Can the object of strong endearment (daughter) create a bulwark, the “blood-dimmed tide”, of an uncertain world, increasingly shaped by a marked sense of hostility and disdain for others? It is a pertinent question raised by W.B.Yeats during the rise of fascism in his famous poem, “A prayer for my daughter”.
Now a celebrated Hindi poet, Jitender Srivastava explores the human and poetic dimensions of the query by fashioning a nuanced and multi-sensory personal long narrative spanning over two dozen poems to resist the catastrophic effects of the intolerance and patriarchy. The poet, having more than 20 books to his credit, creatively reinvigorates the fading bond of human dignity, compassion, concern and cooperation from the tender sensibilities of a ‘daughter’. Kamlesh Verma and Suchita Verma perceptively showcase his 23 poems on the singular theme – daughter – in anthology “Betiyan” ( daughters), recently published by K.K. Publishers.
Showing the path
Jitender’s nuanced vignette deftly subverts recurrent stereotypes about female sensibility, and the poet’s enumeration hardly resembles the utterance of a guiding father who takes protectiveness for obsessive possessiveness. His emotional intensity in no way reveals that the daughters are weak and frail and the poet wants to protect them. If life is inflicted with hardship, pain, anguish and subjugation, the poet exhorts his daughters: If dwindling age leaves you surrounded by all-round gloom/ keep roaring with laughter /your shriek of giggle will save up life /it will keep my trust intact/ Come on my daughters!(Oh! My daughters do Remember).
Contrarily, James Joyce adores his daughter who is “blue veined” (extremely weak and pale): “Rose frail and fair-yet frailest/A wonderful wild/ In gentle eyes than vilest / My blue veined child” (A Flower Given to My Daughter) but here Jitender urges his daughter not to be trounced by anxiety, uncertainty and depression and the shadow of loss must not overwhelm them and implores: if sorrow grows dense/ don't run after shadows/no mirror strike fear into you/ Oh my daughters, my eyeballs / don’t get frightened or defeated / fight against time!
Harbinger of future
The poet does not take past as the future and for him the daughter is the harbinger of future whose presence with the books converts the makeshift reading room into a paradise: “Once it was a balcony / now I made it my study/ it is filled with the warmth of book/ seclusion of books and glow of writings/ gales of laughter/ indicate the presence of daughters ( The rhythm and weather of the home) it is creative revisiting of Jorge Luis Borges who observed: I have always imagined that a paradise will be a kind of library”
The astutely rendered poems betray an aesthetic quest for love, caring, compassion, friendship, dejection, loss, pain , insensitivity through the prism of the formative years of one who is destined to lead a silenced and dispossessed life. In his perceptive introduction, Kamlesh Verma points out that Jitender Srivastva was the first poet in the long history of Hindi poetry who composed more than 20 poems on daughters.
Delineating the distinct semantic import of Jitender's poems, Arun Hota refers to beautiful poems on daughters penned by Nirala, Subdhra Kumari Chauhan and Nagarjun and asserts that the anthology seeks to explore a new dimension of human grace.
Jitender is essentially a poet of human relationship and his verse matters when virtual friendship has replaced the age long bond of affinity.
The selection carries certainly more than strike the eye as it enacts a ring of optimism and charts out the intricate complexities of human relationship that resist easy explanations and the poems ruthlessly attack the patriarchy with out rhetorical flourish. Jitender's poems distill a tantalizing cultural history in a vivid local expression and for which he deserves accolades
