Politics Of Dinkar
It has all the right messages for the nation. The polity
will be well advised not to slot him into a caste for identity politics or
cherry-pick from his statements to imprison governance in dogma.
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Bengali in Bihar, I spoke simple Bengali, shorn of
Sanskrit-origin words that I thought were meant only for editorials in Anandabazar
Patrika until I migrated to Kolkata after school. My Hindi was horrible,
with the written form as devoid of gender sensitivity as Bihari Hindi is (and I
used to wonder how Biharis couldn’t get it right while speaking but could pull
off written compositions perfectly). No elder ever congratulated me for my exam
scorecard; for, amid all the scores in 90s, and a few 100s, that in Hindi
hovered in the 50-60 range, creating an eyesore and attracting the attention of
everybody who had the authority to scold me.
But even this hopeless student of Hindi got goosebumps
all over when the teacher recited Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ (who was a Bihari, by
the way), whose verses were replete with words of tatsam category, and —
I learnt later — who was a puritanical linguist who despised the Urdu standard
of Hindustani (which I am a great admirer of). As was the style of his
generation, Dinkar’s lines were flawlessly rhythmic. During the recess, if
friends did not put forth farmaish for Bollywood songs, the rhythms of
which would be accentuated by beats of the teacher’s desk that was more
sonorous than ours, I could break into a poem of Dinkar and my classmates could
appreciate the rendition with foot-tapping.
Dinkar was much bigger than the meter of his poems,
though. If you are in your teens, indifferent to your nation, his creations can
turn you a nationalist in no time.In prose, with no knowledge of the evolution
of the north Indian language in two branches, a student of Hindi would actually
be convinced by the polemics of Dinkar that almost suggested it was criminal to
use words of Arabic and Persian origin in Hindi[1] (people
who speak the language, by and large, couldn’t care less).
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| Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' |
If I had not had this freaking hobby of linguistics that
led me to historical studies of Indian languages, I would never have known —
like most Hindi speakers don’t — that the Hindi we speak today is closer to
Amir Khusro’s Hindavi, and that the history of the language taught in our
schools is all wrong: Thatit evolved out of Prakrit’s progression to Braj,
Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Magahi etc and beyond. The Braj of Surdas actually did not
proceed beyond Bharatendu Harishchandra, and Awadhi could never scale the dizzying
heights of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas in the modern era. And neither
sounds like the language we speak in the northern regions of the nation today.
Today you need a teacher to understand Surdas and Tulsidas; you do not need one
to understand Khusro. But Dinkar would have none of it. Neither would the
teachers of the Hindi language in Indian schools and universities. And to a
school-going kid, what the teacher says is gospel.
But there is one aspect where ‘Urdu’ fails and ‘Hindi’
scores high. In the tradition of this language with two standards (three — if
you were to consider Hyderabad’s Dakkani as a form of Hindi), there have been
two poets who stood apart for overt political content in their poetry: Dinkar
and Allama Muhammad Iqbal. Perhaps it is a wont of political litterateurs that
they also suffer from a little communal bias. Dinkar’s was limited to
linguistic puritanism. Iqbal suffered from it conspicuously, pushing Islamism
through his verses. What the Muslim poet could never achieve was being able to
provoke his reader to hit the street for activism, which Dinkar could — most
notably against Indira Gandhi’s invocation of Emergency.
Taraana-e-Hind,
better identified as “Saare Jahaan Se Achchha”, makes you feel good about the
Indic civilisation. Tasveer-e-Dard
fills you with helplessness when, snubbed at a roundtable for speaking out of
turn by British officers, Iqbal writes
Yeh dastūr-e-zabāNbandī hai kaisā terī mehfil meN?
YahāN to bāt karne ko tarastī hai zabāN merī!
[What a convention of silent audience have you put in
place! (You provoke, but) I am not supposed to put in a word.]
Nobody knows how many Indians rebelled against the Empire
on reading that, but ask a Lohiaite, an RSS swayamsevak who was
imprisoned in the period 1975-77 or a lesser Kumar Vishwas of the Aam Aadmi Party.
They took on the establishments of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan
Singh mouthing these words of Dinkar:
Sinhāsan khālī karo ki jantā ātī hai!
Don’t wonder why a Puritan Dinkar uses “khālī”
and not “rikt” (while compensating for the meter elsewhere in the line) when
he was of the view that foreign-origin words made Hindi impure. Instead, marvel
at the imagery of the state of affairs of the government’s making he presents
like a communist — while not being unmindful of the rules of classical poetry
unlike communist ‘poets’. The original appears as a screenshot; here is my
translation of the most riveting part, the second stanza:
Plebeians?Yes, the stupid people
of clay,
Bearing with the vagaries of
nature, they;
Even when you squeeze everything
out of them,
Wouldn’t share their pain, would
never have a say.
Farce of democracy, the fourth
stanza:
Shornof any feeling, we are that
flower,
When plucked or when adorningdifferent
soul mates;
Like a suckling baby, easily
cajoled,
For us, they tell us, work the
four estates.
Revolution, the sixth stanza:
Our roars can but shake edifices
of castles,
We merely exhale and crowns are
blown away;
To block our passage is beyond
the time’s means.
It’s we who tell the time what is
its way.
The other stanzas are no less motivational;
let’s leave their appreciation to connoisseurs of Hindi. To demonstrate that
this was not a one-off expression of gusto, I turn to a gem where Dinkar
narrates an episode of the Ramayana, which the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government
and its supporters used to argue the case of “negotiating from a position of
strength” after Pokhran II:
Kshamā shobhtī us bhujang ko jiske pās garal ho
Usko kyā jo dant-hīn, vish-hīn, vinīt, saral ho?
[A snake with venom inspires awe;
a toothless, non-venomous, placid one doesn’t.]
If you didn’t get it, compare the
years India spent trying to persuade the First World to adopt nuclear
disarmament to Lord Rama pleading with the ocean to give him a passage to
Lanka:
tīn divas tak panth māngte raghupati sindhu kināre,
baithe padhte rahe chhand anunay ke
pyāre-pyāre.
uttar meN jab ek nād bhī uthā nahīN sāgar se,
uthī adhīr dhadhak paurush kī āg rām ke shar se.
[For three days, Lord Rama sat on
the shore, praying to the ocean to give him a way. When there was no sign that
the prayers could move the ocean, the lord’s arrows threatened to breathe
fire.]
Those who relate to the
Mahabharata better may consider:
kshamā, dayā, tap, tyāg, manobal sab kā liyā sahārā;
par nar-vyāghra suyodhan tum se kaho, kahāN kab hārā?
kshamāshīl ho ripu-samaksh tum hue
vinat jitnā hi,
dushT kauravoN ne tumko kāyar samjhā utnā hī.
[(The poet asks Yudhishthira):
Forgiveness, mercy, penance, sacrifice, fortitude — you tried all this with
Duryodhana. But tell me when, if ever, you could defeat the tiger among men
(Duryodhana)?
The more you bent before the
enemy seeking forgiveness with modesty, the more the evil Kauravas took you for
a coward.]
These lines are also used by the
right wing to goad the Government of India for action against
terror-sponsoring, cross-border firing Pakistan. The long and short of it,
Dinkar as a metaphor never loses relevance in politics.
But can the jingoism generated
from Dinkar’s verses take the BJP to victory in Bihar? When the 50th
anniversary of the nationalist poet’s creations Sanskriti Ke Chaar Adhyay and Parshuram Ki
Prateeksha was celebrated on 22 May, the
urbane Times of India got one half of the message right, leftist Hindu got the other half. Given
that both the media houses purportedly share the value of anti-casteism, one
wonders whether the commemoration pampered Bhumihars (according to TOI)
or Brahmins (according to The Hindu), with the latter pointing out that
the ceremony was followed by a Goswami Sammelan. Funnily, the quasi communist
paper had the gall to name the attendants — Sushil Kumar Modi, Mangal Pandey
and Nand Kishore Yadav — no way an all-Brahmin cast(e).
Having associated himself with Rajendra
Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Srikrishna Sinha, Rambriksh Benipuri and
Braj Kishore Prasad at different points of time, Dinkar was hardly fixated with
his Bhumihar identity. An admirer of Iqbal, Rabindranath Tagore, John Keats and
John Milton can’t be. Neither was that the message from the prime minister on
the occasion — theurbane newspaper, often accused of frivolity, must observe. In
his speech from Vigyan Bhavan, Narendra Modi cautioned other politicians and
the people at large against slotting the Rashtrakavi into a caste mould.
So, let’s leave the jokes by
‘aliens’ and get the cause right. The never-ending language dispute in India
does have a point of resolution in Dinkar’s creations. Forget what form of
Hindi he pushed. Study the kind of Hindi he used. The repletion with
Sanskrit-origin words makes it intelligible for speakers of all languages that
descended from Sanskrit — from Bengali to Telugu, from Gujarati to Kannada,
from Assamese to Malayalam (Sanskritised Tamil?)… And if that makes the
parlance gobbledygook for north Indians, you have compromises like “khālī” for “rikt” that
Dinkar was not loath to!
Importantly, Dinkar also
advocated the use of one’s mother-tongue big-time, and he was very popular
among Indians who did not speak Hindi[2].
Over and above enabling Indians to communicate with a larger audience
across India, Dinkar gives a sane counsel to politicians. His political
affiliation ranged from revolutionary freedom struggle to Gandhism to opining
that non-violence couldn’t be unexceptionable[3].
Those in the business of governance must thus note that ideology cannot be
dogma.
To the masses, Dinkar’s veer rasa offers a horripilation of
nationalism. Only a comatose patient will not get animated enough for action on
reading his compositions. From the French Revolution to America’s response to
9/11, nobody built a nation without that emotion.
[‘Dinkar’ was Ramdhari
Singh’s nom de plume. For ease of drafting and reading, the word has not
been mentioned in quotes throughout the text.]
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