An Approach to Harindranath
Prof. K. VENKATA REDDY
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.”