Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: A Mystic Turned Leftist
Dr.
K. VENKATA REDDY
Greeted some sixty years ago by Sri Aurobindo as “a poet of almost infinite possibilities,” Harindranath Chattopadhyaya is
hailed today as “a Leftist high-gospeller.” One of
the most versatile and vigorous literary personalities of contemporary
Born in 1898, Harin was the son of Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya, a scientist-dreamer and a mystic jester, and of Varada Sundari who was “half-angel, half-bird.” A wide-eyed wonder-drunk childhood had slowly ripened into a manhood of immeasurable potency and promise. When his first book of poems, The Feast of Youth appeared in 1918, Sri Aurobindo found in it “a rich and finely lavish command of language, a firm possession of the 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 poetic expression……the beginnings of a supreme poetic utterance of the Indian soul in the rhythms of the English tongue.”
Since the publication of his The Feast of Youth numerous collections of poems and plays have come out. Harindranath reveals the core of his faith as well as his endless interest in the process of poetic creation when he says: “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 that movement I begin to grip more firmly the thought...”. Thoughts come to him flapping across the wide ocean like light-winged birds. The result is a body of verse that has truly impressive bulk. His poems have been translated into several languages including Russian and Chinese.
Influenced
by Western methods and models, Harin has taken to
lyric poetry with ease and grace, and has given it a charm, a dignity and a
thought-content. The 209 lyrics that make Spring in Winter are a poetic
record of efflorescence of love, and have an authentic ring throughout. Like
most of Harin’s 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 lovers’ ways and moods, and aches and
joys.
Like
Subramania Bharati, Harindranath feels overwhelmed by the mystic vision of the “dance
of 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 Harin it is Shiva who is lost in the “thandav”,
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.
Here
Harin is susceptible to mystical states and is
responsive to mystical intimations, thereby proving to be a mystic poet.
Virgins
and Vineyards is Harin’s most recent
and most mature contribution to literature. As Harin
himself states in his 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
men.” 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 is Harin’s main strength as a poet.
Harin’s reputation as
a poet has overshadowed his eminence as a playwright. His dramatic output is by
no means negligible. He has nearly a score of plays to his credit. And over a
dozen of them are “devotional plays” dealing with certain situations in the
lives of our religious leaders such as 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 Harin’s
devotional plays. The saintly ardour and the sense of
humility and detachment of the hero 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.
Harin seems to have undergone a metamorphosis,
as it were, in his poetic career. The mystic poet seems to have suddenly
realized that for years and years he has been “kept like a hot-house plant,
secluded, away from the realities of the world.” He now wants “to move among
the poorest and lowly, live among the downtrodden and write about the truths of
life as they exist.” So he promises himself that he “won’t write about God and
the birds and the flowers any more”, and that he “will write about starving
babies, about cruel masters, about poor sad women, about people
who are shot because they asked for food.” This may be only
an intellectual approach to the misery and the tragedy of the slums, the
workhouses, of the exploiters and the exploited” and yet, he feels, “that is
the first step, that is better than singing about
lies, about God and the soul.” This transformation of the mystic poet into a
committed writer is manifest in Harin’s social
plays of protest.
The
most significant of Harin’s social plays are found in
his collection, Five Plays (1937), which includes The Window, The Parrot, 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, Harin has 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, Harin
has 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.
The
Five Plays are essentially products of an earnest and deep commitment to
certain values of life. Like the plays of Arnold Weskar,
they are warm, humane, sincere, passionate, compassionate, brave, honest,
energetic, outspoken, full of enthusiasm and full of concern. The enthusiasm is
largely enthusiasm for paving the way for an egalitarian society. The concern
is mainly concern for the well-being of the worker. They lay bare the
dramatist’s acute awareness of the social problems around him. They register
his protest against the cruelty of the capitalist factory-owners, the
conventional and stultifying morality and makes woman a caged-bird, and the
irresponsibility of writers to social problems!
Harin’s social plays are
dramatically more effective than his devotional plays. Though they are heavily
coated with purpose, they have a tautness and intensity that are seldom found
in our dramatic writing. They are eminently actable on the stage unlike the
majority of Indian plays. With their simple stage-setting, quick movement of
action, limited number of characters and racy dialogue, they can very
successfully be enacted. They are satirically very powerful with well-knit
plots and life-like characters. Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar rightly describes them as “manifestoes of the new
realism.”
The
most ambitious of Harin’s plays is Siddhartha: Man of Peace (1956), an
historical play in eight Acts, a simple and straight- forward enactment of Gautama’s life and message. 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 loses in intensity. Anyway, taking into consideration, the bulk
of his dramatic output the vast variety of themes he successfully handled and,
above all, the poetic heights to which the verses often rise, it must be
admitted that Harindranath is a very significant
dramatist whose contribution to Indian drama in English is praiseworthy.
To
conclude, Harindranatb Chattopadhyaya
is essentially a lyric poet, a mystic turned Leftist. Whatever he has written
bears the distinct stamp of the Indian mind. Whether he writes a poem or a
play, it is unmistakably an Indian speaking English. His metaphor and simile
are refreshingly new and strikingly Indian. He is a poet every inch. He always
writes because he cannot help writing, 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.”