Judith Wright

Source: https://allpoetry.com/Judith-Wright

 Judith Wright was a prolific Australian poet, critic, and short-story writer, who published more than 50 books. Wright was also an uncompromising environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. At the age of 85, just before her death, she attended in Canberra at a march for reconciliation with Aboriginal people.

Rhyme, my old cymbal,

I don't clash you as often,

or trust your old promises

music and unison.

I used to love Keats, Blake;

now I try haiku

for its honed brevities,

its inclusive silences.

(from 'Brevity' in Notes at Edge)

Judith Arundell Wright was born near Armidale, New South Wales, into an old and wealthy pastoral family. Wright was raised on her family's sheep station. After her mother died in 1927, she was educated under her grandmother's supervision. At the age of 14 she was sent to New England Girls' School, where she found consolation from poetry and decided to become a poet. In 1934 she entered Sydney University. Wright studied philosophy, history, psychology and English, without taking a degree.

When Wright was in her 20s, she started to became progressively deaf. Between the years 1937 and 1938 Wright travelled in Britain and Europe. She then worked as a secretary-stenographer and clerk until 1944. From 1944 to 1948 she was a university statistician at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia. At the age of 30 Wright met her lifelong partner, the unorthodox philosopher J.P. McKinney, 23 years her senior; they later married.

Most of Wright's poetry was written in the mountains of southern Queensland. Protesting the political policies of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Premier of Queensland, Wright left her home state in the mid-1970s, and settled to a remote property near the heritage town of Braidwood, south of Canberra, where she wrote many of her later nature poems.

During her career as a writer, Wright did not reject to produce hack work, school plays for Australian Broadcasting Commission and children's books, for her living. She lectured part-time at various Australian universities. In 1975 she collected her addresses and speeches in 'Because I was Invited'. Wright was appointed a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an emeritus professorship of the Literature Board of the Arts Council of Australia. Wright's memoir, 'Half a Lifetime', covered her life until the 1960s, and appeared in 2000. Wright died of a heart attack in Canberra on June 26 at the age of 85. Her ashes were scattered around the mountain cemetery of Tamborine Mountain in Queensland. Wright had owned a strip of rainforest nearby, which she donated to the state so it could be preserved as a national park.

Wright started to publish poems in the late 1930s in literary journals. As a poet she made her debut with The Moving Image (1946), in which she showed her technical excellence without burdens of fashionable trends. Most of the poems were written in wartime - in 'The Trains' Wright took the threat of the war in the Pacific as a subject. The main theme in the volume was the poet's awareness of time, death, and evil on a universal scale. With the following collections Wright gained a reputation as a wholly new voice in literature with a distinctly female perspective. The title poem from Woman to Man (1949) dealt with the sexual act from a woman's point of view. 'The Maker' paralleled the creation of a poem and the creation of a child. Several of her early poems such as 'Bullocky' and 'Woman to Man' became standard anthology pieces. Wright also wrote love poems to her husband. His death in 1966 and her increasing anxiety of the destruction of the natural environment brought more pessimistic undercurrents in her work.

'I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust

the drying creek, the furious animal,

that they oppose us still;

that we are ruined by the thing we kill'.

(from 'Australia 1970')

Wright's poetry was inspired by the various regions in which she lived: the New England, New South Wales, the subtropical rainforests of Tamborine Mountain, Queensland, and the plains of the southern highlands near Braidwood. A new period in Wright's life started in the mid-1950s: "The two threads of my life, the love of the land itself and the deep unease over the fate of its original people, were beginning to twine together, and the rest of my life would be influenced by that connection."In The Two Faces (1955) she took Hiroshima as an example of man's power to destroy even the cycles of nature. Wright's activism on conservation issues led her to focus on the interaction between land and the language. According to Wright, "the true function of art and culture is to interpret us to ourselves, and to relate us to the country and the society in which we live." She started to see that her mission was to find words and poetic forms to bridge the human experience and the natural world, man and earth. "Poetry needs a background in which emotional, as well as material values are given their due weight; and the effect of this shallowness of roots is easily traceable in Australian writing, with its uneasy attempts to solve or to ignore the problem of its attitude to the country." Alienation from the land meant for Wright crisis of the language. She criticized the education system for failing to teach students the pleasures of poetry, and promoted the reading and writing of poetry in schools. Realistically she also expressed doubts about the power of poetry to change the scheme of things.

In the early 1960s Wright helped to found Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. She fought to conserve the Great Barrier Reef, when its ecology was threatened by oil drilling, and campaigned against sand mining on Fraser Island. In her passionate poem 'Australia 1970' Wright expressed her feelings of disappointment and anger, seeing her wild country die, "like the eaglehawk, dangerous till the last breath’s gone, clawing and striking." The Coral Battleground (1977) was her account of the campaign to protect the "great water-gardens, lovely indeed as cherry boughs and flowers under the once clear sea.” In The Cry for the Dead (1981) Wright examined the treatment of Aborigines and destruction of the environment by settlers in Central Queensland from the 1840s to the 1920s.

As a literary critic Wright enjoyed a high reputation, and edited several collections of Australian verse. She was a friend of Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, whose work Wright helped her to get published. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965) was Wright's pioneering effort to reread such early Australian poets as Charles Harpur, Adam Lindsay Gordon, and Henry Kendall.

Wright received several awards, including Grace Leven Prize (1950), Australia-Britannica Award (1964), Robert Frost Memorial Award (1977), Australian World Prize (1984), Queen's Medal for Poetry (1992). She had honorary degrees from several universities. In 1973-74 she was a member of Australia Council

Ghanshyam: Kamala Das

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

In panic I asked Dont you want me any longer dont you want me
Dont you dont you
In love when the snow slowly began to fall
Like a bird I migrated to warmer climes
That was my only method of survival
In this tragic game the unwise like children play
And often lose                      
At three in the morning
I wake trembling from dreams of a stark white loneliness,
Like bleached bones cracking in the desert-sun was my loneliness,
And each time my husband,
His mouth bitter with sleep,
Kisses, mumbling to me of love.
But if he is you and I am you
Who is loving who
Who is the husk who the kernel
Where is the body where is the soul
You come in strange forms
And your names are many.
Is it then a fact that I love the disguise
and the name more than I love you?
Can I consciously weaken bonds?
The child's umbilical cord shrivels and falls
But new connections begin, new traps arise
And new pains
Ghanshyam,
The cell of the eternal sun,
The blood of the eternal fire
The hue of the summer-air,
I want a peace that I can tote
Like an infant in my arms
I want a peace that will doze
In the whites of my eyes when I smile
The ones in saffron robes told me of you  
And when they left
I thought only of what they left unsaid
Wisdom must come in silence
When the guests have gone
The plates are washed
And the lights put out
Wisdom must steal in like a breeze
From beneath the shuttered door
Shyam O Ghanshyam
You have like a fisherman cast your net in the narrows
Of my mind
And towards you my thoughts today
Must race like enchanted fish...

 

Ghanshyam here is a typical Kamala Dasian poem which is semi-autobiographical, semi-religious and semi-classical in the sense that though she has titled it Ghanshyam, addressed to Krishna, the Blue Boy of Brindaban, but instead of it she transgresses into her personal and private spaces, maybe it that she is saying the things of her heart to the Lord as has Mira, unmindful of what the world says about or not, lost in Krishnabhakti and enjoying the company of sadhus and saints, but the case of Kamala different from Mira as she keeps not their company. The pains of Radha the world felt it not, the pains of Mira, the world knew it not. So, what to say of Kamala Das? The pains of her heart she is saying to Krishna, Lord Krishna. On the one hand, classical love poetry enthralls us with its folklore while on the other the reality is far from golden dreams and flight of imagery we can see the widows of Benares and Brindaban living a miserable life, the plight of the women beyond description.

Addressing Krishna as Ghanshyam, the poetess says that the Lord has settled in the arbour of her heart, taken it to be His place, just like the koel bird builds a nest. What does it mean really? The Lord has chosen it to be His place of dwelling. Krishnaprem is as such that it has coloured the poetess in its colour and she is love-mad. Where to go and what to do? Which way to take to? Her life which has been almost like a jungle is now astir with music. But the path to take does not come to the mind.  The cuckoo is cooingly sweetly and the musical notes are doing the rounds. It is not the bird, but just as a harbinger of His melody it is striking the chords of the heart and it is stringing and she like love-mad Mira and Radha is getting crazier. But whenever nearer to, the Lord turns up not rather vanishes out of sight.

There is beauty and music in the lines when she says that Ghanashyam has built a koel like nest into the harbour of her heart. Her life just like a jungle oblivious of it all gets a charm when the koel starts cooing into the woodland. Now the magic has done wonders and the things seem to be touched divinely in spirit which is but the charm of His. Krishna-Kanhaiya knows it all how to steer across the boat of life. 

Ghanshyam,
You have like a koel built your nest in the arbour of my heart.
My life, until now a sleeping jungle is at last astir with music.
You lead me along a route I have never known before
But at each turn when I near you
Like a spectral flame you vanish.

The flame of devotion keeps it flickering, the prayer-lamp holds the years in captive and she gazes into the red eyes of death laying it bare the bitter truths of life and the world and she seems to be possessed with the questions, what is it life, what is it death as well as gets shot back with the answers, life is blood, water, semen. Death is the last sob of a relative beside the red-walled morgue.

The flame of my prayer-lamp holds captive my future
I gaze into the red eye of death
The hot stare of truth unveiled.
Life is moisture
Life is water, semen and blood.
Death is drought
Death is the hot sauna leading to cool rest-rooms
Death is the last, lost sob of the relative
Beside the red-walled morgue.

How can she take to the life of a yogan? Is it the life of taking to bhajans and the rudraksa rosary? And even if she takes, she will take the tulsimala around her neck and the rudraksha rosary into the hands will just for romance and enactment. Kamala seems to be a modern-day Radha. Sometimes she plays the part of Radha, sometimes of Mira and Sometimes of Draupadi, what she is it is very difficult to reveal.

She has woven a raiment of words for Shyam, Ghanshyam, with the songs representing a sky and with music getting liberated in the oceans. The whole world appears to be attuned to Krishna music. But there is of course a time for flirtation and frivolity for everybody and if it is not, what to do with? She is young, full of flesh and blood but her partner is old comparatively. How to calm sexual lust? She weaves the garments of words for Him dressing and decorating in the best possible manner.

O Shyam, my Ghanshyam
With words I weave a raiment for you
With songs a sky
With such music I liberate in the oceans their fervid dances

But here one can mark the personal talk, how the body is at the root of all. We cannot discern bodily lust and sympathies which we need we most.

We played once a husk-game, my lover and I
His body needing mine,
His ageing body in its pride needing the need for mine
And each time his lust was quietned
And he turned his back on me

If the lover is aged and older, how to expect amorous love from? The age gap will stand as a factor. Lovefully she turns to him each and every time, but frustrated returns she without getting the love reciprocated. She sees with the loveful eyes, but he in turn comes to nought.

But what option is left out here for her without resorting to spiritual love? If there is dissatisfaction in love on the personal level, there lies no way to ventilate the thoughts and ideas otherwise. So, it is better to turn to spiritual thoughts.

When she comes to feel it he does not want her, she starts thinking of migrating to warmer climes which is but the only method of survival. Here she is very controversial and dubious in her wording.

In panic I asked Dont you want me any longer dont you want me
Dont you dont you
In love when the snow slowly began to fall
Like a bird I migrated to warmer climes
That was my only method of survival

She grows personal as well as slanderous when she takes to otherwise while making passing references to her old and aged husband, his declining strength and stamina and her loneliness. She resorts to the nights of love-making as well as desertion of that. There lie in differences in being loveful and in being loveless. When one awakes from a dream or a nightmare, one naturally wants somebody by one’s side to cope up with the repercussions.

In this tragic game the unwise like children play
And often lose                      
At three in the morning
I wake trembling from dreams of a stark white loneliness,
Like bleached bones cracking in the desert-sun was my loneliness,

A young wife she complains against her old and aged husband which is but a review of patriarchy and our social norms imposed upon womankind.

And each time my husband,
His mouth bitter with sleep,
Kisses, mumbling to me of love.

Suppose if there is a swap of imagery, how will it look? If he is the Lord and she is also the Lord, how will it appear to be? Who will come to love whom? Perhaps she means to indicate towards the divine state of things. Why will woman come to bear it ages after ages? If the woman is not, how will it be man’s world, God’s creation? How the earthen child and his mother? How the Divine Child and Yasoda? Who cares for whom and how? How the relationship, affection,  bonding in-between? Had the bonding been not, what would it have and for what? The same Krishna as a child of Yasoda, the same Krishna as a lover of Yasoda are but the facts unanswered and asked ages after ages by the conscious souls.

But if he is you and I am you
Who is loving who
Who is the husk who the kernel
Where is the body where is the soul

He is called by so many names and is visible in strange forms beyond the understanding of mankind. But instead of mankind goes calling for. Whatever be that, this is also a fact that man loves just the disguise rather than the real. So, she feels mistaken in loving the Lord by name as it may be misleading too.

You come in strange forms
And your names are many.
Is it then a fact that I love the disguise
and the name more than I love you?

This human life is of connections, biological and earthly. A child’s connection with his mother, can these be shaken off, forsaken? The world is ever fresh, ever new. Just be ready for new beginnings, new connections. The things just get refreshed, renewed.

Can I consciously weaken bonds?
The child's umbilical cord shrivels and falls
But new connections begin, new traps arise
And new pains

If not to say to Him then whom to say to? Who can know it better? Ghanshyam, Shyam is but the  last hope. Referring to Ghanshyam as the cell of the eternal sun, the blood of the eternal fire and the hue of the summer-air, she makes it clear what it is Divinity. But what it can win the heart of a woman when is blessed with a child in her arms. Here the lines refer to Yasoda or may be of a personal reference. How to get peace? Is peace just like an infant lulled into the arms of the mother?

Ghanshyam,
The cell of the eternal sun,
The blood of the eternal fire
The hue of the summer-air,
I want a peace that I can tote
Like an infant in my arms
I want a peace that will doze
In the whites of my eyes when I smile

 

Those in saffron robes have told her of the Lord, but is difficult to be tuned to Hari-name recitation, kirtana and bhajan. The age is not as such, the mood too is not so. How to take to heart? The mind is just in Him, in Krishna, the Krishna of love and love lore. It is difficult to pass youth in Hari-naam.

The ones in saffron robes told me of you  
And when they left
I thought only of what they left unsaid
Wisdom must come in silence

 

She grows personal and referential when she presents the scenery after the guests have gone, plates washed and the lights been switched off opening the vistas and avenues of bridal communion. Wisdom like the breeze stealing the shows peeps in and passes away. If the protagonist’s remembrances be as such, how to pass the nights restlessly without sleep into the eyes? The dreams of love and sex we cannot banish them from the mind. There is something of the bridal marriage day memory in it. But here who is whose bride or groom? Is she talking of the Divine Groom? Or, the earthly love?

When the guests have gone
The plates are washed
And the lights put out
Wisdom must steal in like a breeze
From beneath the shuttered door

 

Shyam, Ghanshyam, what it to do now? The music has the impact of its own. She feels drawn like a fish into the net of the fisherman. The net has been hurled and cast over and the mind is encompassed within its circumference. The enchanted fish must rush towards.

Shyam O Ghanshyam
You have like a fisherman cast your net in the narrows
Of my mind
And towards you my thoughts today
Must race like enchanted fish...

 

One who has no help has but Shyam, Ghanshyam by his or her side. This is but a religious point of view as we have discussed in classical love poetry where there is a point of surrender, total surrender to the Divine. Love for Krishna is good. Something definitely gets purged out while offering to Him, praying to Him and lighting the candle before Him. Such a thing it is in the placing of roses before the altar, the sacred shrine or the tombstone of St.Valentine. To remember him will also suffice to do. Who is the Lover of lovers may the other point of deliberation. Sometimes it also has been seen that the devotee beloved finally thinks of relinquishing the earthly connection for the Love Divine.

If we like to make a psycho-analytical analysis, we shall come to find various things, as for the streaks of abnormal psychology studied and the matter reverting back to psycho-neurotic issues. Sexual dissatisfaction, mismatch marriage, age gap and so on will come out. There is definitely something of the repression and suppression of sexual libido. Restricting and restraining the sexual urges, we cannot channelize our energies towards Divinity. So, such a thing one can study to some extent in Mira too as she was a royal widow. There is something of perverted sexuality which but we cannot deny it.

The psychology of a young devotee is a factor. To read her mind is to know many a thing. Can a beloved be not a worshipper of St.Valentine? But she will be in the likewise manner. Sometimes one turns to spiritual love for consolation. Broken hearts need to be nourished and embalmed. The candle burning before the Cross can also give solace to the broken soul. The light burning before Krishna can also can console the self.

Ghanshyam is no doubt a beautiful love poem written by Kamala Das and nowhere can we find such a description so poetic and lyrical, so aesthetic and amorous. Krishna, where is Krishna? Krishna is in heart, in our heart. Who can know Him? One who feels Him as His own, considers Him as His own moves so closer to. He will surely come to feel the melodies of His Divine Flute piping slowly and the golden notes breaking, unfolding and unfolding and encompassing with ruptures.
Is it a song of Radha or of Mira? Or, is it of Sarojini or of Kamala? Sarojini has also a poem named Ghanashyam and Kamala too has. But Surdas and Rashkhan, they too are specialists of Krishnite love and devotional poetry. Is Kamala a Vaishnava devotee?

The poetess uses the words, as such ‘a koel built your nest’,  ‘in the arbour of my heart’, ‘a sleeping jungle’, ‘at last astir with music’, ‘lead me along a route’,‘like a spectral flame you vanish’, ‘the flame of my prayer-lamp’, ‘I gaze into the red eye of death’, ‘the hot stare of truth unveiled’, etc. add to the beauty, depth and meaning of the poem.

Even as a bird to fly out, but where to go to? Where to go flying, my Lord? The Lord, You Yourself the Boat and the Boatman, the Reed and the Flute, is the thing discussed in. In the vast sea waters of life the ship is but the only shelter.
 

 

Summer In Calcutta: Kamala Das

 Summer In Calcutta by Kamala Das

What is this drink but
The April sun, squeezed
Like an orange in
My glass? I sip the
Fire, I drink and drink
Again, I am drunk
Yes, but on the gold
of suns, What noble
venom now flows through
my veins and fills my
mind with unhurried
laughter? My worries
doze. Wee bubblesring
my glass, like a brides
nervous smile, and meet
my lips. Dear, forgive
this moments lull in
wanting you, the blur
in memory. How
brief the term of my
devotion, how brief
your reign when i with
glass in hand, drink, drink,
and drink again this
Juice of April suns.

 

Summer In Calcutta is one of those poems of Kamala Das in which she not only reminisces the summer spent in Calcutta, but compares with the summer felt within bodily with the internal twitches working at the dark consciousness level. Though we call her a feminist writer, confessional and autobiographical, so candid and frank in expression, but she is erotic, obscene, pornographic, sexual and bodily too at the same time as she cannot without talking about sex and sexual love, physical satisfaction and the quenching of the lust. The summer is hot and blazing no doubt, but she too is hot. The heat of the summer not, but of the body lets it not the poetic persona to be quiet. Something is corroding her psychologically and physically and the poetic female persona seems to be crawling after that gratification. Sambhoga to Samadhi seems to be the philosophy of the poetess. The things of the dark consciousness are the main properties of her poetry. Summer siestas full of sweating and heat aggravate sexual love and affection. She is very frivolous and naughty as she plays with double meaning speaking in overtones and undertones. Sex satisfaction is all that ails her internally.   

Summer in Calcutta is not the summer of Calcutta, but the summer feeling of Kamala, who is just after sensuality, madly after love, man-woman relationship. Her summer is one of the bodily summer in which the protagonists act emotionally and abnormally, going after the sun. The gulmohars blooming in summer do not have anything to tempt and charm Kamala, but the summer of the body, the twitches and intrigues of it during the noontime siesta. Sweating and kissing and relishing upon is the thing of deliberation. There is something of The Sun Rising of John Donne in it. Kamala is but the Lady Chatterley of D.H.Lawrence. To put it ironically, the April sun is like an orange and Kamala after squeezing it taking a glass of orange juice. She is a sexist and her poetry an exercise in sexual enterprise; the dreams of sex and love are bound to give pleasure to anybody else who goes through it. Kamala has fallen into a bad company of lovers, readers and critics.

We do not know it who she, the Mira or the Radha in her love for Krishna? Is she  classical or contemporary? Is she a Krishnite or a modern Radha? We know it not nor can we answer it. Is she taking a glass full of squeezed orange or is daydreaming sexually? It is very difficult to understand her drama, the drama of a modern woman. Is the protagonist a sexually dissatisfied woman of D.H.Lawrence’s novels and stories?

Kamala Das as a poetess is Lawrentine, as she draws from flesh and blood contact, attraction and repulsion met in love, love and hate theme, give and take relationship. She is a poetess of the body, not the soul, but wants to liberate the soul of womankind. Her poetry is the poetry of love, the thirst of it. Spiritually she may be sick, but is a poetess of the body.

The politics of poetry and the poet, Kamala is one such name doing politics with poetry, writing the poetry of feminism, a media-savvy politician, a poetry-writer. Poetry as the politics of feminism and the feminist as a leader holds true in this context.

We applaud her for the critical appreciation and admiration which she has received and we are happy to read about it. But there is something to share with and to be said with reservation that we often like to hear, go by the words of Kamala, but not those of her husband. Had we something on his part then justice could have been reached at least. Kamala as a writer draws from D.H.Lawrence, Judith Wright, Sylvia Plath and so on Western feminists and the writers of a confessional slant. Even the summer which she describes in the poem entitled Summer in Calcutta, God knows what summer is it? There is nothing of the season, not even the heat and dust swirling and playing with into the streets. It may be certainly her modern style, but the summer hints towards otherwise. Bodily lust, hunger and craving are the things of her poetry and there is nothing more. Apart from it, she is media-savvy, who can do it all for to be in the media glare and limelight. The summer of the body is the favourite season of hers. To see it otherwise, she is a spiritually sick child. Vatsyayna, Freud and Rajneesh seem to the best choices of hers. A writer of bodily love, she is not Mira or Radha, though we call her. The other thing too is this that we heaped research dissertations on her slender and slim books rather than appreciating the whole genre in full.

The poetess enquires about the drink it is, the glass of juice she is going to take which is but the April summer sun squeezed like an orange into her glass. This is how the poem begins:

 

What is this drink but
The April sun, squeezed
Like an orange in
My glass?

 

This is her glass she is going to take, this is the juice she is going to sip giving her lips to, tasting the drink and juice. But it is not the soft drink that is going to quell her internal fire. The thirst is internal and very personal even though may be thirsty for which the glass of juice will work it.

She sips and sips, but is still thirsty and wants more, hints it otherwise:

 

I sip the
Fire, I drink and drink
Again, I am drunk

It is not a thing of the common thirst; it is but a matter of bodily thirst, the soul licking the body. The more she has and the more she is thirsty, craving for more and more and thirst turns into otherwise and she feeling it not normally. When she says that she sips fire and keeps drinking, it takes us into the corridors and terraces of secret love and loving where the sick souls speak in whispers speaking the dark mystic poetry of love just like the phantom-listeners sharing among themselves. Having felt the summer, the gold of the suns, she gets puzzled and appears to have taken. Had it been wine, it would have been good. Here the persona seems to be a drinker; a bar girl. What summer can be more gruelling than this summer of the body?

Hot and fiery from within, she feels it unable to bear the fire and heat overpowering her and a time comes when venom seems to be overflowing through her veins:

Yes, but on the gold
of suns, What noble
venom now flows through
my veins and fills my
mind with unhurried
laughter?

The summer is not just the thing doing the rounds, but the sun falling upon and it is now the gold of the suns overtaking her with the imagery. God knows what this strangeness is, why the mind gets filled with this type of laughter.

Her worries start dozing with the situations overpowering matched with the drinking of the drink full of bubbles meeting the lips:

My worries
doze. Wee bubblesring
my glass, like a brides
nervous smile, and meet
my lips.

Whether he turns up or not, which she is expecting so earnestly, but is not fortunate enough to avail of always, she will bear it in the as usual way:

Dear, forgive
this moments lull in
wanting you, the blur
in memory.

Again she talks of fidelity and infidelity in love and the mind brings back the pictures of Adam and Eve and Samson and Delilah:

How
brief the term of my
devotion, how brief
your reign when i with
glass in hand, drink, drink,
and drink again this
Juice of April suns.

 

The term of her devotion may be brief so his faithfulness and sincerity. It is very difficult to be sure of one’s own stint as the things and times changing so the habits and tastes of man. If she commits mistakes after being overpowered by emotions, she must be pardoned as she has developed the habit of taking.

 

Let us see what she means to relate in which context of deliberation. Summer In Calcutta contains in the language of sexual love. The poem shows the poetess as a lover of the body, not the soul. But it is also a fact that the soul dwells it in the body. What can a poor woman do it as she has been made dependent upon?

Summer In Calcutta as a poem takes us to the highest pedestal of thinking in bringing closer to women studies, human rights and violations, freedom of speech and expression, gender bias and equality, feminism and psychoanalysis. Commonly, it is a poem of love and sex and dreams; a poem of lustful summer siestas so full of private and personal twitches and sexuality. But if to see it differently, it is a poem of revolt and rebellion, feministic movement against patriarchy, male domination and bodily possession. Are the women for to be exploited? Why is such a Divine Set-up of things? Is sex not a routine affair possessive and exploitive, dull and monotonous and boring? Can women have not the lone existence of their own? What does a woman do in a marriage dressing as a coy and shy bride? What is it in reality a marriage? A contract, an arrangement for what? The soul is neither a male nor a female. Shiva as Ardhanarishwara, half-male, half-female is the answer to be felt and confided in.

 

Sea Breeze, Bombay: Adil Jussawalla

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

Sea Breeze, Bombay

Partition's people stitched

Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.
An opened people, fraying across the cut
country reknotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,
Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port,
Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work
Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,
Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,
come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,
Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,
Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,
Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,
Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories.

Sea Breeze, Bombay is a Partition story as well as a history of Bombay written down by Adil Jussawalla who after his schooling in Bombay did his college education from London and Oxford and taught for sometime in England and in the mega city just before devoting himself fully to journalism, literary tidbits, columns, reviews and had been also the Literary Editor as well as the Editor of Debonair magazine. Adil Jussawalla who hails from a Parsi community is first of all a poet writing the poetry of the modern age and of modern man. A poet of broken statements, his is an angst, bewilderment and loss expressed through the columns of poetry where it is difficult to search for meaning and his persona is but a city-man, one of the urban space and living. Despair, dislocation, displacement, globalism, cosmopolitanism, modernity and post-modernism are some of the ingredients which he comes to grapple with. The Partition people telling the stitched tales tells of pity and pathos is the thing of narration which the politicians could not feel it then drunken with power. Who to say how has this Partition cost precious human lives of which we had been a mute spectator, witness of all that happened in the name of partition, religion and  politics! How inhuman can be man! The Partition is an example of all that. None is holy from his within. All but know it.

Tracing the history of Bombay, he goes back to the Partition tales and woes, trauma and therapy which it disrupted the sub-continent, ruffled as a whirlwind, a cyclone uprooting the people from their roots of nativity, culture and ethos, snapping connectivity and access from Rawalpindi, Lahore, Peshawar to India and vice versa. Many perished on the way tired of fatigue, hunger, thirst and illnesses the caravans of refugees rendered homeless and while on the other hand violence, bloodshed, genocide, stampede, rape and brutality wreaked havoc in the name of the Partition cutting across the religious lines. Why was such a Partition done in a huff? What did it give to? Just for the chair? So in its trail, bearing the brunt of, an exodus of the Sindhis, the Sindh area people came in migrating to Bombay and got domiciled, undergoing a saga of trouble, tribulation and trauma. But time is the best healer as one forgets it all in the course of time. It was but the island which but gave shelter and refuge to the migrating people from the so-called, newly created and named Pakistan. Again in due course of time the refugees forget the wounds and scars of the Partition and try to re-knot themselves pacing with time, age and situation of life, marking the hectic brisk activity of the land.

A city of banks, harbours and ports, Bombay has a history and narrative of its own. It is the same coast, where the British and other European merchants and mariners came and sojourned for their trade and commerce and competed with for power. They also did their best in developing the island area as it was internally cut in and separated from, but through the landfill the area was flattened and linked with, bridging the edgeways, sideways. The Bombay of today is not the same as it was before the advent of the Europeans and the British. But the people of East Punjab and East Bengal suffered it most from the torture point of view.

Keeping the Holy Fire as a witness, the poet seeks for expiation and penance from the sins committed unknowingly by himself or on behalf of those referred to here and praying to restore and purge it, he begins the talk of the Tibetan refugees and their influx and they coming to settle in and make room for. Even during the hot weather they can seen wearing the red woolen dress as because varied geographical locations and migratory haste, dislocation, displacement, wandering relocation and resettlement. With the change in geographical locations, the things and the status change it from place to place. So the case is with the Tibetan refugees unable to guess the mood and go of the place, the climate and location of it. As a traveller, can man adjust with shifting images and change in locality? Stability comes with the home. But unaware of all that, the sea breeze keeps refreshing and blowing over, settling or unsettling it all, taking to its own recourse. The sea breeze comes and goes away towards the mainland. So are the waves rising and falling picturesque of Nature as thus lost in the play and frivolity of its own.

The fire knows it all. What to say about keeping it as a witness, swearing by? Sometimes the communities lose their temper and get involved in quarrels and clashes. Sometimes some disruptive activities seem to break the bond of affection, but again it swings back to its beat and pulse. Things get restored back to with the somber poise and a calm of mutual understanding is reached for to start it again the brisk activity. The commercial centre comes to a stop, never seems to be at rest. Ships sailing on the seas, coming from, cargoes unloaded, loaded, these are but the general pictures of Bombay, the sea view.

A small poem it is so much of geographical, historical, economic, shipmanly and developmental interest as because to read it is to discuss it differently. How was Bombay initially? Who were the original inhabitants? How did the merchants and the navy men come to, we mean the foreigners? How was the coast earlier? How did it develop? How much time did it take in? How was the land filled as for reclamation? To discuss Bombay is to see the topographical map. Now it is a commercial hub too. How the maritime history and activity of it? It is really a matter of intensive research connected with several kingdoms and shipping corporations. A mariner, a navigator or a shipman’s notes will help us more. The ancient boatmen and the fishers used to inhabit the seven islands as it was a litter of isles and islets. Apart from the history of Bombay, the poem is a history of the refugee problem and the maniac, fanatical division of the sub-continent and the achievement of freedom in the midst of turbulence and tribulation, stampede  and refugee influx. If we can the photos of that time, we may come to feel it. How had it been the vision of the dividers? Divisions cannot be done at the cost of innocent lives who could not see the flowers of freedom. The history of Sindh and the Sindhis too comes under that. Did the Punjabis and the Bengalis not face the brunt? The same has happened with East Punjab and East Bengal. If we hear the stories, tears will trickle down the face. We shall not be able to hear the stories of the betrayed people. How were the simple folks driven out of their homes? The present plight of the Kashmiri pundits also tells the same living in camps in Delhi or rehabilitated. What more to say about the Parsis which the poet says it not? Are the Mohajirs well there in Pakistan? When he talks of the Tibetan refugees, several things come upon the mind’s place, Indo-Tibet, Indo-Chinese relations. How did they come to? Have they been given citizenship rights? Who to look after their problems? Sometimes we feel it about why the people turn into refugees, why the people are driven out of their places. Still now the conditions of the minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh are not so well. When he puts the fire as a witness, the mere spell of it takes to the land of Zoroaster and the Zoroastrians, how they were driven out, how their fire temples were, how the fire has been kept burning still now.

Whose houses who partitioned? Whose lands who divided? It is also a matter of fact. Sea Breeze, Bombay is a poem of Bombay, its shipyards, docks, naval bases; its business centres and commercial hubs; its sea routes and maritime activities. But side by side it is a painful tale of the Partition people raked by loss, casualty, murder, disease, death, suffering, loot, plunder, journey and fatigue. How did the stitched flags serve as the shrouds for them? Whose liberty who used it? Whose freedom who commemorated it?   The reference indicates the murder and killing of the innocent people in the wake of nationalistic fever and frenzy and maniac religious fervour. So, with a bloody foundation the history of our freedom started with and we made a tryst with it opening new vistas and avenues. The scissoring of Sindh created reshuffles, repercussions and upheavals. The history of Bombay none has tried to know it, feel it, how was it Bombay one day, what has it become now. Is this the attainment of freedom? As thus we got independence from is but a hidden truth and what more to allude to? Let the breeze blow it with the influx of the refugees to come to in search of opportunities, peace, happiness and settlement from time to time as but this is the process of history. It all depends on one’s sense of humanism and goodness while grappling with the humanitarian issues like this.

A Buddha Seated On A Lotus: Sarojini Naidu

 

To A Buddha Seated On A Lotus by Sarojini Naidu: A Study

LORD BUDDHA, on thy Lotus-throne,
With praying eyes and hands elate,
What mystic rapture dost thou own,
Immutable and ultimate?
What peace, unravished of our ken,
Annihilate from the world of men?

The wind of change for ever blows
Across the tumult of our way,
To-morrow's unborn griefs depose
The sorrows of our yesterday.
Dream yields to dream, strife follows strife,
And Death unweaves the webs of Life.

For us the travail and the heat,
The broken secrets of our pride,
The strenuous lessons of defeat,
The flower deferred, the fruit denied;
But not the peace, supremely won,
Lord Buddha, of thy Lotus-throne.

With futile hands we seek to gain
Our inaccessible desire,
Diviner summits to attain,
With faith that sinks and feet that tire;
But nought shall conquer or control
The heavenward hunger of our soul.

The end, elusive and afar,
Still lures us with its beckoning flight,
And all our mortal moments are
A session of the Infinite.
How shall we reach the great, unknown
Nirvana of thy Lotus-throne?

To A Buddha Seated On A Lotus by Sarojini Naidu is one of those poems of the poetess which take us back to the days of yore, to the land of Buddha and Buddhism, Buddhist art and architecture, how did they make the statues of Buddha, craft and chisel from art materials and substances, Buddhas cast in gold, Buddhas made from baked clay, Buddhas as art-models and symbols. How to put the iconography of the Buddha life? Buddha in meditation, Buddha under a tree, Buddha on a lotus, Buddha as rock-cut carvings, Buddha as Avalokitesvara; the Buddha of the bhikshus, how to view it? We do not, do not know it. Let us see Sarojini Naidu’s poem To A Buddha Seated On A Lotus. Just mere a darshan, sightseeing of the master says it all. Buddha, the statues of his, so panoramic and serene and lovely to look at made by artisans, artists and sculptors, is really a joy to view Buddha art and artifacts, relics and carvings, sculptures and figurines. What it appalls us is the Divine Grace around Lord Buddha.

Lord Buddha seated on a lotus and lost in prayer and meditation with the elated hands is the thing with which the poetess starts the poem under our discussion. To picture Buddha seated on a lotus in itself adds to the aesthetic sense to the poem. What a mystical posture? How the halo around? How the peace serene? How peace encompassing it all? It is a beauty to see the Lord on the lotus throne as the lotus serves as a myth, motif, symbol and sign. The art model speaks more than a presentation in words. The blissful state of the Lord is itself supportive of what we want to speak forth or put down. As the world is so will remain it peace and nothing can annihilate it. Peace is what we hanker after finally. Everything is laid in peace and rest need not to be discussed here.

The world is forever in a flux as the things keep it changing here. They do not remain the same as they were in the beginning. Even those which are by now will cease to remain so. What it to say about human life, short and transitory? The paths of life too are never smooth. Against the backdrop of all this, the situation given, how to take to, where to go? Life is so full of troubles and tribulations. Tomorrow’s unborn grief takes over the grief of today and if misery and sorrow seem to be a part of life then what to say it more, this is what the poetess means to present it here. One dream after another dream keeps it unfolding the doors of dreams and as thus the story of our attachment keeps doing the rounds. But death is the ultimate reality which we cannot refuse to accept it. Our ordeals of fate we have to take to the test ourselves.

But we the human beings live with the frailties, follies and foibles of our own. We want to be perfect, but we can never be as we of the baser things have to return to dust and clay from where we are and our needs tend to be to. Our wants and desires are many and we cannot limit them. Our wishes too are  not sublime and good. We are concerned with ourselves merely. We want to attain moksha, but this too cannot be so easily. We want to ascend the diviner summits. Nirvana is the most sought after, but few can meddle with it. The samsara is all that we are trapped in; into the vortex of its maya-moha. Vasanaa, infatuation, fascination for is all that engages us and keeps us bound with and we cannot rise above as the daily trifles tending to lust and affection let us not to be free. The travails of life those who ail through know it well. We want to discard and discern like you as you came out leaving the palace and the family, but we cannot help, we cannot be like you, my Lord, is the thing of deliberation. We cannot cut the bonds of maya, moha, illusion, hallucination.

The samsara is of maya-moha with the chakras as such of sukkha and dukkha. How to get rid of? The snares of the world are what we seem to be grappling with, but instead there is something which but burns within, which is the thirst for spiritual thought and idea, the idea of moksha and mukti, deliverance and liberation. The quest for light is indefatigable. How to be with the Divine is the essence and without which the void will seem to be encompassing us.

The poem is in itself a Gautam Buddhian poem as herein lies it a volley of questions answered and unanswered which Siddhartha came to grapple with and in whose solutions to find he left the worldly life to be Gautam Buddha after having got Enlightenment and he the Enlightened One. Why sukkha, why dukkha, sukkha after dukkha and vice versa? What is nirvana? How to attain it? What is moksha and how to attain it? The Lord is the answer of it all, so serene and full of quietude, as if were blessing every seeker after truth. To see the face is to forget the questions ailing the self; to see is to feel peace and blessing. Wisdom comes from peace and blessedness from contentment.

What India has forgotten the world knows that, who is Buddha, how his Buddhism and these will continue to cherish mankind ever in search of shantih, ananda, moksha and nirvana, whoever comes unto him will get shantih, the peace of mind and soul. How to be in his refuge, great shelter sheltering from it all? Into the shelter of Buddha? How to feel that illumination of that light, just a sparkle of that? How to be get lit? The light is the all which is but knowledge.

The first four lines tell of the calmly-poised image of Buddha so full of mystic rapture, serenity and bliss divine:

LORD BUDDHA, on thy Lotus-throne,
With praying eyes and hands elate,
What mystic rapture dost thou own,
Immutable and ultimate?

Let us mark the lines for annotation explaining the heavenward hunger of our human soul:

But nought shall conquer or control
The heavenward hunger of our soul.

As long as the creation is and the world of creatures is so long will the soul aspire to be with the Cosmic Self. The lines are really very beautiful which is but a poetic beauty emboldening the aesthetic sense implied within the texture of the syntax of the structural context.

Who can say about the pathway end, the goal of life which but we are not sure of leading to where at the end of the journey. But instead of whatsoever be that we keep taking the beckoning flight with the view that all our mortal moments are a session of the Infinite:

The end, elusive and afar,
Still lures us with its beckoning flight,
And all our mortal moments are
A session of the Infinite.


The last two lines of the poem give the poetic suggestion with regard to the purpose of our living, why are we here and how the goal of life:

How shall we reach the great, unknown
Nirvana of thy Lotus-throne?

 

 

The Person I Am Looking For: Hazara Singh

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

The Person I Am Looking For by Hazara Singh

If you do not get lowered in your own eyes

While you raise yourself in those of others

If you do not give in to gossips and lies

Rather heed them not, saying ‘Who bothers’.

You may be the person I am looking for.

If you crave not for praise when you win

And look not for sympathy while you lose

If cheers let not your head toss or spin

And after a set-back you offer no excuse.

You may be the person I am looking for.

If you accept counsel without getting sore

And re-assess yourself in the light thereof

If you pledge not to be obstinate any more

And meet others without any frown or scoff.

You may be the person I am looking for.

If you have the will to live and courage to die

You are a beacon-light for people far and wide

If you ignore the jeers and, thus, expose the lie

‘That virtue and success do not go side by side’.

You are the person I am looking for.

The Person I Am Looking For is one of the best poems of Hazara Singh dealing with a very moral and didactic purpose through which he instills a feeling of hope in us as well as tries to inspire and motivate  us in a positive way. This life is for something to do, something to achieve and stand by, not for sitting idle. We live in deeds, not in years, is the thing of deliberation. The poem is almost like A Psalm of Life. There is something of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. A votary of Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, he writes the poetry of his type, epigrammatic and Baconian. His poetry is very didactic and inspirational as well as motivational and he seems to be under Swett Marden and Dale Carnegie. How to achieve the unachievable? How to reach your goal? How to be successful? How to be good and noble? How to cultivate the joy of living, how to pursue the art of living? He teaches about all that. His poem reminds us of the English prose-writers and their stuffs, as such A.G.Gardiner, J.B.Priestly, Robert Lynd and so on.

 Hazara Singh is a poet of his own right and apart from; he is a teacher, a freedom fighter, a thinker and a historian of some sort. As a poet, he derives and draws from nationalists, patriots, freedom fighters, national heroes, democrats, republicans, scientists, thinkers and so on to rebuild and recreate his poetic images. 

One should not get lowered before as for what the people will say. Why to humble oneself in such a way? The head should be held high. Why not to raise oneself in the eyes of others? The poet forbids to hear the gossips and to desist from giving an ear to lies as who likes to participate in gossips will idle away his time in doing useless things and as thus he will spoil himself finally. He will not be able to do anything in his life. He will just idle away passing leisurely time. This life is not meant for them who are inactive and uselessly talkative. This life is not for gossips. This is for action and work. Those who are serious and active talk it not too much without caring for the useless talkers and gossip-masters. Try to keep them avoiding. Who hears them? This should be the thing. Why to bother about? One must try to handle the awkward situation in this way. It is better to avoid them rather than hearing anything else from. Those who do like to remain sincere to their jobs and assignment and undertaking. The poet searches a person who can be as such.

Only they can who crave it not for praise and admiration as there is nothing in false praise and self-praise. What sympathy can they extend to if one loses in or keeps losing? It is not going to make a difference. If cheers come it not in hand, why to sit and repent? One should take the set back as a challenge for to renew the fight. Why to sit still? Why not to be prepared again keeping victory in mind? Even after the loss, one can win if one wants to make the efforts in the right way competitively. Success should be your goal. Wins and losses matter it not, count it not what you have won or lost. Just keep you practising, aspiring for, translating your dreams into a reality. The victory is yours. One who labours, one puts the efforts in wins. Those who crave for praise will not go up. Those who have won it does not mean that they will always. Offer you no excuse please. Just keep you busy with, just keep you labouring, striving for. This should be your target, this should be your goal of life, if you want to achieve something in your life. This world is not for them who sit idle and pass time. This world is for them who really want to work and translate their dreams into a reality.

If one accepts, follows advice without being hurt and tries to re-address oneself in the light of that, one may improve and correct oneself. If one is not obstinate enough and likes meeting others without scoff or frown, one may achieve the target. The poet means to say it that there must scope for correction and re-correction and one should try to follow others and learn from as long as one can widening his knowledge and wisdom, enriching with feeling and experience. We need not be obstinate and stubborn. If we turn crazy, we shall see the things crazily. We must pledge to be in the good direction. Without any frown or scoff, we must accept the things. One must be cordial in welcoming in heartily with open-mindedness. To be narrow and small-minded cannot be the goal.

If one has the will to live and the courage to die for, one can definitely do, but one should have the guts and determination to reach the goal. One can be a role model by sheer hard work, perseverance, nobility, courage and determination. This can happen only after ignoring jeers and exposing lies. To be virtuous and to be successful are two different things. Virtues, nobility, goodness and greatness have nothing to do with success. But one must try to combine them. One must just keep it doing and the act doing will make one big. Goodness does not come to it so easily and for it one needs to be good enough apart from being a man of action.

Who can say that you may not be the person the poet is waiting for? Why to speak of the poet? The world is waiting for? The main thing is to develop virtues in you. Try to be good and noble and ideal. If you are, the people around you will be good as they will come to learn from you. If you righteous and virtuous enough, your righteousness and virtues will automatically come up for a discussion. Do not sit idle. Aim at doing high, something big and the mere act of doing big will make you big. Talent or genius is in each of us, but it needs to be explored in all of its possibilities. If you can reach the target, achieve the goal, the world is yours.

A small poem, The Person I Am Looking For is very beautiful indeed as it can motivate and inspire us so beautifully. The poem tells us how to use our time, how to gain it from life experiences. There must a passion for living. We must know the art of living. How to live a happy life? How to think healthily? We must try to know what this life is, how the lessons it imparts and what it the key to success. The mantra of success is but hard labour. The mantra of success is good behavior and good thinking. If one keeps it not striving, can success come to one? The answer is ‘no’. How to be successful? How to be good? How to be noble? How to be virtuous? This is the thing of deliberation. It all depends on you how you take to on aim and ambition, on your ideal and moral, on your will to do it, accomplish and reach the goal. How to reach the target is completely yours.

Ghanashyam: Sarojini Naidu

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

Ghanashyam by Sarojini Naidu

Thou givest to the shadows on the mountains
The colours of thy glory, Ghanashyam,
Thy laughter to high secret snow-fed fountains,
To forest pines thy healing breath of balm.
Thou lendest to the storm's unbridled tresses
The beauty and the blackness of thy hair,
And scatterest the joy of thy caresses
In lustrous rain upon the limpid air.
Thou dost vouchsafe to pilgrim-hearted ages
The music of thy mercy, Ghanashyam,
And grantest to thy seekers and thy sages
Mystic sanctuaries of transcendent calm.
O take my yearning soul for thine oblation,
Life of all myriad lives that dwell in thee.
Let me be lost, a lamp of adoration,
In thine unfathomed waves of ecstasy.

 

Ghanashyam, Ghanashyam, how the music of the word, Ghanashyam, how the literal meaning? Who is Ghanashyam? The same Krishna Murari, Muraliwalla, Manamohan. But here  Ghanashyam, one who is deep blue coloured, one who is dark coloured as the hanging clouds seem to be laden with showers lurking over the hills, looking darker blue, bluish darkness. And here lies in the mysticism, the mysticism of the word. Can one somewhat dark but with a nicer face-cutting be not called beautiful? The answer is, of course, without any doubt. Is dark not beautiful? Generally in musical notes with the ragaas the word, Ghanashyam, my Ghanashyam spreads the melody and music of its own and this is often done in classical music. He went on playing the music, the murali and I went on hearing the melody so breathtaking, awe-striking is it, if one can feel about, as such is the impact cast or exerted upon. Where is Krishna? The Krishna of heart? How to search him? Where the blue-coloured idol? Where the blue-complexioned boy of Brindavan? How this trend of bhakti? Indian classical tradition of devotees, singers and fakirs lost in Krishnadhun, the rhythm and recitation of Ghanashyam? The heart is submerged in bhakti, Krishna-bhakti, the music of Shyam and it taking away the heart with him. As the halo of the blue lotus is, the azure of the skies, the colour of the hills in the sunshine or during the cloud around, changing into a gloom so is his colour and complexion. When lightning flashes or the thunderbolt crashes, the heart beats it with fear, taking the name of Shyam, Ganashyam just like the birds afraid of and screaming in fear.

 

Here the blue image is so prominent and the yearning merges with the Divine through the music and devotion of heart, through spiritual thirst and longing. Ghanashyam, how to see the image of his? How the painting of his? How the blue-complexion? How the blue colour alluring to all? Without being a devotee, how to be lost in? In Krishna-rasa, Krishna-prema? The blue colour and complexion of his matches with the clouds hanging over the hills and the mountain ranges, in the loom seen far as the outbursts of lurking clouds combined with thunder and lightning, seen in the blue waters of the lake or in the blue lilies fascinating it all. First, love him then feel you the magic of the Love Divine.

The poetess means to say it whose colour is it reflected in the mountains and the gloom around it, whose is it sunniness during the daytime reflecting as strangely, radiating blue, so attractive and charming to core. It is but his colour reflecting over, reflecting in and he is just like that, like that. The snow-fed so high secret fountains from which the crystal and blue waters flow form, drip as the pearls do not misunderstand them as carry forth the laughter of the same. It is none but he who heals with a breath of balm the forest pines. The storms which take us by surprise and awe carry out the beauty and blackness of his hair. But that gloom and storm result in a downpour dispelling and discarding the thaw in the air.

It has been continuing for long, for ages and ages and it will go by as long as the creation is, drenched in your bhakti, is the thing. There will be no life without his Krishnalila, Krishnalila  Divine. Where is not Krishna? At the root of all. This romantico-devotional heart is his; this classico-devotional heart is his, is what we know it not the truth. Just we need to be lost in Krishna-consciousness, Krishna-ananda. Wherever go you, goes it the heart with you, with Krishna, my Ghanashyam. One who is present it in all, how the world to go without his mercy divine?

He is in everything that we do and dream. The ages with time-spirits are the makings of his. There is nothing as hidden from. He is the Lord-god whose blessing is reflected in it all. What can be greater than the soul drenched in Krishna-bhakti? Who is it who gives transcendent calm? It is but he, the power behind our grace and blessing. The poetess prays to him for his grace, blessing and love. When we read the poem Ghanashyam, the picture of Radha who is bluish also dances before the eyes. If there is none, he is but Ghanashyam, if the heart submerged in him, the soul lost in him, why to fear? The world is the leela ground of his and he playing the flute from the orchards, hills, bowers and arbours, hills, dales, vales and mountains, woodlands, forest tracts and rocky domains. Such is the melody of his flute; such is the lyricism of love-song; such is the power of love. He is Shyam, Ghanashyam, the Blue Boy of Brindavan. Where do you lie, fluting, my Lord? Where do you? Where is the melody coming from? The heart stays it not put in. Such is Krishnabhakti. The ecstasy of deep devotion is fathomless and immeasureable.

Ghanashyam is a poem of Krishnabhakti and Krishnaprem, dealing with classical love poetry and bhakti-tradition continuing to since long, so full of folkloric music, dance and song incantations, taking us to Krishnalila and Raaslila, to Brindavan and Mathura, the banks of the Yamuna river and the kadamba trees with the gopis moving about in search of and Krishna playing the flute.

The Pardah Nashin: Sarojini Naidu

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

HER life is a revolving dream
Of languid and sequestered ease;
Her girdles and her fillets gleam
Like changing fires on sunset seas;
Her raiment is like morning mist,
Shot opal, gold and amethyst.

From thieving light of eyes impure,
From coveting sun or wind's caress,
Her days are guarded and secure
Behind her carven lattices,
Like jewels in a turbaned crest,
Like secrets in a lover's breast.

But though no hand unsanctioned dares
Unveil the mysteries of her grace,
Time lifts the curtain unawares,
And Sorrow looks into her face . . .
Who shall prevent the subtle years,
Or shield a woman's eyes from tears?

To read the poem is to be conjured of a Muslim woman going in the burkha, the blackly veil, gown and slippers, naqab or hijab. Just the eyes are visible and nothing else. She is under the veil from head to toe. How to identify her? How to be introduced to her? Hence, the poem The Pardah Nashin before us for a reading. A pardah nashin, a veiled persona, protagonist is the chief attraction of the poem under our deliberation and discussion. One cannot see her, but she can from her pardah as far as she can kaleidoscopically. Through the holes, she can and rarely will she lift it and that too purposively if the need be and that too with a prior permission. We do not know who the dark heroine is; the queen of the heart. Sarojini Naidu would have seen her, met her often in Hyderabad or the bazaars of it which she is describing it here in this poem, but how much advanced had she been when she took a note of and described into her poetry even in that age so ahead of times. E.M.Forster too speaks of the purdahwallis and ghumtawallis, the purdah system in his one of his prose-pieces, but he found it so drastically changed it during his second visit just after the independence perhaps. The poem as a subject-matter is one of human rights, women studies, gender bias, patriarchal hegemony and Asiatic studies. It is a feministic issue. The poem opens our eyes in respect of gender equality, human rights and womanly existence.

The burkha is a long enveloping garment worn by the Muslim women in public and hence a burkhawalli is the protagonist, mouthpiece of this feminist poem. The poetess says that her life is a revolving dream of languid and sequestered ease. The girdles and fillets gleam as these keep fastening the garment at the waist and the headband hair too. The fillet means a band or ribbon worn round the head as for binding the hair which but looks like changing fires on sunset seas in their gleam. Her raiment, whatever call you, clothing, attire or garments is opal, gold and amethyst. Here the poetess has given a different look to the poem after calling the dress raiment and when describing the dress, she uses the words, opal, gold and amethyst. Just like the morning mist it appears to be discarding the nightly shroud and wrapper. It is opal, colours seem to be swimming within it, transparent and translucent as well. Apart from opal, golden the raiment appears to be amethyst, just like a precious stone of a violet or purple variety of quartz, trying to dress in a decorative way, in the best possible manner.

The maiden under the dark blackly veil is almost secure and free from the thieving light of the impure eyes who may not see her with lustful looks her beauty and youth to follow her or hold in  admiration of to die for her as love lies it forbidden here and Laila cannot meet her Majnu. The cover also guards her form the coveting sun or the wind’s caress as these do in the desert lands of Arabia saving from heat and dust and desert storms and swirling sands. The covering keeps her delicate as well hiding from sun and dust. She is guarded well and secure behind the purdah, curtain of the theatre, an artiste in the making. She is just like a jewel of the turbaned crest, a secret of some lover’s breast. The poem is indeed a portrait of an artist, the artist as a young burkhawalli, purdahwalli and this takes us to the imagery of Andrew Marvells’ To His Coy Mistress. Sarojini Naidu herein seems to be the writer of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and The Portrait of a Lady and the Pardah Nashin is but her My Last Duchess, Mona Lisa’s much debate and discussed smile. But only Browning can question it, why did his duchess smile? Had there been some artist here, the model would have been in Madame Tussauds’  museum of wax models. If not, it is here a beautiful human mannequin, an art piece of Naidu and in this regard Beharman’s painting of the last leaf art model and the photo making of the model millionaire cannot be forgotten.

But she is also a living character of flesh and blood. She too has love in her heart. She too has a body and a soul. She is not merely a slave. She also wants to fly like a bird as she is after all a woman. She has also her freedom, her human rights. Though the dress is a beauty, she can definitely wear it, but to oppress and suppress her, throttle her freedom are not going to work. How shall we keep her in the dark?

A thing of beauty definitely it glistens. But who can check the advancing steps of time, age and ageing as time does not leave, spare anyone who ever be it. Her youth and beauty are also as such doomed to be shrunken and shrivelled. Though none can lift her veil, instead of that it will slip through the  passage of time one day when sorrow will peep into the eyes of hers to find that she is also after all a woman and her breast filled with the milk of human kindness which but she cannot forsake it. Who can check tears from her eyes falling, tricking down the cheeks? A woman’s tears only a woman can know it, not a man, only a female, not a male.

The Pardah Nashin as a poem describes a veiled beauty peeping through the purdah, the veil, the hijab or the naqab, the headscarf or the covering over the face. But when she peeps, looks through the lattices it strikes a different chord. A tailor can explain it well as it is also a fact that clothing has a say all through the poem directly or indirectly as we cannot do without taking the dress, attire and reflection into our scrutiny and assessment. Her looks through the lattices piercing may also hint towards Arjuna’s looking of the bird-eye for archery if to compare and contrast with differently. Her looks also may relate to the stories of the modern-day lens-eyed looks of the spectacled, powered girls.

While reading the poem, several pictures come to the eyes as if someone from the country were going on the bullock-cart driving it hurriedly to meet and bid goodbye to the theatre girl acquainted with at the village fair ground and in the meantime the train whistling off from the halt with the things of heart remaining unshared, unsaid to with the strange heroine met by chance and fallen in love with strangers which she should not have done it. The other image may be of someone peeping through the house arrest or the prison cell. The other image may be of a green, red-necked parrot lying caged and speaking ‘Buti bhejo, Sita-Rama, Sita-Ram, Gopiji, buti, buti bhejo’. The situation is almost like that.  The poem also conjures up the image of the clouded skies and the moon shining through. When we think of the purdah system, the Sati system, child marriage and the widows subjected to tyranny also dance before the eyes. Once the purdah system wreaked havoc and India grappled with, struggled to come through casteism, illiteracy, backwardness, underdevelopment, poverty, hunger and above all, inaction, lethargy, fatalism and belief in the Unknown. The last of all, not the least, is Sarojini Naidu the James Joyce or the Henry James of The Pardah Nashin? Is she the Dark Lady of Shakespeare?