Rumblings in my heart, and What the Poets and Artists Said

War is that ultimate toxic, masculine enterprise of human history, which has had little to contribute than devastation of lives and nature and expanding the notion of ‘’my’’ land or river or mountain or whatever else that could be ‘’owned”. 

I hear the rumbling in my heart each day as I read the newspaper, and at times I seek solace in words that come to me from books from the past, even if to feel that I may belong, somewhere in those pages, at least, in an otherwise lonely period of thinking apart from the war-mongers around. While many ideas of these poets and thinkers from the past seem disjointed, each of those I choose today, seem to talk to the contemporary context, even as I cry in pain, as the radio announces us to prepare for a “mock drill” (on 7^th May,2025) in the event of a war. Each day brings in the uncertainty of existence and one is pulled back to the uncertainty that one faced during the pandemic not so long ago. The need exists to speak, write, in whatever disjointed a manner as one can, for we do not know about our tomorrows, today.

And here we are, within less than a year of the BJP government returning to power, with promises of prosperity flowing into every poor person’s bank account, yet to be fulfilled, apart from other promises.

One also pens this in solemn memoriam to all those who have died so far due to the errors in the system: in train accidents, the Kumbh mela, the railway station stampede in Delhi, the Tirumala Tirupati stampede in Andhra Pradesh, the Goa temple stampede more recently, and of course, needless to add, the death of tourists, which has been used as an excuse to marginalise a particular community, yet again. So many dead bodies have piled up within a year; and again, we are asked to get ready for some more to be laid to rest in a war, god forbid it ever happens.

Amid war-propaganda and thirst for blood of the poor soldier or a poor everydayer, the Urdu poet, Sahir (Ludhianvi)’s lamentation of a soldier on War:

Yeh kaun si taakat hai jo hamein apne gharon se, apne maa-baap se, door laakar, humein apne kandhon pe bandook rakhne ko majboor kar deti hai [what is this power that obliges us to go far from our homes, our parents, placing a gun on our shoulders?]

Halaaki hum jaante hain ki jun buri hai, hinsa buri hai, nafrat buri hai [though we know war is bad, so are violence and hatred]

Pet ki aag, ya shauharat ki bhookh, [is it the fire in our bellies or the hunger for glory?]

Insaan ke andar ka loha

Apni chamak dikhane ke liye mauke ki taakh mein rehta hai, [the iron / fire within the human awaits the moment to show the glow / flames]

aur jab mauka aata hai, to yeh nahin dekhta ki uski bivi ka dil toot-ta hai ki uski maa ka dil toot-ta hai ya uski premika ka dil toot-ta hai… [and when the moment arrives, he does not see if he breaks the heart of his wife, his parents, or his beloved] [in the film, Hum Dono, 1961]

I hear again, Charles Chaplin’s imagined anti-climax in The Great Dictator:

 “I am sorry, I don’t want to be an emperor; that is not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible: Jew, Gentile, Black man, White. We all want to help one another… We want to live by each other’s happiness, not each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate one another. This world has room for everyone; the good Earth is rich, and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful. We have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed…our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little…The hate of men will pass and dictators will die…Soldiers, don’t give yourselves to brutes! Men who despise you and enslave you! Who regiment your lives, tell you what to do and what to think and what to feel; who treat you as cattle, use you as cannon fodder; don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You have love of humanity in your hearts; you don’t hate; only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural…Let us fight for a decent world, that will give men a chance to work, that will give you a future and in old age the security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie, they do not fulfil that promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!”

As Oli, my canine significant other, and I walk every morning, passing by Langurs and Monkeys, who seem oblivious to the affairs of the humans they have learnt to live with, sometimes in harmony, and at times, amidst conflict. The pani poori-seller walks past, to earn his daily income. The safai karamchari (the sanitation worker) goes about her daily cleaning of the roads; the attendant at a government office somewhere within the cabins of the Vidhan Sabha (Secretariat), Shimla, passes us by. Or, the kind Mr. B, who just retired from an institute of ‘higher research’ with joy and pomp, dancing to Pahadi pipes and natis, sharing his joy with neighbours of a life lived in honesty that helped people write manuscripts, not always remembering to mention his indirect contribution to it. And I wonder, (what) do these lives mean anything at all to the ones that rule from a distance that completely hides these people’s histories from that of the nation’s? What do these hard-working people, of dignity and well-earned pride, who make our systems run, think of these war drums?

It is the question poet Auden had wondered about:

“(To JS/07/M/378 This Marble Monument is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistic to be

 One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,

For in everything he did hie served the Greater Community,

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The press are convinced that he bought a paper everyday

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way,

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured

And his Health card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

A phonograph, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire,

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war,

he went.

He was married and added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of

his generation,

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. [The Unknown Citizen, by W. H. Auden]

We were told this was ‘azadi’s’ (freedom) ‘amrit kal’. Even by the logic of the Sanskritic time-concept, it was supposed to be that idea that, post-churning, the ocean was to have gifted the ‘good’ with a possibility of prosperity and relief from constant warring. But here we are, full circle, from feudalism, colonialism and imperialism and back again. And the other old narrative of Partition, too, with deportations becoming normalised.

What is it about common people that history is always ready to attack them with toxic war, in which they had no reason to be responsible for?  It may be remembered (for those who keep playing with the trope of the ‘outsider’), that India had welcomed in the past the Tibetan people and given them refuge in the good traditions of international peace and conflict resolution paradigms that once did exist, and India respected and adhered to. India had also given shelter to Bangladeshi refugees (without discrimination on the basis of religion); India had at one time, respected the sovereignty and autonomy of the Palestinian people. India had, at one point in time, followed the principle of Non-alignment, for the cause of economic prosperity and social security. We did not give any of these ideas and practices enough time, nor did we have the pride that these ideas stemmed from our own need to break free from the narratives handed down to us by the colonial powers that sought to rule along the lines of race and creed; and here we are, back again to the concept of revenge while claiming to believe in “vasudhaiva kutumbakam” (the world is our family – and to make it clearer, this world, even in the concept’s Sanskritic origin, does not have any qualification of being a “Hindu” one, alone).

Why do people naively join the bandwagon of war? Knowing well that their own livelihoods have never been more vulnerable? Knowing well that these conflicts do not impact the super-rich (including those in the film industry, who have been told, recently, at the WAVES summit, to celebrate the economic prosperity further with more investments in platforms which were, until now, accessible for common people seeking to post, even inane, expressions? The actors acting as patriots do so for money. The IPL games continue in spite of the attack at Pahalgam. Their incomes are not affected (war, no war). When will the loss of ordinary lives begin to hurt us common people enough as to force the rulers to stop war?

And then, as I asked these questions, another poet spoke, with which it seemed apt to close:

Imaginary Questions (on behalf of, or) for those that rule, hoping for a possibility (even if faint) of a realisation:

“He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow. I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name, and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being….

“Prisoner, tell me, who was I that bound you?”

“It was my master”, said the prisoner. “I thought I could outdo everybody in the world in wealth and power, and I amassed in my own treasure-house the money due to my king. When sleep overcame me I lay upon the bed that was for my lord, and on waking up I found I was a prisoner in my own treasure-house.”

“Prisoner, tell me who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?”

“It was I,” said the prisoner, “who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.” [Ravindranath Tagore, Gitanjali]

R Umamaheshwari is an independent journalist-historian based in Shimla and author of When Godavari Comes: People’s History of a River (Journeys in the Zone of the Dispossessed), 2014, among other works.