Literature Must Fall: Decolonising Mother Tongues
Decolonising Mother Tongues, a workshop on Punjabi poetry, supported by Professor Rajinder Dudrah as part of Creative Multilingualism’s Slanguages research project, took place at Literature Must Fall, in Birmingham, on Saturday 28 September. This all-day event, organised by myself and five other women, was an attempt to curate a creative and political space that brought together writers, academics and activists, through conversations, performances and workshops, to explore the possibility, or impossibility, of decolonising literature.
We set out to avoid and critique tokenistic diversity approaches which face the white centre, which maintain the status quo by focussing on inclusion into existing unequal social structures; for example adding texts by writers of colour to curricula, adding writers of colour to existing institutions and literature festivals in a superficial way. Understanding decolonising as dismantling, the festival set out to go deeper, questioning the elevated status that literature is given, the pedestal that books and writers are often put on. At the heart of the event was the insistence that all literature should be read critically – without idealising literature by writers of colour, or literature in non-Western languages. This approach was also central to our workshop on Punjabi Literature.
“…a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Minute on Education (1835) by Thomas Babington Macaulay
"If you know all the languages of the world but not your mother tongue, that is enslavement. Knowing your mother tongue and all other languages too is empowerment." Lecture, University of Cape Town (2008) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
As we understand the ways in which the colonial project – intent on dominating us by creating a sense of shame and inferiority - has continued in the diaspora, leading us to dismiss and erase our cultures, languages, literatures – it can be with a sense of solace and relief that we turn towards these again; to learn, to understand, to value what we have been told is worthless.
This, along with an emotional connection to Punjabi language and poetry, is perhaps the reason that there was such great enthusiasm and interest in our workshop on Punjabi poetry. Around 30 people attended, to discuss the popular Punjabi poetry of Shiv Kumar Batalvi and Amrita Pritam. These are household names for Punjabis and the opportunity to read, listen to and discuss these poets, rare these days in Britain, is perhaps what drew young and old(er) alike.
However, while an engagement with Punjabi literature is important in itself, especially given the fact that the language is marginalised in India (where Hindi and English are dominant), in Pakistan (where Urdu and English dominate) and in Western countries (where it is a community language at best), my intention for this workshop was to avoid uncritical nostalgia and celebration. In order to decolonise with integrity we need to keep our eyes open also to the classism, casteism, colourism, patriarchy and homophobia of the literatures we inherit from our ancestors. Poets are not immune from these structures, and neither is their work.
For this reason, the session marked a radical shift in how we engage with our literature; not simply to declare the obligatory ‘wah!’, nodding our heads in appreciation, but to read or hear a poem closely, to draw on our communal ideas and knowledge – to translate and analyse the poem together, to critique. Rupinder Kaur introduced Shiv Kumar Batalvi – his life and his work, and we heard him speak and sing through a YouTube clip. We also heard the well-known poem that we were to discuss – ‘Shikra’ (Hawk), and verse by verse we discussed its layers, including the ways in which gender and caste played out in the poem.
The second half of the workshop was a discussion of Amrita Pritam and her poem ‘Ajj Akha Waris Shah Nu’ (Today I call on Waris Shah). Sara Kazmi shared her PhD research, giving a context for Pritam and her poetry – offering a new analysis of a poem that is often read as a call for Waris Shah, writer of the epic Heer, to rise, as a saviour, from his grave – to give a voice to the women suffering in the violence of Partition. According to Kazmi, the poem is Pritam’s indignant response to the male dominated realm of Punjabi poetry. Further time was needed to discuss this interpretation as well as the poem, but perhaps it was ambitious to attempt to look at both poets and poems in depth in one workshop. It is clear that further space needs to be created for such readings, performances, discussions and there are plans ahead for a Punjabi Literature Festival, more workshops and a summer school for reading, learning, translating Punjabi literature.
Those who were present spoke of feeling both enriched and stimulated by an engagement with poetry that they had perhaps heard before, poets they had heard about during their upbringing in India or the UK, which went deeper in this workshop. “It was a wonderful insight for a person new to Punjabi poetry, it made me want to learn more,” said one of the participants, adding that “it was inclusive, there was an opportunity for anyone to speak.”
“I learnt so much about these poets I had only heard about,” was another response, while according to another attendee: “the session on Punjabi poetry really shifted something in my relationship with the language.”
The critical approach towards icons of Punjabi literature carried the spirit of day, answering the call that Literature Must Fall.
For more information about the event mentioned in this blog, please visit:
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Dr Kavita Bhanot is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and a Creative Writing Fellow at Leicester University. She edited the anthologies Too Asian, Not Asian Enough (Tindal Street Press 2011) and The Book of Birmingham (Comma Press, 2018) and was co-editor of the Bare Lit Anthology (Brain Mill Press, 2017). https://www.literaturemustfall.co.uk/
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Slanguages, hip-hop, a Russian play, Punjabi poetry and Oxford University