Kuffir has translated a few Telugu poems about prisons.
...
walls from the nizam's time, barbed wire, electrified to kill
the sentry ramparts, walls within walls, gates within gates
locks locked unlocked, between the guards
the captured greenery
the pigeons that can't fly
the sky imprisoned in the yard
the faint call to namaaz in the absent noon
the moist-eyed ground giving the wind a chill
it's here the seasons had been held since long
...
That's from Vara Vara Rao, whose poem titled Déjà vu was posted or excerpted on many, many blogs (including mine) during the recent debate on quotas.
I used to wonder why many of those stirring poems of Srisri and others (by the way, many Telugu writers including Srisri, Arudra, Dasrathi had Tamil ancestors reaffirming Gramsci's statement about'no parhenogenesis'. I long for those days of multilingual states) brought very little social change. Perhaps as Auden says in his eulogy of Yeats "For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives"
ReplyDeleteswarup,
ReplyDeletewhat sustains the naxal movement in your view? other things apart, at a subliminal level it's the poetry of sri sri.