Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 00:33:02 -0400 
From: "Arun K. Gupta" <ag3l+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Death of a Poet



Any further information that readers can provide about the quoted item
below would be most welcome.  The article shows the irreparable loss
to India from communalism.

The following is quoted from an essay by Ashish Nandy (A critique of
secularism), he in turn quotes from the Indian Express of January 29,1983:
(in an abbreviated form and with minor editing)

  On January 9, the house of a young Telugu poet in the old city of
  Hyderabad was raided by a band of communalists. They stabbed him
  his wife and his child. The woman died immediately, the poet on the
  way to the hospital. The orphaned boy is in the hospital, dangling
  between life and death.  Communal frenzy does not know what it claims.
  They ... did not know that they were destroying a promising Telugu
  poet, who was writing the 17th version of ... the Ramayana.

  ...the poet was born on January 2, 1946 at Kalwakurty, a big tehsil
  village in Mahboobnagar district in the Telangana region. His mother
  was a teacher in the village-school. He too followed in her footsteps.
  `Teaching is the noblest profession,' he used to say. But he was not
  content with being a matric-passed trained basic teacher. His ambition
  was to become a vidwaan of Sanskrit. But Kashi Vidyapeeth rejected him....
  Then he met a scholar, Pandit Gunday Rao Harkarey, who taught him the
  secret of learning a language by the self-taught method.... Thus,
  studying privately, he obtained Master's degrees in three ... languages--
  Sanskrit, Telugu and Hindi.

  He had started composing small poems in Telugu when he was just 12 years
  old.  After his marriage, he produced four volumes of kaavyas and three
  volumes of khanda kaavyas. After the publication of `Vijaya Bheri', `Asru
  Dharu' and `Bharati', he was hailed as the most significant poet since
  Umar Ali Shah. Presenting him at a Telugu mushaira, Viswanath Satyanarayana
  ... said ` This is a gathering of poets in their 70s. This young poet being
  only 25 should not have been here. But if he is here, it is because he was
  already 50 when he was born.'  Such a rich tribute ... is all the more
  significant because the poet was from Telangana and the literary elite of
  Godawari district dismiss Telengana's `ulligaddi, badnikai' Telugu with
  disdain...the unspoilt villager in the poet had survived despite the many
  degrees he obtained...

  The young poet now began studying all the versions of Ramayana -- Valmiki,
  Ranganatha, Bhaskara, Kambha, Milla, Viswanatha, Kalpa Vruksh and Tulsi.
  ` I have discovered rational and logical flaws in Valmiki in his description
  of places and situation', he said, `I want to write my version of Ramayana...
  I want to name it "Yaseen Ramayana". It will be my gift to posterity.' That
  is what Ghulaam Yaseen, the teacher and poet, was busy doing when fanaticism
  struck its deathly blow... And the Ramayana which Ghulaam Yaseen wanted to
  leave behind him ... remains unfinished.

Ashish Nandy continues:

  What was Ghulaam Yaseen ? A secular Muslim who did not know his real
vocation? A good man with a Muslim name who could be used by dedicated
social reformers or by the Indian state to establish bridges between
faiths ? A crypto-Hindu killed by the Hindus by mistake ? Or a true
Muslim who could express his religious sensitivities through other people's
faiths ? Or an Indian whose assassination has simultaneously impoverished
Hinduism, Islam and Indianness ?

*****************

Readers comments are welcome.  A friend of mine who read the item wrote:

 Vishwanatha Satyanarayana belongs to the school of 'Everything by West and
 Muslims is evil'. So an endorsement by him is really something.
 .....
 I am from Telangana and I know what it is to be treated as a culturally
 inferior person. Today I can speak both Telangana and Coastal dialect
 effortlessly but the path of getting there has not been painless.
*****************
arun gupta
ag3L@andrew.cmu.edu
*****************