SANJAY PANDITA
When poetry dares to walk into the trembling regions of human uncertainty, it becomes a mirror not just of emotion but of existence itself. Sir Bowum Naarus, the recent poetic collection of Dr. Shahida Shabnam, emerges from such a luminous terrain — one where feeling, thought, and faith converge into an intricate dialogue. It is a work that affirms poetry as a sanctuary of healing and introspection in a time when much of life dissolves into noise and distraction. In her pages, sorrow becomes luminous, silence speaks, and devotion transforms into the rhythm of breath.
The poet’s world is one of thesholds — of crossings between the visible and the invisible, between solitude and belonging, between the mortal ache and divine surrender. Each poem carries the fragrance of a search that is never-ending, the trace of a prayer that begins in pain and flowers into illumination. As she writes, “Roz dama goand mei samma / Zikry chaam n traish hama,” the gentle invocation captures the essence of remembrance — the act of keeping alive what the world forgets. Her poetry becomes a lamp flickering in the vast corridors of uncertainty, reminding us that even in the deepest darkness, a whisper of faith can still find its way toward light.
In Sir Bowum Naarus, Dr. Shahida Shabnam steps into the ancient continuum of Kashmiri mystic consciousness — that sacred confluence where Shaivite introspection meets Sufi longing. Yet she brings to it a distinctly modern sensibility, one that confronts the fragmented realities of exile, gender, and memory. Her voice does not preach; it reveals. Her poetry does not seek perfection; it seeks truth — and in that seeking lies its radiance. The mystic in her writes not from abstraction but from the dust of lived experience, from the scars of witnessing.
The collection is an extended meditation on the dimensions of the self — the inner landscapes where the human and divine converse. In poems like Shokhi, she distills the agony of separation into lines of unbearable grace. The bereavement is not simply personal; it speaks of all forms of exile — the distance between friends, between people and their homeland, between the soul and its origin. The poem captures that fragile moment when grief becomes transfigured into memory, when the absence of the beloved becomes a form of presence. Her verse, delicate yet devastating, echoes the truth that “hope sustains life,” and that remembrance itself is a form of survival.
Dr. Shahida’s poetic diction mirrors her philosophy: minimalist, uncluttered, and meditative. Her words fall like drops of water upon the surface of the mind, expanding slowly into rings of reflection. There is an aesthetic of restraint that runs through her poems — an understanding that silence, too, is a language. Her use of short lines and direct language allows the pauses to resonate with their own emotional music. The white space becomes breath; the unsaid becomes as eloquent as the spoken. This simplicity, however, is not poverty but precision — a distillation of complexity into essence.
“Mei chu panney / Pannun pehchaan banun” — with this gentle declaration, the poet defines her existential and creative quest. It is both an affirmation and a revelation. The search for identity here is not rooted in ego but in belonging, not in separation but in unity. Each poem becomes an inward pilgrimage toward self-recognition. The self in her poetry is porous, open to the winds of empathy. She stands not apart from her people but among them — a participant in their sorrows, a witness to their silences. Her poetry, therefore, is both intimate and collective, personal and universal.
The double-edged nature of her verse — as both solace and resistance — lends Sir Bowum Naarus its extraordinary range. She writes as a mystic seeking union, yet also as a woman confronting the injustices woven into the fabric of society. In the poem Bha, beginning with “Mei chi oray sabrak jaam walith,” she lays bare the generational inheritance of female endurance — patience transformed into a garment that women are forced to wear, concealing both their wounds and their worth. The lines are steeped in pathos, but beneath that pathos burns defiance — the courage to name what others prefer to ignore. Dr. Shahida transforms pain into protest, not through aggression but through assertion, not through noise but through nuance.
In her world, poetry becomes an instrument of conscience. Her compassion is radical; it does not merely pity but participates. The sufferings of the oppressed, the anxieties of the displaced, the silence of the marginalized — all find resonance in her voice. She turns the poetic space into a realm of ethical awareness, where empathy becomes an act of resistance. The poet’s heart is both lamp and mirror — illuminating, reflecting, and reminding.
The recurring motif of displacement in Sir Bowum Naarus adds a poignant historical dimension to her work. The trauma of migration, the longing for lost homelands, and the fragmentation of identity find powerful articulation in her verse. The poem about her childhood friend Shokhi, who migrates to Jammu and searches for her lost self amid the refugee camps, becomes a miniature epic of exile. Here, the personal merges seamlessly with the collective — one woman’s loss symbolizing the dislocation of an entire generation. Yet even within this atmosphere of absence, the poet discovers resilience; the human spirit, like her own verse, refuses to perish.
Dr. Shahida’s engagement with the divine deepens this emotional topography. Her devotional poems — Ya Rasool Salam Ailayak, Ya Habib Salam Ailayak — are not hymns of ritual but songs of intimacy. Her faith is lived, not inherited; it speaks through longing rather than through law. The sacred in her work is not distant but immanent, breathing through the quotidian — in the sigh, in the silence, in the act of remembering. Her surrender is active, her humility radiant. Through her, we glimpse that spiritual tenderness where devotion and defiance coexist — where to bow is not to break but to rise.
The technical craft of Sir Bowum Naarus deserves special attention. Her mastery of rhythm — the subtle play of sound, pause, and repetition — lends her poetry an almost musical architecture. The Kashmiri cadences flow like soft ripples over the surface of meaning. Her rhymes are quiet but precise, her diction exact yet evocative. Even her imagery seems to hum: birds flutter in silence, lamps tremble against the wind, rivers remember their songs. The metaphors are drawn from nature but steeped in mysticism, echoing the Kashmiri tradition where landscape and soul mirror each other.
The title Sir Bowum Naarus—literally meaning “to traverse the depths of emotion”—beautifully encapsulates Dr. Shahida’s poetic vision. Each of the 102 poems becomes a descent into that depth, a courageous confrontation with what lies beneath speech and silence alike. Spanning 231 pages, the book unfolds like a layered journey—moving from despair to awakening, from solitude to communion. The foreword by Prof. Naseem Shafaie, herself a voice of profound insight, places Dr. Shahida within the illustrious lineage of Kashmiri women poets who transformed pain into power and silence into articulation. The accompanying foreword by Dr. Mushtaq Mohammad Bhat complements this perspective, presenting the collection as an anthology rooted in spirituality. He illuminates how the very title Sir Bowum Naarus harmonizes with the spiritual essence that flows through the poems, making the book not just a literary experience but also a meditative exploration of the self.
Dr. Shahida’s work continues the legacy of Lal Ded and Habba Khatoon, yet with an unmistakable contemporary resonance. Like Lal Ded, she strips away illusion in search of truth; like Habba Khatoon, she sings the ache of longing. But her voice belongs to the present moment — shaped by the anxieties of migration, by the questions of identity, by the moral confusions of modern life. Her poetry becomes the meeting ground of ancient wisdom and modern anguish.
What distinguishes her art is its tonal elasticity — its ability to move between irony and intimacy, despair and devotion, melancholy and meditation. There are poems where the tone verges on cynicism, exposing the barren hypocrisies of a society that has forgotten tenderness. Yet these are never allowed to harden into bitterness; they are redeemed by faith, by beauty, by an unbroken belief in the healing power of love. Her poetry inhabits ambiguity — that gray zone where contradictions coexist, where clarity is replaced by compassion.
Through her art, Dr. Shahida Shabnam redefines what it means to be a poet in uncertain times. She is not merely a chronicler of emotion but a seeker of meaning. Her poems resist closure; they end not with answers but with awakenings. In a world that demands immediacy and explanation, she restores mystery — that essential space where the human soul can still breathe. Her lines, like the “bird perched on the fragile limb of love,” tremble between vulnerability and strength, aware that the act of singing itself is an act of survival.
Sir Bowum Naarus stands as a testament to the enduring power of the poetic word — to console, to question, to transform. It holds within its pages the entire arc of human experience: love, loss, faith, rebellion, surrender. It reminds us that poetry remains the most intimate form of truth-telling, a bridge between the self and the infinite. To read Dr. Shahida is to step into a realm where emotion attains sanctity, where the act of writing becomes indistinguishable from the act of living.
In her luminous world, every sigh is sacred, every silence articulate. The human and the divine meet not at the altar but in the heart. Her voice — tender yet tenacious, mystical yet modern — restores poetry to its original purpose: to help us endure, to help us see. Seer Bhav Narus is thus not just a book but a companion — a mirror for those who seek solace in words and a flame for those who walk through the corridors of night.
When the last line fades, one does not feel closure but continuation — as if the poet’s voice has entered the bloodstream of the reader, whispering still. Dr. Shahida Shabnam reminds us that the truest celebration of poetry lies not in applause but in awakening, not in recognition but in remembrance. Her verse teaches that the real light of Deepawali is the one we kindle within — the flame that endures when all others have gone out.
Sanjay Pandita is a poet, columnist & critical analyst , can be reached at sanjaypanditasp@gmail.com
