Rachita Swain
The 16th of August being Navroz, Parsi Day, I am reminded of the Parsi poet, Adil Jussawalla, one of the first-generation of post-Independence Indian English poetry, who created a niche for himself with his anthology New Writing in India, published from Penguin, U.K. in 1974. Incidentally the only Odia writer in that anthology was Kishori Charan Das. Adil shot into fame with his collection Missing Person. His later works, after a long silence, include I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky and Trying to Say Goodbye.
Adil’s works deal with survival in a dystopia, and making peace with it. To make this comprehensible to the children and youth, in 2013, he published a poetry collection The Right Kind of Dog. Presented with much subtlety, the poems in it have never actually gone out of date or trend. It resonates among us more and more by the day as presence of the oppressed class becomes more prominent, which is the theme of that collection.
His themes reverberate in Odisha with the cases of brick-kiln units torturing women and children of tribal pockets, and imposing forced labor on them with a meager salary of two hundred and fifty rupees per week. Concerns such as these when left unaddressed incline toward leftist traits. Adil, however, makes a conscious effort on his part to maintain neutrality. He refrains from imposing his own judgements. “Mummy has a migraine/Daddy has hurt his back”, subtle bouquet of phrases in the pattern of innocent complaints of two siblings in a poem “Two from British India” are an evocation of how familial ties can make or break a child’s character right from the initial stages. Another poem showcases a boy who ponders over rejections that he can’t understand. Here is a child who is the butt of ridicule at school. The woman who is tortured at home by the husband; by people outside, as treatment fitting an object. A little further, his poems aim at stating the atrocities inflicted also on Dalits, as an oppressed section in the society in his poem “Ekalavya”. An outsider to Hindu mythology, Adil can chisel a person’s ability to be voraciously conscious to the working of the society. It is as if “cutting the thumb” isn’t enough to please the authority. Repressed tensions as these accumulate and burst out, which undermine the position of the oppressed section and drags them back to an inevitability of one—“dangerous”. Going back to regional cases, a husband torturing his wife is a brutally honest occurrence, not much shocking an account. But how common is a wife hacking her husband to death after prolonged torture? It comes as a challenge to the established pattern that needs to be checked immediately. As insiders, we have used the same to stifle our own people through indignity derived from interpolated religious episodes. A glaring reminder is the memorial for victims of witch-hunt in Keonjhar district as a painful reminder of gagged voices on the pretext of blasphemy.
However Adil’s primary focus seems to be on illuminating the condition of children and youth of the country. He sees a great deal of potential in them. They have to have an obligation to stay woke. We require a liberty from the vicious cycle of children perpetuating violence and the violence perpetuated on children— because they are innocent and thus most vulnerable to committing heinous crimes which don’t stop at bullying. Critically appraising situations of the ilk is Indian English poet Adil Jussawalla’s introspection of the children who kill, in his non-fiction Shadowland. The “homicidal” cases he takes into account is an umbrella term for manslaughter, first-degree murder and second-degree murder— all of which nevertheless are premeditations on the psyche of children perpetuating violence. According to him, outrageous is the idea of extension of “possession” from horror movies, to the children going wayward. Law is bound to be dismissed in unprecedented sites as these where church or, for that matter, exorcism from any place of worship comes to interfere. Adil’s greatness lies in his incorporation of cultural values into his non-fiction— animating voices of simple yet unique invitation to “family integration”. Coming from a peace loving sect of Parsis, preservation and enactment of tradition have been their key to success.
Adil admits he’ll never really know, penetrate deep into an affected person’s thought process that is “lying crumpled. Or how it feels like to be bullied. At tops he can only kindle embers of hope and strength of those languishing in the periphery— an allusion to the very apt title of the poetry collection, The Right Kind of Dog. His poems are not here to provide a safe haven to the crushed ones. Rather they are persuasive symbols for the youth, journeys from a limited nadir to the Fire Temple. Without inciting, the fusion of culture in between his straightforward lines is dancing flames to dispel the darkness. No better occasion than Navroz offers a driving force for certainty in a terrible world— to which Adil’s bunch of verses is assistance for the oppressed section of the society. Adil Jussawalla imagines a better world for the children, women and dalits alike –he hopes history doesn’t repeat itself as he sets out to empower the “Dogs” of the society’s making: through awareness, toward a new spring.
