Languages have aptly been likened to rivers and river valleys. I remember Nirmal Verma, fine writer and sensitive human being, saying at a short story reading in Amritsar that he was blessed writing in Hindi, because so many languages flow into it. Kedarnath Singh, one of the tallest poets on the Hindi scene, fleshes out this sentiment in his poetry. Some of the best translators — Vinay Dharwadker, E.V. Ramakrishnan, Harish Trivedi — got around to translating him into English, in a beautifully brought out book, Banaras and Other Poems edited by K. Satchidanandan. Kedarnath Singh’s first language was Bhojpuri. He writes, “ Hindi is my country/ Bhojpuri my home/ I step out of home/ and enter my country/ when let off by country/ I come back home. ” But he cites his problem at the end of the poem, “ For the last sixty years/ I have been looking to find/ one in the other. ”
In a poem ‘Bhojpuri’, he depicts the rural ambience of his language:
“ Its verbs
came from fields
its nouns from dusty paths.
Thunder and the quiet fall of the little mahua flowers
gave it its phonetics
its words were gleaned
like grain from roots.
The musical duet of the hoe and the trowel
shaped its meters. ”
Excellently put. His mother believed that “birds sang lullabies” in Bhojpuri, (a slightly tall one, that!). Watch his emphasis on the oral word. Books and written words came much later and so “ it doesn’t matter much if they are lost./ For the tongue/ is still its largest library. ”
Keki N. Daruwalla Some elements stand out in Kedarnath’s poetry — the way he moves from the real to another plane, you could say the surreal. In his well-known poem ‘Truck’, the “grass seems eager to change the wheels.” The Bridge of Majhi, near his village, comes into view “through the space between the bull’s horns.” When the night train goes over the bridge “ why do the people of my village/ Begin to rock/ Even in their deep sleep? ” he asks. The title poem ‘Banaras’ starts with a dust storm, moves into time and stillness (some stanzas look like still life paintings) and then the poem rises into a mist of its own making. The poem finds the city, “ half in water/ half in a mantra/ half inside a flower/ half inside a corpse/ half of it in sleep/ half in a conch shell. ”
He moves from the real to the abstract effortlessly — a line of poetry gets lost “between the sunlight and the leaves.” In an elegy on his wife’s death anniversary, he writes, “ She was gone/ and then were gone one by one/ many days/ and flocks of birds/ and several languages/ and numerous water-sources were gone from the world/ once she was gone. ” How much has been said in these few words.
Hindi has an extremely rich vein of poetry going back centuries. If the Hindi belt is a bit of a drag on the country, it is no fault of the language. Politicians, superstitions, godmen —rather, ‘fraudmen’ — need to take the blame.
Copper Coin, a new multilingual publishing house run by a bi-lingual poet, Sarabjeet Garcha has started bringing out poetry books in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Marathi. It has brought out John Berger’s Collected Poems and three volumes by Manohar Shetty. (Berger is a Booker Prize winning novelist.) Personal Effects (2010) is a reissue. Shettyhas half a dozen volumes of poetry including Creatures Great and Small and Living Rooms. Though he figures in most anthologies of Indian poetry, and has been published in the finest journals in the U.K. and U.S., he has never fully received his due. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, known more for his diatribes than praise for fellow poets, has talked of the ‘spare richness’ that has marked Shetty’s memorable poems.
Shetty shares his name with a half-thespian and half-stuntman — you can’t be in films without stunts. Lawrence Olivier would be hard put to get a role in Bollywood. Shetty’s poems are short, burnished and packed with images. A peacock’s tail becomes a “ flaming fantail of monocled /Monograms ,” and later he likens the bird to a krait, its “ slick symmetrical scales/ panicky and porous. ” (notice the rich alliterations). Take Stills from Baga Beach, his first poem.
“ Vast freckled Englishwomen
Pylon-limbed
Thaw in the sun. Their breasts
Loll out like baby
Sealions. ”
Breasts have been cupped (no double entendre intended) with many images in poetry, but never with sea lions. Shetty can be profound and bleak at the same time (Can one be profound without being bleak?). In a poem on a cartographer, he says “ each year turns bloodier-edged/. Frontiers push, relent and ignite/ in pogroms of programmed fire. ” Then comes the bit I am pointing to:
“ All territories are shaped like shrapnel
As nations rewrite themselves
With torn nerve-ends. ”
In an interview, Shetty once said, “Poetry is a truth serum taken voluntarily.” Bird and animal kingdoms are for him a joint family. Porcupine, cobra, cat, hyena, snow leopard, fireflies caged in glass bottles by lousy human beings, all have a place in his oeuvre. It took an age for man to shed his fur, he says, “ But just a day or two/ To ambush for ever/ The streaking arc/ in the blurred forest. ” But let us end with the sea — we are talking of Goa’s big poet, after all. He talks of the tide being “moon-chained” (what a glorious image) as it “ deepens to darken/ Eel-scaled waves ”.
Keki N. Daruwalla is a poet and short story writer
