India, Dec. 30 -- Jab taj uchale jaenge...

Jab takht girae jaenge...

Iqbal Bano's sonorous voice spirals and echoes. The applause that follows is thunderous so the ghazal singer repeats the line from Faiz Ahmed Faiz's immortal nazm . Hearing the recording of public rendition of Hum Dekhenge which was sung in Lahore in 1986 to oppose Zia-ul-Haq's dictatorial regime is enough, even when we are 33 years removed from the actual performance, to give a person goosebumps. And for a long time, the subcontinent swore by this very poetic and, at the same time, public exhortation to the masses. However, of late, revolutionary poetry has seen a resurgence of sorts powered by rejection by students of many norms set by the generation that holds the r...