An Essay by Anshuman Singh

Painting by Sampa Saha

This is not a discourse on the intricacies of Hindi poetry. The latter is a vast subject with a history, poetics, and criticism that cannot be encapsulated within the confines of a single puny essay. I am a lover of English literature and came to Hindi poetry via this unlikely (some would say preposterous) route. Born and brought up in Allahabad, which some would immediately recognize as the centre of Hindi excellence, I had no choice but to be surrounded at many times by the practitioners of Hindi literature. But then I was one of that generation whose parents had become quite aware of the importance of an English education, of English speech and English manners. So I was sent to what was then called a convent school. There, we were forbidden to converse in any other language except English. We did not revolt against this largely unwritten rule, being afraid that it would compromise our proficiency in English. Also,our English books contained delightful passages from the great tradition of English literature. We were introduced to abridged versions of classics like Dickens, George Eliot, and Lamb’s Shakespeare, as well as lesser-known authors like Jerome K. Jerome. And then there was poetry, Keats’s Odes, Shelley’s Ozymandias, Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, and many more. My idea of poetry was essentially romantic and dreamy. I liked to surround myself with beauty so that the pleasure of reading about beauty was doubled. There was a thin dividing line between the English poems I loved and the idyllic setting that I was at pains to recreate. I liked to pretend that a ruined Church that was near my house was Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. When I saw a crow, I wanted to believe that it was a raven. A ramshackle house became Poe’s the House of Usher.

These fantasies were pleasant, but I could not transfer them to other subjects like Hindi. The Hindi books were, to me, boring at that time. They contained an assortment of medieval poets like Kabir, Surdas and some modern ones like Jaishankar Prasad, Maithili SharanGupt, and Nirala. The former left me cold as I always had to take help to understand them, while the latter’s sanskritized vocabulary puzzled and defeated me. This was not the Hindi we spoke at home or outside. Why should poetry written in a language that I assumed to be my mother tongue be so incomprehensible? But most of all, it was the Hindi teacher who became a barrier to any form of reading pleasure that I might have wished to attain at the time. His deportment was rustic, with paan always in his mouth and an uncanny ability to make us feel small and insignificant. But one day, he told me that Prasad was one of the first romantic poets in Hindi. This fired me up, and I began to re-read some of his poems earlier discarded due to his unfathomable vocabulary.

बीतीविभावरीजागरी!
अम्बरपनघटमेंडुबोरही
तारा-घटऊषानागरी!

Awake for the night is spent.
In the well of the sky the dawn
Dips her vessel of stars

This description of the dawn breaking in the sky enchanted me as it was in sync with my love of English romantic poetry with its pithy descriptions of nature. I started realizing that the world of Hindi poets is not alien to the appreciation of beauty and that the Western world doesn’t hold a copyright over aesthetic sensibility.

Hindi poetry by Prasad and other chayavadi(romantic) poets enabled me to question my very colonial contempt for what our colonial masters would call vernacular culture.But the categorization of Prasad, Nirala or Mahadevi as ‘romantic’ poets raises serious questions about the writing of the literary history of modern Hindi literature. Is it that the reception and understanding of Hindi poetry are not possible except through forms of historical-literary periodization that are commonly used for European literatures? Does the application of categories invented for structuring the history of Western literature do justice to the highly varied creative output of these poets? Are there indigenous ways of categorizing these poets that might produce a different kind of literary history? I am reminded of an anecdote about a university professor who wanted to apply the principles of Rasa Siddhanta upon Muktibodh’s poetry and could not find any rasa that could adequately sum up the essential mood of his poetry. So he coined the term ‘vichara’(thought) rasa in order to highlight the intellectual and ruminative qualities of Muktibodh’s poetry. The anecdote, when circulated in literary circles, generated chuckles as it implied a general lack of awareness in Hindi departments regarding new critical paradigms whose acceptability and necessity appeared to be beyond any reasonable doubt. In my opinion the laughter also indicated the fact that it was impossible to use forms of pre-colonial critical thought as colonialism had impacted and inflected our minds to such an extent that Western habits of thought had become inseparable from our creative/critical being. The modernity of Hindi poetry of the 20^th century lies not only in the fact that indigenous critical methodologies fail to capture its complexity but also that the poets themselves construct their poetic sensibility in relation to the impact of Western modernity on Indian society.

So, Hindi poetry, to me, was capable of being appreciated and lauded if it could easily fit into Western paradigms of aesthetics and politics. If there were romantic poets in England, there were romantic poets in Hindi. We could construct neat, parallel chronologies of writers and movements and relate the modernity of the west to that of the east. I could delude myself with a comforting thought that what happened in the literary culture of England in the 19^th century happened to us in the early 20^th century. Of course, the chief enemy of this delusion was history itself. Poets like Prasad and Nirala wrote against the backdrop of a national liberation struggle, which was also a struggle against European imperialism. A straightforward replication or even imitation of Western literary culture was an utter impossibility, an absurdity of gargantuan proportions. A Nirala could write about nature in a grand sublime manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, but the same poet could use his pen to express pain and anger as a response to social injustice. No trace of his effervescent romanticism remains in his famous poem Bhikshuk in which he delineates in a highly literal and factual manner, the abject and miserable condition of beggars:

वहआता—
दोटूककलेजेकोकरता, पछताता
पथपरआता।

पेटपीठदोनोंमिलकरहैंएक,
चलरहालकुटियाटेक,
मुट्ठीभरदानेको — भूखमिटानेको
मुँहफटीपुरानीझोलीकाफैलाता

Or notice Nirala’s satirical potshots at Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of independent India

काले-कालेबादलछाए, नआएवीरजवाहरलाल
कैसे-कैसेनागमँडलाए, नआएवीरजवाहरलाल,
बिजलीफनकेमनकीकौंधी, करदीसीधीखोपड़ीऔंधी,
सरपरसरसरकरतेधाए, नआएवीरजवाहरलाल।

Can a poet of such diverse moods and inclinations–empathetic for the downtrodden, savagely derisive towards the politically powerful be neatly slotted as a romantic poet? One can see that modern(western) categorizations are as inadequate as ancient ones(rasa siddhanta). If Nirala is a modern poet, the reception of modernity by Hindi poets has to be understood not only in the wider sense that the ‘modern’ for the colonized is always already inflected with the political baggage of colonialism but also in a much narrower sense which is that western literary modernity came to us in myriad forms- the early modern voices of the Renaissance poets like Shakespeare, the 19^th century legacies of romanticism and realism and finally the European modernism of the early 20^th century. This simultaneity of literary influences, sometimes radically contradictory to each other, could have strange consequences for a Hindi poet. A poet like Muktibodh could move from an intensely personal poems to poems replete with gothic symbolism reminiscent of Baudelaire to intensely political poems describing the rise of authoritarian tendencies. This diversity of registers implies the poet’s intellectual struggles with forms of literary expressions far removed in time and space in the West but impacting the literary career of a single poet as he moves from one form to another quite seamlessly. Let’s look at a poem that is marked by a complete absence of the politics of here and now. Instead, the poem explores the pain at the loss of one’s newborn child by describing its burial:

खुदचुकाबिस्तरबहुतगहरा
नदेखाखोलकरचेहरा
किजोअपनेहृदय-सा
प्यारकाटुकड़ा
हमारीज़िंदगीकाएकटुकड़ा,
प्राणकापरिचय,
हमारीआँख-साअपना
वहीचेहराज़रासिकुड़ा
पड़ाथापीत,
अपनीमृत्युमेंअविभीत।

This poem would be considered atypical of the ‘real’ Muktibodh, the archetypal Marxist poet who could make shattering statements about class struggle and political commitment:

मैंतुमलोगोंसेइतनादूरहूँ
तुम्हारीप्रेरणाओंसेमेरीप्रेरणाइतनीभिन्नहै
किजोतुम्हारेलिएविषहै, मेरेलिएअन्नहै।

Or attacking authoritarianism:

भूल-ग़लती
आजबैठीहैज़िरहबख़्तरपहनकर
तख़्तपरदिलके,
चमकतेहैंखड़ेहथियारउसकेदूरतक,
आँखेंचिलकतीहैंनुकीलेतेज़पत्थर-सी;
खड़ीहैंसिरझुकाए
सबक़तारें
बेज़ुबाँबेबससलाममें,

To conclude, the richness and diversity of 20th-century Hindi poetry elude easy categorizations.  Invested in the teaching of English literature and well-versed in the methods of literary history of the Western world, I tended to apply these methods to modern Hindi literature, especially poetry. This mistake of mine is however a common one. One can see that so many terms borrowed from the literary history of the West have been translated into Hindi and applied to literature produced in Hindi. We have terms likeChayavaad, Pragativaad, Prayogvaad. Sometimes they are not even translated, and we talk about modernism in Hindi poetry. These terms offer modes of analysis that are, without doubt, valid. However, they also reduce the complex negotiations of these poets with literary influences /borrowings to a single narrative. So if Muktibodh is a Marxist poet, Nirala and Prasad are romantic in temperament. This sometimes leads to the exclusion of part of their poetic endeavours. A programmatic view of these poets who become representatives of this or that trend/movement produces a diminution of their poetic capacities. A healthy scepticism regarding such interpretive methodologies is recommended.