Editor's Note
It is not the protest in Hamdam Kashmiri’s poems, but the cool flair with which he conducts this protest that leaves a lasting impression. An intimate understanding and poetic vision shapes the interpretive spaces and lyrical beauty of these translations by Huzaifa Pandit.
— Mani Rao
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Translator's Note
The critic Shams-ur-Rehman Faruqi once noted that in the quest of modernity, the Urdu ghazal strays into the territory of prosaic. Hamdam’s poetry, he wrote, is located at an intersection between tradition and modernity— it refrains from severing its ties with tradition even as its themes are distinct from those espoused by tradition.
Reading Hamdam Kashmiri’s ghazals, one would imagine that their anguish is a reflection on the 90s, with its maelstrom of violence, loss and chaos. But Hamdam started writing poetry in the calm mid 50’s– a testament that restiveness, grief, loss and agitation defined Kashmiri subjectivities even in the ‘tranquil’ years, decades before the catastrophic 90s.
Hamdam’s poetic concerns are about history and loss, he mulls over memorising and memory, forgetfulness and forgetting. The insistence “on erasing every sign of the city” by him, who “talks of building anew” for example is a recognition of the immense symbolic power of memorials, and the contests over memory they embody. This is also amply clear from the particular attention regimes over the years have paid to naming landscapes and institutions, and to the reconstruction and construction of several landmarks. Similarly, the immense fear manifested in the fear of own breath speaks of the trauma and injury littered on the pages of Kashmir history from Gilgit begar during the Dogra rule to death at the hands of unknown gunmen in the contemporary era.
Unlike his contemporaries Rehman Rahi or Dina Nath Nadim, Hamdam’s poetry is not ideological; on the contrary, it is uniquely individualist. His imagery is not novel, nor idiom experimental. He writes in Urdu— Urdu poetry from Kashmir enjoys neither the reach, legacy nor depth of poetry composed in Kashmiri. Despite that, Urdu has emerged paradoxically as both a language of state, as well as of resistance and routine – the paradox that is the truest manifestation of life in Kashmir.
The symbolism in Hamdam’s poetry presents some difficulties for translation. For example: the line “odhnay wala mila hai na bichanay wala” literally translates: Neither I could find one to spread me, nor one to wrap me (around). This has a distinct whiff of eroticism, a far cry from the tenor of the ghazal. Therefore, I took some interpretive liberties in translating this line.
In spaces marked by violence and a reign of silence like Kashmir, translation can emerge as an instrument to create narrative communities; it can speak to readers unfamiliar with the language, concerns and geographies resident in the host text, and testify to the lived experiences of silence.
— Huzaifa Pandit
Alongside The Shadows
In addition to the shade, the trees too were taken by them
All traces of my presence here were erased by them
Who can surmise the link that existed between them?
Along with the eyes, the skylight was confiscated by them
Where did they barge in from? Where did they flee to?
All the charms of the bazaar were plundered by them
Who did we conclude our journey for?
Who pilfered the flowers from the forests?
Hamdam, is it not charity from the adherents of tyranny:
The head of the destitute was spared:
Only the turban trampled as penalty
The Sky Didn’t Always Loom Over My Head
The sky didn’t always loom over my head
I too owned a house once in this city
Darkness will reign in this city of lights
You never had an inkling
No misgiving ever clouded my certainty
No torrential rain could ever wipe it out
The trace of blood clung
to my earth with such obstinacy
Hamdam’s silence now spans an eternity
His call for adhaan
once rang out loud in this silent city
We’ll Put Ourselves To The Test Again
We’ll put ourselves to the test again
We know how fire chars us
Let the fire be blown out now
that we may mark any gain
We will commence life afresh
Build a new house on a new earth
to see if we stand to gain
Let us hand him the throne
That we may witness
What treatment will he mete out to us
in his reign?
That we may steer clearly
through lanes both dazzling and dark
We’ll raise the wick in our eyes
That the flame may not wane
Life has to and will pass inevitably
Let us court loss now
All life we’ve wooed gain
Lavish praise will follow
whether or not the ghazal reads well
Walk into a mushaira, sing the ghazal
pausing only at the refrain
He’d Light Every Nook
He’d light every nook
with lamps. He, who
adorned the nights. What
befell him?
Long years, he
roamed endlessly
He, who knocked on every
door was doomed to vagrancy
Today, he suffers every cruelty
quietly. He, who raised a storm
in a teacup – all fury
He talks of building anew
He – who is intent on erasing every
sign of the city
‘Hamdam’, my life has gone waste entirely
I found no one to unveil me
Nor anyone who’d embrace me
Neither The Executioner Nor The Sword Scares Me
Neither the executioner nor the sword scares me
What has come over me today?
The edicts of the durbar alarm me
I cower in a dark corner
Having wrapped myself firmly around me
The tumult from every direction
strikes renewed fear in me
What should I lean against?
I wonder now
The sight of my own wall
Enough to strike terror in me
That its steadiness may snap
at any moment
Why does the chorus
of my own breath scare me?
I’ve played the murderer’s role
with relish, Hamdam
Why does my own character
now terrify me?
Acknowledgments
Image credits: M. C. Escher. Day and Night. 1938. Woodcut in black and gray, printed from two blocks. Dimensions: 39.1 x 67.7 cm (15 3/8 x 26 5/8 in.). Source: Artchive.com
The self-referential nature of the ghazal, the five birds in Escher’s woodcut, the five ghazals, the shifting figure & ground in contemporary Kashmir all fed into our foregone conclusion to use this as the cover image.
Author | HAMDAM KASHMIRI
‘HAMDAM KASHMIRI’ is the adopted nom-de-plume of Abdul Qayoom Khan. Born in 1937 at Shaheed Gunj in the heart of Srinagar in a business family, Hamdam published his first poem in 1958. However, his first collection of ghazals: “Dhoop Lahoo Ki” (Blood of the Sunshine) was published only in 2003, which featured a selection of ghazals published over forty years. Almost a decade later, he published his second collection of poems: Warq-e-Saada (The Plain Page) in 2012. Although he composed devotional Na’ats and Nazms, he is primarily known for ghazals.
Translator | HUZAIFA PANDIT
HUZAIFA PANDIT teaches English Literature at an Undergraduate college in Kashmir. For his PhD he worked on establishing a comparison between Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish under the rubric of Poetics of Resistance at University of Kashmir. He has contributed papers on a wide range of themes around Kashmir like Translation and Dissent, Masculinity and Student Activism, and edited for volumes like Himalya, Postcolonial Literature, Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, and Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures. He translates poetry from Urdu and Kashmiri into English, and writes poetry in English—his work has been published in PaperCuts, Jaggery Lit, Outlook and Poetry at Sangam, and his poetry collection is “Green is the Colour of Memory” (Hawakal, 2018).