Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

248 I Ramnalh
in the world-more or less exactly what they were doing
fitl:y, seventy, or a hundred years ago.
In the memoir Ludmow ki Pamh Raaten (Five
Lucknow Nights), Ali Sardar Jafri paints a picture of himself
and his Progressive Writers' Association comrades as
voung radicals in the 1930s, perpetually on fire with poetry
and revolution. The fourth night is a dark and stormy
one in 1941. Jafri and his friends have gathered at somebody's
house after midnight, still on a collective high from
l mushtlitil at All India Radio (a traditional high-culture
fo rm infused with new radical energy into something like
an elevated spoken-word poetry slam). On the wall above
the fireplace hangs a portrait of a mujer fibre of Spain, below
which is written "To Death." Jafd ardently describes
the free woman's clenched fists, her heaven-raised face, her
lips taut with fierce emotion, and the swelling breast that
her warrior's garb could not conceal. (These are young guys,
remember; amid the passions of global solidarity, they still
had some work to do on the patriarchy front.)
"In a way:' Jafri writes, "the picture was the translation
of our romantic and our revolutionary emotions; we too
wanted to be warriors unto death. We considered Spain to be
our own country, because it was fighting against fascism fo r
freedom and the beautiful dreams of humanity. Spain's freedom
was our freedom, and on this night, the warrior woman
was included in our party and advancing our courage in the
intoxication ofIndia's freedom."l (And possibly wine, he
adds.) His buddy Faiz Ahmad Faiz offers up a poem he just
heard, and they continue to trade couplets.2 "This music was
a new signal-bell in Faiz's soul, which in his later life would