Shav Vahini Ganga

Parul Khakhar is a Gujarati-language poet from Amreli, Gujarat, India.[1] She was fifty-one years old then.[2]

As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept over India, the newspapers began to cover the crisis by running disturbing images on their front pages, with images of the Ganges river teeming with the corpses of people suspected of death from COVID-19. Unable to cope with the sharp rise in demand for funerals, the cremation facilities were overwhelmed. Patients died from suffocation due to lack of oxygen cylinders. Moved by these media reports, Parul Khakhar wrote a poem in Gujarati, "Shav Vahini Ganga" ("A hearse called Ganges").[2] On 11 May 2021, she posted the poem on Facebook. It went viral and was immediately translated into several languages.[3][4] The translation also went viral on social media.[3]

"Shav Vahini Ganga" is a 14 line poem with an AABBAA rhyme scheme.[3] The poem is written in the style of Marsiya (an elegiac poem or dirge).[1]

The locus of her image, the Ganges itself, is a core symbol of sacredness and famous as such throughout India.[5] The poem evokes the ire of the virus as it leaves a trail of death, as abandoned dead bodies float along the river, the smokes arise from funerary pyres, the very chimneys in crematoria undergo a meltdown from the sheer number of dead they had to incinerate. The piece, as a lamentation for the dead, lists a number of collateral effects of the pandemic: not only pallbearers and mourners became scarce, but even the flow of tears dried up.[6]

The poem implicitly criticises the Narendra Modi government and attributes the government's inaction as the cause of the tragedy during the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic.[7][4] The poem describes Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, as a 'naked king' ruling a 'Ram Rajya' where the sacred river Ganga serves as a hearse for corpses.[3] In writing of the city that 'burns as he fiddles', the Prime Minister, without being directly named, is likened allusively to the Roman Emperor Nero. Modi is addressed in the lines:

"O King, this entire city has at last seen your real face
O King, in your Ram-Rajya, do you see the bodies flowing along the Ganges?".[6]

The people of India themselves are called upon to

"Come out and shout and say it loud
The naked King is lame and weak."[2]

The poem received both praises and criticism.

The poem became immediately popular, as comments on social media picked it up and multiplied exponentially.[4] It was translated into several languages including Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, English, Malayalam Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil.[3][5] Its musical compositions were released in Gujarati and Punjabi.[5] Shalini Randeria and Ilija Trojanow published its German translation in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 21 May 2021 along with their commentary on poem.[8][9] The Hindi translation was done by Ilyas Sheikh.[3]

Khakhar was acclaimed for writing 'such a powerful and brave poem' and yet was also 'bombarded with abusive messages'.[10] Reportedly, social media posted over 28,000 abusive comments reacting to her allusion to the responsibility of the Indian government.[5][3]

Prakash N. Shah and Salil Tripathi compared this poem with Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes emphasizing its power of telling a truth, visible yet unperceived, concerning the rulers of the state.[11][5] Babu Suthar argues that this poem should be viewed as a protest poem in which two traditional and dominant Gujarati poetics, poetics of representation and poetics of transformation, are put aside and language is used as a weapon against the state.[12]

The following month, an editorial appeared in the June issue of Shabdasrishti, a mouthpiece of Gujarat Sahitya Akademi.[13] The editorial, without mentioning Khakhar's poem, dismissed it as "pointless angst expressed in a state of agitation".[6] The editorial called those who discussed or shared the poem 'literary Naxals'.[13][14]

Vishnu Pandya, the editor of Shabdasrishti, elaborated on the view in The Indian Express: "There is no essence of poetry in the poem and neither it is the proper way to pen down poetry. This could be merely venting out one's anger or frustration, and it is being misused by liberals, anti-Modi, anti-BJP and anti-Sangh elements".[13] The popular Gujarati writer Kaajal Oza Vaidya published an article about the poem in Divya Bhaskar on 16 May 2021.[15] While calling the criticism of the government's handling of the pandemic as "fashionable", she blamed the people for not following the Covid-19 related guidelines.[1]

Response to Gujarat Sahitya Akademi's criticism

After the publication of this editorial, which appeared to align itself with the central government defensively, around 169 Gujarati writers issued a statement demanding its withdrawal.[14] Some of the signatories to the statement include Amrit Gangar, Anil Joshi, Babu Suthar, Bharat Mehta, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Himanshi Shelat, Jignesh Mevani, Kamal Vora, Mallika Sarabhai, Panna Naik, Praful Raval, Prakash N. Shah, Pravin Pandya, Priti Sengupta, Raman Soni, Salil Tripathi, Sanjay Chhel, Sharifa Vijaliwala, Suman Shah, Yoseph Macwan, Zakia Soman.[16]

Shortly after, Khakhar published a poem entitled "Taare Bolvanu Nahi" (You Should Not Speak) in Nireekshak, a journal edited by Prakash N. Shah. In the issue, around half of the 16 contributions in the journal were written by Salil Tripathi, Ramesh Savani, Manishi Jani, Yogesh Joshi, Pravin Darji etc and consisted of literary protests challenging the thrust of the position expressed by the Shabdasrishti editorial.[14]

• Gujarati text of the poem
• Translated versions of the poem