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'Ninna Dakhale Yaavaga Needutte (When Will You Show Your Documents)?' And Other Poems

Through 100 pages of 'Poetry as Evidence', Outlook presents a selection of poems and verses that have moved us, and we feel these serve as evidence of our bleak times and lives. Below are the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth poems from the series.

Outlook Web Desk

Updated on: 11 January 2024 5:10 pm

Members of the tribal community protesting in front of Raj Bhavan, Ranchi in 2022 against the government’s proposed drone survey in the villages of Jharkhand.

Ninna Dakhale Yaavaga Needutte? (When Will You Show Your Documents?)

Those queueing for aadhar-ration-cards
between thumb-scans and monkey-tricks of servers
who lose their lives–their documents you demand,
When will you show your documents!?
Those to the gallows went smiling for freedom
refusing the martyr’s fame,
their history pages you tear,
When will you show your documents!?
Of Taj-Mahal-Char-Minar domes
Red-Fort-Qutub-Minar minarets,
their proofs you demand
When will you show your documents!?
Bootlickers of the British rule,
in their intoxicating hate, you–
a Goebbel’s breed–drink blood
When will you show your documents!?
Men lived selling pakoda
and chai in my city, humanity
they didn’t sell, dignity they didn’t
sell, a concoction of lies they didn’t brew.
Tell us, when will you show your documents!?
When thorns pierced, tore, ripped
tyres, tubes which he mended and pumped air
the puncture-man did not sell his identity.
You who sold this country
Tell us, when will you show your documents!?
You who swindled the nation
to whom fake documents mean a trifling
matter must attest at least to humanity.
When will you show your documents!?

—Translated from Kannada by Dhanya Gopal

Siraj Bisaralli, Karnataka

(Siraj Bisaralli is a veteran Kannada journalist and poet who was arrested in 2020 for “breach of peace” after he recited his poem Ninna Dakhale Yaavaga Needuttee? (When Will You Show Your Documents?) at a cultural event during the height of the antiCAA, NRC protests. The poem was later read by H D Kumaraswamy in the Karnataka Assembly.)

Nyay Anyay, Janine (Right or Wrong, Who Cares?)

Three rounds of firing and twenty-three dead, people are such scoundrels
The schoolboys who perished at the threshold were antisocials of course
Look there, they are pretending to be epitomes of innocence
As if they have no idea about the simplest things–Sheesh!
Bullets know nothing but self-defense
Yet, the eyes often stare at the stars in the sky philosophically

The police can do no wrong as long as they belong to me

—Translated from Bengali by Sreemanti Sengupta

Sankha Ghosh, West Bengal

(Sankha Ghosh is one of the most powerful Bengali poets of the postIndependence period, equally loved and respected in West Bengal and Bangladesh. He taught literature at Delhi University and Visva-Bharati before retiring from Jadavpur University as a professor of Bengali. He was conferred the Jnanpith Award in 2017. He died in 2021.)

My Mother’s Fault

You marched with other seven-year-old girls,
Singing songs of freedom at dawn in rural Gujarat,
Believing that would shame the British and they would leave India.

Five years later, they did.
You smiled,
When you first saw Maqbool Fida Husain’s nude sketches of Hindu goddesses,
And laughed,
When I told you that some people wanted to burn his art.

‘Have those people seen any of our ancient sculptures? Those are far naughtier,’
You said.

Your voice broke,
On December 6, 1992,
As you called me at my office in Singapore,
When they destroyed the Babri Masjid.

‘We have just killed Gandhi again,’ you said.

We had.

Aavu te karaay koi divas (Can anyone do such a thing any time?)
You asked, aghast,
Staring at the television,
As Hindu mobs went, house-to-house,
Looking for Muslims to kill,
After a train compartment in Godhra burned,
Killing 58 Hindus in February 2002.

You were right, each time.

After reading what I’ve been writing over the years,
Some folks have complained that I just don’t get it.

I live abroad: what do I know of India?

But I knew you; that was enough.

And that’s why I turned out this way.

Salil Tripathi, Gujarat

(Senior journalist Salil Tripathi’s poem on the Babri Masjid demolition was first published in his book of collected poems titled Offence: The Hindu Case. He faced widespread backlash and suspension of his social media account after a video of him reciting the poem, which he had written for his mother, went viral on Twitter amid the anti-CAA protests in 2020. Tripathi was the Chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee from 2015 to 2021.)