Description:
“Parchhaiyan”, renders Amrita Pritam’s haunting verses, etched, like a permanent wound, into an heirloom chador—the metaphor of spiritual mutuality Hindus and Muslims observe and practice at sacred shrines. Pritam’s poem, intended to evoke the famous poet Waris Shah, to rescue the bleeding Punjab during the violent partition dreaming of a plural and syncretic Punjab-the land of love- form a visual similar to the chadors found at shrines. The work depicts how the glistening social fabric of Punjab gets muddled with the darkness of identity politics into which most Indians and Pakistanis got entrapped in 1947; and in the process lost much of the essential dividends of freedom from the British Raj. Indicating the toxicity of the seventy-year long unabated political standoff between the two nation states, “Parchhaiyan” implores Indians and Pakistanis to introspect the tragedy of the unparallel human price their meaningless blame-game is continuing to cost them. Urging them to open, as Pritam would say, “a new page, in the book of love.”
