DISTANCE
AND DEPTH
IN
MODERN INDO-ANGLIAN POETRY
V. MOHAN PRASAD M.A.,
D.T.E.
The
modern poet is at a great aesthetic distance from the Past. He complains of the
burden of the past. He is sure neither of the present nor future. He is one
with Samuel Beckett who admits, “I can’t say to what extent I have nothing to
say.” The glitter of the past to a Srinivasa Rayaprol is “only of an illusion
of the past. That was not the real past. But a remembered
one.”
The
modern Indo-Anglian poet is in search of a new coinage, an open idiom and an
intransitive usage. He is both a bee and a spider. He roars like a lion but
suffers like a lamb. Like Sartre he ends up saying, “what is is what is not.”
Every
new writer tries to resuscitate dead words. He endeavours to create his own
dimensions of space and time. This every new “poem is a house in the mind”
(William Dickey), attaining a new method of tonality. It is a poem at a
distance spoken vehemently and violently. The geometry
of thought and emotion is built up just as the poem–house is built on the inner
grounds of the mind. The poet’s own voice takes to some assumed identities as
in Dom Moraes’ aesthetically excavated Kanheri Caves poem. In this poem we discover the Indian
equivalent of the Oedipus complex working everywhere. A “tireless striving”, stretching
“its arms towards” imperfection is conceded even by Sarojini Naidu in her poem To
a Buddha Seated on a Lotus. The
futility of Morning Prayer is
realised as an irresolution in his later poem
Distance
and depth, is a two-fold sensation. Can there be a circle without a centre? Are
time and space necessarily warring gods? When one is caught between fixity arid
flux there can be an undrawn circle without a centre
and space and time can become the urdeclared warring gods.
The
two Buddha figures in Kanheri Caves are succinctly antipodal. The nodal
touch of the poem is significant of growing more into time, of extending
consciousness to greater dimensions of distance and depth. Buddha, in this poem
of Dom Moraes is as symbolic of the ecological wilderness as that of the jar in
Anecdote of a Jar by Wallace Stevens, taking dominion everywhere.
Stevens says, “the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice…has
not always to find.” (Of Modern Poetry) Even the past of the poem itself is a
souvenir as someone remarked, “the language of the
past–even if only two pages past–is also a foreign language.”
Are form and feeling–the psychological form of ideas and thoughts and the verbal form of feeling in syntagmatic rhythms–mutually exclusive? If they are–Tukaram would not have said “The water is full of the sky...it contains its own ripples.”
But the modern metaphor
is not an act but a relationship. The modern poet employs the fiction of
personality and he is concerned with the disjunction of the world between its
visual and physical promises. Thus there is a necessary artistic crack between
distance and depth; between the world of the right eye and the world of the
left eye. It is primarily a psychological and social casualty. It is also a
symbolic necessity. The modern poet’s split-personality is a dramatised
metaphor enacted on the inner stage of the self. The poet’s existentialistic
and neutralistic dilemma can be seen in Ezekiel’s poem The Neutral. Man
in his search for either a myth which is a shared belief or fiction which is an
absolute freedom tends to become fictional, allegorical and mythopoeic if not a
downright absurdist and obscurantist. To him his perception of reality comes
distracted, dishevelled and dislocated. He relies on the revelation of dream
rather than the epiphany of book. Even flesh and sense become impersonal and
incomprehensible. Man despairs–as in Krishna Baladev Vaid’s Beyond Silences–in
anonymity because despair by itself is a function of freedom. It is an
emotional luxury and an intellectual necessity. Thus a lot of modern
Indo-Anglian poetry seems to be based upon a Narcissistic outlook.
The post-independence
‘Inglish’ poets feel the horror and boredom of freedom. Like caged birds suddenly
released they are now flying in an eternal circularity, each completing his own circle without a centre. The distance of aesthetic
alienation and the depth of human humiliation, the personal and private wounds
received from one another, a cut-off sensibility setting them apart from Sri
Aurobindo, Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, a loosening of national
self-consciousness and a keeping away from the far far flowing Ganges–these and
many other similar lascerating hurts are what the modern poets suffer from. For
a poet like Dom Moraes the mythical Hindu inward tree is paradoxically uprooted
now and the “
Linguistically of Course
the Indo-Anglian poets have an emotional identity with English. It is the
language of their whole psychic being if not of the dialect of the tribe, their
physical space. ‘Inglish’ poets feel quite at home and away from home. (See
Kamala Das’ An Introduction)
The characteristic feature
of the whole Indo-Anglian poetic scene is all anxiety–the principle of anxiety;
an observation fever–to observe the imperceptible, to experience the
non-experiential. Intellect has its emotions in poets like Sri Aurobindo,
Tagore, Sarojini Naidu,
In an
alien language, “like the weaver, the writer on works on the wrong side of his
material.
He had to do only with language; and it is thus he suddenly finds himself
surrounded by meaning” (Merieau Ponty). Until such time he arrives at a
pattern the ‘Inglish’ poet is delighted at the very amusement of writing in
English which by itself is an element of meaning. Deb Kumar Das’ Jire Canto builds
up a metalanguage. But when it is compared with Ezekiel’s A Very Indian Poem
in English, Deb Kumar seems to be much of a made heart. In Poet, Lover,
Bird Watcher, Ezekiel declares that the best poets wait for words. This
poem is an ironic certainty. If Fire Canto builds up a Thesis of
genesis by an angry, vengeful and negative prayer so also does Pilgrimage, one
of the poems in Waiting for the Beginning and other poems by D. V. K.
Raghavacharyulu who uses optic images. “Putting out desire and the thought of
desire” (D. V. K.) is nothing but knowing “Prayer as all” (Ezekiel).
There is thus in the modern poetic context an excursion into the inner
landscapes of man and poetry has the aura of ‘inscape’ and area of ‘instress’.
Distance may thus be called aura and depth, the inner area. Intellect
crystallising into emotion is the mechanism of modern poetics. It is what
happens when “the phrase of desire / swallows the flesh / of sense” (D. V. K.).
Then, poetry as Wallace Stevens said, must be
understood with one’s nerves.
An incisive insight and
a technique of syncopation can be seen in the poetry of S. K. Kumar. His volume
Articulate Silences is a product of a highbrow attitude. In A. K.
Ramanujan we find synchronisation. N. K. Sethi is not ashamed of his irresolute
vocabulary when he declares, “I had no sentence and no meaning to offer”. He
perhaps believes in the impossibility of all human communication.
Ezekiel has a soulful heart
but not a heartful soul. He presents Indian sensibility as a metaphor (For
Kalpana). Ezekiel’s Night of the Scorpion and K. N. Daruwalla’s Night
of the Jackals are two great poems which account for the pulsating and
vibrating factors of distance and depth, inclination and nature, the spirit and
the flesh. Daruwalla says, “a work of art must hit you
in the gut.” He has many mighty lines to his credit. Unfortunately Ezekiel is
diluting his craftsmanship, not the craftsmanship of metrical composition but the
very poetic logos: the unconscious meaning of the poem; the figure a poem
makes. We come upon the real Ezekiel in his poem “Background, Casually. He
should ‘gather grace’ not at home, but in the chromatic wasteland of a pale,
fading, neutral world; human debris. He should dramatise the dark tragedy of
human fantasy and hallucination. After all he is not destined to be our Ogden
Nash. Both his poems
P. Lal is always
delightful but never surprising. He started all right with his proposed lone
poem In the World’s Cities–From
The modern ‘Inglish’
poet’s love is “tortured with hatred and his hatred is stifled with love”. He
is both a mendicant seeker and an opter-out. He is a prophet at a great
geographical distance singing with an urgency of motivation and a compelling
depth of emotion. Like Ezekiel in Marriage or Dom Moraes in Being
Married he feels himself a frequent wedding guest in his married life.
Pritish Nandy’s poems
betray an incipient sexual ecstasy. Ramanujan’s River flows into
beatific poetic stances. Shanker Mokashi-Punekar has an
Yeatsian moral tenderness. His Captive is a volume of speculative poems.
Kamala Das deals with the reality of physical as well as psychic experience.
Whitman heard the Hindoo teaching his favourite pupils and the Hindu poet
Ramanujan hears it with a comic and cosmic irreverence. If distance is lost,
depth is gained. We have exchanged Gitanjali for The Waste Land.
The loss of religion, tradition, local legend and myth are compensated by an
all-embracing world view. That is the world of the third eye.
There is a dark
inwardness. The poems are bleak but powerful. There is a schizoid vision and a
social as well as individual sickness; but not villainy. The poetry of Kamala
Das; Gouri Deshpande, Ira De, Ela Singh, Sunita Namjoshi, Tilottama Rajan is a
collective naked encounter of the real self. Mind and reality are two spatial
coordinates with them. There is a stifled, tortured and abstract feeling in
their unified voice. It gives us an accumulating sense of the impending
disaster of the private self.
The modern poem is a
“treeless leaf.” It is the last leaf of the finality of agony, loss and
division. An acasual universe of a ‘treeless leaf’ can give us no gathered
meaning.
There is a generation
conflict. But there is also a continuity, a ‘generational’
pull. Balamani Amma’s poem To My Daughter and her daughter Kamala Das’
poem to her own son Jaisurya are evidences to this principle of
continuity. Kamala Das looks back in her grandmother even. The grandmother in
her poetry is a grand symbol operating everywhere. She says:
“My grandmother’s – she
was
the first I loved – trunks
when opened, after
she died, contained only
dolls.” (Captive)
Being distanced from the time past Kamala Das is
now preoccupied with the depth of her own inwardness in the present as every
other modern “Inglish” poet is. Modern “Inglish” poetry is a search for
identity in the distant present, when both the word and world have abandoned
the poets. Modern poetry comes (see Aurobindo’s Essence of Poetry) not
from the harmony of soul vision but from the stress of soul’s division. It is a
dark rhythmic voyage of self-discovery in the realms of inner and outer worlds
of distance and depth.