Differences in assimilation
RAJENDRA CHENNI
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Renowned poet Nissar Ahmed, President of the ongoing Akhila Bharata Kannada Sahitya Sammelan, has consistently refused to be ghettoised as a Muslim poet
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Photo: K. Gopinathan
CULTURAL SPACE Nissar Ahmed's works explore the experiences of urban educated middle-class Muslims
In the poem, "Rangoli Matthu Maga," typical of the urbane low-key poetry, K. S. Nisar Ahmed has practiced for over fifty years, the son asks the father why they don't decorate the front yard with rangoli. The father unsettled by the question mumbles: "Because it doesn't fit our customs." When the son doesn't seem to be convinced he says: "It is not permitted in the Koran and the religious books."
Should he practice what is prescribed in them? "Oh yes!" "You have had your name and the year of construction etched on the front wall of our house. Is that permitted in the Koran?" The father looks at the rangoli, which now looks like a "small bird with twin wings of surprise and doubt" and realizes that it has put up a "shandy of questions in his brain."
Emotional hinterland
The poem also describes the father's childhood experiences, which provide the emotional hinterland to this little episode. As a child, intrigued by the intricate designs of rangoli effortlessly created by the neighbours, he had tried an imitation with chalk pieces only to be called a "kafar" by his mother. When the Iyengar neighbour girl had asked by why Muslims don't make rangoli, he felt an acute embarrassment. He has no answer when the son asks the same question, only more pointedly. Some of the better poems of Nisar Ahmed occupy this unique cultural space, which few others have explored. He writes about the experiences of urban educated middle class Muslims who feel that they have been integrated into the middle class and do not find their religious identity so sharply abrasive as to make them aliens. But episodes such as the one the poem explores, remind them of difference, which makes complete integration impossible.
They are reminders of the difficulty of "not being like you, even while being with you," the title of another sensitive poem. In this poem, the poet realizes that the "cat hidden in the everyday talk of others suddenly raises its paw of doubt and begins to gnaw at his beliefs, rights and even honesty." Nor does it stop here.
The blood spilled out by the paw of doubt is analysed in his presence to look for proper evidences of nationality. And he has to smile and bear it. The poem does not ignore the invisible walls which differences of community erect. They have driven a wedge between the "I" and "you" in the poem.
One may argue that Nissar Ahmed could have explored this angst of difference at greater depth or that he has allowed an easy assimilation into the anonymity of urban middle class culture. But it cannot be ignored that a large majority of Muslims would prefer it to the "authentic" identity of difference because it would push them into the morass of anti-modern conservatism.
It is a complex and ambivalent choice either way. The importance of Nissar Ahmed is that his poetry is sensitive to these issues of assimilation and difference. It has enabled him to explore the paradoxes of identity with irony and an urbane, liberal tone. One of his better-known poems "Amma, Achar, Naanu" enacts the incorrigible paradoxes of tradition and modernity with humour. The speaker who has remained unmarried for the fault of being too choosy is worried that his orthodox mother would choose for him a "burkha clad bear, ignorant of things modern." She has vowed that she will not take for a daughter-in-law one of those "who fear neither god nor religion and expose their bodies to (other) men."
The father, a liberal, asks her to let the son choose, only to hear threats of suicide. A few days later the mother relents and chooses a double graduate for him. He is delighted when the newlywed wife makes herself up in the proper modern fashionable manner for their first outing. In the last minute, she runs inside and comes out wearing his mother's burkha! In the context of the poem it would be hard to comment on the wife's hybrid solution.
Nissar Ahmed has written honestly about the confusions and compromises which the middle class experiences. He has consistently refused to be ghettoised as a Muslim poet. With a sensibility shaped by the Kannada modernist (navya) movement, he has written serious reflective poetry on identity, corruption, political demagoguery and urban claustrophobia.
His poem "America, America" (from the 1970 collection) is a superb enactment of the Indian ambivalence towards what still remains, wrongly of course, a powerful icon of the West. The poem oscillates between the urge of demonise America for its barbaric past, its history of slavery and the present decadent, vulgar display of wealth, to the realization of the helplessness, poverty and dependence of India on its bounties. His celebrated poem, "Kurigalu, Sar, Kurigalu" (from the 1964 collection) remains unsurpassed as a bitter satire on the Indian political paradigm of the sheep and the shepherd. The satire gains a disturbing intensity by its refrain "We, you and they, all of us are the sheep."
His poetry
Sadly not much attention has been paid to the poems in which Nissar Ahmed makes the urban landscape the metaphor around which serious reflections are made about the vulnerability and degradation of human existence. "Khali Situgalu" presents a witty taxonomy of vacant sites in Bangalore only to conclude that "there are vacant sites, in the layouts deep within us, illegally occupied by harsh memories and stinking slums of old disappointments."
"Anaamika Aanglaru" (1982) is about the anonymous British who lived and died in this land without becoming the land's. "Swayam Seveya Gilugalu" (1977) is a bitter portrayal of the anglicised cosmopolites who also fail to refuse to belong to this land.
Nissar Ahmed may not have broken new paths - but to write so consistently and so sensitively for well over five decades is no mean achievement.
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