From Mysticism to Marxism

An Approach to Harindranath

When a journalist enquired of Rabindranath Tagore, “Sir, after you ... who?”, he replied at once: “My mantle falls on Harindranath”. And he was prophetically right. Like Tagore, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, who passed away on June 23, 1990, creating a void in the Indian literary world, a void that cannot be so easily filled, is unquestionably a poet born to sing. His domain of song has its own themes and rhythms. Love poetry, Nature poetry, philosophic poetry in which philosophy is the least obtrusive and almost melts into song, satirical poetry – such has been his preoccupation in poetry. He recited his poetry with a marvellous sense of rhythm and it was always a pleasure to listen to his recitations. As lyrical as his sister and more exuberant in his imagery, he does not go in for jewelled phrases like Sarojini who was naturally influenced by her “decadent” contemporaries in England: His lyrics have the spontaneity and simplicity of Shelley’s, with a transparent and easy-flowing diction.

Yet, surprisingly enough, Harindranath has not received the social recognition and the critical attention he deserves. He has not been given his due by the Bengalis themselves, the literary institutions nor by the film-world and the leftists for whom he did so much. The Central Sahitya Akademi never honoured him. The Indian P. E. N. or the Writers Workshop in Calcutta hardly mention his name. Though he was an exquisite singer, none of his songs in his own voice are now available in the cassette market.

Sublime poetry may be born out of creative inspiration and may often be found to be different in quality from the quality of life its poet had lived on the surface. However, there are poets who, instead of leaving themselves at the mercy of the mysterious inspiration, choose to submit their propensity for getting inspiration to a mentally accepted earthly mission or ideal. Harindranath has subscribed to both the principles in his life. Veering spasmodically between the extremes of Aurobindonian mysticism and Marxian materialism, he sampled every variety of experience and exploited every possible mood, pose and stance.

Harindranath had the unique privilege of living in the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry in its early phase, drawing inspiration from the Master for his aspirations as a poet. It is during this period that he wrote nine volumes of sparkling Reflections, the reflections of a many-dimensional sun of consciousness on the mirror-like lake of a creative mind. They inspire in us many a mood and make us wonder afresh on things we thought we knew well and bring issues and ideas, hitherto considered remote, closer to our nearest. One comes across in them impressive flashes which can be linked to Sri Aurobindo’s vision of man’s evolutionary journey:

“Out of the rough black stone of animal desires and propensities man appears slowly but surely, losing the dark hue and chiselled into the higher being by the hand of error whose blows are myriad and terrible ...”

This theme is distinct in one of his early poems, Futurity

Time is Eternity’s womb-hole ensconcedly bearing
Each man like a foetus in projected formation
Warmed into ripeness conceived by some far evolution;
Sealed grave-lids of eyes, strange image of funeral pathos.

Rawness of limb awaiting the strength of a giant
Moment of master-maturity, rounding of motive,
Sidereal substance, stranger to dream and delirium.
All birth is as yet to be born since man is unfinished
And still in the making, the foetus awaiting the birth-time;
All death is as yet to be dead on the lap of that instant.

Couched sometimes in prosaic poetry, sometimes in poetic prose, the Reflections are epigrammatic and aphoristic. They are imbued with a poetic spirit throughout. There is great poetry, for instance, in the sentence in which Harin says:

“I am deepening into a sense of homewardness– 
solitude of spirit embarrasses me like a mother.”

To Cowper, the English poet, “solitude is sweet.” To Shelley “solitude is tranquil” and for Wordsworth solitude has “self­-sufficing power.” But what Harindranath finds in solitude is a truth serene and exclusive, as authentic as his radian conscious­ness. His revealing observations have matured out of his own experiences.

One of the most versatile and vigorous literary personalities of contemporary India, Harindranath surrendered himself to the magic of poetry at an early age. When he started writing at the age of nineteen, there were no available models for modern Indian poetry in English. People studied the Golden Treasury in colleges and universities and very few had access to Greek or Latin, French or Russian poetry in original or in translation. Harindranath had, therefore, to carve out his own way. He had to plough his lonely furrow.

Harindranath’s poetic career spans a creative period of seventy years or so and presents diverse genres, themes, trends and techniques. He has responded spontaneously, but most creatively, to several shades of life, movements and personalities. Finding in him a spontaneous and inherent poetic gift, Sri Aurobindo greeted him as “a poet of almost Infinite possibilities.” Harindranath’s first book of poems, The Feast of Youth, appeared in 1918. Reviewing his first collection of lyrics in the Arya of November, 1918, Sri Aurobindo observes:

“This is not only genuine poetry, but the work of a young, though still unripe, genius with an incalculable promise of greatness in it. As to the abundance here of all the essential materials, the instruments, the elementary powers of the poetical gift, there can be not a moment’s doubt or hesitation. Even the first few lines, though far from the best are quite decisive. A rich and finely lavish command of language, a firm possession of his 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 expression, are the powers with which the young poet starts. There have been poets of a great final achievement who have begun with gifts of a less precious stuff and had by labour within themselves and a difficult alchemy to turn them into pure gold. Mr. Chattopadhyaya is not of these; he is rather overburdened with the favours of the goddess, comes like some Vedic Marut with golden weapons, golden ornaments, car of gold, throwing in front or him continual lightings of thought in the midst of a shining rain of fancies, and a greater government and a more careful and concentrated use rather than an enhancement of his powers is the one thing his poetry needs for its perfection.”

This is, indeed, a great tribute and a rare treat which Harindranath received from the prophet of The Life Divine.

Between 1918, when Harindranath’s first collection of poems appeared, and 1967, when his last volume of poems, Virgins and Vineyards, saw the light of the day. Harindranath published numerous collections of poems and plays – The Magic Tree (1922), Poems and Plays (1927), Strange Journey (1936), The Dark Well (1939), Edgeways and the Saint (1946), Spring in Winter (1956) and Masks and Farewells (1951).

Harindranath reveals the core of his poetic faith as well as his endless interest in the process of poetic creation when he, in his autobiography, Life and Myself (1948), expresses himself:

“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 their movement I began to grip more firmly the thought...”

As a born-poet Harindranath makes it clear:

“By right of ages I belong
To the dominion of song
And so from out of everything
I draw a lovely song to sing.”

Poetic thoughts came to him flapping across the wide ocean like light-winged birds. He declares:

“Verses open to me
As blossoms to a tree
As colours to a shell
As seconds to a minute
As circles to a well
When a pebble drops within it.”

Harindranath’s early poetry is full of beautiful soul-stirring imagery and haunting rhythm. Vedantic themes or images directly or indirectly lighted the way for his inspiration to unfold itself exuberantly in poetry. In Noon, for instance, Harindranath uses an original and daring image of the noon as a mystic dog with paws of fire. In other poems there is the Vedantic feeling that man is a traveller on earth and he has, therefore, to cultivate the dispassion and detatchment of a traveller. The Vedantic feeling changes later to one of surrender and other self-absorption in what one is doing. Harindranath shares this feeling with us when he says:

“I have ceased to be the potter
and have learned to be the clay.
I have ceased to be the poet
and have learned to be the song.”

Influenced by Western methods and models, Harindranath took to lyric poetry with ease and grace, and gave it charm, dignity and thought content. The 209 lyrics that make “Spring in Winter” are a poetic record of the efflorescence of love, and have an authentic ring throughout. Like most of his 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 lover’s ways and moods, and aches and joys.

“Virgins and Vineyards” was his most recent and mature contribution to literature. As Harindranath himself says in the 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 me.”

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 was Harindranath’s main strength as a poet.

Through all the viscissitudes of his early chequered poetic career, Harindranath has retained his interest in mysticism which he owed mostly to Blake. Like Subramania Btarati, Harindranath was overwhelmed by the mystic vision of the “dance and 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 Harindra­nath it is Shiva who is lost in the “Tandav” – 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.
Star upon star breaks forth in swift pulsation
And multitudinous oceans swell and sweep
Behind you, and enchanted forces leap
Like giant flames out of your meditation.
Your dreaming done, once more you dance your reckless
Dance of destruction, and from globe to globe.
You wander, fashioning a mystic necklace of
shattered worlds”.

Harindranath’s poetic career underwent a metamorphosis. The mystic poet seemed to have realized that for years and years he was “kept like a hot-house plant, secluded, away from the realities of the world.” He wanted “to move among the poorest and lowly, live among the downtrodden and write about the truths of life as they exist.” So, he promised himself that he “won’t write about God and the birds and the flowers any more,” and that be “will write about starving babies, about cruel masters, about poor sad women, about people who are shot because they asked for food.”

From mysticism to Marxism is, indeed, a big leap. But, Harindranath took it when he moved from Pondicherry to Bombay and produced Blood of Stones (1944) and Son of Adam (1946) and Freedom Came (1947) responding boldly to the political and socialist stirrings of the day. Instead of exploring the inner consciousness and evoking images from the world of dreams and broodings, Harin began to concern himself with stock realities of life from the viewpoint of Marxism.

With early impressions of Hyderabad, and living in Bombay, close to the tinsel world of the silver screen, nearer to slums like Kamathipura and Dharavi, under the shadow of the mafia and its god fathers, corroding crime and carnal lust in excess, Harin could not continue to be a romantic poet. How can he listen only to the “music of the spheres” and not face the music of machines, and menacing men? He becomes an odd man out, a person who finds himself lonelier and lonelier in the crowd. He finds cheating, deception, betrayal and ingratitude at every step. Images of street walkers, blood and wounds, murder and disease abound in his present writing. In Harindra’s poetry, this new noise takes weird shapes like surrealistic painting, mobile sculpture, absurd drama and rock music, all rolled in one.

Harindranath is no longer a prayer-prone theist. For him there are no spiritual solutions, escapades into El Dorado or a blind clinging to dark tunnel. His spirit is completely shattered. His alienation is unmitigated. There is no easy answer to his angst. Like Louis Untermeyer’s Prayer he seems to say– 

Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with springs first flutes and drums­–
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.

Harindranath’s later poetry is very disturbing. It has no contemporary references to any political and international figures of events. We find only an occasional reference to Charles Sobhraj and a personal friend Antshen Lobo who died, but the rest of the references and digs are anonymous. There is no relief, no earlier ecstasy, but this is a long soliloquy of pining and pain, as Shakespeare says in Rombo and Juliet: “One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.” At places, Harindranath, like the beatniks, the angry generation of Bengali poets or Digambara Kavis of Telugu, or the Dalit Panther poets of Marathi, spews very shocking and loud images of poverty, misery and suffering. Small wonder, if Harin, who was greeted by Sri Aurobindo as a mystic poet, is hailed today as a leftist highgospeller.

Harin’s reputation as a poet overshadowed his eminence as a playwright. His dramatic output is by no means negligible, with a score of plays to his credit. And over a dozen of them are “devotional plays” dealing with certain situations in the lives of religious leaders like 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 the devotional plays. The hero’s stintly ardour and his sense of humility and detachment 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.

The most significant of Harindranath’s social plays are found in his collection, “Five Plays” (1937), which includes “The Window,” “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, Harindranath 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, he 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.

Harindranath’s plays of social protest were essentially products of an earnest and deep commitment to certain values of life. Like the plays of Arnold Wesker, they are warm, humane, sincere, passionate, compassionate, brave, honest, energetic, out­spoken, full of enthusiasm and concern. They lay bare the dramatist’s acute awareness of the social problems around him and register his protest against the cruelty of the capitalist factory­-owners.

Harindranath’s social plays are dramatically more effective than his devotional ones. Though heavily coated with purpose, they have a tautness and intensity that are seldom found in our dramatic writing. With their simple stage-setting, quick move­ments, limited number of characters and racy dialogue, they can be successfully enacted.

The most ambitious of Harindranath’s plays Siddhartha, Man of Peace (1956) is a simple and straightforward enactment of Gautama’s life and message, in eight Acts. 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, it loses in intensity.

Harin’s writings bear the distinct stamp of the Indian mind. Whether he wrote a poem or a play, it was unmistakably an Indian speaking English. His metaphor and simile were refreshingly new and strikingly Indian. He always wrote because he could not help uniting, 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.”

Harin has a message to deliver, a message of “sympathy and understanding” between man and man, which one can never miss, even in his repetitive, sometimes self-contradictory and nag­ging verse-form. Harindranath seems to join Rabindranath Tagore when the latter says:

“The human world is made one, all the countries are losing their distance every day, their boundaries not offering the same resistance as they did in the past age. Politicians struggle to exploit this great fact and wrangle about establishing trade relationships. But my mission is to urge for a world­wide commerce of heart and mind, sympathy and under­standing and never to allow this sublime opportunity to be sold in the slave markets for the cheap price of individual profits or be shattered away by the whole competition in mutual destructiveness.”