The ongoing conflict between the Israel-America combine and Iran, set against deepening global tensions, is not merely a diplomatic crisis but a grave warning to humanity. Amid the destruction of trillions of dollars’ worth of natural resources and the sacrifice of countless innocent lives, a section of philosophers sees it as the approaching footsteps of a Third World War. Its roots lie not in immediate disputes alone, but deep within the frenzy of power, the blind race for resources, and the desertification of human sensibilities. In such times, the relevance of the Mahabharata only grows.
Vyasa proclaimed ‘ahimṣā paramo dharmaḥ’—non-violence is the highest dharma—making clear that violence is ultimately synonymous with self-destruction. Gandhi called non-violence “the only true force because war never brings justice; it only sows the seeds of fresh revenge.” Anti-war poems, then, are not merely words but the cultural cry of wounded humanity knocking at the doors of power, demanding peace.
When politics fails on the plane of dialogue and economics rises above human values, poetry remains the last refuge where the flame of sensibility continues to burn. Michelangelo’s sonnet on the Sistine Chapel ceiling—ostensibly an account of a sculptor’s physical agony—carries anti-war implications of extraordinary depth. His grotesque images of a body bent, stained, and deformed by an imposed task become, in the larger reading, the helplessness of a soldier dying on the battlefield whose body has been twisted by the ambitions of power. “I am not in the right place—I am not a painter,” he cries, and in that cry is the collective fate of the ordinary citizen whose life has been thrown into the hell imposed by war.
Wilfred Owen, who served on the Western Front during the First World War, wrote poems whose authenticity of experience makes them an invaluable heritage of world literature. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ declares the Latin saying “It is sweet and glorious to die for one’s country” to be “the old Lie.” In “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,”
Owen shatters the myth of heroism in which soldiers are shown smiling in shining uniforms. His ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, rather than imagining church bells for the slaughtered, substitutes the “monstrous anger of the guns” and the “stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” as their only orisons. The devastating irony of Owen’s life was that he fell at the Sambre-Oise Canal on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice; news of his death reached his family as church bells rang in celebration.
Modern poets have powerfully exposed the economic roots of war. Brian Terrell’s ‘Cellphone’ highlights the bloody relationship between consumerist culture and the global war economy. Coltan, the mineral essential for mobile phone batteries, is the reason multinational corporations and military groups fuel conflict in Congo. “This small device in your palm,” he writes, “is a mass grave buried in Congolese soil.” Federico García Lorca’s ‘Murdered by the Sky’, written during his New York years, uses the death of a star in affluent Park Avenue as a symbol of human sensibility extinguished by the noise of technological progress.
Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Unconquerable Inscription’ narrates a socialist prisoner who writes “Long live Lenin!” on his cell wall. Every attempt by the authorities to erase it—whitewash, red paint, mason’s chisel—only makes the slogan more visible. “For what is written cannot be erased,” the freedom fighter laughs, “unless the very foundation is destroyed.”
Ernesto Cardenal’s long poem ‘Apocalypse’ draws a grotesque sketch of nuclear war, linking biblical metaphors with contemporary politics and technology. “The sky rolled up like a piece of burning paper, and the sun turned black like a sackcloth of mourning”—in these images, Gandhi’s warning that violence destroys even the basic elements of nature appears in terrifying reality.
Yet even amid this vision of total destruction, Cardenal locates a faint hope of new creation, possible only when humanity chooses love and coexistence over weapons. His two-line epitaph for Adolfo Báez Bone—executed after a failed rebellion against the Somoza dictatorship in 1954—distils this philosophy: “They killed you… But what they buried was a seed.” The same metaphor of martyrdom as fertile ground runs through Mahmoud Darwish’s tender poem ‘She Forgot a Cloud in the Bed’, where the beloved’s absence is preserved as moisture on the body: “my every limb was soaked in water.” War may alter geography, but it cannot dry these wet memories of love inscribed on the flesh.
African and Latin American voices have been equally indispensable to this tradition. Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi of Sudan writes that monuments erected by power “grow taller with the blood of those whose names they never utter.” Keorapetse Kgositsile of South Africa declares that “freedom is no gift, but the song we must sing with the last breath of our lungs.”
The Somali poet Abdullahi Qarshe condemns the Berlin Conference of 1884, when European powers drew Africa’s borders with the tips of their guns: “the land watered with blood will never accept the harvest of slavery.” David Huerta’s ‘Ayotzinapa’, dedicated to the forty-three Mexican students who disappeared in 2014, extends Cardenal’s metaphor: “They wanted to bury us, but they forgot we were seeds.”
Whether the blood is one’s own or another’s, it is after all the blood of the human race.” Faiz Ahmed Faiz gives voice to the anguish of the common soldier: “For which emperor’s sake is this blood rendered so cheap? For what manner of motherland is this soil that hungers for gore?” Baabusha Kohli’s call—“Poets of the whole world! Come, let us hold each other’s hands and make a large round circle so large that the entire earth can fit inside it”—transforms individual protest into a collective human architecture of solidarity.
Ultimately, every one of these poems is an answer to the question that Gandhari poses in the Stri Parva of the Mahabharata as she surveys the ruins of Kurukshetra: “paśya mādhavi kauravyan hatan vīrān sahasraśaḥ / jayenanena kiṃ karyam rājyena vidhavātmanām”—‘See, Madhavi, thousands of Kaurava heroes slain. What is the use of this victory? What is a kingdom to those whose very souls have been widowed?’ The word vidhavAtmanAm—widowed souls—is the most powerful metaphor in all of war literature.
Whether the voice is Iranian or Israeli, Palestinian or Honduran, Hindi or Greek, these poems collectively refuse the hollow “victory” of missiles and mass death. They seek instead to rescue human consciousness from that spiritual void which Gandhari named the widowhood of the soul. In doing so, they transform the ancient grief of the Mahabharata into a living, global manifesto for peace.
In such times, one cannot but recall the poem by contemporary Iranian poetess Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi, “From an Iranian Mother to an American Mother”: “If your son comes to my country as a guest, my son will receive him with all his heart… But if your son comes to my country as a soldier, my son will be forced to become a defender… And as a mother, you surely understand the power of these sighs—a burning sigh that is far more powerful than any nuclear bomb.”
Behind the current geopolitical friction lies a thinly veiled agenda of neo-colonisation aimed at hegemony over West Asia’s petroleum reserves. The systematic bombardment of civilian infrastructure is a flagrant violation of international law and our shared humanity. While empires fall, the conscience of poetry remains—as Yannis Ritsos insisted when Greece’s military dictatorship banned his verses—unconquerable.
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*Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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