Adhi Raati Des Chambe De - Loona 1

The Chorus Of The Chambavali Women


At the midnight hour
in the land of the champa flower
the champa flowers
o the champa flowers
its flagrant fragrance
sweeps out in the direction
of the palace


In the palace
the queen lies awake
upon her bed
her eyes bereft of sleep
She tells the king
I must have a hundred flowers
of champa
I must have them soon


The king he gathers her
in his arms and says
Take heart, my heart
Let the morning dawn
And I'll bring them to you
But the queen she cannot wait
The king is in a dilemma
If he is gentle she may cry
If he is firm she might die


At the deadly midnight hour
in the land of the champa flower
the champa flowers
o the champa flowers
its perfume runs amok
causing a havoc of desire
in the land of the champa flower.




As Natti and Sutradhar are planning to leave they are held back by the sounds of a sweet song - the women of Chamba are heading that way, singing together in chorus.

Eh Kaun Su Des - Loona I

What Is This Land?


What pleasant land is this
And which this river
That like a snake of fire
ravishes the pale valley
lying softly here?

This is Chamba, my beautiful
And Ravi is the river
Known in the heavens as Aravati
Daughter to the sage Pangi
Sister to Chandrabagh
On earth the daughter was suspected
And into a son made
Bitter was the price paid
for this silver river
by the queen, her mother
and the valley she named
Chamba after her.

Listen, my love
How lovely is the birdsong here
As if a lover is calling out
To his loved one
As if the hollow of a bamboo flute
Has struck the perfect note
As if a ripple of laughter has flown
From lovers upon a couch
Lovely like the first sigh,
of first time lovers
on their first mating
Or like the dying notes
of a sad song
steeped in melancholy.

Come, let’s fly heavenwards now
Come, for the sun has risen
It is time for us to go
To dissolve in this fragrance
And find our way back home.




This song is from the opening sequence of the play. Natti and Sutradhar, heavenly beings from Indra's court, introduce the readers to the beauty of the Chamba valley.

Loona: The telling of it here (Opening Notes)

Loona is so multi-layered and nuanced that I have been wondering for sometime how to organize the material as I begin unfolding this story for myself (and for the few readers following this blog). I have not read the original in Punjabi so I cannot do a direct translation. What I am attempting here is simply a partial re-telling buttressed by a commentary. For a commentator there are many beguiling ways of presenting Loona, so for a while I was confused. But finally I have decided to stick to a direct and linear approach. Loona is written in eight parts – we’ll just take them sequentially one by one. To do anything else would be at the cost of the main story. Also although I have begun today I don’t know at what pace I will continue and over how many months this particular journey will be completed – in the circumstances it is best that the parts follow each other systematically.

For this discussion on Loona I draw upon two principal sources. Segments of the play have been rendered in song by Bhupinder and Mitalee Singh. I will be posting original transcreations of these, along with the audio tracks. For the rest of the commentary I draw upon Dr. B M Bhalla’s English translation of the work. Here and there, I have taken very minor liberties with Dr. Bhalla’s version only to make it more accessible to myself. For instance, in Dr. Bhalla’s version Loona is spelt as Luna. It is only a matter of spelling but Luna is close in spelling to the word ‘lunar’ and conjures up in my mind the vision of an ethereal moon maiden. ‘Loona’ on the other hand, due to its proximity with the Punjabi term for salt, loond, captures better the earthiness and vitality of Shiv's heroine.

Loona: Exploring Desire (Opening Notes)

What fascinates me about Loona is the theme it sets out to explore. Nowhere is the consummate ease with which Shiv can inhabit all 360 degrees on the desire and suffering axis more apparent than it is in Loona. From the opening sequences in which Natti and Sutradhar, heavenly narrators from Indra’s court, make love in the forests we know that desire and yearning are the underlying theme of the narrative. The opening sequences are dense with metaphors and imagery. The Ravi river is a snake of fire, its forked fangs, ravishing the pale, moonlit valley below. The valley of Champa, is a riot of champa flowers blossoming in the deadly midnight hour, unleashing impossible desires. We are introduced to desire as the impulse hidden inside nature, the source of all creation.

And then there are the characters each engaged with his/her own tryst with the nature of desire. There is the old king Salwan battling his loss of libido and seeking a way into the sun of his own being through a new mating. There is Loona, reckless in her anger at being yoked to an older man and yearning for a love which can match hers in ardour and youthfulness. There is Ichran the unceremoniously abandoned wife of Salwan seeking to come to terms with no longer being an object of desire. And then there is the lofty Puran, who desires a love that transcends the physical and seeks a union only with infinitude.

It is very clear that the underlying theme is extremely important to Shiv and he has tried to be totally honest and sincere in his exploration. “It is difficult to walk naked,” he writes in his Introduction. “I have presented the characters in this book in their stark reality. I can’t detach myself from these characters. I leave it to readers to judge their frank reality and truth as they think fit.”

Loona: A New Look At An Old Story (Opening Notes)

Loona, an epic play written in verse form, is perhaps Shiv Batalvi’s single most significant work. It won him the Sahitya Akademi award for literature at the age of twenty eight. The story of Loona was not a new one. It had been around forever, an integral part of the kathas and kissas of Punjabi folklore. Only it wasn’t the story of Loona – it was the story of Puran Bhagat, a prince turned yogi. In the story of Puran, Loona is the vamp, the beautiful and evil young step mother who attempts to seduce him and who when thwarted wreaks terrible revenge.

Shiv’s motivation for re-telling an oft told story was to cast it in a new light, to remove what he identified as the distorting prisms of gender and class discrimination. He writes in his Introduction to the play that stories written by court poets in the pay of the ancient rulers should not be taken without question. Aging kings unable to satisfy the young wives they brought home were likely to be victims of doubt and suspicion, while the multiplicity of progeny from different wives was also likely to lead to intrigue over property and inheritance. And in all these histories and stories it was inevitable, that the king be rendered in the most favourable light by the court poet. “How” asks Shiv “can a modern poet follow that tradition blindly when there is no finality about any issue? There is always another aspect....”

Not only does Shiv question Salwan, the elderly king’s right to treat the beautiful but low born Loona as his property and appropriate her as his wife, he also questions why in popular tradition yogis were always high born and their temptresses of the lower castes. He elaborates, “The condition of high birth was needed even by Rama, Buddha, Charpat and Puran. Not only this, in order to prove that they were really great, lower caste women like Loona were depicted as the embodiment of lust......to deceive the high born righteous followers off the spiritual path.” It is this two-fold discrimination against women and against the depressed classes that Batalvi takes on in his version of the epic.

In many senses Loona is a feminist recasting of the old story. In it we see not only Loona making a bold case for the right of the young woman to make her own choices and express her sexuality, but we see the different women characters whether it is Loona’s girlfriends, the old queen Ichran’s maid, Queen Ichran herself explore the many ways in which women were disenfranchised in the old orders (That their songs and words resonate still in less choate ways in the psyche of the modern day woman are another story). Loona is more wonderful for having been written by a man, for while the feminist point of view is strongly put across Shiv Batalvi retains complete empathy with the male characters in the drama. In Shiv's words, “I have tried to assuage the pain from the deep recesses of my soul where my feminism lay dormant. Also my manhood.”

Ek Kudi Jihda Naa Mohabbat

So many of Shiv’s poems are about lost loves – about a girl called Maina who he met at a fair and who died an early death soon after, or about the girl who inspired Shikra Yaar who left him to get married and go off to America, and of other women he had known and lost. This poem, I like to think, is about the love he never found. Titled Ishtehar or Advertisement it is a search for a missing girl. The central refrain of the song is Gumm hai – this can translate as “Is lost” or it can be translated as the subtly different “Is missing”. I have bypassed both these options and chosen to translate it as “Where is she?” That makes a better song of it in English, to my mind. A recording of the song sung in Shiv’s own voice is available but I’m posting the version sung by Rabbi Shergill here. I was very taken by this song from the first time I heard it sung by Rabbi – at that time I didn’t know of Shiv Batalvi at all.


Ishtehar


Where is that girl called Love
Where is she?
She is simple and beautiful
She is simply beautiful
Where is she?

She has the beauty of a fairy,
the virtues of a Mary,
Lissom and willowy
She walks like poetry
Petals fall from her lips
When she laughs
She is barely there
But at a glance
She can read me

We have been separated
an eternity
Yet it seems like yesterday
It seems like today
It seems like just now
That she was here with me

What is this deception?
Why this trickery?
Now she is with me
Now she isn’t?
I search for her
In every face that passes me
Where is she?

Evening descends upon the bazaar
The streets become rife with smells
At the crossroads
restlessness and exhaustion collide
with the need for pleasure
And in that thronging madness
I stand all alone
her absence gnawing
at my insides

I wait for her to call out to me
Across the crowds of people
Over the milling odours and sounds
I feel she will call any moment
I feel she will call any day
I will recognize her
She will recognize me
But no one calls out
Only the din, the crowds
And no one out there
calling for me

I sense that she is there
Somewhere in this crowded world
Somewhere on these bustling streets
She walks past me
But lost in my search for her
I am unable to see
I stand there bereft
her absence eating into me.

Tell her to come and find me
Tell her to come for my sake
Tell her to come for her own sake
Tell her to come for love’s sake
Tell her to come for God’s sake
Tell her to come if she can hear me
Tell her to come even if she's dying
Tell her to keep the faith
Tell her to come once
Before this life, these songs
desert me
Tell her to come and stem
this pain

That girl called Love
Simple, beautiful
Simply beautiful
Where is she?

Ranjha or Heer?

Much has been made of Shiv Batalvi’s reputation as a heartbroken, jilted lover and as a perennial ladies man. Professor S. Soze in his book on Shiv in the Sahitya Akademi’s Makers of Indian Literature series describes Shiv as a dashing Ranjha type figure. But to me Shiv comes across equally as Heer. In poem after poem he slips effortlessly into the female psyche and writes in a voice which is stunning in its authenticity.

The Ranjha who wrote,

“Mainu tera shabab leh baitha,
rang gora gulab leh baitha”

(Your beauty was my undoing,
it was your fair skin that did me in)

is also the Heer who wrote,

“Aape ni maen baalari,
Maen haale aap mataan jogi
Mat kihra es nu dave?
Aakh su ni maae ihnu
Rove buhl chith ke ni,
Jahg kithe sun na lave!”

(O mother, I’m helpless myself
how then do I give solace to him
Tell him to clench his lips
when he weeps
Lest the world hears him cry)

The Majnu who wrote

Aj din chadhiya tere rang varga

(Today, the morning awoke
wearing the colour of your skin)

Is also the Laila who sang –

Kore shagna di meri mehndi
Jaadu di ho jave ve.....

(Blessed is this mehndi,
that I wear, my beloved,
on the first
of every month
The pain of lost love
flows through it
and keep its ever fresh)

What distinguishes Shiv’s love poetry is that he is not scared of the intensity of love and is able to inhabit it fully. He captures both the impetuous ardour of the parwana, the moth and the slow burning of the shama, the flame - with an equal understanding and empathy. Indeed, I think if anyone is looking to anoint the patron saint of separated lovers, they needn’t look any further than Shiv Batalvi.