Krishna has endured across ages. The supreme symbol of love, the king of educators, the prime motivator, Krishna through the Gita imparts the secret of all knowledge and impels the world to action. And yet it is not divinity but humanity that makes Madhava ponder over love, ruminate over the transience of life and the deep moral and ethical dilemmas it posed even for Him. This is Prabha Varma’s Krishna, as he delineates him in Shyama Madhavam , infinitely humane, inconsolably repentant, and unflinchingly critical of his mortal incarnation. This agonising Krishna won the poet this year’s Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award.
Moments of regret
A verse novel, Shyama Madhavam is a masterpiece of Prabha Varma’s. An attempt to redeem Krishna from the images of love, frolic and play that generations have ascribed as the quintessence of his being, the poet unfolds the horror, agony and angst of the mortal God in the last throes of his life. The infinite pathos of those brief moments when the characters in the Mahabharatha’s epic panorama trail into his consciousness and seek a moral confrontation, are poignantly captured by a poet. When the day darkens, a rope maybe perceived a serpent, but even in broad daylight Krishna’s mind recoils in utter horror at the serpentine forms within him. Thus the ecstatic flamboyance of Krishna’s character is chiselled into a tear drop by Prabha Varma.
Shyama Madhavam, Prabha Varma’s award-winning book
Deeply philosophic, dark and ruminating, Krishna dare not confront many of his co-actors in the epic sweep of time. The silent Karna is a sob that tears his heart asunder. He cannot look at Karna without first turning himself into a mirror, reflecting treacheries and betrayals that crystallised in the grand battlefield of Kurukshetra. In the infinite pathos of being, Krishna realises that victory is a lucky charm that fails to render one peaceful even in death, while loss is the perfect tranquillity of the soul.
As Jayadratha, Dharmaputhra, Gandhari and Panchali among numerous others come to stand before Krishna, he realises that he is rendered mute and culpable, having relinquished dharma for the strategies of warfare. When Gandhari’s maternal lamentations swell his ears and rack his conscience, Krishna loses himself in the fathomless limits of her curses, which for him thus become boons. The most plaintive image of Prabha Varma’s is that of the forlorn Radha. Contrary to history and legend Radha reveals that Krishna had never seen her. The eye that empathised with the devastated Arjuna failed to perceive her piteous plight.
The highlight of this saga of a soul in transit is what can be called the new millennium’s poetic suffix to the Gita . Thus here is a God, surrounded by questions but bereft of answers, who laments that had there been answers these questions would not have held him hostage. As Krishna comes out of his godliness to merge with the sorrows of those little human beings he had wronged, he divines that he too was a pawn in a cosmic chessboard. As one born in darkness, one who had traversed the darkness of sorrows and slander, Krishna’s form fades into the dark sky and his bleeding wound becomes part of a cosmic chaos.
Multiple meanings
In offering new meanings for new times by re-reading the ancient epics, the poet transcends the limitations of time and space. Krishna could belong to the Dwapara Yuga or he could be an agonised soul of the 21st century. In cultivating the art of introspective dissent, this is poetry that fulfils in the best possible manner what could be called the need of the hour, to nurture boundless readings that yield multiple meanings. In an age of renewed myth making, and given the current contexts of our myth-laden daily lives, de-mythicising could be both an ideological imperative as well as a narrative effect.
Here is a work of art that offers a testimony to the poet’s intimacy with the Malayalam language and the profound depths of Indian philosophy.
