The Now Moment: Conversations with Sohan Qadri by Amarjit Chandan: When a poet meets a painter
In 1991, the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan met the Punjabi painter Sohan Qadri in Copenhagen. Born in Nairobi, the poet had spent his youth toiling in India’s “political underground” — a leftist network that spanned Jalandhar, Calcutta, Kathmandu — before settling in London. Born in Chachoki village near Phagwara (Punjab), the painter had spent his youth toiling in India’s “spiritual underground” — tantric mud huts, Sufi shrines, and Himalayan ashrams — before settling in Zurich.
Their encounter in Copenhagen was exemplary in more ways than one. It reminds us that cultures of Punjab have always been profoundly cosmopolitan. Yet, the exilic careers of Chandan and Qadri also betray the neglect, even outright contempt, that their works have received within Punjab from provincial elites and subaltern activists alike. So now when Punjabi institutions slowly look to re-package their careers — attractively stamped by the authority of their “western” friends (John Berger for Chandan and Heinrich Böll for Qadri) — our enthusiasm for these histories is inevitably tinged with feelings of guilt and regret.
This meeting between the poet and the painter had resulted in an intense, almost mythic, 15-hour-long conversation. First published in Punjabi as ‘Hun-Khin’ (Navyug, 2001), Chandan’s transcript is finally available in English, ‘The New Moment: Conversations with Sohan Qadri’. In his Foreword, the translator Rajesh Sharma explains that “conversation” is “a poor shadow of a phrase” for the word Chandan prefers, “bachan-bilas” (play of words). Indeed, this “play” shares little with the form of “philosophical dialogues” instituted by Plato. Nor does it resemble the sanitised genre of “literary interviews”, popularised by The Paris Review. Rather, this bachan-bilas meanders like the fabled, unruly rivers of Punjab. Here flows a rogue procession of yogis and comrades, Sufi mystics and postcolonial artists, Buddhists and experimental poets, Sikh gurus and lover-martyrs. But how does one accommodate such infinite differences? The short answer is: one doesn’t. This is how the river flows.
In this exchange, Qadri assumes the role of a Bodhisattva, eager to transport Chandan into a world of sutras and bani, occult austerities and dhyana. Hypnotic, for sure, but this promised liberation has its discontents. At one point, Qadri recounts the sublime terror of witnessing a naked woman for the first time. She had been abducted by his villagers during the Partition riots. When Chandan asks if this violent vision still troubles him, he says: “No, not at all. I love it… relish it.” The shock of Qadri’s confession is slightly cushioned by his ensuing, tantric reflections on hiras (desire) and ananda (joy). But one worries if the painter is carelessly — or perhaps, carefully, and all the more distressing for that — rubbing the dark shadows of history into pastels of spiritual abstraction.
Meanwhile, even as Chandan plumbs these mysteries of body and soul, he resists Qadri’s spiritual convictions. He cannily reminds Qadri why his Bodhisattva body remains anchored on the shores of history. Before he debated tantra with Scandinavian expressionists, Qadri had also attended communist study circles in Punjab. Before he was canonised as a “neo-tantric painter” by galleries in New York, Qadri had also painted portraits of Patrice Lumumba, the anti-colonial Marxist from Congo.
In his celebrated book, ‘Imagined Communities’, the British Marxist historian Benedict Anderson had quietly hinted at the vast metaphysical abyss that separates “protons from the proletariat”. This book offers us a glimpse of this very abyss. In doing so, it also offers new hope to Punjabi writers. For too long now, their works have appeared in the glossy catalogs of Indian and world literature as mere symptoms of topical crises: the Partition, Sikh separatism, and agrarian distress. For once, Rajesh Sharma’s luminous translation offers Punjabi literature the opportunity to enter the Anglophone sphere on its own terms.
— The reviewer teaches at the Pennsylvania State University, US
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