Sunlight in the Shadows: Anti‑Authoritarian Polemic and the Political Ġhazal‑s in Dushyant Kumar’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines how Dushyant Kumar’s collection, sāye men˙ dhūp (lit. Sunlight in the Shadows), reinvented the classical ġhazal genre as a vernacular weapon of antiauthoritarian dissent—not by abandoning ambiguity, but by recalibrating it under conditions of constraint—during India’s Emergency. This study argues that Kumar’s work constitutes a radical departure from the genre’s traditional emphasis on the abstract longing of the lover for the beloved and other tropes which are peculiar to writing ġhazal in the Perso‑Urdu world. Instead, Kumar systematically repurposed its conventions—its ambiguity, its metaphors of the beloved and the garden, its themes of sacrifice—to mount a sharp polemic against Indira Gandhi’s regime. Through an analysis of ġhazal‑s selected for their range of polemical strategies—from direct satire and political allegory to the recasting of traditional themes like martyrdom—this paper demonstrates how Kumar’s conscious use of a blended Hindi–Urdu vernacular was central to his political project. By writing in “the language I speak,” he dragged the elite ġhazal into the public square, transforming it into a medium for articulating collective disillusionment, resistance, and a scathing critique of a democracy in crisis. Kumar’s work thus stands as a testament to the ġhazal’s potent, and often overlooked, capacity for explicit political engagement.