Sumitranandan Pant

DR. B. N. PRASAD
Ranchi University

With the death of Sumitranandan Pant (on December 28, 1977) Hindi poetry has lost the last of the Big Three of Chayavadand one of its greatest poets. He was born in a village in Garhwal which is surrounded by tall, snow-bound Himalayan peaks. The Himalayan scenery had a deep impact on the adolescent mind of the poet and he began to seek verbal structures to make vocal the patterns of beauty. His adolescent mind also began to experience the tremours of love and in his early poetry these two themes got intertwined. There is nothing unusual about this but when we think that all these poetic labours met with a very strong degree of opposition from the then reigning champions of Hindi poetry, we are enormously surprised. Hindi poetry, before the advent of the literary movement known as Chayavad, was dominated by poets who had eyes only for the superficial reality and who wanted poetry to carry a moral and a message. The verbal structures invented by them were crude and could convey the very obvious and loud aspects of Reality. Pant and his friends, Prasad and Nirala, began to “refine the dialect of the tribe” and began to express thematic patterns which demanded great powers of observation coupled with a very rich sensibility. The first innocent and juvenile outpourings of Pant, therefore, were greeted with jibes and jeerings and he had to contribute a long introduction to his first collection of great poems entitled Pallava (Leaves) to justify his kind of poetry. That was in the ’twenties of this century. Pant and his friends won the day and he was, thus, a pioneer who won new frontiers of theme and expression for Hindi poetry.

Chayavadwas the name given to the new literary movement by its detractors. It literally means one who expressed only the shadows and was indifferent to anything substantial and wholesome and turned his s on reality. The name stuck to the movement, partly because the new poets adopted the nomenclature with enthusiasm and aplomb. In fact this movement was inspired by Romanticism and Pant and his friends were deeply influenced by the poeticcreations of Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth. They were also influenced by the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.

The poets of the Chayavadgroup were interested in recording minute vibrations of the soul and in giving expression to the various moods of external nature. Pant was unique among the poets of Chayavadin that he had seen nature at close quarters uncontaminated by the miseries of man. Through magnificent lyrics he gave expression to the various moods of nature. He was also bit of an aesthete and therefore his early poetry had a fragile beauty and sometimes looked enervated. Hindi poetry, however, owes some of the best nature poems to him.

Nature was his primary love but he was also attracted by man, Gandhi and his movement was altering the mood of the nation and Sumitranandan Pant could not be indifferent to a nation in ferment. He left Allahabad University in the middle of his studies and began to devote his entire time to poetry. He, however, did not associate himself actively with the national movement because he knew that there are also other ways of regenerating a nation. He had great respect for Mahatma Gandhi and wrote a number of poems on him but he never identified himself with the merely local and ephemeral, with the slogans and gushing emotions. He took upon himself the difficult task of bringing about a renaissance in cultural terms. At this moment he found that Chayavadwith its preference for mysticism and verbal patterns of fragile beauty was inadequate for his purposes and he started on a quest of new horizons. Pant had the eyes to perceive the limitations of Chayavadand the capacity to transcend those limitations. Hundreds of Hindi poets remained prisoners of the narrow confines of that literary movement which had certainly played a historical role but was irrelevent in the late ’twenties and early ’thirties Pant’s earlier books had typical romantic titles: Pallava(Leaves) and Gunjan(Murmurings). Hisnext book was entitled Yugant(The End of an Age). It actually signified the beginning of a new voice, a new tone, a new realization. This was followed by another volume entitled Gramya(The Village Girl). He began writing about the external reality, about the farmer, the ant, the labourer. The language used by him in the poems written during this phase also underwent a change. It came closer to the common speech and shed a substantial part of its old, aristocratic aloofness. During this period he was deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Vivekananda. Another influence was also slowly making an impact on his sensibility. This was Marxism which came through his friendship with P. C. Joshi who later on became the Secretary of the Communist Party of India. He was associated with the Progressive Writers Movement and this association sharpened his social conscience. In fact in the late ’thirties the communist theory and programmes attracted hundreds of eminent intellectuals of the world. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day-Lewis, Richard Wright, Jean Paul Sartre, Rabindranath Tagore, Prem Chand, etc., were temporarily attracted by Marx and the achievements of Soviet Union. Pant was also drawn towards that movement and wrote some immaculate verses about social reality. He, however, soon realised that this movement was committed only to a change in the externals and was indifferent to the urges for a basic change in the sensibility. Marx was the god that failed for many intellectuals who were drawn towards him; the god dig not fail for Pant. He was still valid so far as the external reality was concerned but Marx’s theory that art and culture were only superstructures on the economic base was not acceptable to Pant. The poet was convinced that it is the duty of the creative artist to unite the external and internal worlds; he should be aware committed to the moment as well as the milieu; he should be aware simultaneously of the pulls of the society and the soul. In the first phase of his creative career society was on the margin of his artistic picture while nature occupied the centre. In the second phase of his creative career it was the social reality which advanced towards the centre and occupied it. Nature and soul-stirrings remained there but they were pushed to the margin. Sumitranandan Pant was now on the brink of a new breakthrough which could unite the two worlds into a new harmony through an adequate creative alchemy.

This breakthrough came through a contact with the famous Indian dancer and artist Udayshankar. Udayshankar had lived for sometime in Almora in Garhwal and an intimacy developed between the two kindred souls. Both became partners of a pilgrimage to search a principle of unity between the outer and the inner worlds. The ballet and other stylized forms of dance also attracted Pant. Udayshankar made a film named Kalpana(Imagination) which interpreted the outer and inner realities through stylized pictures and movements. Sumitranandan was also associated with the making of this picture. This film was made in South India where Pant came into contact with Sri Aurobindo and his philosophy. Sri Aurobindo confirmed many of Pant’s own speculations and the former’s philosophy gave resonance and richness to the ideological residue of Pant’s poetry. Like Sri Aurobindo the poet also believed that true spirituality should not mean a repudiation of external reality. It should irradiate and impregnate the external reality and make it more meaningful and oriented towards God. Sham spirituality should be replaced bytrue spirituality which takes as its junior partner the social reality. The later poems of Sumitranandan Pant give expression and celebrate the union of the outer and inner worlds. Some of the titles of his collection of poems of this phase are: Swarna Kiran (Golden Light), Swarna Dhooli (Golden Dust), Raja Shikhar (Silver Peaks), Shilpi(The Creator); He, however, never allowed philosophy to crowd out poetry or to cloud it. His poems are verbal artifacts containing warm human experience. They are neither intellectual exercises nor philosophical abstractions.

The doubt that the poet who is drawn to different philosophical systems has the element of uncertainty lurking somewhere in his sensibility may be put forth by some intellectuals. It may also be assumed that this uncertainty is indicative of a certain sense of timidity. This can be true of lesser souls or people with inadequate creative energy. Pant was responsive to the philosophical patterns of East and West but he never allowed his sensibility to be limited by them. He never allowed the philosophical ideas to blur the contours of human experience which was the real stuff of his poetry. Robert Frost has said that great poetry also begins in experience and ends in wisdom and also serenity.

Sumitranandan Pant has also written some poetic dramas and Jyotsna(The Rays of the Moon) is the most famous among them. His talent, however, was not dramatic in nature; it was essentially lyrical. His poetic dramas are only dialogues. He was also a literary critic but his criticism, like the literary criticism of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, is ‘Workshop criticism.’ This means that his criticism is related to his practice of poetry and his ideas on the relation between philosophy and poetry, politics and poetry, imaagination and need of organization are not absolutist in nature. He also wrote some short stories but he will be known primarily as a poet. A few dozen poems of his will stand the test of time and give delight and wisdom to the future generations and it is the highest that can be said about any poet.