kazi in nomansland

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TREASONERS SCREED Farooq Ahmed


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KAZI IN NOMANSLAND

Naeem Mohaiemen


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KAZI IN NOMANSLAND Naeem Mohaiemen


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79

Udayan reminds me, as we walk to the train, that Nazrul is the only person

to appear on the stamps of all three countries.

Thats not right, cant be right. There must have been others.

None, Im sure.

Gandhi?On the Pakistan stamp...? What do you think?!

Hmm...what about Nehru? No, I suppose not. Wait there must have

been someone.

No really, he was the only one.

Are you sure?

Arre bhai, oversure! I did my research, I know Nazruls story.

Months later, in Dhaka central post ofce, Im in a parallel argument.

This time Im the oneoversure. But the Post Master General is notconvinced. He calls his kerani in and asks him to search the library. The kerani

returns fteen minutes later, with a Philately Souvenir Booklet. The director

turns to page 22. He has a seminar essay there. He insists, gently, that I read

it all the way through.

The essay is all about Pakistani stamps. It seems there were 328 stamps

issued by Pakistan from 1947 until the 1971 liberation of Bangladesh

(or breakup of Pakistan, depending on your perspective). Only one of these

featured a Bengali, poet Kazi Nazrul Islam.

His assistant interjects:

But, Sir, there was also the 1956 stamp that had two anna in

Bengali script.

Yes, but that one had distorted Bangla. Bhool Bangla, bujhlen?

Later, Salam the stamp shop owner pulls out his reference notebook to

also dispute the 328 number. He shows me Pakistans Pioneers of Freedom

series, each face drawn in bas relief: Suhrawardy, Fazlul Huq, Khaza

Nazimuddin, Sir Salimullah. But a phone call to another stamp store reveals

that this series came out in the 1990s. The 1 for 328 statistic stays intact.

Nazrul ended up spanning all three countries. After Partition, he refuses

to leave India for Pakistan. Or to be precise, his family makes the decision for

him, Nazrul has already lost the ability to speak. The mysterious disease that

enveloped him is already in its second year. In this manner he becomes an

uneasy new icon: the Muslim poet who refuses Pakistan, or rather resists the

way territory is being redrawn. India embraces this decision, and structures

a moral around it: Muslims have a home in India after all. Perhaps Maulana

Azad serves the same function as well within the new Indian state? All the

token Muslim refuseniks.

At the midnight hour, the Partition of India begins. As new ags go up,


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familiar modes of belonging are broken and reborn. The geographical

impossibility that is the new country of Pakistan: two Wings a thousand

miles apart, that fantastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered

by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God [Salman

Rushdie, Shame, 1983].Yes, the two Pakistans are united by religion but divided by language,

culture and everything else that really matters. In 1952, the central states

clumsy attempt to impose Urdu as an all-Pakistan language goes very badly.

Language riots, four deaths, and the birth of a Bengali nationalist movement

in the Eastern half. By the 1960s, Pakistan is increasingly concerned about

losing the restless Eastern province. The language riots killed one idea, but a

newer one takes its placeculture as cohesion. Bengali culture, appropriately

modied and Islamized, as the scaffolding for national unication.Two Koreas, Two Germanys, and nally, now, a line is drawn. Here,

wewont allow Two Pakistans. Enter Nazrul into the Pakistan project,passing onto the national stamp. To be used on letters or postcards, perhaps

even some to be mailed to our lost families across the border. Reading parts

of his story, a friend tells me of an appropriate Derrida quote: No, the stamp

is not a metaphor, on the contrary, metaphor is a stamp.

Slowly, steadily, Nazrul is rebranded as an exclusively Muslim poet, to be

used as a counterpoint to the dominance of Bengali literary lion and Nobel

laureate Rabindranath Tagore. After all, Tagore is a Hindu, Brahmo Samaj

or not. The cultural fascination with his songs must be wiped out at all costs.

(Tagore has the last laugh, his songs end up as the national anthem for two

countries: India, and later Bangladesh)

Finally, after 1971, when Pakistan is broken and Bangladesh emerges,

Nazrul becomes a third token, a symbol of independent Bangladesh. But how

willing are all these transfers? More on that later, kromosho prokash...

LEFT

Naeem Mohaiemen

Kazi in Nomansland(stamps)

2009

1.5 inches 2 inches each

stamps and glue

Courtesy o the artist and Green Cardamom,

or Lines of Control(Dubai, Karachi, London)and Granta Pakistan issue

FOLLOWING PAGES

Naeem Mohaiemen

Kazi in Nomansland(slivers)

2009

25 inches 3.3 inches each

digital C print & wall text

Courtesy o the artist and Green Cardamom,

or Lines of Control(Dubai, Karachi, London)and Granta Pakistan issue


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In 2008, I wanted to build little stamp towers out of the Nazrul stamps.

A tower for each country, each a different height. But glue curls and moisture

modied those plans, reduced my ambition (thankfully). The Dhaka General

Post Ofce had exactly 19,538 of the 1977 Nazrul commemoratives in stock.With the clockwork efciency of an automaton inside a bad bureaucracy, the

kerani informed me of this number after consulting his book. I noticed, how-

ever, that he did not correct the number after I was nished with my purchase.

In one week, I bought 3,000 of these stamps. Now collectors were wonder-

ing what was going on. My colleague joked that I was causing a tiny tsunami in

the stamp market. Better not be planning any more limited editions.

Meanwhile, Salam the obsessive philatelist had been tracking me.

Bhaiya, did you go to the Post Ofce to buy vintage Nazruls? You shouldhave come to me. Their stamps have been in the godown, totally damp!

Dont worry, for Pakistan and India stamps I still have to come to you.

GPO is for Bangladesh only.

But he doesnt actually have that many of the India and Pakistan Nazrul

stamps. They are harder to get, more expensive. Fifteen times face value, or

even more. When I explain my idea, he offers an alternative. For the India

stamps, the base can be made out of a1977 birth control commemorative.Same dimensions and same amount of dirt on serrated edges, no one will be

able to tell the difference. I pause while I think through the ethics of the wall

labels. But for Pakistan he offers a clincher. The only Pakistan stamp that ts

in size with Nazrul are the multi-hued generics of his theoretical nemesis:

Pakistans founder Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah. Only stamps of Iqbal could have

topped this juxtaposition. Nazrul would appreciate this little ironyon par

with everything else in his life.

In the list of reasons whySarzamin broke apart into Pakistan and

Bangladesh, there are multitudes of economic and cultural statistics.

Stamp politics is only a small p in that schema.

Memory. In New York, I met a psychologist whose uncle had been in Ranchi asylum with Nazrul.

Now researchers say it may have been Picks disease that caused dementia. I can only imagine

Ranchi snapped the remaining wires.


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I am a saint, a soldier of music

I am the prince in disguise

With the dress of a hermit-mystic.

I am a Bedouin, a Chengis the brute

It is none, but me, I salute.

Nazruls poetry is innovative, owing, a new ferocious form in Bengali

language. A decisive break with the genteel parlor modes and bucolic imagery

of imagined village idylls of previous generations, especially the Hindu

bhodrolok litterateur. But his writing is not yet, not fully, directed at the British.

The experience of being a temporary loyalist, a soldier in the 49th Bengal

Regiment of the British Indian Army, pushes things towards a decisive break.

His poetry and songs accelerate, becoming more radical and confrontational,bleeding out faster and faster after his demobilization. In civilian life he nds

the meter of rebellion.

I am thunder

From the God Iswans pipe, I am the mystic Omker

Alas! from the bugle of Isral, I am the roar danger.

I am Bishyamitras disciple, Durbasha the furious

I am the fury of forest re

Nazrul by now has little patience for Gandhis non-cooperation andolon,

or even the Indian Muslim Khilafat movement. Instead he models his politics

after Turkeys Kemal Ataturk, expressing his admiration in the poem Kamal

Pasha. Standing apart from both Hindu and Muslim mainstream political

movements, he argues that the ouster of British rule must be accompanied by

the creation of a secular and modern state. For the sake of a united movement

that already has popular support, Nazrul joins with the broader non-coopera-

tion movement. But a sharper edge still spills out in his lyrics.

I will burn to ashes this universe.

I am the heart opening laughter

I am the great anti-creation terror

I am the Eclipse of the twelve Suns of the nal disaster.

[Bidrohi (Rebel Warrior)]1

Nazruls essays and poems land him on repeated police watch. Essays

like Muhajirin hatyar janya dayi ke? (Who is responsible for killing refu-

gees?) cause the conscation of the publishing magazine. Repeated police


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interventions lead to his arrest, trial and nally incarceration by 1922. While

in prison, he launches a hunger strike, compelling the intervention of his ad-

mirer Rabindranath Tagore. In a telegram sent to jail, Tagore writes: Give up

hunger-strike, our literature claims you. Out of this experience come Nazruls

iconic jail anthems. Things rise to fever pitch, birthing songs of a pure violenceof form and fever.

Destroy those iron gates of prison,

Demolish the blood stained stony altars

Of chain worshipping!

O youthful Isral,

Blow your horn of universal cataclysm!

Let the ag of destructionRise amidst the rubble of prison walls

Of the East!!

Play the music of the festival of Shiva!

Whos the master? Whos the king?

Who is it that gives punishment

Having snatched away the truth, free and open?

Ha! Ha! Ha! Its a laugh

God is to be hanged?

Rumor-monger

Who gives this nasty lesson?

[Karar Oi Louho Kopat (Those Iron Gates of Prison)]2

The damages of the Great War of European nations fatally weakens the

British Raj. Their grip on India loosens and decolonization is increasingly seen

as inevitable. Different strands grab control of the liberation battle. Nazrul

watches in horror as the independence movement he supported abandons the

idea of a secular, united country. Anti-British fervor metastasizes into intense

Hindu-Muslim riots and the seemingly inevitable drums of Partition. In

1941, he publicly writes against the idea of Pakistan, dismaying his Muslim

supporters. His onetime mentor Fazlul Huq now abruptly res him from the

newspaper where he was employed.

Two owers on same stem, Hindu-Musalman

Musalman the centered eye, Hindu the soul

At night now, we chase and slaughter you, my new enemy


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But with dawn, brothers will know what they did to each other

We will embrace and cry, and ask forgiveness again.

[Deshattobodhok (Patriotic)]3

In 1942, soon after witnessing the carnage of communal riots, Nazrulcontracts a mysterious disease. At an astonishing speed, over a period of a

few months, he begins losing his memory and speech. Already abandoned by

Huq, Nazruls family approaches another Bengali Muslim politician, Hussein

Shaheed Suhrawardy. And from here onwards, Nazrul begins his travels in

no-mans land. Huq has already ejected his ward for anti-Partition views,

Suhrawardy rejects him because he worked for his archrival Huq, and the

Congress abandons him because a Muslim who opposes Pakistan is a danger

to the Hindu groups also pushing for Partition.His vegetative state increases and will continue for another three decades.

His wife dies in this period, which leads to one theory that the disease is

syphilis. Later Picks Disease is argued as the more likely diagnosis. A mute

Nazrul stays on in India after 1947, voting with his body against Pakistan.

On the Indian side, he is now presented as a syncretic Muslim who imbibes

Hindu culture; the dark Cassandra of songs about both religious syncretism

and divisions is forgotten.

Where unite Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim-Christian

Who are you? Parsi? Jain? Jew? Santal, Bhil, Garo

Confucius? Charbak-Chela? Keep listing all your names,

be anything you please

In your heart and head, carry whatever books you value

Quran-Puran-Veda-Vedanta-Bible-Tripitak

[Samyabadi (Egalitarian)]

Sarzamin. And now government o Pakistan has put you on a stamp. A country you never set oot

in ater 47. But Soviet authors continue to visit you in India. Non Aligned Movement!


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Along with Syed Mujtaba Ali, he becomes one of the Bengali Muslims

distancing themselves from PakistanNazrul through physical presence

in India, Mujtaba through his essay against Urdu as state language. But in

Pakistan, the state is bent on crushing Hindu tendencies in Bengali culture

and music, so they re-imagine this same Nazrul as a Muslim poet. Facts thatdont t are ignoredpersonal (his Hindu wife who did not convert, his

children who had Hindu names), political, and in poetry.

The Pakistani state tries to present Nazrul as Muslim above all else, even

re-writing some lines of his poems. In his anti-British marching song Chol

Chol Chol (March March March), the stanza shajibkoribomoha-shoshan

(we will rejuvenate the cremation ground) is changed to shajibkoribogoros-

than (we will rejuvenate the graveyard). His KandariHushiyar(Boatman

Beware) has two stanzas deleted (Who dares ask if they be Hindu or Muslim/ Boatman, tell them it is man who drowns, children of our mother) as

well as the line India will rise again. In other textbook reprints, words like

Sanskritized bhagavan are replaced with the Arabicized rohoman.

Nazrul is of course not the only subject of culture wars. There are others;

some become willing participants in unity literature projects, while others

like Shawkat Osman sabotage the process through novels like Kritodasher

Hashi (Slaves Laugh). The coded messages embedded in this new Bengali

literature of discontent remain completely opaque to the Urdu speaking

elite in Karachi and Islamabad. The nal years of the 1960s see Pakistan in

continuing turmoil, with language the Achilles heel of the unity project: simul-

taneously a weapon for transmission, organizing and protest in East Pakistan.

All efforts at united nation fall apart by 1971, when the Pakistan project

collapses. Now, in a foretold tryst moment, another partition and a new

country: Bangladesh. Finally, India ies Nazrul to Bangladesh as a goodwill

gesture towards the new President Sheikh Mujib. A temporary visit becomes

a new home.

BangaBandhu. A resh country invites you on a state visit, later it becomes permanent. Your Kolkata

amily is bafed. Well he seems happy. But I cant talk, how do you know.


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Four years later, Mujib is killed in a vicious military coup. The new army

government moves Nazrul out of the state-provided guesthouse into virtual

house arrest at PG Hospital.

When he dies a year later, the military junta of General Ziaur Rahman

refuses the familys demand to bury him in India. Instead his funeral in

Dhaka is used to cement the military governments hold on the nationalist

narrative. By the time family members manage to bypass the Bangladesh

governments bureaucratic maneuvering and land in Dhaka, the funeral

is over. Nazrul, who fought against Partition, now becomes embedded

in the new narrative being constructed by a Saudi-supported, military-led,

Islamization project in Bangladesh.

You never commanded any destruction

Other religions, other temples

Today we cannot tolerate any other belief

Forgive Us Prophet!

[Khoma Koro Hazrat (Forgive Us Prophet)]

Assassination . 1975, a military coup. Now the poet is transerred to PG Hospital, his world shrinks.

He looks conused in that portrait with nurses. What is happening, why wont anyone tell me.

Nationalism. Nazruls burial is asco and jubilee. I look at General Zias sunglass covered eyes at the

uneral and shiver. Did Zia imagine the next grand uneral would be his own, ve years later.


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Many years later, I go to visit an elderly relative. He talks for a whole

afternoon, and then proudly shows me a photo album. Tourism snaps in India,

Japan, Finland. In India, a set of color photos, posed and formal. There he is,

sitting next to Nazrul. I vaguely recognize the stooped look and inert eyes.But there is nothing left of the wild eyed, long-haired Nazrul of Bidrohi days.

This is Nazrul? I never knew you met him.

Yes of course, this photo is my evidence.

Well...what stories did he tell you?

Stories...he didnt tell us any stories. He didnt say anything. I mean, he

couldnt speak by then.

Oh, of course, this is after he became ill. So why did you meet him then?

We all went. Then it was the fashion, to sit next to Nazrul and get yourpicture taken. It didnt really matter that he couldnt speak.

ENDNOTES

1 Translated by Rezaul Karim Talukdar.

2 Translated by Sajed Kamal.

3 This and all subsequent poems translated

by Naeem Mohaiemen.

kazi in nomansland

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