by

Vishnuguptha

“One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.”
~Voltaire

Weavers, weaving at break of day,
Why do you weave a garment so gay? . . .
Blue as the wing of a halcyon wild,
We weave the robes of a new-born child.

How relevant is the Master’s voice today? ‘Sannaliyane, Sannaliyane’ song adapted by the great Mahagama Sekera, the doyen of Sinhala lyrics, from the Weaver’s Song penned by Sarojini Naidu, the ‘Nightingale of India’, and heartrendingly and poetically narrated by Amaradeva, has been living through the ages and still continuing to mesmerize millions of sensitive minds and enthrall many more ears. The poetic genius resides in Sarojini Naidu’s insight into life’s poignant and inevitable stream from birth to marriage to death in three stanzas. Sekera and Amaradeva have not taken one bit of timbre out of Naidu’s magnum opus.

With the dawn of our Independence, as in the Weaver’s Song, we wove a shawl to wrap around our nation with utter joy and delight. We nursed and nurtured the ‘nation’ and her proud children with care and kindness, with dignity and honesty and with the delicateness and tenderness that is usually reserved for the gentlest of children. A nation’s hopes and aspirations were heaped on her; memories of a tormented past was erased from her and the shawl of whiter shade of blue was meant to add a ‘Godly’ shadow of somberness to the joyous moment of birth. Damsels danced to the heavenly harmony of the multitude and monks and priests and pǔsáris invoked the blessings of the divine; a nation breathed in a sigh of joy and exhaled winds of relief and it was to celebrate the birth of Independence.

Draped in a cloth of whiter shade of blue, the newborn stuttered to grow into mature adolescence. A new nation was born!

Radiating everything that is promising and hopeful, the youth enters a brave new world,.

Weavers, weaving at fall of night,
Why do you weave a garment so bright? . . .
Like the plumes of a peacock, purple and green,
We weave the marriage-veils of a queen.

The laboring and crawling drive of a child gradually gained strength while she grew into adolescence; the visiting relatives and friends cheered on, gazing strangers whispered about the youth’s flexibility and suppleness and compared that to the agility of a ballerina of a far-out world.

Weaver is now weaving the ‘veil of a queen’. With the same sensitivity and warmth that could be found in the lyrics, a nation that has come of age is on the threshold of prime adulthood. A ‘green revolution’, abundant material wealth, unmolested purity and glistening glimmer of beauty are endowed with a promise of partnership; partnership with more secure life ahead and the promise of comforts delivered on a thousand petals with velvety softness. Color television, three-wheeler taxis for the less privileged, western goodies in abundance in street corners everywhere in cities and villages accompany the groom and bride on their way to fullness and plenty.

The intoxicating reassurances and maddening temptations soothe the nation to a false sense of safety and security; they generate and regenerate a pacifying calmness that the nation takes for granted until it is totally taken for granted. The dependency disorder that was originally caused by midwives at birth, later encouraged and augmented by aunts and uncles, cousins and in-laws has taken its toll and now feeding off itself resembling a greedy man sitting on the cutting edge of knife consuming himself. The nation is showing sure signs of bursting from her ridges yet the disorder has taken deep root in her being.

The twilight, the fall of night, turns into ‘moonlight chill’. All the creepers and nightly monsters wake and leave their daytime abodes and tiptoe in quietude at first and then dash in a hurried frenzy that show greed and hunger and pounce on the dainty dame. The North burns and the ethnic flames that devoured lives, properties and paddy fields spread their inevitable tentacles to the South of the country. Racial harmony became a remnant of the past. While in the North, child soldiers indulged in orgies of murder and pillage, in the South the same sensation caught hold of the psyche of the masses. The whole country was engulfed in a grisly hatred aimed at each other; the slow but sure ‘march to the valley of death’ took its painful and excruciating strides.

It lasted more than a quarter of a century. One side won and the other lost. The aspiring bride who entered her second abode with a world of hopes and serenity was shattered and bruised and burnt. Her body was beaten and soul tortured. In the end there are no winners or losers, only vultures and hyenas. The primordial carnivorous sensation manifested itself at the very top of society and at the very bottom too.

The nation was consumed by hatred of minorities; she’s driven to the fringes by her own indulgences and fairytale-histories and falsified heroisms. The notion of Power at all costs takes over the soul of the nation; its core is being eaten into by corruption of an unprecedented scale and nepotism of historic proportions. The humiliation caused to the Chief Justice by a phony impeachment motion and extension of greed for power by way of the Eighteenth Amendment, making the republic a virtual ‘monarchy’ come into being.

Freedom, the supreme gift to man by nature and by birth is dying a slow death. All the signals are visible but no one wants to see them. Blinded by loyalty, harassed by day-to-day demands for material gains and sidetracked by avarice, the nation is slowly entering a threshold of a plateau from where there is no return. That plateau has all signs of enticement and comfort. Its plentiful environs are paved with rubberized highways and crowded with exotic-looking Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Skyways are visible even to the blind. But underneath the surface are burning embers; they are ready to burst and catch real fire in their all-consuming destruction and anarchical spread.

The weavers foresaw it, not because they were clairvoyant but because they had spent more years on the soil than most of the merry-makers. And they sang their last stanza…

Weavers, weaving solemn and still,
What do you weave in the moonlight chill? . . .
White as a feather and white as a cloud,
We weave a dead man’s funeral shroud.

The writer can be contacted at vishnuguptha2012@gmail.com