‘JAANE WALE SIPAHI SE POOCHO’ – AN INDIAN LAMENT ON THE FUTILITY OF WAR

September 17th, 2015

‘Jaane Wale Sipahi Se Poocho’ – An Indian Lament on the Futility of War by Bhavana Mahajan

Subjugated populations since times immemorial have always managed to find outlets for defending themselves – Kings took to building fortresses, the joker to humour and the masses to art, specifically, folk music. Within this cultural tradition, the power of oral hand-me-downs from one set of actors to another resonates across boundaries – of time, space and distance. Yet, while stones and mortar still stand their ground and bear testimony to the “greatness” of the one who commissioned them, the music of resistance tends to fade with the passage of time. However, individual agency can and does salvage some of these oral histories. Dr. Sumangala Damodaran’s quest to reclaim the protest legacy of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) is one such effort. This cultural movement took center-stage in the Indian political scene in the 1940s as their songs of protest became a means of nonviolent mobilization of the grassroots in India’s struggle for independence.

Indian People’s Theatre Association – 50th Anniversary postage stamp.

The 1940s were a decade of great political and social upheaval in India. While the national independence struggle was reaching a crescendo with the “Quit India Movement” of 1942, the “Great Bengal Famine” of 1943 made many wonder what would be the ethos of post-independence India? These concerns about the human condition were amplified by the commissioning of poor peasants into Allied forces to fight the white man’s war, World War II. It is the pathos of our people and the promise of emancipation that the IPTA sang about. These songs, which spoke of the woes of the common man, not only connected the masses in a sense of solidarity (we are all suffering, not just I) but also served to politicize the rural landscape (why do we continue to suffer). With songs and performances in local languages, the IPTA localized the promise of revolution for the uneducated peasant and in that sense brought the freedom struggle “home.”

“Jaane Wale Sipahi Se Poocho” (literally translated as “Ask the Soldier who is Going Away”) questions the relevance of war, especially for those drafted to fight it. It is not a marching or rallying song; instead it is a highly emotive piece that reminds us of the futility of violence. Written by Makhdoom Moheinuddin in Hyderabad, in South West India, as an anti-war song during the Second World War, the song survived in popular memory. Dr. Damodaran is the voice behind the current rendering and first sang it publicly as a student on a peace walk in 1984. 1984 was a watershed year in Indian history marked by large-scale violence against Sikhs, a religious minority, which was triggered by the assassination of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi by her own bodyguards, both of whom were Sikhs. This assassination triggered large-scale violence targeting all members of this community, especially in the capital city, Delhi.

In the aftermath of this violence, members of Parcham, a Delhi based theatre group, launched a Peace March all over Delhi University to collect relief material, etc. The march was supposed to end at Khalsa College, an institution of higher learning with a very large Sikh student population. However, instead of ending peacefully, what the group encountered was a group of angry young Sikh boys, who already feeling vulnerable and victimized, ready to go out and seek revenge. It was to calm this agitated crowd that Damodaran was asked to sing this song by her mentor, Safdar Hashmi. “But this is a anti-war song”, she remembers having said to him, to which he quietly countered, “listen to me”. From anger, this song transformed the atmosphere to one of collective grief reminding everyone of the futility of violence and the pain it inflicts, an example of the power of music to help enforce nonviolent discipline. “It was instantly cathartic…I saw these angry young men who wanted to go out and fight fall to the ground weeping as we started singing the song,” she said.

The IPTA as a cultural movement lost its momentum in the euphoric post-independent India with many of its stalwarts either retiring from active public life or taking to the Indian film industry as writers and performers. Even though she had been a part of the protest music culture from early years of her student life, it was only in 2006 that Damodaran decided to formalize this interest and research other songs of the IPTA’s music tradition. She reached out to veterans and bit-by-bit collected songs that used to be performed in the 1940s. Her search led Damodaran to discover many songs in local languages spanning the length and breath of the country – Bengali in the East, Hindi and Punjabi in the North, Marathi in the West, Malayalam from the South. At this point, she felt the need to preserve this historic legacy and mainstream them in public consciousness. “These songs also record pieces of Indian history like no textbook can”, she said. She worked with other artists like Susmit Sen on a contemporary rendering of some of these songs. The response her efforts generated were phenomenal. “When I started performing publicly, I was initially expecting only the older generations to respond but what I noticed was that even young people responded quite strongly,” Damodaran said when I met her at her residence in Delhi.

A country that houses many ethnicities, mainstream discourse in post-independence India has privileged ‘national identity’ over disparate local ones. However, IPTA’s legacy is also of history, of local contexts and realities, critical reminders of what makes this country unique – unity in diversity. In a world of voices clamoring to be heard, “Jaane wale Sipahi se Poocho” stands out as a call to our humanity and touches audiences even when they don’t understand the language, for it laments not for the self but for the fate of an unknown.

Jane Wale Siphai Se Poochho written by Makhdoom Moheinuddin:

Bhavana Mahajan is a blogger and new media enthusiast based in New Delhi, India.  She studied under Dr. Sumangala Damodaran at the undergraduate level. Currently she is pursuing her doctorate studies in Conflict Resolution at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She can be found on twitter as @attabata.