Majha House poetry fest begins with ode to stories of hope

Tribune News Service

Neha Saini

Amritsar, March 21

The inaugural session of Majha House Festival of Literature, Performance and Film was dedicated to stories of hope and resilience, through poetry aptly, as the world observed International Poetry Day. The three-day festival is being hosted by Majha House in collaboration with Kuldip Nayar Trust and Film South Asia.

Preeti Gill, founder, Majha House, described the inaugural session with eminent writers, poets and scholars in attendance, as an attempt to share the stories of conflict, pain, grief, hope and resilience and a desire to share these narratives to make them ours. She opened the session by reading excerpts from ‘Knotted Grief’ by Naveen Kishore, “It is mainly on Kashmir but works everywhere,” she said.

The evening had readings by Nirupama Dutt, Vinaya Dutt, Sanjoy Hazarika, Priyanka Chhabra, Syeda Hameed, Mandira Nayyar, Gurpratap Khairah and Kanak Mani Dixit. These included short poems and excerpts from writings on Punjab, Manipur and Palestine.

The Punjab Story

Nirupama Dutt and Vinayak Dutt, author of ‘The Punjabi Hindu’, explored history in context to the past, present and future, in their session on the ‘Punjab Story —- Then and Now’. While Nirupama traced the history of the Unionist Party of Punjab, founded by Sir Fazli Husain, Sir Chotu Ram and Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan in 1923, which rose through the nationalist movement for its anti-divisive stance on Punjab and its fall overlapping with Jinnah’s pro-Pakistan ideology, Vinayak explored the various decades in history and present context, observing that Punjab has always gone through phases of mass hysteria due to conflict, yet never been able to arrive at a solution to attain the status of normalcy or prosperity. Priyanka Chhabra, a filmmaker, who has been working to document and archive the inter-generational trauma of Partition, through structure of memories, whether it’s behind the lens or through prose, read excerpts from her upcoming book on the subject.

This segment ended with Jasmeet Nayyar’s spirited rendition of Faiz’s now iconic nazm, ‘Hum Dekhenge’.

Manipur, Mizoram and tales of betrayal

Syeda Hameed, eminent artist, author and founder trustee of the Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia (WIPSA), talked about her eyewitness experience of travelling to conflict-ridden Kuki and Meitei districts, which have seen continued incidents of ethnic violence between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo tribal communities since last year. “Every newspaper, every journal talked about Manipur but through our travel, we have presented a compendium of four reports on Manipur trauma and violence, which is ongoing,” she said. Calling it not a stand-out incident of ethnic violence in the country, she read out excerpts from her report, when she travelled to conflict-torn districts of Kuki-dominated Churachandpur, Bishnupur and Tenggol.

“There is a sense that I am in a foreign country with barricades visible as it is a war zone,” she read as she talked about how people in the state have become disillusioned with the elected government and the systemic violence that has brought Manipur, considered as a jewel of the country, to a state of mourning. Sanjoy Hazarika, too, highlighted the generational trauma of conflict in Mizoram.

An ode to children of Palestine

Mandira Nayyar and Nepal author-publisher and editor Kanak Mani Dixit paid homage to the genocide victims in Gaza by reading poems of famous Palestinian poets and news reports from Western media. Mandira Nayyar read feisty Palestinian poet and human rights activist Susun Abulhawa’s poem ‘We Never Left Home’ as Gurpratap Khairah read a poem dedicated to a child, who got lost in Gulzar’s ‘Raavi Paar’, showed up as Aylan Kurdi on the shores of Turkey in 2015, then again in a bunker in Ukraine in 2022 and finally in Gaza.

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