THE POETRY OF JAI SHANKAR PRASAD
By D. V. K.
RAGHAVACHARI, M.A.
(Lecturer,
Jai
Shankar Prasad holds a very high place among the mystic poets in
modern Hindi literature. Having acquainted himself with the literatures of
Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, and English, he began writing verses even at the age of
fifteen. Since then he has contributed a lot to Hindi literature. His works
include in all eight collections of poetry, nine plays, three novels, five
volumes of short-stories, and several essays in literary criticism, historical
research, and philosophy. His splendid lyrics have been collected in Kanan-kusum,
Karunalaya, Prem-pathik, Jharna, Ansu, and Lahar. The romantic epic,
Kamayani, is his master-piece. Moreover, he is considered to be the pioneer
of ‘Chayavad’. He is certainly one of the greatest Hindi dramatists. He
popularised, for the first time, themes drawn from the so-called dark age of
ancient Indian history; most of his plays concern themselves with Buddhistic
culture. He initiated the use of blank-verse in Hindi poetry. He contributed a
remarkable style, in which the passionate could be felicitously blended with
the intellectual, to the ‘other harmony’ of Prose. He achieved a similar
success in the field of short-story writing; he established
a Prasad-school of short-story writers. He brought to bear on his critical says
a wealth of scholarship and wise divination unequalled by others. To have been
the first in whatever he attempted and the best one, too, is no mean compliment
to his many-sided literary personality.
From
a highly sensuous love Prasad turned towards an intellectual passion opening
abundant vistas of spiritual experience. At the same moment his love avoids the
two extremes of becoming ethereal and of becoming earthly.
The human soul itself becomes incandescent with pure love and partakes of
divinity. His love is placed somewhere between the human and the divine
spheres. The first sight itself abandons the heart on the drifting current of
love, bringing memories from the uncharted regions of soul-life:
‘The
immaculate sweet crescent smiled
When first I saw thee. And anon I
felt
I
knew thy face since long, since the birth of Time.’1
There is again
separation and anguish. He seeks love in the moon, in the stars, in snow, in
waves, in trees and in flowers. The happiness afforded by the grandeur of the
universe seems futile unless it be governed by the consummation of true love:
‘The
bliss that could be hardly contained
Throughout
the endless corridors of space
Was
captive all in the clasp of His hand
In the high hope of love’s happy return.’
The Viraha becomes
cosmic:
‘In
love and in passion,
In
joy and in sorrow,
From
house to house, stricken with pain,
Are
felt the pangs of separation.’
There is a plea for
mercy:
‘Gentle cloud of mercy! rain, o, rain;
And
cool with kindly shower the earth,
Sorrow-singed
and deep-wrinkled with pain
Of cheerless storm and strife.
Reign, o, reign,
Pity
supreme! and bring tranquil mirth
To those that wear in life’s battling train!’
There is a stern
realisation of the complex nature of the world. The good and the bad, the
beautiful and the ugly, the joyous and the sad are so imperceptibly mixed up
that only devoted love can get the best out of life. It is the mental attitude
that determines one’s happiness:
‘Wedded
to meet and part
At
the sacred altar of life,
Joy
and sorrow play
And
eye and heart contend,’
Tennyson too, could
have no complaint against the law of nature:
‘I
curse not nature, no, nor death;
For
nothing is that errs from law.’
Like the great
Victorian, Prasad was convinced that no man can solve the problem of life by
enduring faith alone:
‘In
the yonder shade of the tree of love,
Rest
awhile! weary traveller of the world,
Cool-comforted
in trembling flower-dust,
Tear-swept and strewn along the banks of Faith!’
His natural
descriptions are moist with a strange fancy and delicate imagery that almost
swoon into rich rhythms bearing the promise of a much nobler art:
‘Wake
up! since night has melted away
And
at the sky’s luminous fount
Her
starry tankard fills
The
maiden-queen of dawn;
While
the little birds tremulous
With
rich song fill every bough,
Chirping
with gladness and glee!
And
with her skirt of slender saplings
Flowing
in the gentle breeze, look!
The
young Lathika green and transparent-veined
Has
fetched too, her crystal vase
Of dew-fed, honey-stained, emerald buds!’
As a mystic poet,
Prasad reached the summit of his achievement in Kamayani, his Divine
Comedy. The motto of his early poetry,
‘Honey-tingling
and cool-blushing,
Never-fading
and sweet-smiling,
The
many-unfolding golden lotus
The
image be of my heart’s devotion,’
found
ample fulfilment in that great romantic epic. The impact of reason on mystic
experience gave to his poetry the garb of myth, and the myth itself stands for
the eternal and the unchanging elements of the human mind, even in its
solitude:
‘Along
the lonely paths,
A
little child like me,
With
face, with hands like mine,
Plays ever silently.’
Prasad
was at the same time experimenting with other forms of literature as drama,
short-story and the novel. And to every realm he brought his rich imagination
and rare individuality. As his experience as a writer grew in
quality and abundance, he could evolve his own standards of artistic
expression. He had to dwell apart and lonely; for, he was not a man who
could stoop to conquer. The fitness of his plays for staging was highly
disputed at one time, and remains to this day one of the vexed questions of
literary criticism. Some critics described him as obscure and his poetry as
highly sentimental, his prose as poetry run mad, and his dramatic work as an
avoidable extravagance. But Prasad went on filling every rift with rich ore
until he discovered the key to his genius. The vision haunted him and compelled
him into new creation:
‘Rising
and falling, it comes again and again,
Leaving traces of tender danceful feet.’
Kamayani
is his ‘magnum opus’. In the medium
of the romantic epic he found the adventurous thrills of abundance and variety.
The story had the essential heat of conflict which could be richly exploited by
his dramatic talent. It was to be cast in the form of an epic in which the
theme had to be universal and where things should happen on the grand scale;
and it could find an easy adequacy in the wealth of imagery and power of
expression which he had in plenty. Yet it was not to be rigid in construction,
for, rigidity would be unfavourable to the gentle flow of his verse; and so, it
had to be fashioned as a romance, too. The intensity of a thronging life
inundated by joy could not find a happier expression than in the exuberance of
romanticism. And further, it was to be the culminating point of the mystic
creed and the crowning achievement of his Philosophy of Perennial Bliss
(Ananda). The characters were as old as Time and the Upanishads; and the
Puranas gave him enough material for allegory. The march of the ‘evolutionary
appetite’ of his art towards a greater perfection found its fulfilment in his Kamayani.
Kamayani
is as universal in its subject-matter as
‘Fain
from dust would that its strenuous flight
To
realms of loftier skies be winging.’
That is Mukti. That is
Ananda. Kamayani is a table of torment and in it the heart of Man is
made to sojourn in the primal wonders and the recurring mysteries of life. But
like other long poems of the world it never leaves us in the midst of the
torment. It is also the story of Man’s final victory, of his return to harmony
with Nature.
The
story is as simple as it is old. In the Satapatha-Brahmana and the Bhagavata
we find the episode of the Deluge or the Jalapralaya. Before the creation
of mankind the Sakti had given shape to the Universe and filled it with Devas,
as a part of Her Leela. The Devas defied the divine order; and so the wrath of
Rudra took the form of a vast inundation. In the all-consuming Jala-plavan,
Manu’s
‘That
mad revelry! Was it dream or deception?
The
brightest stars but filled their nights of lust,
In
tumult was their hope of consummate bliss;
Fame
danced, a red ray of frenzied delight!’
The gods knew very
little of the infinitely gentle and the infinitely suffering. Tagore, in his
‘Farewell to Heaven’, says:
‘Pitiless,
heartless, happy heaven looks down upon our sorrows. What pain by the Asvattha
is felt when even a dry leaf should fall from among its many verdant branches,
is not felt by the gods above us when, we on earth homeless and pale as
burnt-out stars, in a trice, fall into the fathomless deeps of life and death.’
In
this state of mind Manu discovers on the distant horizon, a figure clad in radiance.
He addresses her:
‘Who
art thou, the herald of spring,
Slender
in the stress of storm,
A
ripple of fancy, a ray of hope,
Revealing
a world of blissful quiet?’
Sraddha, who is also
called Kamayani, being the daughter of Kama, the God of Love, answers him that
she has come from the country of the Gandharvas in quest of a greater presence
in whom she could merge her own identity in order to achieve a new integrity.
Manu accepts her as his companion. She stands a little away like a flower
waiting for a sun-beam. Sweeping in strenuous outlines to the heaven of his
mind a glorious vision rises up, in which he sees Kamayani as his partner since
ages. King Pururavas felt a similar experience when, on seeing Urvasi for the
first time, he found that he had grown more than a man:
‘And,
thou, who art thou, mystery! golden wonder!
Moving
enchantress! Wast thou not a part
Of
soft auspicious evenings I have loved?
Have
I not seen thy beauty on the clouds?
In moonlight and in starlight and in fire?
Some
flower whose brightness was a trouble? a face
Whose
memory like a picture lived with me?
A
thought I had, but lost? O was thy voice
A
vernal repetition in some grove,
Telling
of lilies clustered o’er with bees
And
quiet waters open to the moon?
Surely
in some past life I loved thy name,
And
syllable by syllable now strive
Its sweetness to recall.
It seems the grace
Of
visible things, of hushed and lovely snows
And burning great inexorable noons.’
In the purity of
unrestrained surrender, she gives herself to Manu:
‘Said
she: “I dedicate myself to thee and thine;
I
am the weaker: I ask not for recompense!”
Manu accepts her as
his companion. The helpless surrender of one who has all beauty of earthliness
and all luxurious experience of the soul reminds us of Panthea’s dream:
‘I
saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt
His
presence flow and mingle through my blood
Till
it became his life, and his grew mine,
And
I was thus absorbed, until it passed,
And
like the vapours when the sun sinks down,
Gathering
again in drops upon the pines,
And
tremulous as they, in the deep night
My
being was condensed.’
She does not merely surrender herself to Manu; she rather avenged herself with beauty. Manu, the archangel, the great son of heaven, moves unto her bosom with a burning sense of yearning, even as King Pururavas advanced towards Urvasi:
‘He
woke with his own voice. His words that first
Dreamed
like a languid wave, sudden were foam;
And
he beheld her standing and his look
Grew
strong; he yearned towards her like a wave,
And
she received him in her eyes as earth
Receives the rain.’
In
the Satapatha Brahmana Manu has been described as the lord of Sraddha:
‘Sraddha: de: vo: vai manuh.’ In the Bhagavata man
has been considered to be the fruit of such a union:
‘Tato:
manuh sraddhade: vah sangna:ya:ma:sa bha:rata
Sraddha:ya:m janaya:ma:sa dasa putra:n sa a:tmava:n.’
In taking such a story
going back to the very tap-root of our culture for his artistic treatment,
Prasad struck gold, for he could bring back a symbolic vision of the race-mind
and of the primeval twilight in which mankind lived. And the story is full of
romantic possibilities and purposeful allegory.
A
short time after this union, the weaknesses of Manu, inherited from the Devas,
reassert themselves to the detriment of pure love. The
‘ahamkara’ in him desires to ‘own’ Kamayani. Manu suffers from the same disease
of sin as Adam did–‘gregariousness and uxoriousness’, as Prof. E.M.W. Tillyard
would describe them. Sraddha who seeks the completeness of her personality in
motherhood, dissuades her lord from sacrificial rites involving ‘himsa’ and
tries to soften him to a more ready acceptance of love and compassion towards
the whole created universe as the creed of his life. Manu feels that his
self-importance is at stake and burns with jealousy when the young fawn are fondled by his wife in anticipation of a mother’s
sweet task of caressing her new-born child. He is angry with her, does not
understand the strange tumult of new delight in the mother’s heart in its
proper light, and leaves her alone in her helpless condition in the cave and
goes into the wide world in quest of greater happiness implying an ampler
satisfaction of his own vulgar desires.
In
the course of his adventures, Manu arrives in the ruined country of Saraswata
where the Devas, losing faith in their Devi, had once fought against their own
kin, the Asuras. The God of Love, Kama, curses mankind for the sin
committed by Manu in abandoning Sraddha:
‘Manu! thou
hast forsaken Sraddha!
Hast
taken her lightly, the embodiment of love!
Let
this new creation of yours
Be
torn therefore in endless strife
And
break into a thousand creeds
And
invent for itself Damnation
Through
problems of its own creation;
Unity,
let there be none; no cessation
Of the conflict. Far, far, the object
Of
its desire be; near, nearer and nearest
For
ever be distress undreamt,
Despair
unwanted and anguish unsought!’
The world trembled and
shook with fear as when Eve disobeyed the divine decree:
‘Earth
felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing
through all her works gave signs of woe,
That
all was lost.’
Manu discovers another
strange apparition, of beauty on the far horizon, for the second time after his
fall:
‘A
lofty laurel of imperious reason
Crowned
her dark mysterious locks
Scattered
snake-wise on her radiant face
Moon-like.
Pity and scorn and passion and discord
Twinkled
in her trembling looks
Lotus-eyed and sweet-intoxicant.
A
full, bud-like mouth, made for song,
Round, and melting red into
a dream-like dimple
At
the lips’ parting, broke into melody
In full-throated ease ravishing and charm-entwining.
In
her bosom dwelt all the wisdom of the world.
Brimming
held forth her hand the Kalash
Of
Karma with foaming Soma divine,
The
while to the starry welkin of thought
The
other gave a prop fear-secure.
Her
languid, billowing, avenging form
Was in lusty luminous ether clad.
And
on a delicate tip-toe poised were
Yet
to faint her liquid lingering feet,
Abandoning her into a sudden rhythm of dance.
She is Ida (Ila). We may here note the vivid contrast between Ida and
Sraddha. Ida (Intellect) represents power and glory, passion and pride,
youthfulness and strength. Sraddha represents detachment and devotion, piety
and faith, mellowness and spiritual beauty. Ida attempts to tempt Manu and she
succeeds. He is drawn towards her irresistible charm. With her he rules over
the new country, and, under his able administration, a new flush of life enters
the land. Its various branches of activity are over-hung with the fruits of a
Renaissance. Man becomes an intellectual prodigy wedded to materialistic
planning. But mankind is divided into various creeds and colour-groups, castes
and classes that are held together only by a fear-complex and an almost
religious faith in the inevitability of the social system. Manu is intoxicated
with success. His ‘ahamkara’ knows no bounds. He brands himself as Prajapathi
and declares himself immune from the laws of society. Ida tries to persuade him
to the right path but fails. Manu argues in his own way:
‘Wherefore
shall I my own creation fear?
Have
I not the right to err if but once?
The
Universe is itself an unrestrained flux
And
in its commotion are involved
Vast
changes affecting the shape of a thousand stars
And
the moon and the sun and the planets;
The
torrid desert is swept by the swelling sea;
And
a quivering flame burns in everything,
The
destroyer and yet the preserver,
The
winter that stores the vernal bloom!
To
transcend the bounds of Annihilation–
That
is my life’s aim. The sturdy moment
Of
Self-assertion in a smouldering heap
Of
ruined hours is the stirring symbol
Of active life and the rest a nightmare!’
We find Manu already
on the defensive, which obviously betrays a weakening of his moral rectitude
that could burst into a spate of reproachful indignation against the Gods for
their cruel vanity. The ancient realm of night that devoured Faust is slowly
encroaching upon his flawless conscience. In Carlyle’s words:
‘He
feels that he is with others, but not of them. Pride and an entire
uncompromising, though secret, love of self are the main springs of his
conduct. Knowledge is with him precious only because it is power; even virtue
he would love chiefly as a finer sort of sensuality, and
because it was his virtue. Go where he may, he will find himself in a
conditional world; widen his sphere as he pleases, he will find it again
encircled by the empire of Necessity; the gay
Ida is disgusted with
the obstinate attitude of Manu and seeks to abandon him. The sense of
possession has entered into his mind. He tries to own and dominate Ida. No
sooner does he lay hand over her dissolving form than
do the doors of the Fort fall down and a discontented populace, outraged by the
incident, rushes into the palace in a rebellious mood and puts him to flight.
Kamayani
suffers estrangement and wanes away in the diurnal wheel of hope and despair.
Manu never returns to her. Her only light in the cottage is her son:
‘Kamayani! she
swooned to earth,
A
flower, ravished of honey,
A
mere skeleton of lines, an outline mere,
The
relic of a picture, the vital hue lost;
A
pale moon, dawn-washed,
Shorn
of radiant beam;
A
dull twilight, a gray patch luminous,
Sans moon, sans star, sans sun!’
She turns to the
‘Maridakini! shall
you not speak?
Shall
you not speak? dear Divine!
Or
joy or sorrow–which exceeds?
Or
infinite stars in the sky,
Or
countless bubbles in the sea,
Which
abound? Speak, Mandakini!
In
all your blue waves the stars
Are
mirrored; and now: to meet
The
sea yonder yearn and tremble!
Speak:
if they be but shadows of one!
Speak
Mandakini! speak Mandakini!’
The child calls her.
She embraces him and forgets her sorrow:
‘Mamma! a
foaming sweet laughter tinkled,
And
her empty house was filled with song.
She
took him in lap, pressed to heart her child;
With
flowing hair he came; and, two dusty hands
Shook
her, teased her, wheeled her about and embalmed
Her
burning anguish and broke her hushed emotion.’
She has a disturbing
dream in the night. She sees in it that her husband is under duress. She goes
in search of him with her little son. Manu is stricken with remorse and,
tormented by his own ingratitude, departs during the night without her
knowledge. Ida, who has also repented in the meanwhile, reaches the abode of
Sraddha and confesses to her her failure to guide the new creation. Sraddha
receives her cordially and points out the weakness in her method:
‘The
light and shade of joy and sorrow–
That
simple path hast thou left;
Hast
divided life into parts outwardly,
False
to nature; hast burdened the soul
Of creation with hatred and lack of faith!’
Thus saying, she puts
her son under Ida’s care with the exhortation to him and, through him, to all
the coming generations:
‘O,
my Saumya! Ida’s affectionate care
Shall
lighten the burden of thy sorrow:
She
has reason and thou aboundest in faith.
Do
thy duty ever without fear–
And
thus shouldst thou redeem mankind
From fall. Spread thy wings of
Compassion,
Hear,
my son! the words of thy dear mother!’
Into these few lines
has been crowded Prasad’s philosophy of a new life. The ‘summum bonum’ of life,
according to him, is an active combination of intellect and faith. This is
strengthened by the later part of the poem.
At
length Kamayani discovers Manu on the banks of the Saraswati. Throughout the
creation he finds an all-pervading spirit of benefaction and, as soon as he
sees his lost companion, he cries in agony which is also an ecstasy at the same
time:
‘O,
my Sraddha! Take me
To those dear, dear Feet!’
She takes him to the
edge of the three-dimensional world where they have a glimpse of a more joyous
Universe of greater dimensions. They discover three luminous points in the
distant space, representing will, knowledge, and action. The poet here becomes
a pure mystic and the scene in which Sraddha leads her husband, showing him a
higher destiny and a more blissful world, reminds us of the ‘Divine Comedy’
where Beatrice takes her lover; Dante, round the seven circles of heaven.
Sraddha explains to Manu that those qualities taken individually cannot make
life complete, and that the successful blending of them all could alone produce
a harmonious pattern for life. Her tender smile runs through those luminous
points which mingle together into a single focus of light that gradually widens
into the effulgent Universe of Ananda:
‘Awake
in the tender eyes of Dawn,
And
rest on the gentle eye-lids of Night
And
dream over the dewy locks of Pity,
Innumerable
stars bright
Rise
like bubbles. None accursed,
No
sinner here; Life is even,
Flooded
with radiant Joy!
This
world is True and for Ever,
And,
undyingly Beautiful!’
Ida and Kumar
(Kamayani’s son) pay homage to the figures of Manu and Sraddha while they fade
away into Eternity:
‘They
understood Infinity, and saw
Time like a snake coiling among the stars.’
The
poet turns once again to Nature, light and shade, plants and herbs, flowers and
honey and butterflies, ‘star-dust and fairy moon-beams, and evokes an idyllic
atmosphere lulling us slowly into a bewildering world of dreams.
‘Sri
Sri’, the inspirer of the younger generation of modern Telugu poets, declared
as his motif:
‘I
too shall blossom,
A
white petal unblemished
In the Lotus of the Universe.’
Nowhere is his ideal
better achieved than in Kamayani. Kamayani is the most splendid poem of
the modern era in Indian literature. It has shown that there is a hope for real
poetry in our country. Nay, it has shown a hope for the survival of the human
race itself. If mankind achieves that equanimity and detachment stressed in
this mighty poem, the hope would not be a forlorn one.
The
achievement of Prasad has been summarised by Dr. Indra Nath Madan:
‘Prasad
symbolises the protest against the gross materialism of the age. He stresses
the beauties of Nature for those who have no leisure to enjoy the reddening of
the rose, the charm of spring, the buzzing of bees and the flowing of the
breeze. He felt, as early as 1913, that the head was becoming empty. He pleads
in almost all his poems for a return to the objects of Nature. According to him
life is not a mass of contradictions, conflicts, abstractions and logical
concepts; it is a flowing stream of bliss and consciousness. He has embodied
this mystic experience of life in Kamayani, a landmark in the history of
Hindi mystic poetry.’
1
All translations of Prasad are by myself.–D.V.K.R.