Kashmiri poet: Nobody prepares men to face empowered women

KOLKATA: No one missed the conviction in her voice when Kashmiri poet Nighat Sahiba said, “Don’t call me a poetess but a poet”, during her first visit to the city to receive the Mallika Sengupta National Award for poetry from Shankha Ghosh on Tuesday. A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, Nighat is now planning to write apoem inspired by Tagore.
Pursuing a writing career wasn’t easy for her. People in literary circles questioned if her poems were ghost-written. Traumatised, she stopped writing for a year. “Writing is related to intelligence. For ages, men have reserved intelligence for themselves. That’s why when a woman who writes is called a woman writer. By doing this, men drag women out of their competition. I don’t want that to happen to me. Thus, I don’t want to be called a poetess,” she says.

The problem, Nighat insists, is “nobody prepares men to face empowered women”. “Some empowered women pretend to be damsels in distress. They think it’s the safest path to get work done,” she says.

‘Pragaash’, a Kashmiri girl band, was forced to quit the music scene following threats. Nighat didn’t face the ire of threat-mongers because “one has to read a lot to think about issuing a threat to a poet while music is accessible to all”.

Growing up in Kashmir’s war-ravaged Anantnag was tough for Nighat. She insists living amidst bullets and pellets make people think “life isn’t important”. To retain her sensitivity, she doesn’t follow disturbing news. She doesn’t believe a Kashmiri poet alone or always has to write about war. “The Kashmir issue can be solved if the political leaders have the will to resolve it,” she says.

Nighat hasn’t heard about the controversy at Jammu medical school where students were barred from wearing abayaduring training. “If a woman enters a certain field, she has to follow the dress code. In personal lives, they should be given freedom to wear what they like,” she says.

Social media, she feels, is a boon. “Everything isn’t fair in war. Many civilians were killed as human shields. Now that social media highlights it, perpetrators are on guard,” she says.