Stars scatter the sky’s edge...

On the 50th death anniversary of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, a look at the poet’s difficult life and enduring poetry.

Poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh. Illustration: P. Manivannan

It is arguable that the oeuvre of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-1964) will outlast other 20th century Hindi poets. Though born in a Maharashtrian family, Muktibodh wrote almost entirely in Hindi. He began to publish when young, and received acclaim when he published in the germinal first edition of Tar Saptak (Upper Octave), brought out in 1943, by Hindi novelist and poet Agyeya.

Despite this initial success, Muktibodh lived a difficult, painful life that ended with a prolonged illness. His difficulty with authority led to some of his books being banned. He led a wandering life in small-town provincial India, trying to make ends meet by taking up a school-teaching job here or writing a textbook there. Though known within Hindi literary circles, his financial troubles never abated.

The

Tar Saptak collection definitively broke with the idiom of an earlier generation of Hindi poets, the famous Chayavadi (roughly translated as poets of mystery and shadow), a group that included names like Prasad, Nirala, Pant, and Mahadevi Varma. To generalise, the Chayavadi generation wished to revive many of the myths of the Sanskritic tradition, in an idiom made modern by Tagore, and English Romanticism. The Chayavadis had themselves broken from the earlier dominant north Indian model of Braj, and begun to write in what had, by the first decade of the 20th century, become modern standard Hindi. In Muktibodh’s view, however, the Sanskritic tradition was not available for such direct upgrade. No more could one meaningfully attempt to write an ancient figure or myth into contemporary coherence — as Prasad tried in his long poem ‘Kamayani’, or as Nirala tried in ‘Ram ki Shakti Puja’.

It is perhaps the allure of Muktibodh that he did not entirely dismiss the Sanskritic tradition. Figures from the tradition do careen across the lunar, blasted urbanscape of the present. One of his most famous, enduring and oft-cited poems is ‘Brahmarakshas’, a class of demons mentioned in the

Kathasaritsagara and the Panchatantra . Muktibodh’s brahmarakshas is a wanderer found at the edge of a city, an erudite man who cannot manage his wealth of knowledge, and hence mutters senselessly, even as the “stars scatter the sky’s edge/from uncountable decimals/come decimal-drops on all sides:/in the transposed spreading field/ beaten, he comes to use/ and lies spread…”

Muktibodh did not live to see his prescience, regarding the destruction of individuality by governmental authoritarianism, rewarded by their actual unspooling in history. More than any event, the Emergency led to a revival of interest in his work, and the bleak, talismanic images in his works — of the claw-fingered brahmarakshas stalking the street at night — will remain in our unconscious, awaiting resurrection every time authoritarianism crushes distinctive poetic individuality.