Shared Heritage...

Writers from South Asia share their joy and anguish at the recently concluded South Asian Literature Festival in Delhi. MONA MEHTA reports My dear puttarji’— that’s how I address my son Hamid Amir in Pakistan and he calls me ‘my dear Amma ji’,” says Ajeet Caur reminiscing about her friends and writers in Pakistan who yet again were not able to make it to the South Asian Literature Festival held in Delhi recently. The acclaimed writer has been organising such festivals for the last three decades, in a bid to nurture and strengthen relationships in the region. The four-day festival saw 190 writers and poets from Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan come together. But Pakistan, the land of her birth, was missing, much to Caur’s dismay. “I call the Pakistani writer, Akhtar Hussain Akhtar, my brother; he says we are hamsheera — children who have shared the milk of the same mother. When he came to attend our first literature festival — Writer’s Conference — in 1987, he brought me a ring as a gift. See, I still wear it,” says Caur flashing a large maroon stone ring on her finger. “Pakistani writers were given visas to come to India for the first time for this conference. Before that they would come on the pretext of attending a relative’s funeral or to lay a flower at someone’s grave,” says Caur. The endeavour grew into a fullfledged movement in 2000 with support from the Ministry of External Affairs when the first SAARC Literature Festival was organised. “Besides sharing clouds and monsoons, birds and animals, oceans and rivers, we also share long civilisational journeys… and there are commonalities in our cultural identity too, horizontally and vertically, at micro and macro levels. We share our pains and anguish too,” says Caur, pointing to shared heritage in the South Asian region. Life, love, compassion, friendship, personal relationships, and family life may be the themes common to all writers at the festival, but what is also common among a few is creativity emerging from trauma.“There is a positive connection between anguish and productivity,” says Caur who lost her 24- year-old daughter several years ago. “What is important is how you channelise your pain, instead of letting it engulf you.” Writer Selina Hossain from Bangladesh agrees. She also lost her daughter, Lara, who was a pilot, in a plane crash, but instead of wallowing in sorrow, she decided to channelise her grief into furthering her daughter’s mission to help the less-privileged, particularly women and children. Her NGO, Lara Foundation, began drawing attention to their issues through her stories. “I may not be able to transform society, but as a writer, my first expression is humanity,” says Hossain, a regular at the festival since the beginning. Nepalese writer Susmita Nepal, too, writes on women’s issues. Born in a village, she saw up close what critical circumstances women have to go through all their lives, even being denied education. “I could not do anything for them when I was a child, but after my schooling, I started going to different villages donating food, clothes and money to needy women. I soon realised that clothes, money, food could not alleviate their suffering. So I decided to write so that their stories could reach out to people and trigger change in society.” She has published seven novels in Nepali, including Solitude Also Cries. For society to progress and humanity to thrive we need peace, says writer Gul Agha Ahmadi from Afghanistan. “Cultural, knowledge, economic and social exchange in the region can help bring peace here and literary exchanges help us learn from each other with shared experience and knowledge. “Religion is not a problem for peace, in fact, the message of Islam is peace. Terrorists misinterpret the Quran to push for their own selfish gains,” he says. He has written several books such as Peace in the Holy Quran, Peace in the Hadiths and Peace in the Islamic Law in Pushto, that backs this perspective. To restore peace in the region we need to rise above the misgivings of the colonial past and resurrect our common cultural heritage, suggests Sri Lankan writer Kaushalya Kumara Singhe. His book, Peep Into the Secret Window, a bird’s-eye view of contemporary Colombo, received rave reviews and was translated into Tamil. Ajmal Kamal, a translator from Karachi wanted to do a cross translation. So Kumara Singhe translated the book into English and Kamal in turn came out with its Urdu and Hindi versions, that will soon be published. Isn’t this a great example of cross-cultural exchange among neighbours?