Influence of Geo-Environment on Modern English

INFLUENCE OF GEO-ENVIRONMENT
ON MODERN INDIAN ENGLISH POETRY

Md. Babar and Qujista Babar

The Post-Independence Indian poetry in English began in an atmosphere of changes, and challenges, modernity and experimentation. During this period there started a new creative urge and awareness, a new faith and credo and a pledge of sharp departure from the established and accepted themes and techniques. David MacCutcheon, a perspective critic, rightly observed:

“The poets of the fifties are fresh, inventive and individual.”

Some of the new poets while experimenting with new techniques and themes have tried to maintain the harmonious relationship with nature and environment. The social milieu which dominated their creative process hasn’t completely blurred their concern for natural and environmental influences and inflexions.

The present article is an assessment of the new poet’s understanding of the environment while creating poems. The Geo-­environmental conditions which influenced the poets include landscapes, rivers, seas, mountains, forests and dust and also hazardous nature including floods and earthquakes which are discussed below:

The major characteristics of modernism in modem Indian English poetry are: rejection of the idealism and romanticism of the predecessors; belief in secular muse; introduction of a bold, new frankness into the poetry. In the process the modern poet wrote about the city and its dusty, dirty environs and poverty-stricken individuals. For achieving the required effect the poets resorted to irony as a means to represent their love-hate relationship with their surroundings.

Many Indian English poets have written poems on and about rivers. The impact of rivers on the poets’ lives fascinated the poets so much that their poetic images are drawn mostly from various aspects of the river. A. K. Ramanujan depicts the river Vaikai in ‘A River’ to contrast the attitudes of the old and the new Tamil poets towards human suffering. The poet writes about the cruelty of the river floods in Madurai City.

He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People every where talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village
houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda, as usual

To R. Parthasarathy the river Vaikai has become a sewer of the city. He bewails the degradation to which the sacred river of the sweet city has been turned. The river has now become a storehouse of junk, a place for unhealthy and unholy activities. The city of ancient grace has now no use for the river.

..........Kingfishers and egrets,
whom she fed, have flown
her paps. Also emperors and poets
who slept in her arms. She is become
a sewer, now. No one has any use for Vaikai,
river, once, of this sweet city.
(from Home Coming - Rough Passage)

K. N. Daruwalla calls his collection of poems ‘Crossing of Rivers’ and thus explains his obsession with rivers and the associated images of life and death, journey and sojourn. The irony in the poem ‘Vignette I’ is not lost on the reader wherein the poet while extolling the religious supremacy of the river Ganga:

The Ganga flows swollen with hymns
The river is a voice
In this desert of human lives.

ends the poem with a despondent stanza:

The Ganga flows through the land
Not to lighten the misery
But to show it.

In yet another poem ‘River Silt’ Daruwalla compresses the entire creation from the beginning into the three parts of the poem by crowding the poem with images drawn from afar in space and time and the overriding image of river journey where the boatman forgets to shift the sails on the waters of life. It is an accurate picture of the progress of mankind from time immemorial on the river of memory.

Jayanta Mahapatra too has written poems which deal with rivers. However, his poem ‘Evening Landscape by the River’ is deceptive in its title as it is a view from the riverside while the poem, ‘Again, One Day, Walking by the River’ tells the readers about the stoic presence of the unchanging river and the sun while the miserable and the helpless forms of human beings pass on K. B. Rai in his poem. “The Sacred Ganges” beautifully portrays purity, peace and tyranny of the Ganges and says that great cities on the banks of the Ganges got great names and holiness. His words about the sacred Ganges are:

Flow, O flow
For ever flow
O symbol of purity
O harbinger of peace
O subduer of tyrants.

But according to V. S. Skanda Prasad the river is God’s beautiful sublime expression:-­

Oh river, truly, you are Almighty’s
Bright, beautiful sublime expression.
(River)

The sea has strong presence, especially in the works of poets who live in Bombay (Mumbai). Ezekiel celebrates the sea in ‘Love Sonnet’:

We look in consort at the distant sea,
And feel it turbulent and salty there,
A passionate and perpetual mystery.

In the poem ‘O My Very Own Cadaver’ Gieve Patel imagines the association of water and body.

I see my body float on waters
That rush down the street,
Like a leaf that humps its way
Over pebbles.

In ‘Naryal Purnima’, the poet expresses superstitions about the rain. The poem concludes with an ambiguous note on the eventual result of the ritual.

The rains may truly fail this year.
Our prayers may go unheard.
Arun Kolatkar in his “The Boat Ride” creates the hypnotic stillness in spite of some minor activities like noises of birds, water, sound, etc. The poem is enriched with naturalised details, marked by precision and detachment. It very often verges on the surrealistic form. The poem is an exercise in poetic descriptions illuminated by minute observations with precise and brilliant metaphor. In the poem ‘Grass’ Jayant Mahapatra tries to find out relationship of sun, grass, loneliness and activity. He wants to hear the echo of his heart in nature.

D. C. Chambial, a poet from the feet of the Himalayas, is keen on celebrating the beauty of hyacinths (plant), the ever green beauty and bounties of the snow-peaked mountains. Chambial is in search of ‘the heart’s honey’ through his unalloyed adoration of his country and countrymen.

Kulbhushan Kushal endears trees and mountains, intends to know them, to understand their language and through their language he hopes to refine his own language. In the poem ‘Call of Mountain’ Kushal’s escape into the natural world is not to be treated as a romantic’s shying away from the burdens of reality. It is only to redefine his perception of reality that he goes to the mountains:

Do you know what they say
In silence?
Let’s endear them and listen to
What they say?

P. Raja perpetuates his journey in quest of the inner self, the inner voice. Despite the heartlessness of man, and lunglessness of Gods, despite fear of uncertainty and loneliness, Raja hopes to remain homebound, earthbound and dust-­bound. With humility, he celebrates the jubilating sense of his morality:

How can I ever cease
Inhaling dust
When I am dust and dust itself?
(Dust.)

In Shashibhushan Rath’s poem ‘Bird’, despite earthquake and storm the crazy bird sings its songs indefatigably. The poet asks the bird even when the child is being pulled out from the concrete dump and still the bird sings the song oflove and life. Rath exhorts the bird:

Look there
How the child is
Being pulled out
From the concrete dump.
And you still sing
The song of love and life.
(Bird)

B. K. Tripathi tries to make this world a better place by way of celebrating the secret rituals of love. In ‘Rhythm’ he observes the rhythm between land and ocean, hills and valleys, sea and coastmen, river and rivermen and hill and hillmen. He also finds the rhythm between sky and earth; historic rhythm in time and space from cavemen to cosmic age. In the same poem regarding human beings he says they are the best and finest creatures, we should live with and love in sweetest bonds and pressure our rhythm to make the world a better, sweeter and warmer one to live in. Finally, in the poem Tripathi tries to make the global rhythm by removing the barricades of nations, religions, caste, creed and colour. He wishes the earth to be a place of love and joy; a home for endearments, caresses, kisses and a paradise of bliss and peace.

Thus there are so many references we can find in the Modern Indian English regarding the influence of Geo-environment on poetry.