Great piece this by Indu Vashist, carried as a guest post by Kafila; I have often wondered about the origins of Jugni. There is hardly anything on the web - and frankly, the Wikipedia article on Jugni is quite unconvincing. It was never convinced Jugni is a woman, or that it has to do anything with spiritualism.
In Alam Lohar's version of Jugni, all she does is go from place to place; and in each stanza, after announcing her arrival, the poet directly gets down to celebrating (or introducing or characterizing), with a varying amount of seriousness but unmistakable revolutionary undertones, the setting to which Jugni has traveled.
Also striking is the construct 'mere ali Jugni' (my version of Jugni), as if there was another Jugni that was well known, but the poet was conjuring her own version of it. All this is quite in line with a wandering poet's attempt at 'shadowing' the Queen's Jubilee, a creating a parallel 'Jugni' as a vehicle of dissent, discontent, resistance or opposition. My heart goes out to the two poets whose artistic vocation took them to dreadful end in Gujranwala. We need to know more about them. (Talk about 'unsung' heroes!)
Kudos Indu Vashist. Well done Kafila. The post can be read here: Who is Jugni?: Indu Vashist « Kafila
In Alam Lohar's version of Jugni, all she does is go from place to place; and in each stanza, after announcing her arrival, the poet directly gets down to celebrating (or introducing or characterizing), with a varying amount of seriousness but unmistakable revolutionary undertones, the setting to which Jugni has traveled.
Also striking is the construct 'mere ali Jugni' (my version of Jugni), as if there was another Jugni that was well known, but the poet was conjuring her own version of it. All this is quite in line with a wandering poet's attempt at 'shadowing' the Queen's Jubilee, a creating a parallel 'Jugni' as a vehicle of dissent, discontent, resistance or opposition. My heart goes out to the two poets whose artistic vocation took them to dreadful end in Gujranwala. We need to know more about them. (Talk about 'unsung' heroes!)
Kudos Indu Vashist. Well done Kafila. The post can be read here: Who is Jugni?: Indu Vashist « Kafila
