THE POWER OF POETRY: RASHIDOV’S ETERNAL KASHMIR SONG

The romantic novella The Song of Kashmir (1956) reflects the Indian people’s struggle for liberation. Judging by its tone, this summary of Rashidov’s works and the reference in it to The Song of Kashmir date from Soviet times, and at first glance seem far removed from the genre or the content of the piece. The novella itself is presented as a dramatic and florid retelling of a traditional Kashmiri legend about the cyclical change of seasons and the yearly triumph of the forces of life over the forces of death and decay. The novella’s narrative of natural wisdom is developed through the story of the all-conquering love between Bambur, the King of the Bees, and the spring narcissus, personified by Nargis and surrounded by other equally beautiful and life-loving flowers. Their antagonists, the cruel Blizzard and the enigmatic bringer of death, Harud, overwhelm the blossoming valley with their vile power but in the end are defeated, powerless against the love and the force of life embodied by the flowers, the bees, the trees and the sun shining down on the valley.

In August 1953 Sheikh Abdullah and a number of his associates were arrested by the Indian authorities, accused of conspiring with Pakistan (and thus also with the USA) against the Indian state with the aim of seceding from India and joining Pakistan. Nehru was apparently shocked when he saw the evidence of his former friend’s scheming against India. The infamous Kashmir Conspiracy Case began and there were demonstrations and civil disturbances all over the country. At the time it looked as if Nehru had managed to unravel the imperialist plot, and in 1955 the Soviet leaders Nicolay Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev paid a triumphal visit to India to finally cement the victory of the left-wing forces over the capitalist reactionaries. But what does all this have to do with The Song of Kashmir?

Among that large Soviet delegation to India was Rashidov, who attended a performance of the first opera in the Kashmiri language written by the poet Dinanath Nadim (a major figure of the Cultural Conference, a progressive writer’s movement in Kashmir). The opera, Bombur taa Yamberzal (The Bee King and the Narcissus) was based on a traditional Kashmiri legend, radically re-worked by Nadim. According to Moti Lal Kemmu, a prominent playwright and theatre critic, who also took part in the performance, in our discussions the 1953 episode [the alleged conspiracy with Pakistan – AU] was attributed to imperialistic intrigue. Since the Cultural Conference was an organisation of progressive writers, artists and performers, it promoted cultural programmes reflecting the unity of all peace-loving Kashmiris and exposing imperialistic manoeuvring. Nadim decided to reflect this political position in his opera, which he created after a visit to China and influenced heavily by an opera he had seen called The White Haired Girl. This, one of the eight model operas of revolutionary China, told the story of a peasant couple who are separated by enemy figures, only to be reunited after the protagonist joins the Chinese revolutionary army fighting the Japanese invaders. The reunion is made possible by victory over the enemy and, simultaneously, the overthrow of an evil landowner who had held the girl in captivity. The plot, which parallels the liberation of the motherland and that of the fiancée in an act of courageous resistance at both romantic and political levels, was created within Socialist Realism and also became a template for several Asian writers.
The Song of Kashmir was published in Uzbek (Kashmir qo’shig’i) in 1956, shortly after the Soviet delegation to India; in1958 it was translated into Russian, and in 1961 the Uzbek composer Georgy Muschel wrote a ballet based on the novella. In an article about the composer’s life, Lilia Nikolenko wrote: The ballet was created out of [Muschel’s] direct impressions of Sharaf Rashidov’s poem, The Song of Kashmir, which reflected a poetic Indian legend. The composer also wrote the libretto to the ballet, in which the common striving of the people of the East for independence and the triumph of peace and goodwill are manifested with power and passion.

It is interesting to see how the public discourse surrounding The Song of Kashmir gradually changed over time. Eventually it lost all reference to the opera Bombur taa Yamberzal and its significance for politics and society in Kashmir in the mid-1950s. Dinanath Nadim is mentioned only as a re-teller of an ancient Kashmiri legend. The politically significant identification of the

Kashmiri and Indian cultures is taken for granted and the plot as presented by Rashidov now symbolises the common effort of the peoples of the East in their struggle for independence. Political and literary references and remakes of The Song of Kashmir continued to proliferate, using a growing range of media.

In 1965 a cartoon, Nargis, was made in the USSR based on The Song of Kashmir. This version featured a doppelgänger motif and the dramatic death and resurrection of the protagonist. In 1967, twelve years after the first performance of Bombur taa Yamberzal, Dinanath Nadim’s opera received the Sahitya Academi Award for its contribution to the development of Kashmiri literature. According to the Kashmiri writer and blogger Vinayak

Razdan, in 1971, the Soviet government conferred on Nadim the Soviet Land Nehru Award, a prize given by the Soviet Union to selected Indian artists in recognition of their outstanding work.

In the late 1970s, in the context of growing tension between India and Pakistan, Rashidov, who by now had retired from literary work, re-published The Song of Kashmir with the additional commentary about the various possible interpretations of its plot. According to the Indian journalist Alok Shekhar, in 1984 Rashidov’s novella inspired and informed the famous Soviet-Indian film The Legend of Love. In another curious twist, another major Asian writer, Salman Rushdie, gave the name Bombur Yamberzal to one of his characters in Shalimar The Clown, a novel about Kashmir and the politics of the sub-continent that ripped apart the lives of those caught in the middle of the battleground. To underline the inherent contradiction within the plot, Rushdie named Bombur Yamberzal’s wife, Harud, a small but remarkable touch of his postmodernist irony. The resilience and flexibility of the legend is indeed remarkable.

By Shishir Raj. Advocate. Supreme Court of India. New Delhi