Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
Aahvaan - 'The Call' is a powerful narrative poem by Gopal Prasad, written between 1974 and 1976 and rooted in the poet’s first-hand witness of the devastating famine that struck rural Bihar in 1966-67.Through the journey of a lone traveler (pathik) who walks across the Indian countryside, the poem unfolds as a series of heartbreaking encounters - a starving beggar feeding peepal-fruit to dying children, a debt-trapped farmer who toils day and night yet can never repay his loans, and a thinker who diagnoses the nation’s true crisis.Set in the early decades of Independence, the poem holds up a mirror to a young nation: lofty five-year plans and grand slogans on one side, and on the other, hunger, corruption, black-marketeering, bribe-laden bank loans, electioneering, casteism, communalism, and the slow forgetting of India’s own cultural roots.Yet Aahvaan is not a poem of despair. After the traveler is tempted by escape into renunciation (sanyas), the poet rejects retreat and instead issues a stirring call to action - summoning the youth of every village to awaken, to build rural industry and irrigation, to establish Panchayati Raj and justice, to forge worker-partnership and economic equality, and above all to rekindle love for the nation.A moving blend of social realism and patriotic idealism, Aahvaan speaks to anyone who cares about rural India, social justice, and the unfinished work of nation-building.
