Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: A Mystic Turned Leftist

Dr. K. Venkata Reddy

Sri Krishnadevaraya University, Anantapur

Greeted some sixty years ago by Sri Aurobindo as “a poet of almost infinite possibilities,” Harindranath Chattopadhyaya is hailed today as “a Leftist high-gospeller.” One of the most versatile and vigorous literary personalities of contemporary India, Harin is a poet, painter, playwright, musician, actor–all rolled into one. Veering spasmodically between the extremes of Aurobindonian mysticism and Marxian materialism, he has sampled every variety of experience, and exploited every possible mood, pose and stance. Small wonder, therefore, if such a literary giant has been chosen for the B. C. Roy Award for Literature for the year 1981. Conferred on such a brilliant man of letters, it is an honour done not so much to Harin as to the Award itself.

Born in 1898, Harin was the son of Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya, a scientist-dreamer and a mystic jester, and of Varada Sundari who was “half-angel, half-bird.” A wide-eyed wonder-drunk childhood had slowly ripened into a manhood of immeasurable potency and promise. When his first book of poems, The Feast of Youth appeared in 1918, Sri Aurobindo found in it “a rich and finely lavish command of language, a firm possession of the metrical instrument, an almost blinding gleam and glitter of the wealth of imagination and fancy, a stream of unfailingly poetic thought and image and a high, though as yet uncertain, pitch of poetic expression……the beginnings of a supreme poetic utterance of the Indian soul in the rhythms of the English tongue.”

Since the publication of his The Feast of Youth numerous collections of poems and plays have come out. Harindranath reveals the core of his faith as well as his endless interest in the process of poetic creation when he says: “I dwelt more and more ... in the innermost recesses of the heart from where poetry comes. Words and phrases became an obsession; thoughts floated across the mind like clouds, some delicately tinted, others stormy, but past all that movement I begin to grip more firmly the thought...”. Thoughts come to him flapping across the wide ocean like light-winged birds. The result is a body of verse that has truly impressive bulk. His poems have been translated into several languages including Russian and Chinese.

Influenced by Western methods and models, Harin has taken to lyric poetry with ease and grace, and has given it a charm, a dignity and a thought-content. The 209 lyrics that make Spring in Winter are a poetic record of efflorescence of love, and have an authentic ring throughout. Like most of Harin’s lyrics, these are simple, sensuous, direct and neither stale nor startling. The lover’s varied moods and fancies, faithfully rendered in these exquisite lyrics give them something of an orchestrated unity of its own. A personal romantic experience becomes a poetic paradigm of lovers’ ways and moods, and aches and joys.

Like Subramania Bharati, Harindranath feels overwhelmed by the mystic vision of the “dance of doom.” For Bharati, it is Kali who destroys the worlds in a frenzy of dance and then creates them anew as Shiva, the auspicious, approaches her and quenches her divine rage. But, for Harin it is Shiva who is lost in the “thandav”, the mystic dance of doom:

In a rich rapture of intoxication
Dream-lost you move from deep shadowy deep
Along infinitudes of mortal sleep
Which veils the naked spirit of creation.

Here Harin is susceptible to mystical states and is responsive to mystical intimations, thereby proving to be a mystic poet.

Virgins and Vineyards is Harin’s most recent and most mature contribution to literature. As Harin himself states in his preface, “The poetry has come through at white heat and I have glowed throughout the writing of it, feeling a sense of gratefulness to my ancestors who continue to dream dreams through and in me, never losing touch with modern trends and events of history, which continue to alter the values of men.” The poet is perfectly at ease here, mixing memory and reverie, fact and fancy, politics and philosophy. There is a mingling of metrical ease and verbal fluency which is Harin’s main strength as a poet.

Harin’s reputation as a poet has overshadowed his eminence as a playwright. His dramatic output is by no means negligible. He has nearly a score of plays to his credit. And over a dozen of them are “devotional plays” dealing with certain situations in the lives of our religious leaders such as Jayadeva, Ravidas, Eknath, Pundalik and Sakku Bai. They are all written in verse, and are playlets rather than full-length plays. The criticism generally levelled against these plays is that they are loose in construction and blurred in characterisation with predominance of poetry over action. Tukaram, which is free from these faults, is easily the best of Harin’s devotional plays. The saintly ardour and the sense of humility and detachment of the hero are clearly brought out in his mellifluous songs as well as his dialogues with his wife and Rameshwar. The different scenes are well-knit and the poetry is functional rather than decorative as in some other plays. Its chief merit lies in its being effective as both a closet play and a stage play.

Harin seems to have undergone a metamorphosis, as it were, in his poetic career. The mystic poet seems to have suddenly realized that for years and years he has been “kept like a hot-house plant, secluded, away from the realities of the world.” He now wants “to move among the poorest and lowly, live among the downtrodden and write about the truths of life as they exist.” So he promises himself that he “won’t write about God and the birds and the flowers any more”, and that he “will write about starving babies, about cruel masters, about poor sad women, about people who are shot because they asked for food.” This may be only an intellectual approach to the misery and the tragedy of the slums, the workhouses, of the exploiters and the exploited” and yet, he feels, “that is the first step, that is better than singing about lies, about God and the soul.” This transformation of the mystic poet into a committed writer is manifest in Harin’s social plays of protest.

The most significant of Harin’s social plays are found in his collection, Five Plays (1937), which includes The Window, The Parrot, The Sentry’s Lantern, The Coffin and The Evening Lamp. They heralded the emergence of a significant working-class dramatist with innate potentialities. Like Mulk Raj Anand in the field of Indian fiction in English, Harin has succeeded in bringing a kind of life to the Indian stage that was never there before. For the first time in the history of Indian drama in English, Harin has introduced working-class characters on the stage. No Indian dramatist in English had ever cut such large slices of the working-class life. Sympathy for the exploited, revolt against stultifying morality, a plea for purposeful writing–such are the themes of these plays which are at once realistic and symbolic.

The Five Plays are essentially products of an earnest and deep commitment to certain values of life. Like the plays of Arnold Weskar, they are warm, humane, sincere, passionate, compassionate, brave, honest, energetic, outspoken, full of enthusiasm and full of concern. The enthusiasm is largely enthusiasm for paving the way for an egalitarian society. The concern is mainly concern for the well-being of the worker. They lay bare the dramatist’s acute awareness of the social problems around him. They register his protest against the cruelty of the capitalist factory-owners, the conventional and stultifying morality and makes woman a caged-bird, and the irresponsibility of writers to social problems!

Harin’s social plays are dramatically more effective than his devotional plays. Though they are heavily coated with purpose, they have a tautness and intensity that are seldom found in our dramatic writing. They are eminently actable on the stage unlike the majority of Indian plays. With their simple stage-setting, quick movement of action, limited number of characters and racy dialogue, they can very successfully be enacted. They are satirically very powerful with well-knit plots and life-like characters. Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar rightly describes them as “manifestoes of the new realism.”

The most ambitious of Harin’s plays is Siddhartha: Man of Peace (1956), an historical play in eight Acts, a simple and straight- forward enactment of Gautama’s life and message. The elaborate plot, the enormous number of scenes, situations and episodes and the large number of characters make for a certain prolexity and ostensible lack of tautness and concentration. In other words, what the play gains in detail loses in intensity. Anyway, taking into consideration, the bulk of his dramatic output the vast variety of themes he successfully handled and, above all, the poetic heights to which the verses often rise, it must be admitted that Harindranath is a very significant dramatist whose contribution to Indian drama in English is praiseworthy.

To conclude, Harindranatb Chattopadhyaya is essentially a lyric poet, a mystic turned Leftist. Whatever he has written bears the distinct stamp of the Indian mind. Whether he writes a poem or a play, it is unmistakably an Indian speaking English. His metaphor and simile are refreshingly new and strikingly Indian. He is a poet every inch. He always writes because he cannot help writing, and also because poetry is man’s–the poet’s as well as the reader’s–elemental need: “no expendable luxury but the very oxygen of existence.”

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