Pakistani poet Jaun Elia’s work evokes the unspoken that divides Southasia

What is the single greatest tragedy that we face as Southasians today? There may be many answers, but for the philosopher-poet Jaun Elia, the one crisis at the core of it all: Repression and internal division.

Born in Amroha, a small city in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1931, Elia witnessed a tumultuous period of history and the Partition of India. He opposed this event bitterly all his life, even as a thorough Karachiite.

In his words, we are unable to speak and listen; this inability perpetuates our division. He calls this the defining tragedy of our times:

“Aik hey haadisa to hai, aur woh yeh k aaj tak
Baat nahi kahi gayee, baat nahi suni gayee”

(There is only one tragedy, and that is:
Words have not been spoken; words have not been heard.)

Most other left-leaning intellectuals of his time followed the then-dominant Soviet mode of thinking, a mindset encapsulated most notably by the Progressive Writers Association. The thought process was that the secret to progressive change lay in understanding the external world, the world of high politics and economics laws, absolute truth and “objectivity”.

Elia invites his readers into the internal world of the subject: the internally divided subject. For him, this is not a rebellion against Marxism per se but a rebellion against the...

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