Rendezvous with Rafiq Kathwari

Recipient of the prestigious 45th Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, photographer and art revivalist Rafiq Kathwari chats up with CityPlus about why he likes to hold his home Kashmir, in his heart. 

It is not easy to be a wanderer and trot the whole world as if it were a pastor land, especially when you have to leave home that is no less than heaven on earth yet torn with violence. Rafiq Kathwari, the contemporary English language poet, photographer and social entrepreneur moulds the wails of this bleeding land into poetry dividing his time between New York, Dublin, and Kashmir. Cityplus spoke to this first non-Irish poet who also received the prestigious 45th Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award last year.

On being a story teller

He states, “Kashmiris must tell their story themselves and we have begun to do that. Starting with A Country without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali, a seminal book of poems about India’s ruthless suppression of a popular movement seeking justice; Curfewed Nights by Basharat Peer who is the Editor of the New York Times India Ink, The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, Of Occupation And Resistance, a noteworthy essay anthology by young Kashmiris.” 

He continues, “But Kashmir does not exist in a vacuum. One must view Kashmir in a global context. I wrote a poem inspired... actually triggered… to use the more appropriate word… by a headline in the New York Times: Israeli Troops Kill 90 Dogs in Arab Town. It’s not only about Hebron, but also about Kashmir. It’s a short poem.” 

Reinventing Kashmir through poetry

Many poems in his manuscript are either about his mother or are in her voice. “When she was young, my mother started hearing voices, a condition that became progressively worse. So, through my poems I am constantly trying to reinvent my mother. Her madness has become a divine gift. Her voice could say practically anything and get away with it. My mother is the Valley of Kashmir. Her mind is a metaphor for the Partition,” he explains.

On Agha Shahid Ali 

Agha Shahid Ali and Rafiq were neighbours in Srinagar. Reminiscing about the late poet Rafiq says, “Very few angels have as big a heart as he had. He encouraged me especially when I was struggling to break away from an imposing family business heritage. He guided me well when I started translating Allama Iqbal’s poems and Shahid’s comments were spot on, particularly because he himself had translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz.”
Narrating another piece from his memory of Shahid, Rafiq says, “One summer in Srinagar, Shahid and I worked on a photo essay together, ‘Kashmir Retextured’, which later won the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) Award for Outstanding Photo Essay in New Media. Shahid wrote all the captions for the essay. Later, we spent a week in Barcelona trying to get a dummy book printed for Thames and Hudson in London. They said get Rushdie to write an introduction, but Rushdie was in hiding at that time.”
Rafiq adds, “The dummy is screaming to come out of my closet in New York. Shahid’s imagery pops up in my poems. It’s part of my inner template. I was with him in Amherst, Massachusetts the night he was called back.”

Where is his nest? 

For Rafiq, home is where the heart is. He says, “It’s a biblical condition…Rootlessness. It’s not something unique, but it gives you a unique perspective to your own native place. In a self-imposed exile you are compelled as a writer to create an imaginary homeland. Joyce and Beckett wrote about Ireland living in Paris. Rushdie writes about India living both in New York and London. I have an American sensibility as well as a South Asian cultural heritage. Rushdie said we are all chutney, and if I may, the spicy ingredients parsed brilliantly by Edward Said, but in a larger sense we are all children of Lord Macaulay.” He is at home with Rumi as he is with Rimbaud and Rushdie. That’s his nest.

On translating Iqbal

Allama Iqbal was a poet philosopher, a 20th Century giant of South Asian poetry who wrote in Urdu and Farsi and English but Iqbal’s poetry is a tricky one to comprehend. How did Rafiq manage to translate his works then?
 “I tried to cut through Iqbal’s didactic philosophy which he couldn’t himself overcome. For instance, in Jugnoo, his long poem about the Firefly, when you slice through the marvels of Allah, the seven or eight similes Iqbal uses to describe the Jugnoo are what Ezra Pound, in another context, called the “exoticism of Oriental poetry”. I have tried to bring Iqbal to a 21st Century secular audience, mindful of Iqbal’s all important tone.”

What’s next?

Rafiq has been trying to translate poet Rahman Rahi’s writings in Kashmir for the last 50 years. But first I must apply for a grant. “Poetry makes nothing happen, and it isn’t easy to make nothing happen,” says Rafiq as he signs off.

Colours of a New Dawn

What happens when the vision sees beyond the layers of glass? It gives birth to an artist. The same vision has bore the artist long hidden within Sravanthi Juluri.

“There is no must in Art because art is free,” said legendary Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. And if something has become synonymous with this quotation it is a mélange of different oeuvres that artist Sravanthi Juluri presents on her canvas. From inside the crevices of light bursts open a linguistic map of colours that is so different in every curvature of the lines thickening or taking new shapes when it is seen without the veil of brush strokes that the artist has been using digging deep inside her own soul. She recently held an art exhibition titled ‘The Journey of a Butterfly’ at Goethe Zentrum.

Brush with colours

Art is not made, it is born. Sometimes a dot falls and the artist becomes of that place. This is precisely how the journey of Sravanthi can be depicted. A queer child that she was, she always wanted to do things differently. It was when she was in Berkley that she had the epiphany and realized Art is her vocation. “I was having coffee and saw two men carrying a huge sheet of blue glass to ‘Stain Glass Garden’. The light pierced it and broke into a thousand splintering gems. I felt transported inside an atomic cosmos. It drew me to the institute where I learnt stain glass painting,” beams the artist adding that glass is conglomeration of everything. It is made from sand symbolizing the creation of human being – different human traits, and its final mingling with dust.  

The lost symbols

If Mallarme and Baudelaire culminated raw ideas into symbolism, Shravanthi emerged as an accomplished artist whose genius reflects in the frequent symbols of leaves and butterflies that she uses as mark of freedom. Her paintings liquefy a topography with different themes appearing as scarlet dots that enlarges as the vision shifts to the irregular splotches in darker shades that are none other than the expanding tissues of  womb in whose rupture glitters streams of Life in threads of trickling paint – bare flashes of Hope that flickers and disappears in the swiping flood of Modern Age. 

Kāli as source of inspiration

A red bindi gleams on Sravanthi’s forehead almost like sunrise – source of energy and flamboyance. She adores the hidden power inside every woman. That’s how she reaches out to the fair sex through her canvas. The use of red and yellow in her abstracts are symbolic of splashes of vermilion and turmeric used in worshipping goddesses. “I celebrate the deity inside a woman through these colours,” she adds. Kali, for her, is the perennial source of energy of what is unknown. She uses it as the reflection, creation, destruction and many other themes that are intertwined with the cycle of Nature and psyche’s perception of the same. 

A humanist and not the feminist

As an artist she makes best use of her canvas for depicting the rights of women, the sufferings that they go through.  She did a series of paintings on honour killings by cutting headlines from newspapers and pasting the same on the canvas. “People’s memory is short. I wanted them to remember that this is happening all around them. They, too, can feel the cry of a suppressed woman,” broods Sravanthi. At the same time if she is asked to choose between Amrita Sher-Gill or Frida Kahlo, she would choose the latter. Reason being Kahlo’s complex symbolism she can identify herself and her art with.                                                     

Artist Vs- Politics

When the Picasso of India legendary M. F. Hussain had painted Indira Gandhi as goddess Durga he had created waves. Another lesser known similar thing happened in Calcutta Art circles when artist Suvaprassana celebrated Mamata Banerjee on his canvas. The artist stands face to face with politics, but Sravanthi has a different take on it, “That time of Hussain was different. Many can find their inspiration in political figures. But I won’t paint any politician especially the kind of political potboilers we see coming up almost every day in myriads of forms – almost like corporate lobbying.” She signs off, “I don’t feel there’s much value in supporting political values.”

When Art Ives in Heart

It is not easy to create a signature style for yourself when your mind is full of the imprints of Art Maestroes. But Jaya Baheti with her free flow of brush has done that.

Realism is too stark a nudity for an aesthetic eye to complete its search for beauty and truth even if the same are ‘created’. The membranes of a creative palette transgress into stony entities hurting the very eye that watches it with heightened intensity. A diaphanous touch of rustic streaks awakens the surreal in the real. Artist Jaya Baheti’s oeuvres seem to be radiating with the same. The rustic landscapes coalesce with brush strokes that give them almost an abstract feel. Juxtaposed to this softness are her geometric opuses of human figures with too-large heads. 

Beginner’s strokes

Born in Pune Jaya is a Hyderabadi now, her marriage has brought her to the Char Minar City. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pune. “I began with my solo show at Chitari Art Gallery and it was an astounding success amongst the Art connoisseurs. So many art lovers came to the exhibition.” It was her father’s friend artist Murli Lahoti who influenced her a lot during her growing years.

Inspirations and influences 

Art seems to have known the address of her home. A young Jaya would see her mother do everything in an artistic way. She would be enthralled to watch her arranging plates on the dining table and fresh flowers in beautiful patterns. “Even the food that she would serve would be decorated artistically with an array of colourful vegetables and sprigs of herbs,” says the artist. 
“I am a free soul. I let this freedom flow on my canvas,” informs Jaya. No wonder she has a vast mélange of genres that keep finding ways into her brush strokes be it with acrylics, water-colours, mixed media, ceramics, glass, charcoal, ink or wood. Her artistic mood moulds these into an aesthetic object. 

In one of her paintings titled ‘Moon Bath’ she put a silver coin as the moon in the sky that gleams against the dark contours of secrets. She has curated many art exhibitions across the country and her art exhibitions have been held in many other countries.

On Art in a market hit by recession

A luxury item that any Richie Rich of the metropolis considers an objet d’art to be in times when the economic recession is gaping at all markets. Art aficianadoes keep adding in their collection only the colossal names. Other buyers maintain reticence while trying to keep the strings of their purses tight. Jaya has quite a different take on this, “In Hyderabad, you see an art event happening every day. Art galleries are coming up. Hyderabad is a good market. Buyers and rains come all of a sudden so why be despondent in predictions?”   

Arty affairs

Her strokes pick a drop of water and make rivulets flow surrounding which grow verdant forests – rain soaked. And the vision gets trapped in the greenscape that swirls as strokes of abstract elements blending with finesse in what is present and hidden from the eye. That’s how come her exhibitions have travelled to Art Mosaic Gallery, Singapore; Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi; Bombay Art Society, Bombay; Taj Deccan, Hyderabad and in many other renowned art galleries of the country. Her upcoming shows are to be held in Germany, New York and London. 

Lest We Forget

Jagran Cityplus remembers Lance Naik Mohammed Firoz Khan a martyr who sacrificed his life fighting against Pakistani troops at LoC in Jammu & Kashmir October last year.

A soldier, miles away posted at LoC was packing up to celebrate Eid-ul-Azha with his family at Hyderabad. There was a smile on his face that he packed in his luggage with the toys for his little children. The luggage did reach his home, but the smile was smothered. Toys were shattered. Lance Naik Mohammad Firoz Khan was killed as Pakistani troops opened fire in Poonch district at Mendhar sub-sector. His last words, “Jai, Hind!” seemed to resonate again and again in the Nawab Sahab Kunta graveyard, old city Hyderabad, where he was buried with full military honours.  

Country roads

The 35 year old soldier, Firoz was a resident of Hyderabad old city, Nawab Sahab Kunta. His father Mohammad Jafar Khan, too, was in Indian Army and wanted his son to serve the country. “Even when we would play in the ground, my brother would always mention his dreams of joining the army. He would be our leader in any game,” reminisces his younger brother Mohammad Alauddin Khan with teary eyes. And a leader indeed he was. He was with 18 Madras Regiment for twelve years serving in the battalion 38 Rashtriya Rifles. His first posting was in Ooty. He was posted at Kargil from 2005-2007. “From the army posts he would call us regularly and talk to each member of the family,” adds Alauddin in a low voice.

His mother Razia Begum fondly touches the memento that her son received while he was sent on UN Mission of Congo from 2010-2011. She gives a crushed smile, “My son has made all of us proud. He would always say that he will make it big one day while serving the army.” Labour Minister Danam Nagender, Mayor Majid Hussain, YSR Congress party president Y. S. Jaganmohan Reddy, BJP leaders G. Kishan Reddy and Bandaru Dattatreya and other political party leaders had come to pay their respects to the martyred soldier when his body was brought to Hyderabad on October 17, 2013 for the funeral.

The last moments

Firoz had visited his family on Eid-ul-Fitr the last year in August. He had been given leave for Eid-ul-Azha but as soon as he heard of the firings on Indian Army posts in Poonch, where he was posted, he did not care about his leaves and went ahead to join his compatriots saying, “I can celebrate Eid later, but have to teach the enemy a lesson!” He went to the firing spot and fired back gallantly at the Pakistani troops. He was hit by a mortar splinter. Before dying, the last words that he uttered were, “Jai, Hind!” His three children Afsheen aged 5, Ashraf aged 3 and 10 month old Naaz were waiting for him come and celebrate the festival with them. Little did they know that their father was a shaheed now. They looked on innocently as hundreds of people took part in the funeral procession of the martyr and gathered at the graveyard for the burial rites. His wife Nasreen Fatima is still in a state of shock, her hands still bearing very faint traces of henna. 

Highest honour for Firoz

The soldier’s house wears a sad gloomy look with his mementos kept amidst blue paper flowers. Soon they will be humbled to have Param Vir Chakra to be kept on the highest shelf of the showcase in the living room. “We have been informed by Army officials that Firoz bhai will be awarded Param Vir Chakra,” informs his brother Alauddin. The family will go to New Delhi on Independence Day to receive the highest military award for gallantry. Firoz is dead, but his deeds of martyrdom will live for an eternity.

Hyderabad Urban Lab

How well do we know our city? Anant Maringanti, one of the founders of Hyderabad Urban Lab(HUL) speaks to Cityplus to let us know how we can find the answer to that question.

You must have come across chemistry labs, but have you ever heard of an urban lab? Meet Anant Maringanti, one of the founders of Hyderabad Urban Lab (HUL). A lab with the aim to help urbanites understand their own world and bring a change to it. Anant is an economics geographer who, after his stay abroad, came back to his roots, his city and is letting others see it from a different perspective.

Right to know one’s own city

It was in the year 1956 that a French philosopher brought the concept of the right to know one’s own city. United Nations has also been closely involved with it over the years. The fundamental idea is to produce knowledge about the city in a local text and to understand how urbanization is shaping up internal and external lives of urbanites. Anant elaborates, “Cities are topographies that do not belong to a particular person. They are developed over ages undergoing many changes that eventually shape them up. They are entities. We are yet to find out how cities function as entities. Ours is an idea to explore this more.”

Bholakpur, for instance

Much like factories, cities too produce their own waste. And every city has its own places filtering the waste of a city much like kidneys do for a body. For Hyderabad, Bholakpur works as its kidneys. The 150 year old area is known as the leather tannery of the city amidst verdant crop fields. “People came from villages to settle down there and then around it, a city transformed. Now, at Bholakpur people live who deal with the scrap that the city produces – these people actually have made the city livable and clean. Areas like Bholakpur do not feature much in town planning. In 2009 when drinking water was mixed up with sewerage water, the area was labeled as the hub of maladies. Nobody bothered to find out whose fault it was and why it happened. It is an important area that puts commodities back to life post consumption; this is what needs to be recognized when cities are planned,” says Anant. Hyderabad Urban Lab began its research work on Bholakpur the last year to locate Bholakpur and places of the same sort on the global and political economy by giving its people a platform to tell their tales.

Meta Data

The data related to a city is rarely transparent. There is always a mismatch between two government bodies thanks to their own ‘risk and benefit’ factors. The accurate data can help save many a denizen during natural calamities or man-made disasters. Not only this, it will help people understand their city in a much better way. They can connect with one another as and when required. Anant signs off saying, “We are trying to accumulate accurate government public data. This will be very useful in the communication between public and government. We have begun to collect data and data samples from various sources. We teach students GIS and ask them to collect data for us.”

The Blurred Lines of Art and Heart

In a conversation with Jagran Cityplus, the well-known poet, art curator and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote talks about Indian poetry, his translation work on Lal Děd and more.

There is no easy way to answer the great Indian question, ‘Where do you come from?’ especially when you belong to an ethnic micro minority. But Ranjit Hoskote the celebrated contemporary English language poet, art curator and cultural theorist busts the interrogation mark through his work that liquefies the cross cultural identities to culminate onto what sub-continent has not cast its glance at.

It was not for nothing that celebrated Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali had said of him, “Hoskote wants to discover language, as one would a new chemical in a laboratory experiment. This sense of linguistic play, usually missing from sub-continental poetry in English, is abundant in Hoskote’s work.” In a conversation with Cityplus, Hoskote talks about Indian poetry, his translation work on Lal Děd and more.

On various ‘isms’

An art curator that Hoskote is, any ‘ism’ for him begins as liberation and ends up being a cage. ‘isms’ are not movements, but moments in Art. “Once these ‘isms’ mark a major breakthrough in terms of artistic practices, the nature of aesthetic experience, and how the line between life and art is blurred, the artist moves on to a new level of resolution. His sense of practice is transformed, but if he fossilizes that into a set of rules, then he is betraying himself. It is sad if someone remains a surrealist for his whole life.” 
On this the poet adds, “Isms create definitions of what belongs to the Self and what is against the Self. They become basis for antagonism. The minute you identify with that belief you are constrained and what is outside your Self appears hostile and strange. In political terms ‘isms’ are lethal, dangerous!”

Are artists or poets loners?

Anyone who is an artist knows the mystery of the world. “A good artist may be socially or personally alienated, but he is never alienated from his art. As an artist you recognize there is no unitary Self. Self, within itself, contains many other Selfs. It is hybrid and rooted in many places experiences, various cultural impulses and confluences. You develop a way of looking at the world in a different sense infused with curiosity and empathy. You do not create art to put down what you already know,” avers the poet and art curator.

On Tagore’s centenary of winning the Nobel

“It is very difficult to understand on what basis the Nobel Prize Committee makes its choices. Reasons why they chose whom are very obscure. Often, it has to do with their sense of a writer’s dealing with major political or cultural crisis. There are a number of Indian writers who could easily claim to be worthy of winning a Nobel.  Nevertheless, back home we have prestigious Sahitya Akademi.” The question, however, still oscillates from 1913 to 2013 with the air hanging still.

On Lal Děd

It is not often that a reader savours a work of translation as a pristine and independent entity in itself quite juxtaposed to the European styles. That is how ‘I, Lalla’ came into being. It took Hoskote twenty years to translate the vākhs of the 14th century Kashmiri mystic Lal Děd, Lalleshwari, Lalla and Lal Arifa as she is called. Hoskote gets nostalgic, “This mystic figure is very significant to me, deeply personal. It was a desire to connect with my original roots. Translating it was a challenge for me. I am a diasporic Kashmiri. It took over my soul. Every poem is annotative as there is Sufi, Tantric and Saivite usage. Hers was a poetry that cut across all divisions carrying heritage of Kashmir.”

The Poet Who Wears Many Hats

Sridala Swami is a rising star in the circles of Indian poetry. Her other interests such as photography, film making culminate as other opuses of her poetic sensibilities.

It is not often that somebody puts his / her fingers in many pies and takes the cake home. But Sridala Swami wears many hats with élan. She is a poet, photographer, short story writer and documentary film-maker. Swami has recently returned from prestigious Iowa University after a three month Writer-in-Residence program.

Tryst with writing

Sridala began writing poems when she was in her early twenties. And what William Wordsworth had said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Sridala has an ambivalent take on the Bard’s views. She says, “An image or a whiff of perfume is enough to transport me to a different world from where I get my poems. I do not set out for a journey to find out a poem, it comes to me on its own.”

While she reverberates what Wordsworth had said her other views are juxtaposed. She elaborates, “We have overused nature as our inspiration. That suited Romanticism well, now we are in a Post Modern era; the images are as diverse as a spoon or the clitter clatter of a keyboard.” And it is interesting to explore her poetic sensibilities through her first poetry book ‘A Reluctant Survivor’ published in 2007 by Sahitya Akademi. It was short-listed for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008.The brevity of lines contains themes as diverse as riots and maladies. She has penned four books for children as well. Her next book is a poetry volume entitled ‘Escape Artist’.

Her other facets

Swami is also a film editor from FTII. She has edited a number of short movies, documentaries and commercials. Her keen eye for details brought her closer to photography. That is how come her solo photography exhibition ‘Posting the Light; Dispatches from Hamburg’ held at Kalakrti Art Gallery, Hyderabad brought her accolades. She has just come back to Hyderabad from Iowa University where she was Writer-in-Residence at the International Writing Program. She says beams with joy, “It was a wonderful experience meeting other fellow writers from different countries.”

On Indian poetry

Many publishers claim that there are no readers of poetry. Sridala lambasts this notion saying, “If that were the case we would not be having so many enthralling poetry-aficionado-pulling poetry sessions at so many grand Literary Fests that are organised all over the country. Prakriti organises South India’s big festival related to poetry only.” She laments that in India its people do not know different periods of poetry unlike those of Britain. It is because the poets of different languages do not come and join hands on one single platform. “Poets, in India, need clarity of vision and unison,” she reminisces her favourite poets - Agha Shahid Ali, Nissim Ezekiel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nâzım Hikmet and Anne Carson. She signs off, “These poets are so close to my heart. They make me want to learn poetry all over again.”