‘For All My Memories Are Not Tormented Ones’

In Prabhat’s poems you come across a ‘settlement’ (‘basti’) in which the mutual relationships between human beings, nature and society take a very unusual turn. In this poetry-settlement, “water fowl and ducks are living out their days in refugee camps”; music slows down “in the factory of listening and seeing”; on remembering someone, sometimes “all the doors of the world close restlessly”; someone enters a burning house because “without hope, who would barge into a burning house”. This is a poetry-settlement where a hut has so much space left that “twenty men can stand inside” but into whose “desolate anguish” the poet does not want anyone to enter – yet ants, cows and dogs (note: no human beings) enter, and the poet “hesitates to turn down” these entrants, which is the reason for his “silence on countless matters”. This is a poetry-settlement where merely cleaning the house with a broom “makes the yard sparkle” and impels a “craving to invite someone over” although “the house and its surroundings . . . have stayed about the same”; where a tree cannot help a bird because it is a stump; where the night’s eyes exude tears of happiness, which means winter is here – which the poet wants to keep “so close to the skin”; where the rain does not despair when falling upon a graveyard; and where, in this settlement of a solitary man,

I will live in the world of solitude if I must
but I will not be miserable

for all my memories
are not tormented ones

Whereas it may appear that such a poet’s world/universe is confined to his ‘settlement’, I propose that he imagines the world/universe as a ‘settlement’. Not only are its structure and worldview that of a settlement, even the materials that construct it are the same materials that populate – and destroy – a settlement: intimacy, suffocation, helplessness, poverty and marginalization. This is a textual and readable settlement made of a subaltern indifference to its own various significations.

2

A lot of writing in Hindi is born of envy: vexed by the bright, successful world and mocking it with its revolutionary morality, but not doubting or mocking a poet’s or poem’s success (material or abstract). Which is why the prosperity of the poet – parallel to the proletariat façade of the poetry – is often ignored. Coming from humble families and backgrounds, these envious Hindi writers wield their influence in the best universities, media groups, academies of literature and publishing houses, but this envy refuses to go (I remember the late Sanjeev Mishra’s splendid poem which talks of a poet, “bearing the scorn of successful young people, reading up on ways to prevent cerebral atrophy, bursting with information about anti-depressants, suffering from high blood pressure, and arriving in the 21st century with a hangover from the 20th”). And there is another sort of envy (as widespread as this refined, class-marked envy) which causes a writer to love the entire world – except other writers.

Prabhat’s settlement has no envy: his poems come to the metropolis but do not envy the splendid buildings, the well-fed people, the shiny big bazaars and malls. As if all that does not exist! This almost ecological absence of envy gives his poetry a very different kind of stature and adds to what I see as its ‘misfit’ charm.

3

When you turned indifferent
it wouldn’t have been possible
for you to fit within yourself
this feeling that you are turning indifferent

If it is still possible to rehabilitate the forgotten meaning of vi-bhakti (separation and union at the same time); the attitude towards life and death in Prabhat’s poems is made of a vi-bhakti (blend) of imposed indifference and a constant search for new forms of belonging. If it is possible to speak like Valmiki, his poems are a vi-bhakti of shoka (mourning) and shloka (verse).