[I found the following in the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry. It’s by Adil Jussawalla.]

Sea Breeze, Bombay

by Adil Jussawalla

Partition’s people stitched
Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.
An opened people, fraying across the cut
country reknotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,
Brokering and bays, refugees’ harbour and port,
Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work
Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,
Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,
come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,
Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,
Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,
Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,
Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland’s histories.

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Indian author Raja Rao passed away in Austin, Texas, at the grand old age of 96. He’s best known as the author of Kanthapura, and is one of those authors so strongly identified with the 1930s and 40s that it was actually a little surprising to find out he was still alive. (But then, his contemporary Mulk Raj Anand only passed away fairly recently himself.)

Rao lived a nomadic, complicated, 20th century life. He was born and raised in Mysore, and oddly enough for a South Indian Brahmin boy, he received his education mainly at Muslim schools in Hyderabad (his father worked for the local government, I believe). According to excerpts of his memoirs here, he also studied at Aligarh Muslim University until he received an invitation to come to a university in Montpellier, France, from a visiting French professor. This was around 1928; he ended up staying in France for more than a decade, studying, again surprisingly, Christian theology, and marrying a French woman who was also in academia. The marriage soon fell apart, and Rao returned to India on the eve of the Second World War, becoming more and more religious. He spent a great deal of time in ashrams in the 1940s, though he was also active in the independence movement. Though Rao later returned to France, he finally settled in Austin, Texas, where he taught in the Philosophy department (alongside G.V. Desani) until he retired in 1980. Continue reading →

Even in translation, the writings of Saadat Hasan Manto are blindingly good. Manto published about 250 short stories in a very brief career — alcoholism killed him at the age of 42 — and countless nonfiction pieces for newspapers and magazines. Much of Manto’s nonfiction writing is witty and sharp, though he also has a dark side that comes out in some of his best work. Partly because they’re available online, today I’d like to point readers to a series of rhetorical “Letters to Uncle Sam” Manto wrote in the early 1950s. There were nine in total, and four of them have been put online at Chowk: one, two, three, four.

If you know Manto well, you might want to skip down a bit for quotes and comments on the “Letters.” For those who don’t know Manto: the stories are amazing, often horrifying. The Partition stories Manto wrote are about the darkest you’ll ever see. Several of them deal explicitly with the psychic effects of rape, on both men and women, perpetrators and victims. Even Manto’s pre-partition writings (stories like “Khushia,” for instance) seem deeply preoccupied with the problem of masculinity and the objectification of women, from a perspective that’s only partly feminist.

Manto was in Bombay through the Partition (in 1948, he decided to move, with his family, to Lahore), so it’s unclear to me whether he personally knew people who had experienced this kind of violence. But stories like “Open it!” and “Cold Meat” (both of which provoked obscenity trials in Pakistan) seem to be inspired by a very personal awareness of the effects of traumatic violence. Whether or not he was personally there, Manto’s partition stories keenly capture the dehumanization that follows communal violence.

(As a place to start, I would recommend the collection Black Margins, though pretty much any collection will do.) Continue reading →