Nissim Ezekiel: Bijay Kant Dubey

 I took her to a cinema, we saw

The lovers kiss, we saw the jealous man

With subtle comradeship upset their plan

And how their love compelled him to withdraw.

----Nissim Ezekiel in the poem ‘An Affair’ from A Time To Change collection

(Nissim Ezekiel, Collected Poems, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, Third impression, 2007, p. 11)

Between the acts of wedded love

A quieter passion flows,

Which keeps the nuptial pattern firm

As passion comes and goes,

And in the soil of wedded love

Rears a white rose.

----In the poem ‘Marriage Poem’ taken from Sixty Poems collection

(Ibid, p.46)

People have discussed Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) in their own way, taking his poetry from the first modern poet point of view, making his tryst with destiny in the post-independence period, calling him the beginner of modernism, though there is nothing like that as because K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar himself refers to as one of the new poets and Nissim has been included in ‘The New Poets’ chapter of Indian Writing in English, taking together Shahid Suhrawardy, Manjeri S.Isvaran, P.R.Kaikini, Krishan Shungloo and others even before him. In the beginning, he too like Lal and others used to send poems to C.R.Mandy as for giving a breakthrough in the issues of the Illustarted Weekly of India, which the editor reported to Iyengar by saying that he felt corroded with the bad quality of the verses written by the Indians, but had been still hopeful of getting a talent. Even before Nissim there had been Tagore, Aurobindo and Harindrananth to show the traits of modernism. Apart from them, some were there to make us felt their presence. If we go through the texts of the 1960’s, they will themselves speak of the position. Indian English poetry then had been nowhere. Just the people used to read them in the literary essays section and we used to waver between Indo-Anglian or Indo-Anglican. If we turn over the older syllabuses, we shall come to mark. M.K.Naik’s A History of Indian English Literature itself appeared in 1980 and the first prize ever to an Indian English poet went to Jayanta Mahapatra as for Relationship in 1980. Nissim too had been a writer of some middle order, but evolved in due course of time. It is also true side by side that journalism kept him alive and he felt stimulated from time to time as for being a Bomabayan. Even after the Nobel to Tagore, the men on the syllabus committee for English in different universities wavered in prescribing the poems from Gitanjali to M.A. students, barring sporadic and stray instances. Virtually, from the eighties or the nineties, we have started to keep it going. Something it has been done quite under the advice and suggestion given by the UGC, its peer teams and committees.

Several things have gone into the making of Nissim Ezekiel the poet and his growth and development as a writer of Indian verse. The first is he received his education from a convent school which he speaks of and later on moved to England for a brief stay and returned back to as it happened with R.Parthasarathy. Secondly, he had been a modern man, a Bombayan who grew up in the negation of Aurobindo and his trends. Thirdly, he was a teacher of Bombay University. Fourthly, a freelancer he was and an editor of literary journals. But no other poet is questioned, interrogated so much as he is in his delineation, picturisation and perusal of India, Indian scenes, sites and landscapes. This is as because he fails to understand the myth and psyche of mother India, just views her from a distance, like an alien insider with his outsiderish feeling and emotion. The main thing of being aloof or separated from is his being a Maharashtrian Jew. He has nothing to do with Indian philosohy, spirituality, religion, ethics, morality and metaphysics. The poet as a modern man of the city talks of love marriage, tea parties, honeymoon, love affairs, picnics, outings, valedictions and so on. Outwardly, he appears to be modern, frank and free, but is conservative and orthodox.

There were poets even before Nissim Ezekiel and the tradition has been continuing since, not from him. Think of the time when Ezekiel was not. Just suppose it, feel the vacuum. Many used to write definitely, but dared not publish, as an Indian can be a scholar of English but can never be a Shakespeare, similarly an Englishman can be a scholar of Hindi but can never be a Soor or Tulsi, used to hold true. One should write in one’s own mother tongue? Why to choose the foreign language as the medium of expression? An English woman in a sari used to click before. Even Indian English poetry passed through different tests and ordeals, should it be called Anglo-Indian, Indo-Anglican, Indo-Anglian, Indian poetry in English or Indian English poetry? People debated and discussed over, should the Indians write in English? Finally, the theme of Indianness, a term of some larger connotation came to rescue it. Such a thing was asked in connection with Ezekiel as he had had nothing to do with Indian thought, culture, tradition and philosophy; spirituality, metaphysics and theology. Nissim himself refutes the poetry of Aurobindo and calls himself a convent educated boy writing in English.

On finding none around to publish the books, P.Lal and his friends founded the Writers’ Workshop, Calcutta. Nissim too got the support and benefit from the establishment. A poet of the Bombayan circle of critics, he has definitely got the support of the people otherwise he would not have scaled what we we presume it today. Even in Advanced Literary Essays (Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1961) by Prof.J.N.Mundra and Prof.C.L.Sahni and Quintessence of Literary Essays by W.R.Goodman (Doaba House, New Delhi 1968), we do not find the names of Nissim, Kamala, Jayanta, Ramanujan, Adil and Daruwalla. In Mundra’s book, one can see the names of B.Rajan, Krishan Shungloo, Subho Tagore, Sudhindranath Dutt, V.N.Bhushan, Cyril Modak, Nilima Devi and Adi K. Sett as new poets. In the anthology of poetry, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, published from Sahitya Akademi in 1970, Prof. V.K.Gokak presents the poets on a broader scale rather than concentrating on him merely as the harbinger of modernism in Indian English poetry.

Nissim is a poet of the urban space, modern city life and thought-content. A modern hollow man, he can relate to in that way quite easily. Just love and human relationship form the poetic crux of his story. To laugh at, caricature and joke is the job of the poet and he chuckles merely. A faded romantic, he is not so colourful. He has the desire within to fall in love, but draws the steps back too, as societal rigidity and community obligation continue to nourish him otherwise. A Jew he cannot change himself rather than adhering to it, never can imagine of mixing as the ghettos continue to bind him. He beats the band of love-mariage, but consummates it not and he marries as per arranged lines. India too had been in search of modern poets and we got it in their voices. But modernism is not so easy to be delved deep, as because it comes not poetically, but appliances, apparatuses, comforts, experiences, discoveries, inventions, medicines, fashions, designs, spirits and times too have something to say to and to add to. Logic, reason, fact and fiction have dispelled the darkness within. Humanism, liberalism and development too have the stories to tell them. It has definitely taken time in making the people modern one by one.

If one goes through the poems of Nissim Ezekiel, one may come to mark the influences of the English poets which he is so heavily under, as for example the Elizabethan sonneteers and lyric writers, the metaphysicals, the romantics, the Victorians and the moderns may be referred to. Thomas Wyatt, Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, etc. are some of them whose influences can be definitely felt and marked upon his poetry. The influence of Andrew Marvell, John Milton, George Herbert, John Donne and others can be marked in his psalms. His conversational style has something to owe to T.S.Eliot and Walt Whitman, but his caricature takes to a different plane. The grammar of poesy is certainly not the chief priority of the poet as he intends it not on dabbling in rhetoric and prosody. He just goes on putting them in a free-flowing verse.

In the fifities, he started to publish, but that could not make a way so easily and he took time in growing up, getting famed. As a poet, he went on evolving and substantiating his stance as because had not been so prolific as we think think of now. Ones or twos added to his poetic corpus. He was definitely not a classicist, scholarly in his write-up, but a modern moving along modern life and culture, city living and urbanity, keeping pace with and this added to his corpus, benefited him in a befitting way. Man and his manners, modern life and society, thought and culture had been the topic of his perusal and he perused that too. Irony was his forte; humour the chief property and he continued to regale with these. The India of rural spaces and scapes, the hamlets dark, thinly populated and scattered across a vast stretch of the land, dotting it with their own solitude and away from being human haunt could not draw his pen towards and he felt helpless in taking to. He was blind to the treasure trove of India, its ancient temples and rich legacy of the land, Indian heritage and culture. We often question with regard to him, how far Indian he is and the quest for identity leaves him not behind. He is no doubt a peculiar type of poet, commemorative of private and personal ethics and reflection.

There is nothing as that to look for sublimity in him. The cinema hall, the theatre, the park, the airport, the dockyard, the picnic spot, the restaurant, the salon, the club and the shopping complex, this is the hub of his city-centric poetry. A poet of Bombay, the ever growing city with the pace of time, the metropolitan to the mega city, engages him. He is a poet of birthday gifts, marriage parties, love letters and goodbye parties. Please, thank you, good morning, good evening, good night, kindly, bye-bye, ta-ta, see you again, etc. are the things of his etiquette and mannerism. The poet as an observer likes to visit the art galleries, put on display and there he may view the pregnant woman seeing the nudes and feeling ashamed of; in the cinema hall, he will like to propose before, but faltering to kiss and at the hotel the semi-nude of the Cuban dancer will come to the rescue of his delight. I love you, I like you, these are the terms recurring in variety and the poet seems to be inclined after. Valentine cards and roses, bouquets of flowers, new year greeting cards, wedding bells jingling and he going with the gifts, all these things lie in muted well. The boyfriend, the girlfriend and the love story, a quest after beauty, an inclination for and infatuation with, the revellings into the realms of fancy and imagination add to his poetic dimension. The best of the hotels and the hostels he seeks to derive from and to give to. An art critic, he can apply modern art to poetry writing.

In the poem, A Woman Obseved, which happens to be in The Exact Name, he pictures a pregnant woman viewing the nudes at the art gallery:

I watch her sadly as

she leaves the place, my eyes

embracing all that sensual

movement bursting through the dress.

(Collected Poems, ibid, p.140)

Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd To His Love, Edmund Spenser’s One Day I Wrote Her Name, Sir Philip Sidney’s Loving in Truth, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus? and Forget Not Yet , Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, John Donne’s The Sun Rising, etc. seem to take the canvas away from him and he dwells far, into the realms of love and its dreams and promises.

Holding the tongue in cheek, Nissim chuckles, never to let them into guffaws, just keeps beaming with joy, discerning it all, really a critical person. Maybe it that he is not scholastic, pedantic, classical and great from the old and medieval point of view, but is definitely a great poet, a classical romantic he is no doubt, if to review that from a different perspective of delving. The things which are easily accessible in the English poets are predominant in him and he excels in assimilating them. A romantic poet he is, but differently, without a deceptive appearance. Outwardly, he appears to be ludicrous, humorous, ironical and satiric, pontifical and hypocritical, but from the inward within of his, he is but highly philosophical and metaphysical. It is difficult to judge a talent like that of Ezekiel as because sometimes he appears to be too much trite and hackneyed, but is not so at all.

Sometimes the ordariness of expression takes us aback, sometimes the irony of conversational English punctuated by a foreign learner’s desire to learn and practice spoken English, which is but ludicrous English, one committing mistakes to be proficient in. Such a thing Somerset Maugham too speaks about in his prose-piece, Learning to Write. Several stenos and clerks too turn into knowledgeable persons in the long run. Many lawyers too without having a base in English learn to pefect it in the end. Too much erring and instead of it, the forcible continuation too teaches us awkwardly to be dextetous. Nissim should also take a note of it that the geography department teacher’s somehow carried on English is just the one side of the picture while on the other many of our English tachers fail to deliver in English, speak hesitatingly, haltingly, who later on may take over as or turn into university heads and good professors of English, guides and resource persons.

Nissim’s poetry is an exercise in spoken English, one practising, taking the tips to learn it, one following how do the people use and apply it and that too where in India. English is used in getting the cases and complaints lodged; the diaries being entered into at the police station and they writing in their own way, whatever pidgin-English coming into the mind, the policemen entering into, erring to perfect it. The school, the college, the court campus and all other offices are the places where it is applied in. Some trying to be oversmart too like to converse in English. To use a few English words once was a matter of pride. Even the illiterate villagers used to appreciate and talk of. Even the illiterate peons of the convent schools too in the long run develop their common sense as for understanding the speech. Just through the patriot and his usage of English, Nissim is caricaturing the monkeyish disciples of the iconic, father-figure, Mahatma Gandhi. The British prisoners, but our freedom fighters, in their aping of Gandhi and Gandhism, sometimes seem to have befooled. Some of them had not been freedom fighters, but turned they into as for pension. Some of them were very blunt and were lathi-wielding. Had they been not aggressive, the English too would not have left, is also the other side of the truth. Specially, the half-wits, the half-learned fellows are the butts of his humour. While discussing Nissim’s poems centring round the half-learned people’s English, it comes to the fore, the little-read fathers-in-law taking the interview of the simple and rural girls, asking them, what’s your father’s name, the composition of tea-making and others to be responded back in broken English. Sometimes even the street roamers and loafers, who do not like to read and write, but go on roaming, passing time and spending father’s money, too like to perform well, starting their career from the profession of a salesman or a business executive, an agent of a company or a medical representative.

While reading the poem, Marriage, several things come to the mind’s plane, as such, what is love, what is marriage and what the workings of these. Perhaps love does not remain the same love started earlier. Sacred and sacrosanct love, promised with never to part ways, gets care-worn, anxiety-ridden in due course of time and its duration. Situations and circumstances perturb and perplex it. Human lust and greed unquenchable and hankering after more, propelled by ever changing Nature, seem to take to its own recourse. Similar is the case with husband and wife, lover and beloved, bride and bridegroom. In the sensual and sensuous pleasures of man, lie in the stories of man’s temptation and fall from heaven and Cain’s mark. For sometime, one may feel blissful, but the things which go on affecting will continue to work for fissure and fission and this is the way of the world and of man. Man will definitely get lured towards Eve; they will take the forbidden fruit and be expelled from the garden of bliss and paradise. What Nissim here seeks to say is the temptation for gold, wine and beauty. Nissim’s poem Marriage is almost like Joyce’s sketch, Araby. Something of the daydreaming of Lamb’s Dream Children is here. Just like a newly modern boy, as Gandhiji once used to copy the English in dress, manner and etiquette, Nissim too tries to do that. There is a fascination for Christian life and love, their attitude and manner. His phraseology actually moves around love affair, honeymoon, birthday party and a visit to the cinema hall. Once upon a time people used to rush in to the cinema halls and many a love-story used to culminate and coincide with thereon. Many a college girl, in a tabooed society of ours, used to meet under the pretext of exchanging books and notes. Nissim as a poet too is a lover of this type who will like to visit the cinema hall to share the unsaid feelings of the heart. He just keeps dreaming about love-affair, but can never consummate it.

In the poem, The Couple, the lover appears wonderful to the beloved and vice versa which is no doubt a novel expression to take us by storm. Both of them remain glued to each other, which is but magnetic attraction. Nissim as a modern age city boy has the idea of all that it happens in love. The co-educational convent schools are the best place to study and experience it. Apart from it, a Bombayan he has experience of making love in the park and the garden. Valentine’s Day is specific in this regard, but who will be the Valentine of Nissim?

The first stanza from The Couple may be quoted to illustrate the point:

Indolence and arrogance

were rooted in her primal will,

a woman to fear, not to love,

yet he made love to her

(who can say he loved her?)

and damn the consequences.

(Vilas Sarang, Edited by, Indian English Poetry Since 1950: An Anthology, Disha Books, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, Reprinted 2007, p.44)

The last stanza of the poem throws the light on the poem:

To love her was impossible,

to abandon her unthinkable.

He had to make love to her,

a charade of passion and possession

in which some truth was found in her.

(Ibid, p.44)

By calling her wonderful, Nissim just wants to make her puff with pride and to look back in amazement when the bird gets netted or trapped. The poet has overpraised her to win over and this none can do but a modern like Nissim himself. Both of them keep saying to each other, the beloved hearing it and smiling, which God knows it, who is actually wonderful? One can learn the tactics of love-making from him. How clever is he!

Nissim is a master poet of spoken English and its nuances, specially Indian English speech and accent is the thing of his delineation and he seeks to derive from it, taking it to be the matter of poetry. It is a mistake with the Indians that they like to master grammar rather than taking exercises in language. Such a tendency has been continuing from Panini and his texts. A strict grammarian cannot be a good literary man.

In the poem, which he is so acclaimed for, namely Night of The Scorpion, the poet recrerates an Indian scene, where his mother stung by a scorpion lies unconscious and writhing in pain and burning sensation. The poet sees her so helpless before together with the coming and going peasants. The village folks with the lamps burning dimly and their shadows cast before and the steady rains continuing in for sometime more picture the canvas of the poem. The incessant rains perhaps have forced the scorpion to crawl beneath a knapsack and taking a chance bit it. People search for the creature, but they fail to trace. This is as usual which takes place in every village home.

After the bite, the exorcists and herbalists make a way into the scene. With the village folks in the background as the audience, the mother at the centre of all activity, the herbalist applies the herbal paste to chill and comfort the bite. The priestly men try to tame the poison through mantric incantation while his father, a sceptic and a rationalist applies the paraffin oil and gives a lit match stick to it. The flames feed upon for a while. In the midst of all this, one can overhear the people talking of bhoga, we mean suffering. Such a thing it had been in her previous karma and now it has got lessened. Someone ends on a note of benediction that it is a harbinger of the lessening of sin if be any in the next birth. There is an Indian calculation of past karma and dharma in Night of The Scorpion poem and here one can find it how he is at home in the use of indirect Indianness.

Nissim as an observer holds a low profile, he goes on marking all this with his mother at the centre of all that hectic activity and the specialists treating in their own way and the well-wishers and neighbours wishing Godspeed and recovery while the villain at large, we mean the wicked scorpion with the diabolic tail, the catalist of all that absconding, whom the curses even cannot curse. Nissim as a Jewish man marks the Indian scene and happening in the aftermath of a scorpion bite in the poem, Night of The Scorpion.

In the poem, Background, Casually, the poet in a funny way tries to introduce himself, by calling, how ‘A poet-rascal-clown was born’, one of lean and thin structure, he makes a way through the diverse majority communities, his being a mugging Jew, whom the Christians will take otherwise, the Hindus in their own. As a boy, he failed to spin a top, nor could he fly the kites so smoothly. This brings enough joy for him to feel, be it the developed or undeveloped place, he is happy to be where he is now.

One from from Shanwar Teli caste, Saturday oil-presser caste, his experience tells a different tale, how did the hooded bullocks make the rounds as for crushing seeds for bread. Their ancestors took to oil pressing soon after their arrival in India. A rabbi-saint, instead of his wish or trial, he can never be, he is what he ahd to be. Nissim Ezekiel’s Background, Casually is more powerful and beautiful than that of Kamala Das’ An Introduction. To turn and twist and present the things is the job of Nissim and he does it so eloquently. To take the matters lightly and jocularly and to regale and to recreate is his poetic art, craft and technique.

Nissim seems to be serving, offering Indian chutney or European sauce and this can be felt in his poem Goodbye Party For Miss Pushpa T. S., as it is in other poems too. God knows, who is this Pushpa? Is she a sister or a girl of acquaintance in disguise? Nissim all the time keeps us in the dark with regard to identity, letting it go, changing the topic quite often to bemuse us. Here, just using coming, going, eating or sleeping, he recreates the whole scene. Pushpa is going to foreign and he is there to see her off. Pushpa is smiling and smiling to hear the English of Nissim as and when he says it that there is not only external sweetness in her, but some internal sweetness too is therein. We do not know it if the others have found or not, but he is good at pumping and puncturing. He can make one climb the palm tree and drink juice and at the same time has the guts of cutting the tree underneath. The juice-taker will come to feel what lies in the pleasure of taking at the cost of excitement.

To read Nissim Ezekiel is to smile sometimes, burst into a laughter all alone. Peculiar things he says them in a peculiar and humourous way. There is of course something of a commentator or an advertiser or an anchorman in him; an announcer he can recreate us entertainingly. Even if one asks him to pray or keep silence for a few moments by closing the eyes, he cannot keep still rather will make you burst into a laughter through his antics and activities.

The conservative husbands of the purdahwalli wives will themselves will love to read him if they get a chance to go through his verses, as for example, the poem entitled In India, taken from The Exact Name :

The wives of India sit apart.

They do not drink,

they do not talk,

of course, they do not kiss.

The men are quite at home

among the foreign styles

(what fun the flirting is!)

I myself, decorously,

press a thigh or two in sly innocence.

The party is a great success.

( Collected Poems, p.133)

To read Nissim Ezekiel is to come to feel it that he is not a yogi, but a bhogi and whoever claims it to be solely, it is really difficult to be. God knows, who is whose guru? Sometimes even the saints fail to keep themselves in control; we mean the pseudo-sadhus and their leaked in stories of life. In one poem, the poet sees the world full of girls and poetry as the language of lovers and he finding it in his prosaic poetry and the poem is none but The Language of Lovers for our kind pereusal. Under the pretext of putting the words through the mouth of a foolish critic, he clears the things of his heart tactically. The Egoists’ Prayers even twist and turn the dialogues taking place between him and God and it is quite clear that he can never be devout and dutiful as the personal works are too many to devote to and he is definitely not one among the chosen few to be mindful of his duties.

Creative Poetry, How To be Poetical? How To Write Poetry And Contribute To?

 By Bijay Kant Dubey

It is a fact that one cannot discern and dislodge the cultural stuff, so is the case, as because even if we want to be impersonal, it is bound to reflect the racial, archetypal and territorial stuffs. Myths and motifs are a part of our life. One cannot so easily the legacy of thought and idea, the historical past and the hinge of the cultural heritage. The psyche is composed of the consciousness layers.  Time, Western and Eastern, mechanical and cosmic, how to put in? How to tell about samay, kaal, bela, prahar and danda, which is what? How the vidhan, code of danda? The jurisprudence of punishment? Here time has been deliberated upon mythically and archetypally. Cutting the space of Indian manna, I am trying to take it out what it our psyche, manna.

Main samay hun,/  Akshay samay hun,/ Akshay aur amar samay,/ Samay, kaal, gati/ Jiski koi  sima nahi hoti hain,/ Main samay hun,/ Samay ka chakka/ Jo ghumata rahata hun,/ Sab kucch mere under .( I am Time,/ Indestructible Time,/Indestructible and immortal,/Time, tense, movement which have no limit,/ I am Time,/ The Wheel of Time/ Which keeps it rotating,/ Everything but under me.)

 

Samay Ki Mutthi Mei, Everything But Under The Clutch of Time can be a subordinate title. If you want to title the poem simply, you may call it, Mai Samay Hun, I Am Time. The other option for it may be Akshay Samay, Indestructible time which is but a suggestion. Mai Akashay, Akshay Samay Hun, I Am Indestructible, Indestructible Time may add to rhyming it more as a title suggested again.

To see the flower and to imagine romantically is but the European way of deliberation which but the romantics can think of taking the flight of imagination, gliding in their way. Here the picture of a dream girl conjures upon, a romantic girl standing with a bouquet of flowers. A flower princess she herself presents it the bouquet. Can the lady love be as such? Here Rajanaigandha has been personified. Sometimes a beautiful girl, strangely fair and white stands before you unawares and you on looking her seek to scribble and jot down spontaneously.

Rajanigandha mere ghar ki dahaliz ke paas/ Phulon ka guccha liyei huyi khadi dene ke liye/ Kucch khamosh, kucch sahami huyi/ Apnei aanshuyon ko poncchatin huyi/ Oshabhari raat kahi jaati huyi,/ Kya yahi pyaar hai? (Rajanigandha at my doorstep/ Standing with a bouquet of flowers to gift/Somewhat silent, somewhat stricken/ Wiping the tears of hers/ Leaving under the misty night for somewhere,/ Is this love?)

Wei pucchatei hain,/ Kavita kya hoti hain?,/ Kaisei batayun,/ Kavita kya cheez hoti hain?,/ Kavita kavita ke liyei. (They ask it, / What is poetry?,/ But how to say,/ What is it poetry?,/ Poetry is for poetry.)

What is poetry? It is really very difficult to define it. Poetry is poetry, as take you, take I. Poetry is a flow of emotions and feelings. Sometimes one feels it within to express the inexpressible, the unputdownable on paper.

Poetry writing is an art and the poetry-writer as an artist tries to convert his experiences and memories into that art, transfusing it all. A poem is but an idea, a reflection, a symbol, a motif, a myth, a dream, and an imagination.  A poem is but a photograph hanging on the wall. When we were children, we used to see the photograph of Abraham Lincoln. Bapu’s smile, have you forgotten it? How sweet is it even now! The old man smiling sweetly and innocently.

To be a poet is to be a man of emotion and feeling, to be sentimental and sensitive. To be a poet is to be sensuous, a lover of beauty, truth and goodness, always in search of beauty.

The sentimental heart is the origin of poetry and here from poetry originates it, as the mind perceives, observes and restores the images.

Chandni raaton mei/ Mei tumhei khojata hun,/ Meri ruha tumhari ruha se/Baatei karti hai,/ Tum kahan ho,/ Tum kahan ho? (In the moonlit nights/ I search you,/ My soul with your soul/ Holds the talks,/ Where are you,/ Where are you?) (Title: Pyaar Ka Geet, The Song of Love)

Pyaar ka geet eisa hi hota. (The song of love is as such.) The other thing, Bhagwan ka ghar kahan, hriday hi hota hai, where the house of God, it is but human heart.

Mandir kahan hain?,/ Wah to manna mei hai,/ Mann ko cchodkar,/Tum khoj rahe ho unko kahan? (Where is the temple?,/That is in the manna,/ Leaving you manna,/ Where do you keep searching Him?)  (Title: Manna Mandir, The Temple of Heart)

Akeli ladaki,/ Jaayegi kahan,/ Jivan ke shua path par? (All alone girl,/ Where will she go,/ On the lonely path of life?)

Shuna Jeevan-path, Lonely Life-path may be a title suggested for it. The poems could have been titled right from the start, but these have been at last and the titles too have been coming to rhythmically.

Seva se badhakar,/ Koi dharma nahi,/ Lekin koi jo karte nahi/ Ab. (There is nothing as greater,/ Religion than service,/But nobody does it/ Now-a-days.)

Seva, Service is the title that I cannot suggest it here. Mera Dharam-karam, My Religion-duty can be another option for it.

 

 

Kaisa jo wah hoga,/ Ram ka geet ga raha,/ Krishan ka geet ga raha,/ Kaisa jo wah Rama-bhakta,/ Krishna-bhakta? ( How will he be,/ Singing  the song of Rama,/ Singing the song of  Krishna,/ How that Ram-bhakta,/ Krishna-bhakta?)

Apnei aanshuyon ko ponnccha,/ Rama ka geet ga raha,/ Krishna ka geet ga raha. (Wiping tears of his eyes,/ Singing the song of Rama,/ Singing the song of Krishna.)

Waha kahi dur khada,/ Dur khada,/ Dur desh ka yaatri. (He standing somewhere far,/  Standing far,/ The traveller from far off land.)

How to title it? What should it be? The matter is one from Strange Singer of Rama. A poem of three stanzas here we want to title it, Kaisa Jo Wah Ram Ka Bhakta, Krishna Ka Bhakta? (How That Rama’s Bhakta, Krishna’s Bhakta?) And in addition to the title, we seem to be questioning even that additionally, Kaisi Jo Usaki Bhakti? (How Is That His Devotion?).

Jab apanei log parayei ho jatei hain/ To usase badhakar/ Dukha hi kya? (When the own people turn they into others/ Then what it is bigger than/ That of sorrow and suffering?) Title: Kaisa Lagaa, Boliyei?, How Did You Feel That, Speak You?

‘Kaisa Lagaa, Boliyei?, How Did You Feel That, Speak You?’ is but a life-experience, what this life has given to me and what have I got from it. As these are bilingual poems, so the tiles and their versions exist side by side. Try to choose one.

 

Devadasi, kya yogan bana,/ Gujar jaayengi,/Tumhari raatei? (Devadasi, will becoming a yogan,/ Pass it on/Your nights?)

Yaha kiski sajish,/ Ab to bata,/ O, Devadasi,/ Rahana nahi mandiron mei? (Whose is this conspiracy,/ Now say you,/ O, Devadasi,/ Need not live in temples?)

Devadasi or Kiski Saajish may be the title of the poem. One may also title it, Devadasi, Yah Kiski Sajish? (Devadasi, Whose Is This Conspiracy?). Generally, oracle-makers, soothsayers, astrologers, palmists, florists and other middle men would have brought her here. The first late child may have been coaxed to be here. The astrologers and fortune-tellers would have persuaded the parents to gift the first new-born to be consecrated to Divine services rendered in the form of temple-serving maids which but I resisted it on seeing them for the first time in rock-built temples. Now say you, how will she live in the company of stone gods and goddesses? How will she pass her nights? It is definitely good to serve the gods and goddesses, but not to be by being there. The temples may be classical, the priests may be too, but their hearts not reasonable and logical at all. The whispering villagers and conspiring Brahmins have I never admired them in life.

Vishwanath ke mandir mei,/ Mera manna,/ Shahanai bajata huya. (In the temple of Vishwanath,/ My manna/ Playing the shehnoi.)

Main nahi janata,/ Wah raag-bhairavi yaa kaushiki? (I do not know,/ If that raag-bhairavi or kaushiki?)

Dhanyavad, dhanyavad/ Shir jhukakar thoda, haath uthakar abhivadan mei.(Thank you, thank you,/ Bowing the head a bit, raising the hand in greeting.)

A poem of three small stanzas, Baba Ke Mandir Mei Ek Shehnoi-vadak, A Shehnoi-player In The Temple of Baba is the title I seem to be suggesting to you. One line which came to me later on is ‘Shuniyei’ (Listen you) from, but I did not like it to be included in as one more stanza interrupting the design of the poem. Baba Ke Mandir Mei here indicates Vishwanath Ke Sang, In The Company of Vishwanath. It may be the main pagoda or the courtyard, be it anywhere.

Mere manna mandir mei,/ Wah kaun shi pujaran/ Phul chadhanei aatin hain? (In my temple of manna,/ Who is the worshipper/ Coming with flowers to offer?)

Should I title it, Prem-pratigya, Love-oath or Prem-pujaran, A Love-worshipper, now say you to me?

Sometimes sadness overtakes us and we seem to be possessed of, grappling to come out emotionally. The repentance, struggle and suffering of life, how to put in? How have sorrows raked us? How have we mourned and wept inconsolably? God even did not come in to wipe them out, the tears trickling down the cheeks.

Kitanei badal jo gayei,/ Log jo yahan/ Jo panei thei! (How have they changed,/ The people/ Who were so much own!) Ttile: Badalatei Log, Badaletei Samay, Changing Men, Changing Times

Badalatei Log, Badaletei Samay, Changing Men, Changing Times hints towards a change in our attitude and thinking. Things do not remain the same. Everything changes with time.

Teri aankhon se bahatei,/ Aanshuyon ko/Ponccha jo/Shaka nahi,/ Mera dard, mera dukha!(The tears/ Flowing from your eyes/ Could not/Wipe them,/ My pain, my sorrow!)

Sometimes one fails to render into line by line, just the meaning is converted into so is the case  with the poem written in the memory of my youngest brother. Mera Dard, My Pain I would like to title it. There are two titles, one for the Hindi version another for the English version.

Shraddha ke phul jo bikhar gayei,/ Kaisei karu jo puja-upashana? (Scattered it the flowers of reverence,/ How to worship with the sacred heart?)

Here there is a variation from in the second English line of the poem. It should have been, how to do worship, prayer?, but here the other thing has been attached to instead of. How to title it? If you do not, let me, Shraddha Ke Suman, Flowers of Reverence and this is but faith and its flickering.

Roshani chali gayi,/ Andhera hain,/ Ghup andhera. (Light has gone out,/ There is darkness,/ Deep darkness.)

Kshin Hota Prakash, Diminishing Light may be the title suggested here in an experimental way.

Ek madhyaraatri/ Jab mainei apna darwaza khola/ Bahar baansa ke pole se jhulata/Mitti ke asthi-kalasha ko dekha/ Maan nahi/ Uski naabhi aur bhashma  mitti ke paatra mei. (One midnight/ When opened I the door/ Outside by the bamboo pole found I hanging/ An earthen small asthi-kalasha/ Mother not/ But her navel and ashes in a clay pot.) Title: Asthi-kalasha

Asthi-kalasha, I want to keep it in Hindi and English as well and I think the meaning is quite clear as for the images, thoughts and ideas it carries with along.

 

Pinda-dana,/ Bhuta ke liye,/ Diwnagagata atma ki/ Shanti ke liyei. (Pinda-dana,/ For the spirit,/ The dead soul/ The peace of it.) Title: Pinda-dana

Pinda-dana is actually a journey of the soul, from earth to earth, wind to wind, spirit to spirit, water to water and fire to fire. The soul has merged into the Supreme Soul and what more to say to? The path of life is almost the same. Everyone has to go bare-footed, empty-handed. Let Buddha be our guide. Om shantih shantih shantih.

Mera kucch bhi nahi yahan,/ Khali haath yaya hun,/ Khali haath chala jaayunga/ Yahan se.(I have nothing my own here,/ I have come empty-handed,/  Empty-handed shall I go away/ From here.) Title: Khali Haath, Empty-handed

Pehle bhi akela thaa,/ Abhi bhi hun/ Akelapan cchodata jo nahi. (In the beginning had been all alone,/ Even now am alone,/ Loneliness leaves me it not.) Title: Main Aur Mera Sathi, I And My Companion

Khali Haath, Empty-handed, Main Aur Mera Sathi, I And My Companion, are the poems which I do not want to say it about. Now it is your turn to say.

 

 

Freedom by Jayanta Mahapatra

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

What the others have left he seems to be describing, taking up for an evaluation, a re-evaluation  as for what did we promise at the time of the attainment of freedom and what we got, how have we stood up to the promises made and pledged? Now the time for realization has come, the time for re-assessment. The tales of freedom, who to tell it? The situation is just like the radio talk of George Bernard Shaw broadcast over the BBC, London in which the dramatist seeks to know what it is freedom, who a freeman and how the types of freedom. Are we free really? Who can be free? So is the case herein. To see it in other words, it is but Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It is not the talk of Jayanta Mahapatra, but of every conscious human being, what have we for the widows, daughters and poor people? What have for the hopeless and the helpless? What have we for the desperate and the devastated? The  answer which but every conscious being will say, we have done nothing  for them. We have done nothing for those who expect it from. We do not think the women are in a better state even now. Many live below the poverty line. Still now many go half-fed, half-clothed. Many do not have the cots to sleep on. The small hutments, mud houses, they leak it badly during the rainy days, so shivering with cold during the wintry days and so full of humidity during the summertime.

The poet starting the poem in the likewise manner says it that he feels it at times his country’s body floats it into the river. He just imagines about to suppose that if sinks down or keeps floating the river, what will it happen? Just like a boat it will keep floating. The  things will remain half-submerged, hidden from wide view as it happens during the rainy days with the flood warning when the villages go under water and the people run for rescue centres if any in the suburbs

Left alone, he grows into a half-disembodied bamboo whose lower part is sunk into the bank. In this context we may hear the Tennysonian lines as said in The Brook,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever. 

From the river-bank the poet notices it all, the river and the people, the boats and the boatmen floating on the waters.

Here old widows and dying men cherish for to be free from. But the body does not freed so easily. Only prayers cannot give them all.  What will a life of inaction give to? Does God hear the prayers of the inactive? God is in action. Blind faith cannot lead us far. Blind faith cannot give us food. God helps those who help themselves, is the thing of reckoning.

Children too talk of freedom nurturing and nourishing the dreams of it in an ideal way, thinking highly of it, upholding noble ideas. But they know it not what it is freedom. What the meaning of freedom? Freedom is just an imagination, a thought and an idea. Can you say, what do you understand  by it? What do I? Are you free? Am I free? Do you not encroach or infringe upon someone’s rights? Practically we are not free. Theoretically and idealistically we are free. Freedom is that which one feels it after reading ‘Where the mind is without fear’. Khushwant Singh’s columns too speak of freedom and liberty even though does he mazak with us, comic, caricature and joke.

At times, as I watch,
it seems as though my country's body
floats down somewhere on the river.

Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.

Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.

While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.

In my blindness, at times I fear
I'd wander back to either of them.

In order for me not to lose face,
it is necessary for me to be alone.

Not to meet the woman and her child
in that remote village in the hills
who never had even a little rice
for their one daily meal these fifty years.

And not to see the uncaught, bloodied light
of sunsets cling to the tall white columns
of Parliament House.

In the new temple man has built nearby,
the priest is the one who knows freedom,
while God hides in the dark like an alien.

And each day I keep looking for the light
shadows find excuses to keep.

Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it's alone.

The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal,
the beds of streams of the sleeping god.

I keep the ashes away,
try not to wear them on my forehead.

On the one hand the pontifical and hypocritical ones talk of being over religious, but while on the other the people lie underdeveloped, hungry and distraught, so devastated in their life. The hamlets tell of their poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, living below the poverty line under miserable conditions. What does freedom mean to them?

But the sunsets glowing around the white pillars of Parliament House tell it otherwise taking to different panorama of life. Who are sitting therein? Who not? How the stories of it? The stories of people and the lands? How the story of the house? Who made it and when? And who leased it? Is it of the architects and masons? Or, of time? Is it of lawmakers or of people and their representatives? Who represents whom? How direct narration, indirect narration? Their voices sometimes echo and re-echo it in the house, but the people fail to hear it. The voices of agony, anguish, distress, bruise, distress, trouble, tribulation, struggle, suffering, pity, pathos and loss, a few can hear and overhear it.

In the new temple built near it, the priest knows what freedom is, but God seems to be hiding as an alien. How peculiar is the concept? How the oblique approach of the poet? What is religion? Where is God? Which is what and what is whose? Is God Daridranarayana or in kangal-bhojana? This too is a point of deliberation which but Adi Shankaracharya felt it once as Shiva showed him in the form of.

Each day he thinks of being light, hopes to be enlightened with, but darkness seems to be enveloping in. Darkness leaves him not alone and with the excuses it seems to be escaping each and every time.

An idea, a thought has both negative and positive aspects. The Gita too says it, ‘Annad bhavanti bhutani’, ‘The world is created from food or the things from food’, translate you as thus.

Do you want to see the land with the eyes of the unfed and the uncovered people? Try to know from them who have not been fed well. The eyes will tell a saga of life. The hungry stomach and the thirsty lips will tell the story of life as felt and experienced, trouble and tribulation faced and borne.

It is a different poem so indifferent in thought and idea, image and reflection. To quote in the words of William Wordsworth, we have grown too much worldly as the world is too much with us. But apart from all this, nothing can cut the base of existentialism, nothingness and nihilism. What are our institutions for? What is our purpose? What do we want? Do the humans not err? Are we sincere? What is the thing that is not intentional? The every work that do we is but self-tending.

Have we not heard, ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’?

The only freedom he has known it in life is but the freedom of the body. Putting the anti-thesis the poet says in the manner of G.B.Shaw, but Donne too says it but in a metaphysical way in Death, Be Not Proud.

To be religious is not to be blind to logic and reason. To be metaphysical is not to too much superstitious, mythical and mystical, unnecessarily supernatural. Along with karma, dharma too is important. To be a karmayogin too is a thing to be reckoned with. Only to talk about the sleeping gods is not good at all. Smearing the forehead with the ash, he does not want to look over religious and mystical. Rather than being hypocritical and pontifical, he wants to go in his own way.

To talk to, revert to freedom and its tale is to be back to the children, widows and poor people and to hear from them the tales of their hard life. So, rather than losing one’s face one needs to be silent. Why to say them all? Why to critique in a discerning way if the people like it not to hear the candid stories of freedom, liberty and independence?

Who is a legislator, who a lawmaker? What was he? What had  he been when he was not? We do not want to discuss these. Who knows rule and regulation in what way we cannot say it. Something one learns from the chair.  After all we are human beings full of errors and omissions, failures and foibles. Are we for law? If we are asked to say keeping the hands on the Gita, can we?

Law and justice? Are these the voice of the heart? Is law not a document? Say, who is for justice? Is justice not compassion? Who is a judge? Is he not a man? Who is whose? Who a criminal? Why is he a criminal? Is he a man or not? We do not understand. How the Jurisprudence of God we do not know it, it is beyond the comprehension of human mind!

Is the court for litigation or reconciliation? Or should, there be some acquittals? The lapses of law, how to compromise with? Something needs to be borrowed from dhamma.

I too thought it similarly while celebrating the fifty years of India with some thinking which I kept ruminating. What have we for the widows, women and children? For the poor daughters of India? What did we for the old men? For the addicts? Did we ever think of making rehabilitation centres? Did we ever about the making of the old man houses? Could we eradicate poverty? Could we do away with hunger?

Such a thing it is in political science and its theories and the consequences of historical movements. Democracy, equality and fraternity, good is the message of the French revolution, but what did we do to the king’s family, the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian revolution, we appreciate it for socialism, uniting the labourers of the world, admiring the dignity of labour, but what did we do the Czar family? Democracy turned into a chaos and socialism in proletariat dictatorship.

The jurisprudence of law is something different, is but the metaphysical side of it. Situations, circumstances and times keep changing. Everything does not remain the same. The  chariot of time keeps it rotating. What we see it today will not be tomorrow. What it seems to be is nothing and nothing is what it seems to be. The charkha of fate too keeps spinning. What one will become none can predict it. Not even the astrologers and palmists. Do they know their fate? The history of land, the history of time, the history of man, we know it not. The history of the house the house-builders know it well, but we take it not their version, we just enter into, take the version of the kings and their people, we mean the courtiers. Such an anti-thesis it is in George Bernard Shaw even though he may be a propagandist, a monotonous talker. Such an aspect it is in  George Orwell’s Gandhi and elephant shooting essays. Such a thing it is in John Galsworthy. Read them and say you. The  British historians of constitutional history will enlighten upon the topic in hand.

But there is something to learn from R.K.Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day, Oscar Wilde’s The Model Millionaire, O.Henry’s The Last Leaf, Leo Tolstoy’s Three Questions, A.L. Tennyson’s Ulysses, Samuel  Brecht’s  Life of Galileo, K.A Abbas’ The Refugee, Lady Gregory’s Rising of The Moon and so on. Freedom is not of human rights activists or freedom fighters. Freedom is not in charters. Freedom is in the sense of being free; freedom is in the understanding of mass and matter. How to take liberty with the idea is the main. Nissim Ezekiel’s The Patriot and Night of the Scorpion too teach about the clarity of thought and idea.

It is better to be alone and to confide in reckoning. The flight of imagination has always lured us and has a charm of its own. To confute and contradict is not at all good all the times. But the thoughts keep swaying and images swapping positions and places. Allen Ginsberg too lessons it otherwise as for what the digressed and lost generations have given in as for spiritual thirst and search for knowledge abandoning material pleasure. Freedom is not what you think, what I think. Freedom is an experimentation with liberty and while experimenting with, if one fails, the other may make a way for. It will right to conclude the poem with Rousseau’s line:

“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”

What the others have left he seems to be describing, taking up for an evaluation, a re-evaluation  as for what did we promise at the time of the attainment of freedom and what we got, how have we stood up to the promises made and pledged? Now the time for realization has come, the time for re-assessment. The tales of freedom, who to tell it? The situation is just like the radio talk of George Bernard Shaw broadcast over the BBC, London in which the dramatist seeks to know what it is freedom, who a freeman and how the types of freedom. Are we free really? Who can be free? So is the case herein. To see it in other words, it is but Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It is not the talk of Jayanta Mahapatra, but of every conscious human being, what have we for the widows, daughters and poor people? What have for the hopeless and the helpless? What have we for the desperate and the devastated? The  answer which but every conscious being will say, we have done nothing  for them. We have done nothing for those who expect it from. We do not think the women are in a better state even now. Many live below the poverty line. Still now many go half-fed, half-clothed. Many do not have the cots to sleep on. The small hutments, mud houses, they leak it badly during the rainy days, so shivering with cold during the wintry days and so full of humidity during the summertime.

The poet starting the poem in the likewise manner says it that he feels it at times his country’s body floats it into the river. He just imagines about to suppose that if sinks down or keeps floating the river, what will it happen? Just like a boat it will keep floating. The  things will remain half-submerged, hidden from wide view as it happens during the rainy days with the flood warning when the villages go under water and the people run for rescue centres if any in the suburbs. Left alone, he grows into a half-disembodied bamboo whose lower part is sunk into the bank. In this context we may hear the Tennysonian lines as said in The Brook,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

From the river-bank the poet notices it all, the river and the people, the boats and the boatmen floating on the waters. Here old widows and dying men cherish for to be free from. But the body does not freed so easily. Only prayers cannot give them all.  What will a life of inaction give to? Does God hear the prayers of the inactive? God is in action. Blind faith cannot lead us far. Blind faith cannot give us food. God helps those who help themselves, is the thing of reckoning.

Children too talk of freedom nurturing and nourishing the dreams of it in an ideal way, thinking highly of it, upholding noble ideas. But they know it not what it is freedom. What the meaning of freedom? Freedom is just an imagination, a thought and an idea. Can you say, what do you understand  by it? What do I? Are you free? Am I free? Do you not encroach or infringe upon someone’s rights? Practically we are not free. Theoretically and idealistically we are free. Freedom is that which one feels it after reading ‘Where the mind is without fear’. Khushwant Singh’s columns too speak of freedom and liberty even though does he mazak with us, comic, caricature and joke.

At times, as I watch,
it seems as though my country's body
floats down somewhere on the river.

Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.

Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.

While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.

In my blindness, at times I fear
I'd wander back to either of them.
In order for me not to lose face,
it is necessary for me to be alone.

Not to meet the woman and her child
in that remote village in the hills
who never had even a little rice
for their one daily meal these fifty years.

And not to see the uncaught, bloodied light
of sunsets cling to the tall white columns
of Parliament House.

In the new temple man has built nearby,
the priest is the one who knows freedom,
while God hides in the dark like an alien.

And each day I keep looking for the light
shadows find excuses to keep.

Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it's alone.

The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal,
the beds of streams of the sleeping god.

I keep the ashes away,
try not to wear them on my forehead.

On the one hand the pontifical and hypocritical ones talk of being over religious, but while on the other the people lie underdeveloped, hungry and distraught, so devastated in their life. The hamlets tell of their poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, living below the poverty line under miserable conditions. What does freedom mean to them?

But the sunsets glowing around the white pillars of Parliament House tell it otherwise taking to different panorama of life. Who are sitting therein? Who not? How the stories of it? The stories of people and the lands? How the story of the house? Who made it and when? And who leased it? Is it of the architects and masons? Or, of time? Is it of lawmakers or of people and their representatives? Who represents whom? How direct narration, indirect narration? Their voices sometimes echo and re-echo it in the house, but the people fail to hear it. The voices of agony, anguish, distress, bruise, distress, trouble, tribulation, struggle, suffering, pity, pathos and loss, a few can hear and overhear it. In the new temple built near it, the priest knows what freedom is, but God seems to be hiding as an alien. How peculiar is the concept? How the oblique approach of the poet? What is religion? Where is God? Which is what and what is whose? Is God Daridranarayana or in kangal-bhojana? This too is a point of deliberation which but Adi Shankaracharya felt it once as Shiva showed him in the form of.

Each day he thinks of being light, hopes to be enlightened with, but darkness seems to be enveloping in. Darkness leaves him not alone and with the excuses it seems to be escaping each and every time. An idea, a thought has both negative and positive aspects. The Gita too says it, ‘Annad bhavanti bhutani’, ‘The world is created from food or the things from food’, translate you as thus. Do you want to see the land with the eyes of the unfed and the uncovered people? Try to know from them who have not been fed well. The eyes will tell a saga of life. The hungry stomach and the thirsty lips will tell the story of life as felt and experienced, trouble and tribulation faced and borne. It is a different poem so indifferent in thought and idea, image and reflection. To quote in the words of William Wordsworth, we have grown too much worldly as the world is too much with us. But apart from all this, nothing can cut the base of existentialism, nothingness and nihilism. What are our institutions for? What is our purpose? What do we want? Do the humans not err? Are we sincere? What is the thing that is not intentional? The every work that do we is but self-tending.

Have we not heard, ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’?

The only freedom he has known it in life is but the freedom of the body. Putting the anti-thesis the poet says in the manner of G.B.Shaw, but Donne too says it but in a metaphysical way in Death, Be Not Proud.

To be religious is not to be blind to logic and reason. To be metaphysical is not to too much superstitious, mythical and mystical, unnecessarily supernatural. Along with karma, dharma too is important. To be a karmayogin too is a thing to be reckoned with. Only to talk about the sleeping gods is not good at all. Smearing the forehead with the ash, he does not want to look over religious and mystical. Rather than being hypocritical and pontifical, he wants to go in his own way. To talk to, revert to freedom and its tale is to be back to the children, widows and poor people and to hear from them the tales of their hard life. So, rather than losing one’s face one needs to be silent. Why to say them all? Why to critique in a discerning way if the people like it not to hear the candid stories of freedom, liberty and independence?

Who is a legislator, who a lawmaker? What was he? What had  he been when he was not? We do not want to discuss these. Who knows rule and regulation in what way we cannot say it. Something one learns from the chair.  After all we are human beings full of errors and omissions, failures and foibles. Are we for law? If we are asked to say keeping the hands on the Gita, can we? Law and justice? Are these the voice of the heart? Is law not a document? Say, who is for justice? Is justice not compassion? Who is a judge? Is he not a man? Who is whose? Who a criminal? Why is he a criminal? Is he a man or not? We do not understand. How the Jurisprudence of God we do not know it, it is beyond the comprehension of human mind! Is the court for litigation or reconciliation? Or should, there be some acquittals? The lapses of law, how to compromise with? Something needs to be borrowed from dhamma.

I too thought it similarly while celebrating the fifty years of India with some thinking which I kept ruminating. What have we for the widows, women and children? For the poor daughters of India? What did we for the old men? For the addicts? Did we ever think of making rehabilitation centres? Did we ever about the making of the old man houses? Could we eradicate poverty? Could we do away with hunger? Such a thing it is in political science and its theories and the consequences of historical movements. Democracy, equality and fraternity, good is the message of the French revolution, but what did we do to the king’s family, the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian revolution, we appreciate it for socialism, uniting the labourers of the world, admiring the dignity of labour, but what did we do the Czar family? Democracy turned into a chaos and socialism in proletariat dictatorship.

The jurisprudence of law is something different, is but the metaphysical side of it. Situations, circumstances and times keep changing. Everything does not remain the same. The  chariot of time keeps it rotating. What we see it today will not be tomorrow. What it seems to be is nothing and nothing is what it seems to be. The charkha of fate too keeps spinning. What one will become none can predict it. Not even the astrologers and palmists. Do they know their fate? The history of land, the history of time, the history of man, we know it not. The history of the house the house-builders know it well, but we take it not their version, we just enter into, take the version of the kings and their people, we mean the courtiers. Such an anti-thesis it is in George Bernard Shaw even though he may be a propagandist, a monotonous talker. Such an aspect it is in  George Orwell’s Gandhi and elephant shooting essays. Such a thing it is in John Galsworthy. Read them and say you. The  British historians of constitutional history will enlighten upon the topic in hand.

But there is something to learn from R.K.Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day, Oscar Wilde’s The Model Millionaire, O.Henry’s The Last Leaf, Leo Tolstoy’s Three Questions, A.L. Tennyson’s Ulysses, Samuel  Brecht’s  Life of Galileo, K.A Abbas’ The Refugee, Lady Gregory’s Rising of The Moon and so on. Freedom is not of human rights activists or freedom fighters. Freedom is not in charters. Freedom is in the sense of being free; freedom is in the understanding of mass and matter. How to take liberty with the idea is the main? Nissim Ezekiel’s The Patriot and Night of the Scorpion too teach about the clarity of thought and idea. It is better to be alone and to confide in reckoning. The flight of imagination has always lured us and has a charm of its own. To confute and contradict is not at all good all the times. But the thoughts keep swaying and images swapping positions and places. Allen Ginsberg too lessons it otherwise as for what the digressed and lost generations have given in as for spiritual thirst and search for knowledge abandoning material pleasure. Freedom is not what you think, what I think. Freedom is an experimentation with liberty and while experimenting with, if one fails, the other may make a way for. It will right to conclude the poem with Rousseau’s line:

“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”

 

 

 

 

Small Towns and the River: Mamang Dai

By: Bijay Kant Dubey 

Small Towns And The River by Mamang Dai is a poem of Arunchal pradesh where she was born, of Shillong, Meghalaya where she read it, did her schooloing from, of Assam where her graduation with English Honours from Gauhati Universty and it all telling of the cartography and topgraphy of the Northeast of India indirectly, how it was in the past, how it is now, how the indigenous tribes and cultures of it in contrast to as well as taking us far for an ethnogrphic, socio-linguistical study. A poetess from Pasighat, East Siang District, Arunachal Pradesh is first an IAS, but for devoting more time to journalism and literature she chose it otherwise.  A recipient of Padma Shri from the Govt. of India and Sahitya Akademi Award, she comes from the Adi tribe with a folk base of her own deeply rooted into the soil of her land. To read her is to be reminded of Verrier Elwin and George Grierson and Jim Corbett.

In the poem, one can mark the history and growth of towns, Indian towns, hilly towns and the history of struggling folks trying to shed ignorance as well as underdevelopment, moving out for job and better opprtunites and also he feels towards the pull of the tradition of patriarchs or tribal chieftains seeing with the hawkish eye. But at the first instance it is a poem of the river and the small town. But mythically it is a song of man and Nature, how the conncetion is in between. The second thing is experience, the experience of life, the world, as seen and  experienced and viewed. How the contrasts between society and development? How to clutch them along? How to myth and tradition with the stride?

Small towns always remind me of death.
My hometown lies calmly amidst the trees,
it is always the same,
in summer or winter,
with the dust flying,
or the wind howling down the gorge. 

The poetess while starting the narrative says what she has come to feel it personally as an inhabitant, as an in-dweller what the town meant to her, how the history of their, how the trends and traditions of them doing the rounds, beleifs and faiths whch but sustaining them so far. To read the poem is to come to feel the history of Assam and the frontiers, the history of the ethnographic tribes and tribesmen, the opening of colleges and schools. How was it Pasighat in the past? How is it now? Does development take a toll upon nature? And if not developed, can man be man? Let us study it the relationship between man and nature, the relationship between the town and the river.

The small towns remind her of death, what she has seen, come to feel it, how the communities have been living, burying their dead, carrying on with rituals and beliefs and in the midst of all, she lies with her divided self, split personality in choosing in between the two as for where to go, what it to opt for.  Her hometown lies it calmly in the midst of trees and hills. It is almost the same, the same archetypal village; the same hutment she sees it over the years coming down to as an image and if to see it otherwise, ‘Home, home, there is no place like home.’

Just the other day someone died.
In the dreadful silence we wept
looking at the sad wreath of tuberoses.
Life and death, life and death,
only the rituals are permanent. 

How life goes on, keeps on moving she narrates it here in this poem. How did   happen it one day when soemone of her close died and she kept weeping, mourning the loss in silence placed with a sad wreath of tuberorses? Life and death, death and life, it will continue unto the last as long as man is on earth. But it is the rituals which some may confide in for a repose.

Here identifying herself with the river the poetess tells the archetypal stories of life and death. How do they bury their dead? How do they do away with? The scene is one of silence and mourning; man coming and going whcih is but never-ending story. The lines remind us of Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears, Break, Break, Break, Crossing the Bar, The Brook and In Memoriam.

The river has a soul.
In the summer it cuts through the land
like a torrent of grief. Sometimes,
sometimes, I think it holds its breath
seeking a land of fish and stars 

The river has a soul whcih she has come to feel it and it is also true that without the river, the forest, the hill and the land man cannot live. The river is a source of life-giving water as well as for agriculture and she has seen the river in different seasons. During the rainy days, it has a tale of own to tell about the babble and murmur by and during the summertime so different.

The river has a soul.
It knows, stretching past the town,
from the first drop of rain to dry earth
and mist on the mountaintops,
the river knows
the immortality of water. 

Water, water, water, the drop of water for the thirsty, on the barren earth parching and dried, burning with heat and dust swirling, how to pray for to be blessed with a cold shower, the clouds gatehring over Himavant for a cloudburst. No life without water is the thing. Water for fertility, vegetation, how to explain it, for the seeds to germinate? But Coleridge describes it with the sighting of the scenery and the return of the ship when retribution for the guilt is done.

To read the lines here is to be reminded of The Waste Land, Kailasha and Mansarovar, Meru and Vaigai river, the Ghagra which but Eliot, Yeats, Ramanujan, Daruwalla refer to into their poems. It is the river on whose banks lie it the settlements of the indigenous people. It is water for which the saints prayed to Shiva for emanting the Ganges from his matted locks to the earth. The tale of the Neelachal hills and the Brahmaputra of Kamakhya, how to allude to?

A shrine of happy pictures
marks the days of childhood.
Small towns grow with anxiety
for the future.
The dead are placed pointing west.
When the soul rises
it will walk into the golden east,
into the house of the sun.

What golden dreams does she dream? Where her Konark Sun Temple? How her land of the rising sun? Does she mean to hint towards the Tawang monastery too?

Life, what was it during childhood? How had it been the times? How did the huts after the growth of towns? There is something of Hood’s My Chldhood and the loss of innocence. There is something of Lamb’s chimney-sweepers.The sun has been used in as a myth and a motif too as Lawrence refers to in his travelogues, novels and short stories.  There is something of Sea and Sardinia, The Lost Girl, Etruscan Places and Apocalypse; there is something of The Ship of Death, Bavarian Gantians and Shadows. Resurrection stories of Lawrence too can be referred to. The Mexican backgrounds which Lawrence refers to too take us to a different world of native myth and mysticism. What more do we know about the Mayan civilization?

In the cool bamboo,
restored in sunlight,
life matters, like this. 

Life matters, as the bamboos keep murmuring in the wind adding to greenery and vegetation. The word bamboo has a mythical text. How do we use, wehn do we and for what purposes? Bamboos are needed for huts. Bamboos are needed for making the bier. Even for making baskets, cots, mud houses and for fences it is needed. This is how life goes in the forest ranges, the hilly terrains where there is life too and it pulsates with. Here we can hear the mystic drums of Nigeria not, but Arunachal.

In small towns by the river
we all want to walk with the gods. 

The small towns dotting the river banks have a tale of ther own to tell, the folks have a mythical base of their own to share with. The river is essential for every purpose. Even in the past the ciivilizations grew up on the river banks. Even now the Hindu people need them for pinda-dana on the ghat and asthi-kalasha to keep it hanging by the tree of to be immersed in.

To read the poems is read the alternative version of history; is to know history through folk mediums and local sources. It is also true we have neglected  regional history so much in attaching imporatnce to the war, loot and  plunder.To read is to be remembered of the poems of Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Ben Okri and so on. To read the poem is to know the history of the seven sisterly states and to relate to and align it with otherwise to the main story. While reading the poem, the mind gets lifted to Nagaland and the Naga sadhus; their rigorous and austere sadhna and hathayoga which but few know it. What more do we abut the Ahom dynasty and the Sikkimese kings?

Her theme is one of A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal where Wordsworth talks of the insensitive body of Lucy Gray turned into the rocks, stones and trees. Is it a poem of the Siang river or the Siyom river? As Mahapatra talks of the river Daya so does she here in this poem. Has Wordsworth not written about Tintern Abbey and the Wye river and London 1802?

The river of Time, the hutment of Nature, the presence of Man, the history of Earth, what to say it about? What it in race and ethnicity? What it in myth and mysticism? Where do they lead to ultimately? Should we not ask our own conscience to deliberate? Who can but about the pathway of life? But there must be something to confide in, repose in as for temporary solace.