Vasundhara Gupta (left) and Amira Gill
“This light, smeared and spotted, this night-bitten dawn. This isn’t surely the dawn we waited for so eagerly,” goes the opening lines of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem, Subh-e-Azadi (translated by Baran Farooqui), about the pain of partition. These tear-stained words are beautifully set to music in the eponymous song sung by Amira Gill and composed by herself and Vasundhara Gupta. Gill’s richly textured voice takes you to the ransacked villages, killings, rape and pillaging. The wound might have healed, but the scar remains.
The song was released on streaming platforms on August 26 to mark the premiere of the docu-drama Child of Empire, at the Sundance Film Festival 2022. The film resulted from Project Dastaan, a 2019 initiative to help partition survivors visit the villages they left behind. Child of Empire is currently being shown at various museums in the UK.
“For me, the most fascinating, and perhaps the most important, message was that this was the only poem that Faiz saab ever wrote about partition,” says Gill. “For a writer that renowned and prolific, for whom the partition was life-altering, to write only one poem about it meant it was an all-encapsulating experience; he poured all of himself into these words.”
Seventy-five years after partition, as Gupta says, we are the last generation to have a direct line to the survivors and witnesses of the event. Songs like ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ lets it remain alive in our collective consciousness.