Distance and Depth in Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry

DISTANCE AND DEPTH
IN MODERN INDO-ANGLIAN POETRY

V. MOHAN PRASAD M.A., D.T.E.

The modern poet is at a great aesthetic distance from the Past. He complains of the burden of the past. He is sure neither of the present nor future. He is one with Samuel Beckett who admits, “I can’t say to what extent I have nothing to say.” The glitter of the past to a Srinivasa Rayaprol is “only of an illusion of the past. That was not the real past. But a remembered one.”

The modern Indo-Anglian poet is in search of a new coinage, an open idiom and an intransitive usage. He is both a bee and a spider. He roars like a lion but suffers like a lamb. Like Sartre he ends up saying, “what is is what is not.”

Every new writer tries to resuscitate dead words. He endeavours to create his own dimensions of space and time. This every new “poem is a house in the mind” (William Dickey), attaining a new method of tonality. It is a poem at a distance spoken vehemently and violently. The geometry of thought and emotion is built up just as the poem–house is built on the inner grounds of the mind. The poet’s own voice takes to some assumed identities as in Dom Moraes’ aesthetically excavated Kanheri Caves poem. In this poem we discover the Indian equivalent of the Oedipus complex working everywhere. A “tireless striving”, stretching “its arms towards” imperfection is conceded even by Sarojini Naidu in her poem To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus. The futility of Morning Prayer is realised as an irresolution in his later poem Enterprise, by Nissim Ezekiel. A comparison of Ezekiel’s Enterprisewith Agra Shahid Ali’s poem A Pilgrimage to Amarnath will yield curious meanings with a central intelligence of life. The theme of both these poems is locale of death, departure and decay; friendless, faceless and purposeless–an existentialist’s mere shadowy commitment, a feeble hope of a chancy revelation. Does Nissim Ezekiel pray at the instance of Eliot who offers his Mantra of prayer and poetry? In his Prayer Ezekiel asserts, “But prayer as All I have not known.” We have yet another enigmatic poem An Apology to Goutama by Kamala Das. If in Sarojini Naidu’s To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus we have a lyric woman longing for the inaccessible, inKamala Das we have the anti-lyrical private voice suggesting a dialectical organisation of sensual and spiritual aspects. Goutama is brought down to Mr. Goutama by Kamala Das. Her speaking voice withdraws to its own private sense of diffused and dissipated spirituality. The voice relies on the experiential wisdom of the body which is shown to be native and significant. Goutama is reduced to a tramp and a vagabond as in an absurd drama. Even a Radha Krishna legend is not spared by Kamala Das. She covers the aesthetic distance with a vengeance. The homeless souls in the poem, return to the old Kadamba tree “to hang like bats from its pure physicality”. The elements of transmutation must be discovered by each in his own impulsive disowning of inherited mythologies. Sarojini’s Radha is only “self-slain with doubt.” Kamala Das sardonically carnalises abstract passion to render experience immediate. Sarojini’s Indian Dancers and Kamala Das’ The Dance of Eunuchs offer yet another contrast marking off the generative points of vision and voice, theme and tonality revealing the stare of calculated incomprehension between two penetrations. In Sarojini’s poem the dance is an ecstasy, rapture and delight ending in a Khajuraho smile. On the contrary the dance in Kamala Das’ poem is immobile. This is a hysteric dance of self-torture, self-pity and death-wish. The symbols of fertility are inverted, fractured, desiccated. The sound of a sterile thunder does not incantatorily say ‘Da Da Da.’ The “jingling jingling jingling” is like “Jug jug jug to dirty ears.” It is a drought of sexual experience. Adi K. Sett’s poem The Nautch Girl atleast promises some fruitage but not the dreary dance of eunuchs. And in Sarojini’s poem there is a rhythmic equation with the very space which quivers to the tremulous contours of the body.

Distance and depth, is a two-fold sensation. Can there be a circle without a centre? Are time and space necessarily warring gods? When one is caught between fixity arid flux there can be an undrawn circle without a centre and space and time can become the urdeclared warring gods.

The two Buddha figures in Kanheri Caves are succinctly antipodal. The nodal touch of the poem is significant of growing more into time, of extending consciousness to greater dimensions of distance and depth. Buddha, in this poem of Dom Moraes is as symbolic of the ecological wilderness as that of the jar in Anecdote of a Jar by Wallace Stevens, taking dominion everywhere. Stevens says, “the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice…has not always to find.” (Of Modern Poetry) Even the past of the poem itself is a souvenir as someone remarked, “the language of the past–even if only two pages past–is also a foreign language.”

Are form and feeling–the psychological form of ideas and thoughts and the verbal form of feeling in syntagmatic rhythms–mutually exclusive? If they are–Tukaram would not have said “The water is full of the sky...it contains its own ripples.”

But the modern metaphor is not an act but a relationship. The modern poet employs the fiction of personality and he is concerned with the disjunction of the world between its visual and physical promises. Thus there is a necessary artistic crack between distance and depth; between the world of the right eye and the world of the left eye. It is primarily a psychological and social casualty. It is also a symbolic necessity. The modern poet’s split-personality is a dramatised metaphor enacted on the inner stage of the self. The poet’s existentialistic and neutralistic dilemma can be seen in Ezekiel’s poem The Neutral. Man in his search for either a myth which is a shared belief or fiction which is an absolute freedom tends to become fictional, allegorical and mythopoeic if not a downright absurdist and obscurantist. To him his perception of reality comes distracted, dishevelled and dislocated. He relies on the revelation of dream rather than the epiphany of book. Even flesh and sense become impersonal and incomprehensible. Man despairs–as in Krishna Baladev Vaid’s Beyond Silences–inanonymity because despair by itself is a function of freedom. It is an emotional luxury and an intellectual necessity. Thus a lot of modern Indo-Anglian poetry seems to be based upon a Narcissistic outlook.

The post-independence ‘Inglish’ poets feel the horror and boredom of freedom. Like caged birds suddenly released they are now flying in an eternal circularity, each completing his own circle without a centre. The distance of aesthetic alienation and the depth of human humiliation, the personal and private wounds received from one another, a cut-off sensibility setting them apart from Sri Aurobindo, Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, a loosening of national self-consciousness and a keeping away from the far far flowing Ganges–these and many other similar lascerating hurts are what the modern poets suffer from. For a poet like Dom Moraes the mythical Hindu inward tree is paradoxically uprooted now and the “Ganga is sunken”, and the temple bells sound lazily. Poets are now lit a geographical emotional and ecological distance from the quick pulp and sap of life. From Chidambaram to Chicago is a big leap, but A. K. Ramanujan in his poem Some Indian uses of History on a Rainy Day, promises to recover the past from “somewhere in the inverse / Branching under the earth”.

Linguistically of Course the Indo-Anglian poets have an emotional identity with English. It is the language of their whole psychic being if not of the dialect of the tribe, their physical space. ‘Inglish’ poets feel quite at home and away from home. (See Kamala Das’ An Introduction)

The characteristic feature of the whole Indo-Anglian poetic scene is all anxiety–the principle of anxiety; an observation fever–to observe the imperceptible, to experience the non-experiential. Intellect has its emotions in poets like Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Pondicherry school of poets like Sethna, Chettur and Gokak, and finally that myriad-minded Harindranath. But all that is a vague past. One generation of poets in distanced from another generation.

In an alien language, “like the weaver, the writer on works on the wrong side of his material. He had to do only with language; and it is thus he suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning” (Merieau Ponty). Untilsuch time he arrives at a pattern the ‘Inglish’ poet is delighted at the very amusement of writing in English which by itself is an element of meaning. Deb Kumar Das’ Jire Canto builds up a metalanguage. But when it is compared with Ezekiel’s A Very Indian Poem in English, Deb Kumar seems to be much of a made heart. In Poet, Lover, Bird Watcher, Ezekiel declares that the best poets wait for words. This poem is an ironic certainty. If Fire Canto builds up a Thesis of genesis by an angry, vengeful and negative prayer so also does Pilgrimage, one of the poems in Waiting for the Beginning and other poems by D. V. K. Raghavacharyulu who uses optic images. “Putting out desire and the thought of desire” (D. V. K.) is nothing but knowing “Prayer as all” (Ezekiel). There is thus in the modern poetic context an excursion into the inner landscapes of man and poetry has the aura of ‘inscape’ and area of ‘instress’. Distance may thus be called aura and depth, the inner area. Intellect crystallising into emotion is the mechanism of modern poetics. It is what happens when “the phrase of desire / swallows the flesh / of sense” (D. V. K.). Then, poetry as Wallace Stevens said, must be understood with one’s nerves.

An incisive insight and a technique of syncopation can be seen in the poetry of S. K. Kumar. His volume Articulate Silences is a product of a highbrow attitude. In A. K. Ramanujan we find synchronisation. N. K. Sethi is not ashamed of his irresolute vocabulary when he declares, “I had no sentence and no meaning to offer”. He perhaps believes in the impossibility of all human communication.

Ezekiel has a soulful heart but not a heartful soul. He presents Indian sensibility as a metaphor (For Kalpana). Ezekiel’s Night of the Scorpion and K. N. Daruwalla’s Night of the Jackals are two great poems which account for the pulsating and vibrating factors of distance and depth, inclination and nature, the spirit and the flesh. Daruwalla says, “a work of art must hit you in the gut.” He has many mighty lines to his credit. Unfortunately Ezekiel is diluting his craftsmanship, not the craftsmanship of metrical composition but the very poetic logos: the unconscious meaning of the poem; the figure a poem makes. We come upon the real Ezekiel in his poem “ground, Casually. He should ‘gather grace’ not at home, but in the chromatic wasteland of a pale, fading, neutral world; human debris. He should dramatise the dark tragedy of human fantasy and hallucination. After all he is not destined to be our Ogden Nash. Both his poems Enterpriseand Morning Prayer are only feeble expressions of a cosmic frustration and spiritual exhaustion. A poet should be in his own words, ‘a Rascal-Clown.’ He should be all–a bird, a lover and a bird watcher. A poet unwittingly discovers the anonymous truth of the world in his multifarious activities. Ezekiel should not wish to be a finished man: only his poems can be finished ones. It will also be an irony if an Unfinished Man has An Exact Name. If his ‘landscape has no depth or height’ he should move away from the urban to the rural. His poem After the Show compels comparison with Kamala Das’ poem The Motif in the Mirror. There is a semantic, psychic and sexual incompatibility in Ezekiel’s poem. He seems to have written this poem as casually as a lazy man skipping stones across the river. Kamala Das has an imagistic strength.

P. Lal is always delightful but never surprising. He started all right with his proposed lone poem In the World’s Cities–From Calcutta which is a lilting juxtaposition of a metropolis and a small village. He has always a posy in his mind, always soft and sweet. He knows no suffering. It is only in some two poems The Lecturer and The Poet that he tells truth from fiction by using neurotic expressions. Occasionally his poems enter and share the created space as in the Yakshi. His lyrical rhythm helps the mind to think into unity.

The modern ‘Inglish’ poet’s love is “tortured with hatred and his hatred is stifled with love”. He is both a mendicant seeker and an opter-out. He is a prophet at a great geographical distance singing with an urgency of motivation and a compelling depth of emotion. Like Ezekiel in Marriage or Dom Moraes in Being Married he feels himself a frequent wedding guest in his married life.

Pritish Nandy’s poems betray an incipient sexual ecstasy. Ramanujan’s River flows into beatific poetic stances. Shanker Mokashi-Punekar has an Yeatsian moral tenderness. His Captive is a volume of speculative poems. Kamala Das deals with the reality of physical as well as psychic experience. Whitman heard the Hindoo teaching his favourite pupils and the Hindu poet Ramanujan hears it with a comic and cosmic irreverence. If distance is lost, depth is gained. We have exchanged Gitanjali for The Waste Land. The loss of religion, tradition, local legend and myth are compensated by an all-embracing world view. That is the world of the third eye.

There is a dark inwardness. The poems are bleak but powerful. There is a schizoid vision and a social as well as individual sickness; but not villainy. The poetry of Kamala Das; Gouri Deshpande, Ira De, Ela Singh, Sunita Namjoshi, Tilottama Rajan is a collective naked encounter of the real self. Mind and reality are two spatial coordinates with them. There is a stifled, tortured and abstract feeling in their unified voice. It gives us an accumulating sense of the impending disaster of the private self.

The modern poem is a “treeless leaf.” It is the last leaf of the finality of agony, loss and division. An acasual universe of a ‘treeless leaf’ can give us no gathered meaning.

There is a generation conflict. But there is also a continuity, a ‘generational’ pull. Balamani Amma’s poem To My Daughter and her daughter Kamala Das’ poem to her own son Jaisurya are evidences to this principle of continuity. Kamala Das looks in her grandmother even. The grandmother in her poetry is a grand symbol operating everywhere. She says:

“My grandmother’s – she was
the first I loved – trunks when opened, after
she died, contained only dolls.” (Captive)

Being distanced from the time past Kamala Das is now preoccupied with the depth of her own inwardness in the present as every other modern “Inglish” poet is. Modern “Inglish” poetry is a search for identity in the distant present, when both the word and world have abandoned the poets. Modern poetry comes (see Aurobindo’s Essence of Poetry)not from the harmony of soul vision but from the stress of soul’s division. It is a dark rhythmic voyage of self-discovery in the realms of inner and outer worlds of distance and depth.