Welcome to Indian Poetry – May 2010

This edition, however, is not that one. Poets have been accused so often of aestheticising pain to the point of anaesthetizing it, of choosing the decorative over the sordid, the beautiful over the bloody, that it’s time to look the accusation straight in the face.

Almost all the poems in this edition invoke moments of pain, loss and erasure. But interestingly, each of these three poets treats those moments differently.

One responds to the brutality and injustice of religious fundamentalism with a torrent of images, vigorous and relentless in its indictment of a foetid and compromised moral landscape. The post-1992 Ayodhya and post-2002 Gujarat poetry of Dileep Jhaveri is the poetry of fury and impotence. He knows his role as poet is to keep the history of a savage genocide alive through unrelenting repetition, through all the verbal energy at his command: “Born over centuries/ you kept dying, hoping that surely someone will be born to/ narrate your tale.” This is poetry that acknowledges its moral responsibility, even as it grapples with the futility of the project. “Forgive me,” the poet says finally, acknowledging his failure in the roles of alchemist, healer and social conscience.

The second poet responds to the erosion of a traditional folk heritage of myth and memory with a tone of quiet elegy. Mamang Dai’s poetry is a lyrical song of collective celebration and regret, pain and yearning, quest and hope. She speaks in an interview of her poetry being the voice of protest and the voice of love. It seems to mean that even while her poetry registers loss and injustice, it refuses to mirror its adversary by adopting the same strategies of rage and bellicosity. The hushed voice that captures “the whispers of the world”, her work suggests, is as radical as any other.

The third poet seems to speak of a more generalized pain – ‘twilight’ on “the minarets of the mind”. But an unnamed sense of personal loss and nostalgia seems to coexist here with an implicit lament for a region where a life without conflict now seems inconceivable. Yash Sharma from Jammu is a singer of his own lyric verse in Dogri, and his cadences are imbued with a romantic melancholy, punctuated with moments of disconcerting sharpness. A poem about an evening in a hill station ends with a caretaker’s practical reflection on whether the visiting politician will organize a job for his son. A seemingly predictable lament about the parental misfortune of having daughters ends with a line that works for its sheer poignant simplicity: “They keep returning home uninvited.”

There is grief in these poems, and there is pain. There is rage here, and there is lingering melancholy. But it is emphatically not the poetry of defeat.

Jhaveri, for all his admission of failure, knows that the computer screen will flicker on yet again. He knows that even while the world insists that “Poetry is lost, lost, lost,” the poet will “plug his ears” and write on.

And Mamang Dai knows that prayer flags in the heart that are felled by storms have a way of rising. There are flickering moments when the ‘past’ does seem to be ‘over’. And there are times when we can even turn, however fleetingly, into “floating smudges of colour/ flying high over the mountain barrier”.