BREAKING FREE FROM SUFFOCATION

RAGHUVIR SAHAY (1928-1990)

    ■ Raghuvir Sahay belongs to a tradition of literature that looks forward rather than to the past for inspiration, for whom the golden age would come when the aspirations of all the millions of people are fulfilled.

   Sahay, like most literary figures of his generation was not merely a significant poet. He was a writer-journalist, a social commentator, a literary critic and a partisan for secularism.

   From late 60's till  the beginning of 80's he was editor of Hindi weekly Dinman, whose  status as the best political-social journal in Hindi is yet to be surpassed.

    He advocated the use of a language that preserved the heritage of Hindustani, the Hindi-Urdu synthesis.

GHUTAN KE BAHAR : BREAKING FREE FROM SUFFOCATION

■ It is true that one can realize one's human side even while continuing to live in one's own little village.

But it is not possible to cross from one village, one social group, one kind of suffocation, and one kind of freedom to another, while remaining within the boundaries set by one's birth.

If one is to pass over into some other language, some other mode of being, some other country and some other history, some other enclosure, in short -- though only to free oneself from that as well, even sooner than before -- one must break through the seige laid by a closed society, which is a partisan of its own language and which all the while keeps the creative person under observation.

My strength does not come from knowing what I have joined myself to.

The joy I feel in creating springs from the knowledge of what I have broken from, so as to establish a new dwelling place. And if I could also be certain that my new world was built on the debris of the old, I'd be perfectly satisfied.   

  MUJHE KUCHH AUR KAMA THA : I OUGHT TO BE DOING MUCH ELSE

■ I  OUGHT to be doing much else
        in this unwhole world
        not just keep the promise
        to a landlord
        or shriek at
        a world of horrors
        I ought to be doing much else
        not stand and eat
        a plate in hand
        in a hall teeming with men and women
        maybe I ought to break
        much more than an empty plate
        this year I
        should have made it
        not just gaze in the looking-glass
        shaving a stubble on my chin

I ought to sing and thunder with rage
          or just laugh
          I ought to be going places
          making the salad
          with my sleeves rolled
          I ought to have roughed the bully up
          outbrag the braggart
          dare the dandy
          I ought I ought to put
          my child to sleep
          with a nice lullaby
          I ought to perform much more
          than a mere salute
          gasping in the morning
          and not look atforty
          dazed at the ways of the world
          yet it's amazing
          no one took the note
          when the success
          succeeded

I've watched it happen
          aflimsyfaith everyday
          vanishing bit by bit
          between the jaws of a glorious people
          with survivor's guilt
          of five famines
          I ought to be doing much else
          instead I sit in a reading room
          looking for a familiar face
          now and then for a hefty tome
          I ought to know I know I know
          when my own generation
          took over the reins of the nation
          yet this way the world acts
          doting on rebels
          shunning the revolt

Translations from Hindi : Harish Trivedi/Daniel Weissbort.

• English translations of RS poems
• Article in Delhi Magazine