandit population-babies, men, women. Asks the poet with a bleeding
heart- what drove the fanatics ‘’to pump eighteen bullets into the
tender constitution of a tiny kid .........when a single would have
done ‘’?
If it is pain and tears here, he gives vent to his deep anger in
cutting satire are another place, when he describes the madness and
misery of misanthropy and munificence in the inverse between the
migrant and the militant in the following verses:
Here a migrant stands in a queue
in this blazing afternoon sun
for his monthly allocation-
three hundred and seventy five rupees
& kilo sugar..........
A few lines later:
And yonder in that prison
is detained a terrorist called militant
who receives four fifty a month,
milk mutton........
overseen and monitored
by human rights groups........
Asks his victim the migrant
why don’t I turn a Militant
If only for a better deal.
One can go on and on and find that the Anthology is not only
scholastic but in the main it is a chronicle of human tragedy both on
the part of the perpetrators and the victims. The human angle
dominates at every point. It goes to the credit of the author who is
an eminent physician and no poet by profession or training that he has
written it all under an urge kindled within him, by the suddenly rapid
and unforeseen transitions of human behaviour. It thus bears the stamp
of spontaneity and freshness.
All through the Anthology he has sought and succeeded in avoiding the
imitation of any style or language or versification. Whatever the
quality of it, that is properly his own and is engaging. He has also
not permitted the words to divert or diminish the attention of the
reader from the original purpose or interest he has succeeded in
creating. He has simply clothed his thoughts in what he thought was
most appropriate language.
Having said that much about “Of Gods, Men and Militants’’ one feels
like going beyond its limits with the hope that the excesses and
insanity depicted in it are gradually yielding place to better sense
and sanity.
The extreme madness which manifested itself on September 11 (2001)
from the scene of the anthology, and on October 1 and December 13 last
year, awoke the world at large to the barbarity of the demented
soldiers of faith deluded by fundamentalists of fraud.
There appears a reflux of the tide. A ray of light is gaining ground
and a feeling and belief is growing that whole generations of mankind
ought not to be consigned to a hopeless inheritance of ignorance and
misery and that a secure haven might emerge when  the storms are
exhausted and past. A volume of verses dedicated to that hope and
happening would be a memorable reward to Dr. Chowdhary.

Source: Kashmir Sentinel,