The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as Solidarity in Postcolonial Anti-Authoritarian Movements in Islamicate South Asia

Poetry and Islam

Poetry as politics has a long history in the Islamicate world. From the earliest days of Arab-Islamic society, poetry was not only ‘the only major fine art’ (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 1, 458; Vol. 3, 40) but also an important way of expressing political views and building social cohesion. Through the expansion of Islam from the Iberian Peninsula to Southeast Asia, poetry flourished as the cornerstone of Islamicate culture (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 2, 32; Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 67–9). Poetry played an important role in the imperial project of Islam, and was used to spread awareness of both the political conquests of the Caliphate and as evidence of its cultural sophistication and supremacy (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 1, 229–30; Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 74).

By the 11th century, Persian culture had become the dominant high culture of the Islamicate world (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 2, 307; Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 127). Persian poetry instructed the reader/listener about history and politics, and served as entertainment for courtly life (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 2, 297; Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 128). By patronizing poetry, Islamic empires legitimized their rule by displaying their cosmopolitan inclusiveness and cultural superiority (Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 185). But Islamic empires also incorporated local cultural forms, as one can see in comparing poetic form among the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires (Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 218).

As Islam spread to South Asia, so too did Persian poetry. The Delhi Sultanate revered Persian poetry, perhaps even more than the Safavids themselves, and poets from the Safavid Empire would travel to Delhi to perform for large, appreciative audiences (Dale, 2010: 51; Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 2, 420). But poetry in the Mughal Empire also developed its own features tied to Sufi religious devotion, which was broadly oriented to issues of social justice that ‘proved potent at moments of social protest’ (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 1, 239; see also Dale, 2010: 152; Faroqhi, 2015: 385; Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 1, 297; Vol. 2, 244; Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 130). Sufis incorporated existing South Asian cultural forms into Islamic practice, inventing Urdu as a literary version of Hindustani (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 3, 144), translating Persian classics into various local languages (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 2, 423; Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 361), and fusing older Punjabi folk poetry with the Persian tradition (Lapidus, 2010 [1988]: 366).

This cultural translation developed into a uniquely South Asian style of poetry which soon grew to global cultural influence (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 3, 82; Streusand, 2011: 81). While many of the Mughal traditions began to fade with European colonialism, in the 19th century, ‘Urdu poetry was producing some of its greatest triumphs precisely in the genres sanctified by the Persian tradition (though not without Modern modifications)’ (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 3, 338; see also Dale, 2010: 151). In the 20th century, Urdu poetry continued to play a central role in cultural life in South Asia, where poetry festivals and public poetry readings – traditions dating back to the founding of Islam – remained popular, especially among young men. And even though most South Asians did not convert to Islam during the Mughal period (Hodgson, 1958–9: Vol. 3, 59), the unique cultural and political significance of poetry in India continues to the present. While in recent years the Sangh Parivar has made great efforts to erase this legacy, there’s little doubt among scholars that Delhi, in particular, continues to be part of the Islamicate cultural world (Rajgopalan, 2011: 258). Despite efforts made by the colonial and postcolonial state to lessen Islam’s cultural influence, the current cultural landscape of north India continues to be shaped by its longue durée past.

Islamicate Resistance Poetry across the Globe

From the days of Muhammad until the 19th century, political themes in Islamicate poetry were associated with the ruling class. But with the global shift in power from Asia to Europe (Plys, 2013), Islamicate poetry became associated instead with political resistance against the state. Resistance poetry played a role in national independence movements, for example in Bangladesh (Ahmed 2014), Algeria (Chaker, 1989; Hornedo, 2012), Tunisia (Khayati, 1989), the Sahara (Picón et al., 2015), Iraq (Jones, 2014), Somalia (Hassan et al., 1995), Zanzibar (Mulokozi, 1975), and Mozambique (Searle, 1982); in anti-colonial resistance movements, especially in Palestine (Alshaer, 2009; Ashrawi, 1978; Canova, 1971; Elmessiri, 1981; Maira and Shihade, 2012; Sulaiman, 1984) and Kashmir (Ali, 2012; Kak, 2013; Kaul, 2017); and in postcolonial movements to restore democracy, for example in Nigeria (Okùnoyè, 2011) and Uzbekistan (Kendizior, 2007). In the context of these anti-state movements, poetry was employed to build solidarity within anti-authoritarian resistance movements by making it known that a sentiment of opposition against the state was widespread and growing.

During anti-colonial independence movements, poetry served several functions. It detailed the horrors of colonialism and thereby influenced public opinion against European rule while helping to recruit movement participants (FRELIMO, 1979: Vol. 1, 6–7; Vol. 2, 1–4; Hassan et al., 1995: 167; Khayati, 1989: 137). Poetry aided architects of independence movements in building a nationalist consciousness that both educated the general public and helped build affective bonds among movement participants (Ahmed, 2014: 257; Searle, 1982: 308). In places in the Islamicate world that remain under colonial rule, such as Palestine and Kashmir, poetry is similarly employed as a means of expressing the violence of colonialism, the need for self-rule, and as a way of reclaiming local cultural forms (Alshaer, 2009: 215; Ashrawi, 1978: 77; Canova, 1971: 583; Elmessiri, 1981: 79). In Kashmir, poetry provides a space to come to terms with state violence and the struggle for self-rule (Kaul, 2017: 6). Suvir Kaul tells us the story of Muzaffar, a poet who began writing while in jail for many years without trial, contending that he took up poetry in order to keep ‘hope behind bars’, to prevent his torturers from breaking his will, and to remember the sacrifice of his comrades who instead of being jailed and tortured were killed (Kaul, 2017: 132–3). The act of writing poetry behind bars, claims Kaul, ‘is necessary for sustained faith in a political ideal’ (Kaul, 2017: 133). But these poems are not just for those who write them, as when such ‘poems are read, quoted, or sung in public they contribute to the collective vocabulary by which trauma is known and shared’ (Kaul, 2017: 134). The resistance poem not only helps the anti-colonial movement participant retain their commitment to the movement, but also appeals to a wider public by creating a shared sense of grievance and struggle.

In postcolonial movements to restore democracy, poetry plays the same role of building solidarity and raising awareness among a broader public. In Nigeria, the military dictatorship ushered in a period of authoritarian rule, during which poetry became a means of voicing opposition in the face of the suppression of free speech, freedom of association, and freedom to protest. When journalism could no longer inform the public and critique the state because of censorship, poetry was instead published in newspapers to depict the terror of everyday life under military dictatorship (Okùnoyè, 2011: 72). In Uzbekistan, poetry similarly plays a role in the movement against an increasingly authoritarian Uzbek state. In 1990, Uzbekistan gained its independence, but also became an authoritarian state under the rule of Islam Karimov. From the Samurid to the Timurid empires, Samarkand and Bukhara were centres of both state power and high culture, which included a poetic tradition. When the Russian Empire, and later, the Soviet Union, colonized Uzbekistan, Uzbek poetry was employed to assert local language and culture, preserving it for the future. Poetry, not surprisingly, continues to be the medium for dissident writers, who self-publish and pass around poems from hand to hand or post them on the internet (Kendizior, 2007: 320). Poetry in the context of post-colonial authoritarian rule does the work that journalists and social movement organizers cannot do for fear of arrest, that is, to describe the political situation, inform the public about the movement against the state, and to foster sympathy for resistance.

Building Solidarity in Social Movements

Organizing social movements involves ‘emotion work’ (Goodwin et al., 2004: 414), i.e. effort to create and reinforce group loyalty, inspire the movement, and calm fears that participants might have. Emotion work is crucial for movement success, as the construction of a shared identity is foundational for coordinated social action (Gamson et al., 1991: 28). Emotions, according to Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, are strategic tools of social movements (Goodwin et al., 2004: 417). Organizers must foster what Goodwin and colleagues call ‘affective bonds’ among participants (Goodwin et al., 2004: 418), because a feeling of attachment to the movement and to fellow participants is important for building and sustaining collective action among participants. The capacity to successfully do ‘emotion work’ depends on what Goodwin et al. term the ‘cultural materials’ available at a movement’s disposal. Social movements happen in a historical, cultural, and structural context that can aid in creating shared collective identity. But the creation of shared identity does not happen organically, but instead is usually the outcome of emotion work done by movement participants (Platt and Fraser, 1998: 176). Consciousness-raising and the development of solidarity among movement participants is an important precursor to mobilization (Hirsch, 1990: 252).

One strategy for solidarity building is through borrowing from and remaking cultural traditions to inspire mobilization (Eyerman and Jamison, 1998: 2). Cultural materials are important not just for the ‘internal articulation of the movement’ but also as ‘a prime recruiting instrument’ (Eyerman, 2002: 456). Emotion gives ideology and ideas the power to motivate and thereby can potentially lead to collective action (Jasper, 1998: 420). Cultural materials that evoke emotion can aid organizers in solidarity building, thereby expanding and deepening the potential for mobilizing (Adams, 2002: 22, 27). Cultural materials, according to Jaqueline Adams (2002), can be a way of communicating movement goals to a wider audience; can raise public and participant consciousness, thereby aiding in the mobilization of collective action; and can provide reassurance to both participants and potential recruits, through the process of making cultural materials. It can also help participants develop bonds with each other and can help attract resources – both financial and of other types – to the movement (Adams, 2002: 27).

Poetry, in the Islamicate context, does exactly this – it helps to create and reinforce group loyalty and inspires and calms fears that participants might have by generating emotional bonds among participants and recruits through reinforcing and reinterpreting the centuries-old tradition of Islamicate poetry. However, what an analysis of the role of Islamicate resistance poetry in social movements reveals is that there remain occlusions in this literature on how the political context structures the menu of tactics that can be used for solidarity building. In more authoritarian political contexts such as life under colonialism, dictatorship, or other forms of non-democratic rule, possibilities for social movement mobilization are constrained. As a result, movement leaders have a greater reliance on the role of cultural materials for solidarity building in cases where media is censored, rights to protest revoked, and dissent severely punished. In authoritarian contexts, other avenues of building solidarity are closed off or involve more risk for social movement participants. Writing and circulating poetry affords relatively less risk to social movement participants, but can have a positive effect on solidarity building.

Poetry as Knowledge Production

Using poetry as a sociological method begs justification, as a sociological analysis of poetry appears, on the surface, contradictory. Sociology is generally of the assumption that language is communication, sufficiently explainable by its social context (Ward, 1981: 7). However, poetry often transcends language, along with its originally intended social context. How, then, can poetry be compatible with the production of sociological knowledge?

Unlike a sociology of literature that homes in on the social context in which a novel, short story, or other work of prose is created by an author who is themselves embedded in a social context, understanding a poem and the poet who creates it requires the modification of the existing sociology of literature theories and concepts. While the poet certainly has their own social context, the poem they produce is a historical object: ‘its coordination of imagery, rhythm and word have a sensuousness and tangible quality even when the poem’s tendency is abstract and metaphysical’ (Ward, 1981: 204). As such, the poem as object is able to transcend its social origins, evoking emotional responses far beyond its original social context.

Poetry is able to accomplish this distance from its social context, contends Ward, by creating knowledge outside of existing modes of knowledge production. Unlike a work of history or philosophy that will logically reason an argument or present a narrative, or a novel or film that will depict some aspect of social life, the imagery created by the poet is often separated from the intended meaning of the poem. For example, a poet might present an image of a pastoral scene but the intended meaning is that of romantic love. Therefore, as Ward contends, ‘Poetry thus aspires to the pure distillation of meaning itself, and of meaning’s delighting possibility’ (Ward, 1981: 223). The knowledge created by a poem hits at a different register than knowledge production through prose. The knowledge communicated through poetry is an emotion, an experience, compelling the reader to devise a different way of being in and thinking about the world. In poetry, ‘there is a truth which is free of the society in which it is found’ (1981: 224).

For this reason, poetry not only can be used in moments of state repression to do emotion work of an anti-state social movement, but in these poems as historical artefacts, researchers can uncover what it felt like to live in that repressive political regime. In this essay, I use poetry therefore as a historical object created by anti-state social movements during times of political repression as a movement tactic and tool. To this end, I have constructed an original data set consisting of poems, archival documents, and oral history interviews. I spent two years in India doing archival research and oral history interviews, three months in London, and less than a year in Berlin doing archival research, during which time I came across several collections of poems that had been penned by anti-Emergency movement participants of various political persuasions. In London, I utilized the India Office Library at the British Library. In Berlin, I looked to the archives at the Zentrum Moderner Orient. In India, I have worked in various archives across the country; I spent considerable time at the larger archives, including the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, but I have also made use of smaller and regional archives. In New Delhi, these include the VV Giri Archives on Indian Labor, the PC Joshi Archives on Contemporary History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Central Secretariat Library, and the Delhi Archives. I have also conducted archival research outside of Delhi, including the Punjab State Archives in Chandigarh, Haryana State Archives in Panchkula, the KN Raj Memorial Library and Kerala State Archives, both in Thiruvanathapuram.

Because archival records of the Emergency remain classified, and newspapers were censored, newspapers are not reliable and archives are not available sources. As the state archives across the Global South continue to ‘reflect the old regimes’ (Ritchie, 2015: xii) and fail to preserve documents on anti-state protest, oral histories have become an increasingly popular approach. For decades, oral history methods have been used by historians and historical social scientists to recover narratives – mainly of leftists and feminists – that have been disproportionately silenced in historical documents (Abrams, 2010: 153; Yow, 2005: 3). To learn more about the Emergency and the resistance to it, I conducted oral history interviews with the men who led the movement for democratization in India. I interviewed 11 activists, all male and high-caste. They ranged in age from 60 to in their 80 s. I logged a total of 33 hours of interview time: the shortest interview lasted one hour and the longest eight hours.

The poems I uncovered during the course of my research, in the context of classified records and censored newspapers, struck me as a source that could potentially offer insights into the historical narrative of anti-Emergency resistance given that so few other primary sources are currently available. Admittedly, this strategy of using poetry as historical object is not novel, particularly for scholarship in the Islamicate context, where poetry has a long history of detailing historico-political developments. Ibn Khaldun used court poetry as historical source material in writing The Muqaddimah (1377). Wrote Khaldun, ‘Poetry is the archive of the Arabs, containing their sciences, their history, their wisdom’ (Khaldun, 2005 [1377]: 424, 455). Khaldun explains in an extensive footnote that the Caliphs encouraged poets to act as custodians of political history, and in the reciting of poetry during courtly events, Caliphates across the Islamic world were able to preserve history and pass it on to younger generations (Khaldun, 2005 [1377]: 456). Not only is poetry, as Ward argues, a historical record of emotion, but because, as Khaldun contends, poetry has great significance in the Islamicate context as a means of historical and political record, poetry as historical object is particularly well suited as a primary source for historical political sociology of the Islamic world.

But the use of poetry as a primary source for historical sociology is not relegated to the time of Ibn Khaldun. Jonathan Wyrtzen, in Making Morocco (2015), similarly looked to poetry as a way to access histories of resistance. For Wyrtzen, Berber poetry constitutes ‘a unique historical source base’, as the poems he drew from in order to detail histories of resistance were created contemporaneously with the events they describe and analyse (Wyrtzen, 2015: 96).

Anti-Emergency Resistance Poetry

The resistance poetry of the Emergency, regardless of the political orientation or mother tongue of the writer, was part of North India’s Islamicate poetic tradition. Even poems by Hindu nationalists were consciously part of the Urdu poetic tradition (Vijay, 2018). Socialist anti-Emergency poet Kamlesh Shukla told me that when he moved to Delhi in the early 1960s, the Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place was a hub for poets, painters, and playwrights. Poets and other artists, Mr. Shukla told me, were politicized by the environment in the coffee house, where ‘anti-establishment politics [was] being propagated and people would gather around those ideas’. After the Emergency began, this coffee house became a place where poets would

bring these items [cyclostyled copies of their poems] in bags and distribute it to somebody in [the] coffee house. It was a convenient place for all that … So such items you would get. They would exchange hands in the coffee house, without letting it be known to others. It was done secretly.

In, ‘Silence’, KG Sankara Pillai interrogates the silence of the Emergency as compared to the meditative silence of religious worship. In this contrast, he compares the ‘terrifying silence’ of the Emergency with the meditative silence of Buddhist meditation, Gandhian meditation, and Christian worship:

Today I seek: what is silence?

Is it the children lulled by the hunger at noon in the villages?

Is it the sacred Vedic culture of old?

The phallus at Kedarnath?

The mother in the queue waiting with her dead child

For her weekly ration of rice and wheat?

Is it the head of the Buddha in meditation?

The cross drenched in the rain over the grave?

Gandhi struck dumb in the streets?

What is silence?

Today I know the secret meanings silence breeds on earth.

Not the silence of Gandhi,

But the terrifying silence of the monstrous serpent

Encircling the river Jamuna

In every hood of its power is the venomous silence

that kills.

It steals into the lanes of remote villages—

Under the mask of taxes and poverty,

disowned dead bodies, ignorance, despair, torments,

The numberless chains that bind every finger,

Word and thought,

The furies crying for blood.

Silence is the pursuing spy,

The enveloping temptation,

The crucifying betrayer.

Today I know

The silence that empties the chair of the questioner

The silence of his mother who next day loses her son

The silence of his widow,

The silence of the black coffee waiting on the table,

The silence of the red flowers leaping over the lawn

(KG Sankara Pillai, trans. Malayalam in Banerjee, 2012: 81–2)

This theme of Emergency-era censorship and its effect on the human psyche is a common theme that emerges in many anti-Emergency poems. Moreover, ‘silence’, ‘suffocation’, ‘terror’, are common descriptors used by poets to describe repression and censorship. In so doing, these poems echo the Arendtian logic of totalitarian regimes that ‘prepare each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, correspond to each other and need each other in order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving’ (Arendt, 1994 [1948]: 474). The fear of repression, Arendt contends, not only destroys public life but also represses private life in that it ‘bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’ (Arendt, 1994 [1948]: 475). One sees loneliness as a recurrent theme in the poetry of the Emergency. In showing how silence changed its social meaning during the Emergency from being associated with religious devotion to associations with an authoritarian regime that evoked feelings of terror in the people it ruled, the poet communicates an important social truth about the Emergency.

Pranav Kumar Bandyopadhyay, in ‘Emergency Newspapers’, writes: ‘Reading the daily newspaper has been a/Daily habit with him/Like eating his daily bread/He now feels suffocated’ (Pranav Kumar Bandyopadhyay, trans. Hindi in Perry, 1983: 66). As a historical record of the Emergency, these lines communicate how media censorship disrupted the lives of those who read newspapers as part of their daily routine. Reading the newspaper in the morning seems like a trivial matter, but as it is a common and culturally significant ritual, media censorship was a daily reminder to those who read newspapers while enjoying their morning tea that India had become a dictatorship. The elimination of this cultural ritual was more than just a mundane reminder of censorship and repression. It shows how the Emergency was able to penetrate intimate spaces of social life, so much so that newspaper readers could feel suffocated by Emergency censorship.

Srijan Sen, in ‘The Mourners’, levies a critique of politicians:

The fire weeps for the oil,

…

And here weeps Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter

For the outcasts who sleep in the gutter.

The snake weeps for the frog,

…

And all the Marxist Ministers weep

For the fate of India’s revolution.

(Srijan Sen, trans. Bengali in Banerjee, 2012: 74)

The poems written by anti-Emergency activists not only record the injustices of the Emergency but also how authoritarian repression made people feel. Especially for political prisoners, poetry was employed to maintain morale and enthusiasm for the movement and to signal to others that resistance was widespread even though, as a result of censorship, journalists failed to report on the resistance movement. These poems countered state narratives that there was broad public support for the Emergency and thereby showed those who opposed it that they were not alone in their views. As a historical object, these poems demonstrate how the political repression of the Emergency felt for those who resisted it. But they also served the purpose of building and strengthening solidarity within the movement, both for the writer and the reader of the poems, by communicating anti-Emergency activists’ feelings about political repression.

Conclusions

In The Rebel (1991 [1951]), Albert Camus describes how cultivating the spirit of rebellion is foundational to any attempt to redress injustice and suffering:

Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dimitri Karamazov’s cry of ‘Why?’ will continue to resound; art and rebellion will die only with the last man. … Rebellion proves in this way that it is the very movement of life and that it cannot be denied without renouncing life. Its purest outburst, on each occasion, gives birth to existence. Thus it is love and fecundity or it is nothing at all. (Camus, 1991 [1951]: 303–4)

In this essay, I trust I have shown how poetry can be levied by social movements to aid in solidarity building – an important precursor to collective action. But poetry is especially suited to do this in moments of state repression as, by virtue of its literary form, it can be both extremely political and vague. As such, poetry has the potential to cultivate the spirit of resistance in times where other avenues are closed off. An analysis of the anti-authoritarian poetry of the Emergency demonstrates that anti-authoritarian arts are important, especially during periods of political repression, because they effectively do the emotion work of movements or would-be movements against the state, providing the writer with an outlet for their emotions about the movement, while also indicating to the reader that they are not alone in their commitment to the movement. As such, the poetry of the Emergency shows us that even art that is seen, heard, or read by only a few others can help advance movements that resist authoritarian states.