I've been re-reading your poem and comprehending it better, but I want to be sure before I post any more blog entries. You start with Coleridge, a silly poet who identifies himself and Britain with the Mughal Empire, the Mongols who converted to Islam and conquered Hindustan, destroying its learning, its schools, its culture, and its architecture. The ancient trade routes were all but obliterated. And Kashmir, your Fatherland, underwent artillery siege. Something like that? (By the way, I liked the sudden shift from plain to rhymed couplets. Or near rhymes.)
She agreed, more or less, with my reading:
I suppose so, it's a bit of fantasy as well. The first wave of refugees from Kashmir during the Mongol Era settled in Varanasi. But yes it's largely the current state of the homeland with the violence.
That current violence is between Muslims and Hindus. (Mostly.) Knowing the details above enables us better to understand the poem. (Obviously.)
It (strife in Kashmir) an interesting subject. One should think it is in the interest of people with influence to send in the resources necessary to mitigate the tension, set people on a sustainable path, and thus end the strife. The resources are there (here?) to make that happen.
ReplyDeleteBut, as your post suggests to me, we need to go back in history to identify the foundations of the strife.
By the way, I have time now to change "And" to "An", if Vitasta wants me to.
Postscript:
ReplyDeleteModernity--which the Bottomless Bottleists (postmodernists) love to deplore--has traditionally been the proven and sustainable solution to the problems and animosities of the past. Isn't modernity simply a mitigation of the past, which is in most cases "a train wreck"?
And is it not ironic that the rejection of modernity is attended by the revival and the maintenance of past conflicts?
"Post-colonial" world view indeed... Tsk.
In Kashmir's case, we might need to consider premodernism as a contributing factor this time.
ReplyDeleteJeffery Hodges
* * *