Truth and poetry

If the task of the public intellectual is to speak truth to power,its a rather hackneyed definition for an age whence the species has disappeared,and the gods are long past their twilight. But the poet still has an honourably abstract job: the preservation of beauty,especially when tyrannical regimes seek to destroy it to paraphrase and invoke another poet originally from troubled climes,to explicate the predicament of little-known Aqeel Shatir in Ahmedabad. Shatir is being hounded by the Gujarat Urdu Sahitya Akademi for nearly a month and asked to return now with interest the Rs 10,000 he was given as assistance for publishing an anthology of his poems. His ostentatious offence: a few lines in a guest piece in the anthology that were critical of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Shatir claims the offending sentences were removed from the copies available in the market,but the Akademi isnt satisfied. The question for this literary bureaucracy remains unwavering: Are you an artistic and intellectual democracy? While needing prior permission of the powers-that-be literary or political or both to print a few words in a critical introduction or in ones verse would be the beginnings of tyranny anywhere,Gujarat has a distinct problem with art and artists. We saw a lot of that in Baroda in 2007. It seems,there is some grand narrative that writers and artists in the state cannot digress from.

Truth and beauty,together they constitute all that the poet need ever know and do. Some at the Akademi say its the prospect of a prize that brought the piece in Shatirs anthology to light,two years after the book was published. Its also a fact that the Akademis notice was issued soon after Shatir filed RTI queries about its accounting practices. Urdu poetry has beauty enough,perhaps so does Shatirs. Where lies the truth of this battle? And how should we react when we know it?