It can feel charmingly anachronistic to read a writer who steadfastly believed in poetry as humanising and restorative — convictions rendered quaint by the deconstructive force of today’s identity politics as well as capitalism’s undermining of the sublime. But Jnanpith-winning Hindi writer Kunwar Narain, who passed away in 2017 at the age of 90, shows that there is life in these ideals yet, if only because the voice in which they are spoken has what Seamus Heaney once described, talking about the potential of lyric poetry, as “the ring of truth”.
Selections from Narain’s several books of poetry have appeared in No Other World from 2008 and in the just-published Witnesses of Remembrance, both translations by his son, Apurva Narain. Apurva notes that for his father, writing has been “like loving or praying, a personal act.” His poems seem to ask the question: How to live?
Turning back
There is a search for an inner context, one often created through identification with the outside. The poet reads human qualities into trees, wind, sunlight, flowers while also tending to see the human self as disembodied, immanent in nature, best experienced through an exhilarating expansiveness. “It is always from there that I have turned back,” starts the poem ‘A Fish of the Sea’, “leaving myself unfinished — where there is deceit, injustice, cowardice, folly [...] somehow to begin again.”
The poem ends with this marvellous image: “to surround himself with some new expanse/ and become tiny, like a fish/ and so inaugurate another sea...”
Narain’s reclusiveness has often been remarked upon — he’s been called the Buddha of contemporary Hindi poetry — and his
poems seem to create a distinction between life and world: an abiding, insistent fascination with life and a recognition of the world’s increasing degradation. And so despite his turning to nature, there is none of that Romantic hope in a fresh beginning. (In contrast to, say, William Blake’s excitement — “a new heaven is begun” — over his own birth, Narain says, “I reached this world a little late.”)
Practising anonymity
He is a modernist in his view of urban civilisation — concrete jungles in which people prey on people “in the most modern and evolved of ways” — and he writes, after Brecht, of the dark times, which poetry does not redress. Yet the life force animating Narain’s poetry makes it hopeful. He speaks with dignity and, often, directness and it is in this manner of speaking that his greatest appeal lies.
Apurva quotes journalist Ravish Kumar on the debasement of public language and how Narain’s style is a respite. “His language urges gentleness, and makes us practice anonymity. How I wish that our politics, our society, all of us, would establish a poet’s language publicly.”
Narain’s way of renouncing authority — that anonymity Kumar mentions — is by freeing his poems of the sort of cloying autobiographical detail that is increasingly the stuff of lyric poetry.
Personal history is overrated, Narain seems to be saying. In his treatment of larger histories too he keeps returning to the Indian past — mythic, ancient, medieval, recent: there is the same breaking away from the facts and putting the poetic emphasis elsewhere.
Heavy heart
The poet repeatedly finds himself at historical sites — Fatehpur Sikri, Ayodhya, Golconda, or at that point in the northwest of the subcontinent from where Alexander turned back. But these are less wide-eyed tourist visits, more preordained returns in the manner of one trapped in a labyrinth or chakravyahu, the title of Narain’s debut collection.
History through its retelling becomes myth, the archetypal event, captured for instance in the lines “[...] return I must/ with a heavy heart/ from the dusty blood-sodden fields/ of the same Kurukshetra —/ the same Panipat — the same Plassey” from the poem ‘A World Under My Feet’. If new myths are created in the imagination of the poet, it is also he who sees how existing ones have started to ring hollow: Ayodhya is corrupted, no longer Ram’s realm, and Dwarka is not Krishna’s home but a suburb of Delhi.
Narain’s exemplary tone of voice is very frequently, even if not always, captured by these consistently painstaking and erudite translations. So he also lives in English now, and one hopes that the special weirdness of our literary culture, in which a writer could be a proven stalwart in one language but virtually unknown in another, is redeemed through these two books and other forthcoming translations of Narain’s huge oeuvre.
Witnesses of Remembrance: Selected Newer Poems; Kunwar Narain, trs Apurva Narain, Eka, ₹599
The writer’s latest book is the collection of stories A Day in the Life.
