Blood Has a Memory

There are poems we inherit the way we inherit family recipes or old shawls folded into cedar trunks. They arrive wrapped in affection, carrying the scent of another generation. My mother never had the luxury of lingering over music. She was raising three children in a bustling joint family, tending to my grandparents, hosting guests who seemed to arrive with the certainty of a sunset and helping with homework, all the while ensuring lunch, tea and dinner appeared on time. Yet every now and then, almost absent-mindedly, she would begin humming. Sometimes it was Bahadur Shah Zafar mourning an empire lost but not his dignity. Sometimes it was Faiz Ahmed Faiz asking, "Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang (Don't ask for the love of the old days my beloved)." She was not performing. She was remembering. Looking back, I realise she was teaching us something without ever intending to: songs outlive circumstances. Poetry survives the kitchens in which it is first whispered.

My grandparents taught me something similar, though in quieter ways. They had lived through Partition, yet they refused to speak of it as though humanity itself had fractured. Borders had changed, they would say. Maps had been redrawn. But people were still people. Love had not acquired a religion overnight. Grief had not begun asking for passports. My maternal grandparents spoke of Lahore and Delhi, of friends left behind, not with bitterness but with longing. My paternal grandfather found his deepest peace not in political arguments but in travelling to Agra, to the Radha Soami satsang (spiritual gathering) where his guru awaited. We children waited for something altogether more earthly: the laddoos (sweets) he would bring back. Years later, he would breathe his last there, at the feet of the spiritual teacher he revered. I was barely five, too young to understand death, yet old enough to understand that devotion had somehow softened its arrival. Even then, memory was teaching me that faith was never meant to divide. It was meant to deepen.

The first protest I ever attended unsettled that childhood certainty.

Protests and poetry

Safdar Hashmi had been murdered. An artist had been killed because he believed theatre belonged in the streets, among ordinary people, rather than safely behind curtains. I stood amid the crowd as a schoolboy, overwhelmed by adults whose grief had become public. Somewhere between the placards and the silence, between the slogans and the tears, I understood that poetry was not merely something recited at mushairas (poetry recitals) or remembered from schoolbooks. It could stand in front of power. It could become witness. It could become dangerous.

That was the day Sahir Ludhianvi stopped being a lyricist of beloved film songs and became something much larger in my imagination. He became a companion. His immortal words did not feel like literature. They felt like a moral compass:

“Zulm phir zulm hai, baṛhtā hai to miṭ jātā hai; Khoon phir khoon hai, ṭapke gā to jam jāegā.”

(Tyranny remains tyranny. When it grows beyond measure, it destroys itself. Blood remains blood. Once spilled, it does not vanish. It remains. It remembers.)

A year later, in 1990, came the Mandal Commission protests. Again I found myself among students, but this time the air itself seemed charged with desperation. What frightened me was not the shouting. It was the fire. Young people were setting themselves alight. What astonished me was not merely that they did it, but that they believed death might be the only language left capable of being heard. Even today, I remember wondering what kind of nation leaves its children believing flames speak more loudly than words.

That question has never left me.

Perhaps that is why I have never believed that poetry belongs only to romance. Long before politicians invented slogans, poets had already named the wound. Long before newspapers counted casualties, poets had documented the cost to the human soul. History records victories and defeats; poetry records what victory felt like to the mother who waited, the child who watched, the neighbour who buried a friend.

Mirza Ghalib understood this with astonishing precision when he asked:

“Ragon mein daudte phirne ke hum nahin qa’il, Jab aankh hi se na tapka, to phir lahoo kya hai?”

(What is blood if it never rises to the eyes, never becomes tears, never responds to another’s suffering?)

Between Ghalib’s question and Sahir’s answer lies an entire philosophy of citizenship. Blood is not just what flows through our veins. It is memory. It is witness. It is the quiet refusal to allow another human being’s pain from becoming anonymous.

The first protest I attended did not teach me whom to support. It taught me something infinitely more enduring. It taught me that every generation eventually arrives at a moment when it must decide if it will merely observe history or remember its humanity. And perhaps that is why the greatest poems never really belong to yesterday. They wait patiently for another frightened young person standing in another crowd, asking the same ancient question: What do we owe one another when conscience calls? 

Years after those first protests in Delhi, another city, another continent and another set of marches would teach me that Sahir’s poetry had quietly crossed oceans before I ever did.

New York became my university in ways no classroom ever could. I marched with friends for LGBTQ+ rights when the AIDS epidemic still carried with it not only disease but also shame, fear and astonishing indifference. ACT UP activists would lie down in the streets, allowing their bodies to become the protest itself. As police officers lifted them into waiting buses, some went willingly, almost peacefully, knowing arrest was part of the choreography of conscience.

One image has never left me.

A man, frail from full-blown AIDS, had lost control of his bowels. His illness had robbed him of continence, but it had not robbed him of dignity. He remained where he was, refusing embarrassment, refusing invisibility. The smell lingered in the summer air. So did the silence that fell around him. It was impossible to look away.

Years later I would realise that Sahir had already prepared me for that moment. Blood remembers. Bodies remember too. So do societies. Every civilisation is eventually judged by what it chooses to notice – and by what it trains itself not to see.

Those same streets would later fill with women marching for reproductive rights, joined by men who understood that liberty is indivisible. The slogans have faded with time, as slogans often do. But what remains is something quieter and far more enduring: the sight of strangers carrying one another’s burdens without questioning whether those burdens belonged to them. The denial of one person’s autonomy, we instinctively understood, would eventually diminish everyone else’s freedom. That lesson has never left me.

It is one reason I have never believed democracy is measured only inside legislatures or courtrooms. Sometimes democracy is measured by who walks beside you when the cause is not directly their own.

Why food is about feeding belonging

James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” His words have remained with me because they describe not only protest but hospitality. To face another human being honestly – to sit across from them without caricature or fear – is itself a profoundly democratic act.

Perhaps that is why I eventually found my truest language not on the streets but in kitchens.

For more than three decades I have cooked professionally, yet I have long suspected that recipes are only the excuse. Food has never been merely nourishment. It is diplomacy without microphones. It is philosophy served warm. It is memory made edible.

Bread, too, has a memory. Every loaf remembers the hands that kneaded it. Every spice remembers a geography. Every recipe carries migration folded quietly into its ingredients.

Long before passports existed, recipes were already crossing borders. Long before governments debated immigration, kitchens had quietly welcomed strangers.

Some of the most moving meals of my life were never served to celebrities or presidents, although many have sat at my tables. They were served to people who had crossed oceans carrying little more than hope. Families from Afghanistan. Families from Syria. People who had left homes they never imagined leaving.

They would often thank me with a gratitude that felt almost disproportionate to the meal before them. Gradually I understood why. They were not thanking me simply for the food. They were thanking me because, for a few hours, they were not guests or refugees or headlines. They were simply a family gathered around a table. I wanted to tell them that dinner had never really been about feeding hunger. It was about feeding belonging.

There is an ancient wisdom that every civilisation once understood before politics complicated it: if someone can eat safely at your table, they have already begun finding a home.

Kitchens preserve civilisations

Perhaps that is why I have always believed kitchens understand memory better than parliaments. Parliaments preserve laws. Kitchens preserve civilisation. Around my own dining table in New York, conversations unfolded that newspapers insisted were impossible.

Madhur Jaffrey.

Gael Greene.

Jewish friends.

Muslim friends.

People who loved Israel.

People who loved Palestine.

People who believed passionately in one history and others who carried an entirely different inheritance of grief.

The newspapers would have called them opponents. The table called them guests.

Arguments were spirited. Emotions sometimes ran high. There were moments of deep disagreement. Yet inevitably someone would interrupt to ask for another helping of dal. Someone else would pass the pickle without being asked. Bread would move from one end of the table to the other. No one’s convictions disappeared. Neither did anyone’s humanity. It has always struck me as remarkable that the simplest gestures often accomplish what the grandest speeches cannot.

Pass the bread.

Offer more rice.

Ask whether someone would like another spoonful.

Civilisation survives not only because constitutions are written well, but because ordinary people continue extending ordinary kindness. Pablo Neruda, in his great odes to bread, tomatoes, onions and salt, understood something that philosophers sometimes overlook: the ordinary is sacred. Nations may be built through laws, but they are sustained through the rituals of everyday generosity.

That is why I keep returning to the table. Not because food solves conflict. It does not. Not because meals erase injustice. They cannot. But because every shared meal quietly insists upon a truth that politics too often forgets. Before we are citizens, we are children. Before we are voters, we are eaters. Before we are ideologies, we are someone’s son or daughter, someone’s beloved, someone’s parent, someone’s friend. Bread remembers that. And if bread remembers, perhaps we should too. 

Flags matter; people matter more

The older I grow, the less interested I become in flags waving triumphantly above crowds and the more interested in the ordinary people standing beneath them. Flags matter. They hold history, sacrifice, aspiration and belonging. Millions have lived for them. Millions have died beneath them. But flags are at their most beautiful when they shelter human dignity rather than demand it be surrendered. Perhaps that is why the poets I have loved most deeply have never asked me to choose between loving my country and loving my conscience. They have insisted that the two are inseparable.

Kabir arrives first. Not because he was the earliest, but because every conversation about truth eventually arrives at his doorstep.

“Saanch barabar tap nahin, jhooth barabar paap.”

(There is no discipline greater than truth. There is no sin greater than falsehood.)

Notice how radical that remains. Kabir does not ask whether truth belongs to a Hindu or a Muslim, a king or a labourer, the victorious or the defeated. Truth refuses ownership. It belongs only to those willing to be transformed by it. That is where every democracy must begin.

Truth requires fearlessness. And fearlessness naturally brings us to Rabindranath Tagore.

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…”

Tagore’s prayer has often been mistaken for patriotism dressed in beautiful language. It is something far more demanding. He does not pray for military strength or economic supremacy. He asks for fearless minds because he understood that frightened nations eventually begin fearing their own citizens.

Fear is efficient. It has never been creative. It may produce obedience but has never produced greatness. Fearless minds, however, eventually discover that silence is no longer possible. And that is where Faiz Ahmed Faiz quietly enters the conversation.

“Bol, ke lab azaad hain tere.”

(Speak, for your lips are free.)

Faiz was never merely asking people to raise their voices. He was defending something much older than politics itself. To speak honestly is to affirm another person’s humanity. To silence someone completely is not simply winning an argument. It is to suggest that their experience no longer deserves language.

That lesson echoes across civilisations. The Buddha asked his followers not to accept teachings blindly but to examine them. Guru Nanak crossed boundaries rather than reinforcing them. The Upanishads insisted that inquiry was itself sacred. Krishna, standing on the plains of Kurukshetra, did not remove Arjuna’s doubts. He honoured them before asking him to act. Perhaps wisdom has always distrusted certainty.

B. R. Ambedkar understood this instinctively. He gave India one of the world’s most remarkable constitutions, yet he knew that no constitution, however elegantly drafted, could survive if its citizens abandoned curiosity. He wrote:

“The cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence.”

Not loyalty. Not ideology. Not obedience. The cultivation of mind. Because cultivated minds ask difficult questions. Crowds often stop asking them.

Martin Luther King Jr., standing beneath the Lincoln Memorial, reached almost the same destination through another path:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King never promised inevitability. He promised responsibility. Justice bends only because generations keep placing their hands upon it.

Václav Havel, writing from prison under another political system, offered perhaps the most comforting definition of hope I have ever encountered. Hope, he wrote, is not the conviction that things will turn out well. It is the certainty that something is worth doing regardless of how it turns out.

How close that sounds to the Bhagavad Gita.

Act because conscience demands action. Leave permanence to history.

And then there is James Baldwin. Few writers have loved their country more fiercely by refusing to flatter it:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

That sentence belongs beside Kabir. Beside Ambedkar. Beside Faiz. Beside Sahir. Because each reminds us that patriotism without honesty becomes performance.

Salman Rushdie, reflecting on exile and belonging, observed that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated. Memory, then, is never a perfect archive. It is an act of reconstruction. We return to it carrying today’s questions, today’s griefs, today’s hopes. That is why great literature never remains trapped inside the century that produced it. Every generation discovers itself in the same poems because every generation rediscovers the same moral dilemmas.

Toni Morrison took that thought even further. She understood that memory is not nostalgia. Memory is survival. To remember is to refuse erasure. To remember is to insist that suffering, joy, love and injustice alike deserve witnesses. Perhaps that is why Sahir’s opening couplet still feels as though it was written yesterday. Not because tyranny repeats itself in identical ways. But because human beings continue wrestling with the same temptations – to simplify one another, to mistake disagreement for betrayal, to imagine that power can erase memory.

It cannot. History may remember victories. Poetry remembers voices. And ordinary people remember both. I have come to believe that nations do not become great because they never disagree. They become great because they remain large enough to accommodate disagreement without surrendering dignity.

Flags, after all, do not remember. People do. Mothers humming Faiz while preparing dinner remember. Grandparents who refused to let Partition poison their hearts remember Students standing silently at the funeral of an artist remember. A man lying in a New York street, refusing to let illness rob him of his humanity, remembers. A refugee tasting safety for the first time around a stranger’s table remembers. And perhaps that is the quiet miracle every poet has always understood.

Empires rise. Governments change. Borders move. Flags fade in the sun. But conscience, like memory, keeps finding new languages in which to speak. The older I become, the less convinced I am that civilisations collapse because they run out of wealth, weapons or technology. They collapse when they run out of imagination. When they lose the ability to imagine that the person across the street, across the border, across the ballot box, across the dinner table or across the prayer mat carries fears remarkably similar to their own. We divide before we discover. We label before we listen. We fear before we understand. Perhaps that has always been the oldest tragedy of civilisation.

Artificial intelligence now writes essays. Satellites photograph every corner of the earth. Algorithms know what we will buy before we know what we desire. Yet we remain astonishingly primitive in one enduring way. We still struggle to recognise ourselves in one another.

The tragedy is not disagreement. Disagreement built philosophy. Disagreement built democracy. Disagreement built science. The tragedy begins when disagreement no longer leaves room for dignity. That is why literature has always distrusted certainty. The novelist understands complexity. The poet understands contradiction. The ideologue rarely has time for either. Every generation inherits its own Kurukshetra. Some fight it with swords. Some with ballots. Some with books. Some with songs. Some with silence.

The battlefield of the Bhagavad Gita has never belonged only to ancient India. It exists wherever conscience wrestles with convenience. Arjuna’s crisis was never simply about war. It was about recognising himself in those standing across the battlefield. He saw teachers before enemies. Grandfathers before generals. Cousins before opponents.

Krishna did not ask him to stop feeling compassion. He asked him never to abandon discernment. There is an enormous difference. Compassion without courage becomes surrender. Courage without compassion becomes cruelty. Civilisation survives only when the two continue walking together. That is why I keep returning to 'ordinary people.' Not because they are perfect. Because they quietly carry fragments of greatness.

These are not extraordinary people because history books will remember them. They are extraordinary because civilisation depends upon them. Poets understand this instinctively. Governments administer nations. Ordinary people sustain them.

Rushdie has spent much of his life reminding us that memory is never fixed. We rebuild the past every time we remember it. Morrison taught us that memory is also an act of resistance. What is remembered cannot be erased quite so easily. Baldwin insisted that love is not sentimental. It is demanding. It asks us to see one another honestly before asking us to agree.

Sahir knew all of this without writing a single manifesto.

He wrote a poem.

Perhaps because poets have always understood that arguments convince the mind. Stories convince the heart. Memory convinces civilisation. History will remember elections. It will remember wars. It will remember treaties. It will remember economies that rose and fell. But humanity remembers something else.

It remembers who opened the door. Who shared the bread. Who refused to surrender another person’s dignity. Who continued asking difficult questions when easier answers were available. Who remained kind after cruelty became fashionable. Who chose conversation over certainty. Who chose conscience over applause. When my grandparents spoke of Partition, they never spoke as though people had been divided.

They spoke as though maps had. The rivers still flowed. The wheat still ripened beneath the same sun. Mothers still worried whether their children had eaten enough. Children still chased kites with the same impossible optimism. Neighbours still recognised the fragrance of the same spices drifting from kitchens. Human beings remained stubbornly, beautifully familiar to one another.

Perhaps they understood something my generation keeps having to rediscover. Borders are sometimes necessary. Hatred never is. That is why I believe the greatest patriotism is never insecure. It is confident enough to hear criticism without mistaking it for betrayal. It is generous enough to expand belonging instead of narrowing it. It knows that a nation is strengthened not by the uniformity of its citizens but by the confidence with which it allows them to remain different.

And perhaps that is why Sahir continues to walk beside us. Not because history has failed to move forward. But because the human heart continues asking the same ancient questions. Who belongs? Whose suffering matters? What does citizenship owe compassion?What does power owe memory? His answer was never ideological.

It was profoundly human:

“Zulm phir zulm hai, baṛhtā hai to miṭ jātā hai;
Khoon phir khoon hai, ṭapke gā to jam jāegā.”

The poem was never really about blood.

It was about what blood carries. Memory. Witness. Kinship. Responsibility. Love.

If there is one lesson my mother left me with in the songs she hummed, one lesson my grandparents left me with in the way they remembered Partition, one lesson the protests in Delhi and New York taught me, one lesson refugees taught me around my table, and one lesson the poets have whispered across generations, it is this: History remembers victories. Humanity remembers voices. Empires rise. Empires fall. Governments are elected. Governments are replaced. Flags are raised. Flags fade. Archives gather dust.

But somewhere tonight, in a kitchen fragrant with cumin and cardamom, in a classroom where a teacher recites Sahir for the first time, in a refugee camp where bread is broken among strangers, in a university hostel where students are arguing long after midnight, in a lonely room where someone reaches for a poem because they can no longer bear the silence. Another generation will discover what every generation before it has eventually learned.

Blood has a memory. Bread has a memory. Songs have a memory. And ordinary people, carrying fragments of extraordinary grace, are the quiet custodians of them all. That is how civilisations survive. Not by remembering whom they defeated. But by refusing to forget one another. 

Suvir Saran is a chef, cookbook author, educator as well as a farmer who specialises in bringing Indian cooking to the American kitchen. 

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