Respect for diversity
Voic of Hunza
Voic of Hunza
By Intizar Hussain
“AS a Gujarati writer, my queries are addressed to the literary fraternity,” said a prominent writer. The queries he raised were bitter. And the literary fraternity he was addressing included writers of all schools of thought coming from different parts of South Asia. Save for India, the largest delegation was from Pakistan, led by Kishwar Naheed. The occasion was the Saarc Writers Conference and the venue was the India International Centre in New Delhi, where these writers had assembled in a festive mood, meeting one another and a host of their admirers.The happiest soul among all was Ajeet Cour, who opined on the occasion that “the meeting of creative minds is always a miraculous experience”. This particular miraculous experience was the result of what she called her mad dream. A dream of more meaningful creativity, in which greater harmony among human beings and their environment is achieved, that included harmony with all kinds of species, be they plants or animals, so that the concept of peaceful co-existence could be turned into a reality.She recalled September 1987 when she had organized what she claimed to be the first ever Indian Pakistani Writers Conference in New Delhi, which “gradually matured into a forum where the writers from all over the Saarc region could come together”.And it was now being held as the 11th Saarc Writers Conference, defined by Ajeet Cour as a “dialogue aimed at learning to know each other’s values, culture, and heritage so that there is constant openness and respect for diversity”. All the writers gathered kept this view in their minds and spoke with a sense of optimism, giving due recognition and respect to the ‘otherness of the others’. But the Gujarati writer coming from Ahmadabad spoke in a different tone, expressing his bitterness. “As a writer in Gujarati, my queries are addressed to the literary fraternity. First of all, should we not ask ourselves if issues of the communal divide have mattered to our vocation as writers, and if yes, have we made efforts to understand or address them in our writing? Why have these issues not stirred our consciousness despite the continuous recurrence of communal violence for over three decades in Gujarat leading to its most explosive form in the recent carnage?” The Gujarati writer, who uttered these words, was Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh. He is also a known painter or perhaps a bit more. I still remember seeing, a few years back, his paintings on screen depicting the riot-stricken Ahmadabad soaked in blood. Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh doesn’t know Urdu. But he is conscious of the fact that in Gujarati “there exists a genre of poetry entrenched deeply in the Urdu literary tradition”. Ghazal writing and publishing, he pointed out, has remained alive for nearly a century attracting poets from almost every part of the subcontinent. “Intricacies of the classical mode of Urdu ghazal and its Gujarati versions are often discussed and debated in literary fora. Not long ago the Mushairas held sway alongside Kavisammelans at a popular level,” he said. “Gujarati has numerous words and terms of Perso-Arabic origin inextricably woven into daily vocabulary. A large number (perhaps a majority) of Muslims speak only Gujarati and their Urdu or Hindustani is heavily influenced by Gujarati expressions,” he added.
But, he regretted, all this least mattered to the contemporary Gujarati writers. “The complexities of a plural Muslim ethos of Gujarat or the larger ethos of inter-community cultures across religions has remained unexplored in contemporary Gujarati literature.”On the whole, according to him, there is “a lack of understanding or of a desire of understanding cultures other than those the writers belong to or are familiar with”. Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh also had something unpleasant to say with regard to Gujarati writers’ attitude towards the recent carnage of the Muslims in Gujarat. A Hindi journal had, according to him, approached these writers for eliciting their reactions to the catastrophe, but failed in its attempt and so had to pad up its special number with writings from other sources.
He also referred to a literary journal of Ahmadabad that lamented the lack of concern for the events of 9/11 among the writers. But, Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh regretted, this journal did not feel the need to point out the same lack of concern among the Gujarati writers for the holocaust that took place in 2002 in their own land. This is how Ghulam Sheikh explained the attitude of literary fraternity in Gujarat, a fraternity which is expected to rise above prevalent prejudices and has an understanding of and respect for the ‘otherness of the others’. That is exactly what justifies the Saarc Writers Conference’s, for all the writers in New Delhi seemed to have, even momentarily, developed the kind of understanding in which respect for each other is considered vital.
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