Subhash Mukhopadhyay

Shakti Chattopadhyay: The Poet Who Would Rather Not Be Called a Poet

By setting his face determinedly away from hallowed poetic mores and literary conventions, Shakti Chattopadhyay evolved an idiom and an ethos entirely his own.

In his foreword to the Collected Poems of Shakti Chattopadhyay (Podyo Somogro, Ananda Publishers, July, 1989), Subhash Mukhopadhyay pointedly located Shakti in a direct line of descent from Jibanananda Das.

Subhash was not suggesting that Shakti wrote like Jibanananda or shared his Weltanschauung, or even that he had learnt his craft from the senior poet who exercised such a powerful influence on many poets of Shakti’s generation. What Subhash really meant is that while it was Jibanananda who had helped restore Bengali poetry post Rabindranath Tagore to its main stream – after it had drifted in such different directions as cerebral poetry, devout/pious poetry and ‘committed’ poetry – Shakti had carried on in the Jibanananda tradition of pure poetry. In other words, that if a serious reader was to trace the development of Bengali poetry in its purest form, she had to necessarily focus on the work of these two true poets.

One can disagree with Subhash’s take on the development trajectory of Bengali poetry, but he makes an important point nevertheless: that both Jibanananda and Shakti stand apart from most poets of their respective generations both in what they were seeking to achieve and how they were going about it. In some sense, Shakti was even more of a heretic than Jibanananda whose early lyricism was often redolent of the limpid grace, the easy mellifluousness of much of Rabindranath Tagore’s middle period. Consider the opening poem of Jibanananda’s first major anthology, ‘Dhusar Pandulipi’ (‘The Greying Manuscript’, 1936):

Maybe you don’t know it, not that you need to know –
And yet every song I sing has only you at its heart.

Contrast this with some of Shakti’s earliest offerings, for example the poem Jarasandha published in 1956, when he was a callow 22 year old, later anthologised in He Prem, He Naishabdya ( ‘Hello Love! Hello Silence!’):

When a mild breeze rises, I tend to think the sea is near. With your wasted
hands you hold me tight. That tells me, if I would go bathing with the dark-
ness of all I have, the ocean would recede, the chill would recede, and so
would death.
Maybe then you gave birth to death, thinking it was life. I live in darkness,
will stay on in the dark – or become darkness.
Why did you get me here? Take me back.

Also read: The Portrait of a Poet

Nothing quite like this had been attempted by a Bengali poet before. Buddhadeb Basu, whose poetry magazine Kabita had carried Jarasandha, was excited by the discovery of an explosive new talent. And yet Jarasandha somehow linked up with tradition in some sense, for it foregrounded a character from the Mahabharat. Soon, however, Shakti was venturing into completely uncharted territory, trying his hand, in another poem published in Kabita, at what may be legitimately described as automatic writing that defied both sequential thinking and ‘rational’ structures:

I won’t live very long I don’t want to
At harvest time I’ll take in enchanting vistas
Have settled liegemen down in my home unlighted
Will pick some for a while but not live too long.

Here was a rebel who would brook no constraints on his poetic imagination, no limits on his artistic apparatus, by way either of diction or of metrical structures and rhyme patterns. And he insisted that the hermetic world of his kind of poetry was the only one that mattered – or even existed. Literary or linguistic conventions meant nearly nothing to him, and he cheerfully, and audaciously, melded respectable Sanskrit-originated (‘tatsamo’) words and turns of phrase with unalloyed colloquialisms, even colourful street lingo. Miraculously, he seemed able to pull it off most times, too, often to the consternation of readers brought up on more staid diets.

Volume 1 of his collected poems, always called Podyo Somogro.

Early on, Shakti also began to stress that he wrote podyo (verse), not kabita (poetry). The mystique of high art, Shakti was telling his readers, was not what he was striving after. His verse was not an instrument of exploration, but rather a tool of affirmation. Its reward, he believed, lay not in the excitement of discovery, but in the pleasure of encountering the familiar, though often in an atypical garb. (Which is why his collected poems have always been called Podyo-Somogro, not Kabita-Somogro.) He was also trying to trace his path back to the original meaning of the word poetry – which is ‘heightened speech’. And it was the process of heightening that concerned him more than what it was seeking to heighten.

This is not to suggest, however, that Shakti Chattopadhyay was content with testing and expanding the formalistic capabilities of his art alone. Far from it, indeed. His irreverence, his predilection for iconoclasm, his infinite capacity for self-deprecation and the intensity of his feeling for nature helped significantly widen the content horizons of Bengali poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s. Here is the sparkling little poem Epitaph – rendered into English by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra – dripping with wicked humour but also, strangely, bitter-sweet:

He gave up none of the world’s pleasures;
He was a poet and a scrounge.

Rejoice!, said his publishers. The fellow’s dead.
At least he won’t now turn up threateningly at the office,
Dressed for the evening, demanding his royalties:
The money, you swine, or I’ll gut the place.

And so he was laid on the pyre – troublemaker, pauper, poet.

Shakti rarely had a ‘message’ to deliver through his lines. But when he did permit himself a broad comment on the human condition – which, admittedly, was not very often – he could bring to his commentary such strikingly simple, but vivid, imagery as to make his ‘statement’ a profoundly moving one:

It’s not given to man to know what comes ahead or after him.
Succeeding is not all, for it’s no more than appearing
Nicely turned-out before the man who is stark naked;
Or perhaps, on the beach,
Riling up the party with tall tales from the hills –
It’s not given to man to know what comes ahead or after him.

The first Hungriyalists. Shakti Chattopadhyay is top left.

Looking back, it was only natural that this arch nonconformist was caught up with what came to be known, in the early 1960s, as the Hungry Generation – the artistic movement that had set out to storm the citadel of the ‘poetry establishment’. The movement happened to be the most comprehensive repudiation of the values around which Bengali poetry had grown since the 19th century – rationalism, intellectual discipline and a belief in progress – junking them as degenerate and retrograde. (The jury is still out on the movement’s lasting achievements, but there is no question that it had a transformative effect on the vocabulary of many younger poets of the day.) Indeed, I like to think that, more than Malay Roychoudhury who is generally credited with the authorship of that first, famous Hungryalist Manifesto of November 1961, it was Shakti Chattopadhyay who was responsible for these scalding lines, or, at any rate, for the thoughts underlying them:

“Poetry is no more a civilising manoeuvre, a replanting of the bamboozled gardens; it is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning fire, a sowing of the tempestual Hunger….. Poetry is an activity of the narcissistic spirit. Naturally, we have discarded the blankety-blank school of modern poetry, the darling of the press, where poetry does not resurrect itself in an orgasmic flow, but words come out bubbling in an artificial muddle.”

You can scarcely claim to spy the ‘bamboozled gardens’, original or ‘replanted’, in the opening poem (or all the others that follow it) of the book Sonar Machhi Khun Korechhi (‘I Killed the Golden Fly’), here presented in excerpts in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s excellent translation:

The body shakes all over, walls crash into walls, cornices into cornices,
The midnight sidewalks change places.
It’s the hour of homecoming, home inside home, leg inside leg,
Ribcage inside ribcage,
And nothing else – or is there more? – until one gets home…..

‘Stop!’ And you freeze. Your hands go up,
Until you’re bundled into a van.
Black Maria inside Black Maria inside Black Maria.
You whiz past rows of unlit windows, doors, a graveyard, piles of skeletons,
Maggots inside skeletons, life throbbing inside maggots, death inside life,
And so death inside death
And nothing more…

Imagine, the train stationary and the platform gaining speed,
A fused electric bulb as bright as starlight;
Imagine the feet not moving and the sandals walking away,
Heaven where hell is and hell where heaven;
Imagine, newborns carrying in perambulators the dead to Nimtala,
And, across the river, decrepit old men dancing in the bridal-chamber…

There came a time in the mid-1960s when Shakti disavowed his association with the Generation, but if there was one poem the Hungryalists would be proud to have their ensign emblazoned with, it has to be this tour de force of poetic inspiration and ingenuity. What is remarkable about this kind of ‘instant’ writing is that, even though it is straining at the leash all the time, the poet’s imagination never strays beyond the central vision that drives the poem, and, for all one knew, the impression of ‘automatism’ was a carefully-crafted illusion. It is a virtuoso act of poetic craftsmanship. Perhaps no other poem, individually, with the possible exception of Jibanananda Das’s One Day, Eight Years Ago, has done more to push the frontiers of post-Rabindranath Tagore Bengali poetry to quite this extent.

Also read: ‘The Place of Love is Uncertain’: Two Poems by Vinod Kumar Shukla

A quick word on the Hungriyalists and their supposed intellectual/spiritual ancestry which is often traced to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. Ginsberg arrived in India in 1962 and travelled widely across the country, seeking what he believed was the fountainhead of an ‘irrational existence’ free from the trappings of consumerism and predatory capitalism. In Kolkata, he met and befriended Shakti and his Hungry Generation friends in what proved to be the intersection of not only two cultures, both also two insurgencies, and each, no doubt, fertilised the other in varying degrees.

But perhaps Ginsberg took away from this encounter much more than he left behind here, and it may not be appropriate to claim that he became a seminal influence on Shakti or his poetic idiom. The Hungriyalists had already raised their mutinous flag in Kolkata and elsewhere in India, and even Shakti’s own poetry, having imbibed the spirit of that mutiny, had begun to move in the direction that would define his work for the rest of his life.

Shakti Chattopadhyay was seldom an easy read. Subhash Mukhopadhyay makes no secret of his early struggles with Shakti’s poetry, confessing how picking his way through the maze of associations and very private memories that lie strewn over much of Shakti’s work often proved to be such a challenge. Soon, though, he realised that the trick was to not try to understand everything, to stop worrying about ‘meanings’, and allow oneself to be swept up with the elemental power of the poetry.

Most readers will agree with Subhash here, who is suggesting, though he does not say it in so many words, that Shakti was, above all, a lyric poet, who, unlike some of his contemporaries, was always unabashed about this fact. (His repeated insistence that he was a versifier, rather than a poet, also points to this acknowledgement.) He was always at home in such charmingly lyrical pieces as the following, but each of these little poems is lighted up with its own quirky humour:

   It was still dark                                                it was still light
In the alleyways of Hridaypur                         games of caprice thrived.
Mists shrouded the river                                 fuzzy lay the sky
The debonair moon yet shed                          an unforgiving light.
What good is it surpassing her                   whose brow knit in a frown
   Invites shut doors all around                      and cautious watches abound?
   What good is it calling to her                    now at the long day’s end
As Hridaypur’s games of caprice                play out to their jejune end?

Translating Shakti presents challenges quite as formidable as those confronting the translator of Jibanananda Das. Or maybe the problems are somewhat more daunting here, for lilting end-rhyme patterns that make up so much of the appeal of Shakti’s poetry are impossible to transliterate. That is perhaps why translators such as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra strike out in different directions, without bothering to construct rhyme or metrical patterns mimicking or even paralleling the originals, instead instating metrical structures recognisable in the other language. Here is Mehrotra doing just that with this gem of an early poem:

                      A memory comes back.
                            The whistle, the junction,
                          The level crossing, the stalled train.
Will I see you in the window, reading Hart Crane?

                          The journey was long, a hundred and fifty miles,
                         At the end of which all I got is,
                       ‘You aren’t so rich to be wasting money like this’.
                         You were right. I was just a schoolteacher then.

                       We sat in the moonlight.
                      You took out a photograph
                      And said, ‘Keep it.’
                      I have it in my wallet still.

                      A memory comes back.
                      The whistle, the junction,
                    The level crossing, a stalled train.
                    Don’t tell me you still read Hart Crane.

With his infinite curiosity about new forms and structures, Shakti wrote prolifically and fast – at times, one suspects, a little too fast – and nothing – no theme, no motif – was anathema to him, or too sacred to deal with. On occasion, he would tell himself that, as poet, he needed to engage with things that he had either neglected or not found stimulating enough:
Poetry needs to step up to unlock every temple door,
For that’s what poetry is about:
Shedding the indolence of the pitch black night
And cradling in your hands the moon…

One would like to believe that, in his own way, this exceptionally gifted poet did his best to cradle the moon in his hands. But most Shakti aficionados would yet remember him as a nonpareil lyric poet who could fashion, when he wanted, the plain word and the unremarkable image into pictures of ineffable beauty:

Behind tightly-shut doors the town sleeps,
When sudden the night erupts
In a cry of ‘Abani, are you home?’

It rains here without end all the year round,
As clouds graze lazy, like pregnant cows.
Sated and heavy, the grass, lush-green,
Grows over the door-step and hems the door in:
‘Abani, are you home?’

Half in stupor, faraway in my heart,
From pain I drift off into sleep,
When suddenly the night erupts
In the cry of ‘Abani, are you in?’

Is this humble verse, or high poetry? At least one reader does not care.

The author gratefully acknowledges the permission to use a few of poet and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s previously unpublished translations from Shakti Chattopadhyay. The poems/excerpts not ascribed to any translator were done by the author.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

Even in Prose, Subhash Mukhopadhyay Yearned for a More Equal World

Subhash Mukhopadhyay was not just a poet who also dabbled in prose, but a consummate artist equally at home in several prose genres.

Some months ago, I received a mail from Sergei Serebriyani, Russian author-translator, asking for some details about the poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay. I said ‘poet’, but Serebriayani’s questions referred primarily to one of Subhash’s prose writings – Hungras (‘The Hungerstrike’), a Bengali novel first published in 1973.

It turned out that Serebriyani was to present a conference paper on the thematic parallels between that novel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s celebrated One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I later found out that he had translated into Russian two of Mukhopadhya’s major works in prose – Hungras and Ke Kothai Jai (‘Everyone for their own Destiny’) – in 1977 and 1981 respectively.

My answers to his questions, about how widely Subhash’s prose was read these days in West Bengal and how many Indian languages Hungras has been translated into, must have surprised and disappointed him. But he sought to reassure me that, in Bangladesh (where Serebriyani happens to go often), Subhash Mukhopadhyay continued to be read with great interest; indeed, that new editions of his prose writings continued to appear in Dhaka fairly regularly.

I mention this interaction to highlight the fact that, while in Subhash’s home country, interest in his prose is marginal at best, many readers and commentators in other countries continue to engage with the entire body of his creative work, and not with his poetry alone.

Not many readers in India would know today that the range of Mukhopadhyay’s prose writings was strikingly wide, or that his first literary efforts had made prose their vehicle. Indeed, that his prose writings are so far from being a mere extension of the world of his poetry – as happens not infrequently with major poets – that, by overlooking them, we risk knowing Mukhopadhyay only partially at best. They also remain unaware that exploring the many linkages between his poetry and his prose – linkages that operate at multiple levels – can be such a richly rewarding experience in itself.

Pre-partition Bengal

Subhash published his first book of poems, Padatik (‘The Foot Soldier’) when he had just turned 21. But he had been writing prose since school and, in the early 1940s, started working as a journalist for the Communist Party of India’s Bengal mouthpiece Janajuddha (People’s War).

His work took him to pre-partition Bengal’s far corners – the rugged Garo hills in the north as well as south Bengal’s flood plains, around Kolkata’s industrial ghettoes, but also into the tall grasslands and Sal forests of Dooars.

These were turbulent years. The freedom movement was reaching its crescendo; the escalating World War was turning Bengal’s small towns and sleepy villages upside down, with Allied troops setting up camp in every nook and cranny; there was a new-found daring in labour militancy; and, on all sides, there was desperate poverty although the immensely fertile Gangetic plains yielded up golden harvests of paddy year after year.

Then came the crippling Great Bengal Famine of 1943/44 – a tragedy without equal in living memory. Three million women, men and children starved to death, many more were maimed in body and mind for the rest of their lives. For the young communist activist, this was a shattering experience, but it also steeled his resolve to join the battle to change the world. His reportage of these years later shaped his first book of prose, Amar Bangla (‘My Bengal’), which came out in 1951.

Also Read: Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s Poems Anticipated the India of Today

Freedom had arrived in the meantime, Janajuddha made way for Swadhinata (Freedom), and Subhash had just emerged from a nearly three-year-long prison term in independent India. These years in different jails in Kolkata and elsewhere find echoes in his many later works, most immediately in Jakhon Jekhane (‘Whenever, Wherever’, 1960), his second book of reportage-based prose.

Though he had come out with two more books of verse – Chirkut (‘The Parchment’) and Agnikone (‘The Abode of the Fire-God’) before 1951, he did not publish a single new anthology of his poetry between 1951 and 1960, though as many as seven books of prose came from his pen in this period.

They included Bangalir Itihas (‘History of Bengal’s Society and Culture’) a virtuoso adaptation, for youngsters, of Prof Nihar Ranjan Roy’s eponymous masterpiece, a treatise on how language evolved as the foremost means of human communication, a biography of Jagadish Chandra Bose, and a Bengali translation of Bhabani Bhattacharyya’s celebrated novel So Many Hungers.

In later years, Subhash Mukhopadhyay repeatedly returned to the reportage mode: Dak Banglar Diary (‘An Itinerant’s Diary’, 1967), Naroder Diary (‘Narada’s Diary’, 1969), Kshoma Nei (‘There’s No Forgiving’, 1971) and Abar Dak Banglar Dake (‘Bengal Calls Again’, 1981) are notable works of this genre.

These comprised not impressionistic sketches drawn by a poet alone. Often, they were detailed studies of how Bengal’s (or West Bengal’s) political economy evolved, how it struggled to cope with the tasks of reducing hunger and want, and how communities took on state repression and unbridled economic exploitation.

A sketch from artist Chittaprosad’s album ‘Hungry Bengal’ depicting the famine. Credit: Chittaprosad

A variety of style

Kshoma Nei is a narrative built around the resistance against genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971, an angry narrative that invited the ire of a well-known Bengali authoress who accused Subhash of hate-mongering and incitement to violence, accusations that the writer angrily, very publicly, repudiated.

Hungras (1973), Ke Kothai Jai (1976), Ontoreep, ba Hansener Asukh (‘Hansen’s Disease’, 1983), Comrade, Kotha Kao (‘Comrade, Speak Up’, 1990) and Kancha Paka (‘Raw and Ready’, 1989) are, however, best described as novellas/novels. They span a fascinating range of themes: a long-drawn-out hunger strike by political prisoners seen through the eyes of two different protagonists in parallel to each other; a young couple, disenchanted with social revolution, rededicating themselves to social change in the course of a train journey where an elderly co-passenger, a battle-scarred old-school communist, recounts his hopes and his disappointments to them; a colony of lepers abandoned to their ‘fate’ where a newly-arrived patient, a one-time political radical, tries to come to terms with his future; an industrial township torn between conflicting loyalties coming apart in the end; ‘reminiscences’ of a rootless wanderer who doesn’t know where he belongs and yet becomes part of a bustling community living at life’s margins.

Subhash works with different narrative styles in these books. Some of the stories are told as conventional third-person accounts, some speak in the first person while some others employ a mix of both voices. The common thread that runs through these diverse tales is that of compassion intertwined with a yearning for a less unequal world. In this, these stories link up unmistakably with everything else that Subhash Mukhopadhyay ever wrote as an adult – whether in verse or in prose.

Also Read: ‘Flowers of Stone’: Intimations of Loss and Triumph in the Poetry of Subhash Mukhopadhyay

And yet, he was far from being a doctrinaire communist. After Stalin’s death, Subhash wrote an eulogy which does not ring very convincing today, but he also translated into Bengali Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at a time (in 1965) when the Soviet Union still denounced Solzhenitsyn as a renegade. (Dr Serebriayani tells me how the Soviet authorities were scandalised to hear that Subhash Mukhopadhyay, the Lenin Peace Prize-winning communist intellectual with a large readership in the USSR, had had anything to do with Solzhenitsyn.)

With equal elan, he translated the Rosenberg letters, Hugh Toye’s The Springing Tiger, Anne Frank’s Diary, Azad’s India Wins Freedom and Sher Jung’s Tryst with Tigers. Even when he wrote frank travel diaries – Vietname Kichhudin (‘Travelling around Vietnam’,1974), for example – they were in a crisp, lively idiom that has come to be identified as his signature style. His politics essentially remained the same throughout – though his political affiliations changed colour in the later years – but his cultural tastes were always eclectic, not hidebound.

Let us end with an excerpt from Amar Bangla (‘My Bengal’), his first-published book of prose. This is the book’s concluding piece, called Haat Barao (‘Lend Him Your Hand’):

The Teesta is a river that barely wets your ankles in winter. If you turn your head back as you walk across it, you will see the great hulk of a giant hunched over his knees, his back pressed against the sky. In truth, it is not a giant, it is the Himalayas.

And, in a little village in Nandigram that no one seems to have heard of, what do you see on the far horizon, beyond the rows of salt-eaten palm trees? Something that is first only a tiny dot but keeps growing bigger and bigger, till it is as tall as a palm tree? The mast of an approaching ship. And beyond the sand dunes in front, the vast sweep of the blue ocean. The Bay of Bengal.

This, then, is my Bengal, stretching from the mighty Himalayas to the endless sea: the mountains are its watch-tower, the ocean the moat protecting it.

The train to Faridpur was a long time away yet. I was sitting in the Rajbari market yard, waiting for the train. It was a mist-laden early morning during the time of the great famine of the forties. A little distance from us, beside the army camp on the road to the train station, I spotted a weird creature. It was approaching us slowly, on all fours. It didn’t look like any animal I had known before. Its two eyes glinted even through the fog’s veil. Had I been alone, I might have blacked out from fear. Because there was something in those eyes that chilled you to the bone.

The creature came closer. It was picking out clumsily little somethings from the dust, eating them. Its flaring eyes were searching for something in the mist. Its two front paws looked quite like a man’s hands. Only the fingers seemed to be scrawnier, longer. It had no hair on its body. What animal was this?

I shuddered as it came near me. Man—the son of god. It was a boy twelve or thirteen years old, with not a stitch of clothing on him. His back was broken. He couldn’t walk any more. So he crawled about on his hands and feet. In the market yard he picked up grains of rice and gram from the dust and ate them.

I ran away from him to the railway station. But even today those two burning eyes fix me in their maddening gaze now and then. As I look out on the wide and deep rivers that dispense bountiful harvests all round, I hear him breathe hard. With his wasted, spindly fingers, he is pointing at those murderers who in towns and villages and cities and ports are fastening the noose of death around the necks of the living. Who won’t let men live a life fit for men.

Those two blazing eyes seek peace. Let there be peace all across Bengal, in her green fields rippling with golden corn, in the farmer’s barns bursting with paddy. Let peace twine hands with countless men rising in protest in factories and mines. No more war, no more death from starvation. Let there be a life of freedom, of happiness, a new life built by millions of strong, willing hands. A life of peace.

Amid the darkening shadows of war and famine, those two blinding eyes watch over this land that stretches from the Himalayas to the seas. They are the eyes of someone who is struggling to get up on his feet. Give him your hand. Help him stand up again.

Nothing quite like this had been attempted in the Bengali language before. Subhash just turned 27 when he wrote this piece. The audacious simplicity of prose has intensely lyrical underpinnings, something perhaps only Tagore had achieved in his 1940 memoirs, Chhelebela (‘My Boyhood Days’).

Anjan Basu has published a book of translations – As Day is Breaking – from the work of the Jnanpith Award-winning poet, Subhash Mukhopadhyay. Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s Poems Anticipated the India of Today

Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s verse had an austere beauty of cadence that was as moving as it was graceful.

Among the books I received as a prize from my school in one of my senior years, there were three by Subhash Mukhopadhyay, whose birth centenary is today. The first, Jato Durei Jai (However Far I Go, 1962), was the book of poems that had won him the Sahitya Academy Award in 1964. The second was Amar Bangla (My Bengal, 1951), a collection of journalistic sketches, while the third, Bangalir Itihaas, was an adaptation for youngsters of Nihar Ranjan Roy’s monumental history of Bengal’s society and culture by the same name.

As a child growing up in an old-fashioned communist household, I was not unaware of Mukhopadhyay’s name or his work. And yet these books were a revelation. Was the poet who wrote the eponymous poem in Jato Durei Jai the same militant activist who had been a member of the party since his teens, who indeed had spent years in Budge Budge, one of greater Kolkata’s industrial ghettoes, organising, agitating, writing leaflets and pasting fiery posters on curfew-bound walls?

However far I go
with me goes
the name of a river
strung in a garland of waves –

However far I go.

On my eyelids lingers
the memory
of a courtyard scrubbed clean
and on it
a long row of the marks
of Lakshmi’s feet.

However far I go.

Nothing from Mukhopadhyay’s earlier poetry that I had been familiar with – Padatik (The Foot Soldier, 1940), Agnikone (The Abode of the Fire-God, 1948) or Chirkut (The Parchment, 1950) – though written between 1951-57, the poems of Phul Phutuk (Let Many Flowers Bloom) were not anthologised in a separate book before 1990 – had prepared me for something quite like this.

Also read: ‘Flowers of Stone’: Intimations of Loss and Triumph in the Poetry of Subhash Mukhopadhyay

The unrelenting intensity of tone and the stark vividness of imagery of my favourite piece from Agnikone – ‘Ekti Kobitar Jonyo (For the Sake of a Poem)’ were still fresh in my young mind:

A poem is about to get written. For its sake
the sky, like a blue tongue of fire,
seethes in rage; over the sea
a violent storm flails its wings, the smoky locks
of the clouds’ wild hair unravel, the roll of thunder
echoes in the forest, in its roots
the terror of landslides throbs fiercely…

How could I, then, help being struck by the very intimate tone, the very soft-focus images, of ‘Dur Theke Dekho (You Can Look on From a Distance)’:

I will keep
stirring up my thoughts with a spoon –
you can listen to them
from another table.

In front of me will stand a cup
and on my lap two fingers
like two knitting-needles will go on
weaving a pattern of many memories –
you can look on as you sit
at another table.

Even when the poem transitions from the very private world of two individuals to a landscape in ferment, it manages to retain the very personal tone of its voice:

Then
when time will have gone cold
noisily will I get up from my chair
and without looking back even once
I will walk away
to where lightning
is striking houses like a whip-lash
where pulling giant trees by their hair
the wind is driving them to the ground
where a fierce torrent of rain
is scratching on window-panes
with its claws.

You can look on from a distance.

Clearly, the diction was a lot mellower here, the tone softer. The clever turn of phrase, the irrepressible wit of the Subhash Mukhopadhyay of the Padatik days still show up now and then, but they had fully shed the somewhat harsh urbaneness of the poet’s vocabulary (“My love, now’s not the time to play with flowers / for ruination, stark, stares us in the face./ Gone from our eyes are the blue dreams of pleasure / as a remorseless sun our backside bakes”):

His money grew on trees
in his backyard.
Goddess Lakshmi
came to his house on stilts,
in double-quick time.
A tall wall mounted with spikes
stood guard
so that the churlish wind
of lowly birth
did never get an entry.

But then
as he was busy
gulping down big mouthfuls
breathlessly,
suddenly
one day
through the fingers of his hand
life fell off
and rolled away from him.

The man never knew
when.

Mukhopadhyay’s worldview, his politics, could still be divined by any attentive reader of his verse. But its compelling quality now derived from a clear stream of universal humanism from which men of different ideological and cultural sympathies could slake their thirst.

Also read: Nirendranath Chakraborty – The Poet of Starry Nights and Sun-Drenched Summers

The belief in a new dawn which was to come, in a future which would light up the horizons, still steeped in the darkness of misery and unfreedom, was no less ardent. But that belief no longer felt the need to declaim, or speak in strident tones.

On the giant slab of jet-black stone overhead
busy sharpening its claws
lightning
seethes in blind rage.

Tiny ants, on their tiny feet
scramble for cover in the safety of their nests.

The storm is just about to break.

Terror hangs over the open field.
Blades of grass quiver,
and somewhere nearby
the restless flapping of wings
of birds who lost their way.

Well, let the storm come—
after all, it will pass sometime, surely?

We will keep standing
just where we happen to be,
our heads pushed back, high –

and our roots
struck deeper
deeper still inside the earth.

With Flowers of Stone, his elegy on the novelist Manik Bandopadhyay – whose life had been cut short at the tragically early age of f48 – Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s verse had achieved an austere beauty of cadence that was as moving as it was graceful:

Oh, take the flowers away –
they hurt.
Garlands pile up
to become mountains.
Flowers pile up, one heap on top of another,
till they all turn into stone.

Take the stone away, please –
it hurts.

Because men make flowers
tell so many lies,
flowers did never much appeal to me.
I would rather that I had sparks of fire –
no can make masks with them……..

Night after long night I sat awake to watch
when and how it becomes light.
My days passed
trying to unravel the mysteries of the dark.
Never did I, even not for a moment,
stop and sit still.
I squeezed out life’s essences
and left them to settle in many hearts –
today they spilled over, every one of them.

No.
I am no longer content with mere words.
I would rather that I could reach out
to that one place where all words arise
and also end –
that one source of all our words,
the final destination of all our names,
the earth, the water, and the wind —
I wish now to be one with all of them.

Yes, put me down now,
let
loads of firewood embrace me.
Let an ineluctable spark of the fire
allow me to forget for ever
all the pain that flowers bring.

The sparseness of Mukhopadhyay’s diction in Jato Durey Jai, I soon made out, was deceptive. I could see that he used the spoken word with a verve and flexibility I had not encountered yet. Colloquialisms, ‘rustic’ turns of phrase, even colourful street lingo – he could harness all of these to fine poetical use, and they provided his poetry with a dynamic that had few parallels in Bengali literature.

Also read: No Diktat on Poetry in Dark Times

He wrote prolifically for nearly 40 more years after Jato Durei Jai – talking of poetry alone, and not counting the many books of translations from other poets that he authored, he published 11 more anthologies after this – but his poetic idiom had pretty much taken shape by then.

His craft evolved after this also, of course, but no more did he push the boundaries of his craft. Both Kaal Modhumas (It’s Spring Tomorrow, 1966) and Chheley Gechhe Boney (The Exiled Son, 1972) sparkle with Mukhopadhyay’s flair for using the unassuming spoken word to dramatic effect:

I know that the moment
I sit down to a game of chess,
a million touts, leaving whatever they were doing,
will crouch low near my shoulder
and try to tell me my every move
much as one would teach a parrot how to talk.

I don’t know for sure
if, after this,
I should not tell them with folded hands:

Distinguished gentlemen,
please sit quietly and watch,
or else
be so kind as to go back to your seats.

And, for god’s sake,
let me play my own game
as I please.

The late 1960s-early 1970s were traumatic years for the Indian Left, with both official repression as well as deadly fratricidal battles inside the movement maiming its soul. Mukhopadhyay engaged with these turbulent times with alacrity and intensity.

Leaving me alone to grapple with my chains,
my son went into banishment.

Though they knew very well
they would find nothing,
two truckloads of policemen
at gunpoint last night
turned the house upside down.
They little knew they were stoking
the fire that silently smoulders
in a man well past forty.

Even now, as a procession goes by,
silently I stand by the road.
To every rally I still make my way
and listen to all that people say.
For whoever that does something good,
my hand always goes up in support.
But then, with my nose to the grind,
I no longer have
fire on my mind.

Leaving me behind in my chains
away went my son in banishment.
And yet, in his hands unfurled,
I see but my own ensign
anointing him
the Prince of our time.

Another poem from Chheley Gechhe Boney memorably captures the devastating effects of the squalid internecine battles that the Left was waging against itself in those terrible years. Two erstwhile comrades who had gone their own separate ways meet up accidentally after many years. A lot of water has flown under the bridge and the euphoria of the ‘revolutionary’ years is now a distant memory. The friends reminisce about those years enthusiastically, but then the time comes to talk about the present:

And, suddenly
we realised we had been touched by fear,
both of us.

We fell silent for a while,
perhaps neither of us wanting
to give anything away.
Then, suddenly, as we began to let it all out –
where we stood, on which side
we stood now

A monster wave
came screaming in, and in its two hands
picked us up high
and dashed us down in fury.

Suddenly, before our eyes,
rose a sheer wall –
and leaning against the iron door
outside
stood the dark night.
With a start, we realised
we stood once again
in two cells
next to each other.

Caught in our own web, back in the prison
That we had built ourselves.

From the late 1980s onwards, Mukhopadhyay’s politics began to shift focus. One imagines that the dismantling of the Soviet Union played its part in this transformation. At any rate, all across the world there was loss of faith in radical socialism – in its familiar incarnations, at all events – and India could not be expected to buck the trend.

Also read: A Riveting Mix of Poetry and Politics

Mukhopadhyay’s own health began to fail him, too. He continued to write, at times desultorily, at others with great skill and feeling about things that still moved him deeply. We will close with a look at one of his last published poems – ‘Aranye Rodan (A Cry in the Wilderness)’ from the book Chhorano Ghunti (Flying Dice, 2001) – which is animated by some of the themes that always exercised his sensibility with great force:

The dust of roads
that I walked on long, long ago,
chases me around in my sleep
every day.

Hissing
and swaying its sinister head
like the hood of a cobra,
a flag – raised high in the sky –
is discharging its load of poison
on to the ground.

Eyelids droop
in dark fear.

Saroj Roy, who could
catch a snake with his bare hands,
Robi Mitter, who in ‘forty-two,
had plunged in
with his bow and arrow,
Satya Ghosal, that wizard of words,
who could cast a spell
on whole crowds of men —

From Garbeta to Keshpur,
from Keshpur down to Chandrakona,
I go around, calling out names
in vain –
my cry in the wilderness
upon a dark night.

These lines from nearly 20 years ago, when India was still a very different country from how we find her today, stare back at us despairingly, with great poignancy. Mukhopadhyay, then, was not only looking back to his past, to our collective past: he was anticipating also the shape of things to come.

That is the marker of a true poet. Zeitgeist – the spirit of the age – takes hold of his mind and he gives expression to that spirit for the benefit of several later generations. Mukhopadhyay had set this task for himself, and he seldom strayed from it.

Anjan Basu is a literary critic, commentator and translator of poetry. As Day is Breaking is his book of translations from the work of Subhash Mukhopadhyay. Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

‘Flowers of Stone’: Intimations of Loss and Triumph in the Poetry of Subhash Mukhopadhyay

On February 12, we have stepped into the centenary of Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s (1919-2003) birth. Here’s a look at how he chose to engage with the craft of poetry-writing in a world marked by deep fault lines.

On February 12, we have stepped into the centenary of Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s (1919-2003) birth. Here’s a look at how he chose to engage with the craft of poetry-writing in a world marked by deep fault lines.

Eminent Bengali poet late Subhash Mukhopadhyay. Credit: Facebook

Personal manifestos can often be clumsy and awkward – they also date easily – and so it is a tribute to Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s genius that his statement of poetic intent, penned over 50 years ago, rings fresh and true to this day:

I want to stand every single word
on their own feet.
I wish to see every shadow
grow their own eyes.
I would like every static word
to walk free.

That someone called me a poet
I wouldn’t want.
I would rather that I could
walk on with many others
shoulder to shoulder, holding hands
till the day I die.

Oh! But that I could
lay my pen down
by the tractor’s side
and say,
Here, I am done now –
Brother, will you give me a light?

Kaal Madhumash (literally, Tomorrow is Spring) made its appearance in 1966, nearly three decades into Mukhopadhyay’s career. But the humble spoken word of everyday life, with its infinite variety of tone, colour and cadence, had been the body and soul of his poetry for many years already. Here was a consummate artist who, at the peak of his powers, wove his magic out of the sparsest of props. The story of how his craft evolved is worth recalling in the year of his birth centenary.

Mukhopadhyay started publishing quite early, and Padatik (The Foot-Soldier), his first book, came out in 1940, as he just turned 21. Urbane and witty, and already capable of coming up now and then with incredibly clever turns of phrase and strikingly original rhyme patterns, he, however, was not to come truly into his own before Agnikone’(The Abode of the Fire God) that made its appearance in 1948. The very first offering of the collection, For the Sake of a Poem, bursts forth with an intensity of tone and a vividness of imagery that take your breath away:

A poem is about to get written. For its sake
the sky, like a blue tongue of fire,

seethes with rage; over the sea
a violent storm flails its wings, the smoky locks
of the clouds’ wild hair unravel, the roll of thunder
echoes in the forest, in its roots
the terror of landslides throbs fiercely,
lightning cranes its neck to look back
and, by its light, over the entire valley,
mirrored in dark red blood, at its own image,
looks the terrible Moloch.
A poem gets written for his sake…………

Mukhopadhyay’s weltanschaung was fashioned by the turbulent 1940s, when great political and social upheavals rocked India and, indeed, the world. And he was not merely an onlooker, and plunged headlong into the battle for equity and social justice as a young communist activist, choosing, at the party’s bidding, to live in Budge Budge’s industrial ghetto for several years, where he had to daily shuffle his duties as an agitator and organiser with those of a reporter-cum-column writer for the party’s mouthpiece. In the event, his poetry quickly shed the somewhat self-conscious urbaneness of the initial years and grew mellower, more earnest in tone, even as images from humdrum, everyday lives came increasingly to make up his canvas:

The sky is like Babarali’s crazed eyes.
Underneath it, walking with a procession
and struggling to keep pace,
many miles from home,
is Babarali’s little daughter Salemon,
looking for
her mother.

Where in the city’s labyrinth
of alley-ways and blind lanes,
where are you hiding,
Salemon’s mother?

Where under the sky
that looks like Babarali’s deranged eyes,
where have you set up home,
Salemon’s mother?

Do you hear
how, in chorus with other voices
in the procession,
the corners of her sticky eyes
running with tear-drops
and calling out to you,
Salemon’s mother,
is your daughter
born in the time of a famine,
and now staring at another?

It is only you, Salemon’s mother,
that she is searching for.

By now, Mukhopadhyay had clearly outgrown the need to speak cleverly. Or mockingly (‘My love, now’s is not the time to play with flowers / For ruination, stark, stares us in the face./ Gone from our eyes are the blue dreams of pleasure / As a remorseless sun our backsides bakes’). His intellectual commitments had found their moral and emotional equivalents in the bitter struggles, the collective joys and sorrows, the unredeemed darknesses and the sporadic iridiscence of hope in the lives that ordinary Indians lived around him. He no longer felt the need to declaim, or to pontificate (‘Comrade, shan’t we usher in the new day now?…..’) – and while his world view could still quite easily be divined by any attentive reader of his poetry, its compelling quality derived from a clear stream of universal humanism from which men of all ideological and cultural sympathies could drink deeply:

‘Where under a cataract-blinded sky
His ancient head
Sagging to his knees
A scraggy stick in hand
Sits doddering old darkness

Where all through the long night
And the entire day
Autumn leaves fall drip drop drip drop
On to the ground

Where like the stevedore on a steamer
Memory sits
Plumbing the depth
Of life’s ocean
All day

Towards there
I know
The icy winds of winter
Will shove me too
One day

Oh, mother Earth
May I never
See the face
Of that wasted day

Before that time comes
Do take out my eyes
And tie them
Like two jingling anklets
To my two feet

Here simplicity of diction blends magically into startlingly vivid word pictures. The overall impression, however, is one of extreme economy, and this often helps mask the technical virtuosity, the verve at play in Mukhopadhyay’s mature poetry:

After drowning the western sky in blood
Intimidating, like a raging bandit
Glowering all the while at those out on the streets
Back to his formidable den
Returned
The sun

A very long while after
To investigate at first hand
So that day could easily be turned into night
In the policeman’s Black Maria / Came / Evening

As I switched on the light
Out through the open window
Leapt
Darkness

And when
I drew the curtains open
Like a startled, frightened deer
In a tight embrace
Clasped me
The wind

It is possible to forget that Mukhopadhyay stood in a line – maybe not in a direct line, though – of descent from Bengali poetry’s great lyricists, including Rabindranath Tagore – till we look a little more closely and come up with verses such as this:

I will never forget
How
You helped erase my grief
On a dark night.

The sky outside
Was blinded by the swirling dust
Kicked up
By the stiff desert wind.

In the dark, a pack of camels
Their bells jingling
Were making their reluctant way
From the town to the village
Turning up their noses in disgust.

What tree was that on the road’s other side?
I did not know.
What flower was that in bloom in that garden?
I did not know, either.

I was a stranger, new To this unfamiliar town.
In the distance
The car lights, shining a little above the road
Were criss-crossing one another
Breathlessly.

They looked as though
They were deep furrows
On the forehead of a man
Who had lived a hard life.
Suddenly, my tears froze
And the invisible coffin
That sat on my shoulders
Felt incredibly heavy.
That day I realised
That living was lighter
Than death.

Memories of an empty life
Came back to me.
I thought of my country
Of the times we lived in
And I missed it all so badly.
I, a complete stranger
New to this town
Still held on my wrist
My own country’s time.
Words of sympathy rolled towards me
But however much I tried
I could not hold them in my hands.

It was then, in silence
That you stood up, and walked towards me
And held my hand.
No, you did not say a word
But how you made me forget my grief
On that dark night –

You may one day forget
But I will not.

Words shorn of all ornamentation, words that yet are drawn from the heart of the most deeply felt emotions, combine here to create what can only be described as musical phrases of stunning beauty. Mourning the death, and at the same time celebrating the life, of the great Bengali novelist-storyteller Manik Bandopadhayay, who died at the tragically early age of 48, Mukhopadhyay weaves an unforgettable tapestry of night and day, of death and life:

Night after long night I sat awake to watch
when and how it becomes light.
My days were spent
trying to unravel the mysteries of the dark.
Never did I, even not for a moment
stop and sit still.
I squeezed out life’s essences
and left them to settle in many hearts –
today they spilled over, every one of them.

No
I am no longer content with mere words.
I would rather that I could reach out
to that one place where all words arise
and also end –
that one source of all our words
that final destination of all our names,
the earth, the water and the wind –
I wish now to be one with all of them.

Yes
put me down now
let
loads of firewood embrace me.
Let an ineluctable spark of fire
allow me to forget for ever
all the pain that flowers bring.

A more moving elegy is unlikely to have been sculpted out of such simple building blocks anywhere.

Anjan Basu freelances as literary critic, commentator and translator. He has published a book of translations from the work of the well-known Bengali poet Subhash Mukhopadhayay.