PANIKER ON POETRY

All creation carries a seed of mystery .The creation of poetry is also a mysterious process. Even the poet may not know its secret. What happens in each poem is a divine birth where human and superhuman powers come together unexpectedly yet inevitably as if predetermined in some unknown fashion. By the time the poet's energy or vitality gets transformed into the poem, the same radiating energy kills a part of the poet. The birth of a poem is a memorial to that destruction, that partial death. It is doubtful whether this creative power can ever be analyzed and understood by the destructive acts of simple reason. Those who have known that power do not need analysis; those who have not known its force have no use for it. The best method is to know creation through creation. All good poems are the result of a divine union so that each poem is obscure, yet each will have a dim halo around it To reveal the sources of the inspiration of poetry is even more difficult than writing a poem; what the poet can do is only to speak about his state of mind or the circumstances of his life when he wrote a poem.....

....Whatever claims a poet may make, no poet can do beyond the limits of his genius. Even trying to do the best within one's ability is no child's play. It is also wrong to assume that poetry for a poet is circumscribed or defined by a single poem. It goes on bubbling, surging and overflowing into the next poem. There is an often invisible relationship between one poem and another. Only the poet will be anxious about the poems not yet written, the reader is ignorant of it. Can we say that each poem is but one incarnation of poetic creativity? If so how many incarnations does poetry have!

Ayyappa Paniker( Kurukshetropakhyanam,on the writing of his poem, Kurukshetram)

The end of historiography? -AYYAPPA PANIKER


Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, 1912-1999.



WITH the passing of Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai on April 10, 1999 at his native village in Kuttanad taluk of Alappuzha district at the age of 87, a certain phase of Malayalam fiction with a good deal of emphasis on historiographic documentation may be said to have come to its logical end. That the novel should hold up a mirror to life in the raw, cooked rare and showing the red, was almost an axiom with the generation of writers who grew up under the tutelage of the redoubtable intellectual Kesari Balakrishna Pillai, whose unorthodox views and cosmopolitan outlook had a substantial influence on them in their formative years. It was perhaps Thakazhi who benefited most from it in his creative work.

Hailing from an underdeveloped village, where he had his early education, he went to Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram) to study law, which later helped him work as a pleader. The years he spent in Trivandrum in the company of Kesari made him familiar with world literature, especially with the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Hugo, Zola, Tolstoy and Gorki. In a sense this contact with the Western masters of the narrative opened his vision, both in terms of content and the technique of story-telling, which in his last years he was eager to unlearn.

Thakazhi's first short story (The Poor) was published in 1929, his first novel (Reward for Sacrifice) in 1934. In the 1930s and 1940s he was active in the Progressive Literature Movement, and his early stories and novels reveal the twin influence of Freud and Marx. His involvement with leftist politics has left its imprint on his early novels like Thottiyude Makan (Scavenger's Son, 1947) and Randidangazhi (Two Measures, 1948). The trend began to change slowly towards the publication of his popular classic Chemmeen (Shrimps, 1956). This evolution of his perception of art and life continued into his later masterpieces such as Ouseppinte Makkal (Children of Ouseph, 1959), Enippadikal (Rungs of the Ladder, 1964), and Chukku (Dried Ginger, 1967), culminating in his magnum opus Kayar (The Rope, 1978).

One can see two things in this trajectory: one, the relentless, though slow, development of his creative powers; the other, the indifference with which he pushes off pot-boilers in between irresistible masterpieces. But it cannot be denied that, whatever be the final assessment of the aesthetic quality of his individual works, there is a fierce and sustained concern for the suffering of the underdog - beggar, prostitute, peasant, factory worker, fisherfolk, scavenger, shopkeeper, the downtrodden, the impoverished middle class, destitute women, orphans, and what not. He was no sentimentalist, although he could portray human sentiments with sharp objectivity and precision. All his 600-odd short stories, his novels, his innumerable articles, speeches, biographical writings and travelogues throb with concern for mankind. They run through the whole gamut of human emotions.

ON April 11, a grateful village bade farewell to the man who had put their tiny spot of land forever on the map of the world. The crowds had their last look at him, whom they had grown familiar with in their routine daily activities, but got dazed as though they were seeing him for the first time that afternoon. The village was appropriating to itself the writer who had appropriated its name to himself for nearly seven decades, meticulously recording the history of its people in all its lovely and ugly nuances, its joys and sorrows, its petty quarrels and aching dreams. The village historian himself was becoming part of history.

Trying to write in the past tense about Thakazhi, the chronicler of the eternal present, is an unenviable task. Which reflects only the limitations of our understanding of human mortality, for, by writing one's age, one becomes ageless.

"He's gone, gone away, leaving us all behind," murmured his wife Kathamma to herself, as I moved over to her by the side of the hero whom she had looked after, silently and wistfully, for over sixty years. "He'll never go away, he's always with us, will be so, in our hearts, for all time to come," I whispered to myself, for it was what everybody there felt. They had all, it seemed, walked out of his stories and novels, the humble and the lowly, the little men and women, who could never aim at superhuman proportions. Here was life indistinct from the literature that grew out of it and in turn created it. He is now part of the memory of the land, which memory he himself had enshrined in his immortal writings.


Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai. Through the microcosm of Kuttanad, Thakazhi emerges not merely as the chronicler of his village complex, but by exploiting the puranic mode of narration, as the historiographer of mankind.

AS a story-teller Thakazhi was an artist to his fingertips. His short, crisp sentences narrate the tale with controlled breath. There is no trace of bombast anywhere. In his best stories, one can almost hear the sound of breathing as if it were orally told. His imagination was down to earth, and his grand theme was the earth, man's attachment to the earth.

Kayar weaves it into a massive symphony, fully orchestrated with landscape and watershed. In more than a thousand pages, it unfolds the majestic tapestry with scores of tales that a village loves to remember and recount. In slow movement it unfolds the tragicomic chronicle of individuals and families and groups that integrates and disintegrates this imagined community. Kayar may be read as an epitome of Kerala history, told from the perspective of a tiny village. There are recurring images of a familiar historian, a raconteur, like Achoma Kurup, who cannot take rest unless he passes on the tradition of story-telling, along with the inherited and accumulated stories of the community to the new generation, both the tale and its telling, both the history and its historiography. Thakazhi has gone on record that he learned this dual art from Vyasa, the author of Mahabharata.

The documentary aspect of Kayar is brought out by the very topography of Kuttanad, which is Thakazhi's home tinai (region). Kerala is proverbially thought of as land reclaimed from the sea by Parasurama - perhaps a rubric for the tribe or tribes that worked the miracle before history and historiography started. So is Kuttanad an entirely man-made land, where the annual flood still acts as a reminder of the primordial dominance of water. Small plots of land made of mud dug up mostly by the landless Pulayas and Parayas from the placid waters at the meeting place of rivers like the Pampa and the backwaters of the Vembanand lake. But those who created this fertile delta owned no part of it; and this alienation of man and the fruits of his labour is a focal theme of the novel.

The craze for landed property has for long been a fundamental feature of humankind's character, until in the post-industrial age people left the fields to take up other enterprises such as tea and rubber plantations or go abroad for more lucrative jobs. The rise and fall of Kuttanad is retold in Kayar from the time of the first land survey and settlement about 200 years ago. Land had then functioned as the counter for all financial transitions, and continued to dominate all human concerns and relationships, till the Land Reforms Act changed everything. This historic transformation of man's relationship with land, as also between man and man, men and women and even man and God, forms the staple theme of Kayar.

As the simple sentences form little paragraphs, tiny episodes, snatches of dialogues and reminiscences, and echo across the vast paddy fields and the expansive backwaters, they swell into epic dimensions, and tarawad after tarawad collapses in the flood tide of socio-economic and political upheavals. Through the microcosm of Kuttanad, Thakazhi emerges not merely as the chronicler of his village complex, but by exploiting the puranic mode of narration, as the historiographer of mankind.

The horizontal and vertical mobility of the speaker and the listener and the subject of speech is subtly suggested by the image of the coir yarn, homespun, multi-layered, strong and resilient, but never monological: the land survey and settlement, the Nair Regulation Act, the spread of Western education, the Moplah rebellion, the freedom struggle, all the earth-shaking events dovetailed into a fine sequence, and a finer consequence. Randidangazhi is concerned with the struggle of the agricultural labourers of Kuttanad and their ruthless masters; Thottiyude Makan with the scavengers of Alappuzha; Chemmeen with the fisherfolk of Ambalappuzha and its surroundings; Enippadikal with the ambitious politicians and bureaucrats of the State Capital; Kayar is a blend of all these, including and transcending all these, with a narrative sweep, imaginative vision, and spiritual insight, unsurpassed by any other contemporary novel in Malayalam.

 

FUTURISM AND THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

AYYAPPA PANIKER


Yes, yes, we know that much. We had modernism, and that was followed by post-modernism, whatever that might mean. But what comes after post-modernism? This is our worry now. Some might say that that is the end of it. Why should we assume that everything has to be followed by something. But, no, we cannot leave it like that. We know very well that a period is often defined not necessarily by the people of that period, but by those who step into their shoes later, sometimes much later. Today the situation seems to be very different. We are no longer interested in what is going on now. What has to come later is what fascinates now. What has come about has any way come, so let us focus attention on what is yet to come. Now, tell what comes next?

So like the children listening to the proverbial grandmother, we keep asking what is next. The escape from the present, the oppressive present, is what most people are obsessed with. Romanticism was killed by Realism, Realism was toppled by Modernism, now Post-modernism is replacing Modernism: but tell us what comes next. If you can’t do that, we are going to switch off the light and close our eyes and go to sleep. Don’t be too slow. This obsession with the future, before that future itself has started worrying about how to manifest itself, is what characterizes the dawn of the third millennium.

So, we call it by some name the situation itself offers: let’s use the term futurism. For one thing, it is obvious that it is yet to arrive, and we have a vague feeling that future will always be future; it cannot
overtake the present. Futurism, therefore, is the ideology of the future. Since future will never be identical with the present, its potential is unlimited, and will never be fully realized — except perhaps in the ever-distant, fast-receding future. Future is what future does, and all prognostications based on the present are by definition excluded from Futurism.


To get futurism or bhavishyadvad accepted as the theoretical foundation or ideology of the third millennium, one has to spell out its features of identification on the one hand, and its differences from other and earlier manifestations of the time-spirit. After all, every age has its


own predilections and prejudices, its own strengths and limitations. When one projects an ideology such as futurism, which will always remain a thing in the making, which militates against full-scale manifestation, and which maintains an embryonic existence, one can give only sufficiently vague identifications, for it remains to be seen whether the projected propositions shall ever hold good in the coming times. Many of these things are conditional, and it may be that we do not know all the conditions. Once this limitation is accepted, one may hazard a few things that might apply to the future — in this case the third millennium A.D.


 Like the fragrance in the flower: like the flower in the fragrance

We know that the bud has no smell, although when it blossoms into a flower, it emits fragrance and goes in search of the sensitive nose. There is no fragrance whatsoever even jn the fully-blossomed flower,
unless there is a nose to accept and recognise the fragrance. But we cannot say that the nose is the cause of the flower. My first speculation is whether futurism in relation to the present is comparable to the fragrance in the flower. That speculation is immediately followed and challenged by its own corollary,
i.e., the flower suggested, evoked or manifested by the fragrance. If the flower is made valuable by the fragrance, then the fragrance in the flower is almost identical with the flower in the fragrance.
There is a flower in the fragrance which allows or enables us to identify• the flower. This may then be one of the paradigms of the futurist proposition.


Like the flower in the fruit: like the fruit in the flower

This paradigm also might help us to speculate on the futurist theory. Since the theory here is far ahead of the physical realization of the theory in the form of practice, futurism is like the flower in the deep
structure of the fruit: since no fruit can be there without the flower, the flower is very much there in the fruit, its promise, its fulfillment, its raison d’etre. But since the taste of the fruit is necessarily different from the fragrance of the flower, too close an identification may be hazardous.


Like the word in the meaning: like the meaning in the word

Is the word-meaning paradigm more satisfactory than the flower-fruit paradigm? Does the word reveal the meaning, as the future is revealed by the present? Why should the future be so dependent on the present? Are the word and the meaning so independent of each other as not to contain one in the other? The highly speculative nature of these questions implies that given the word, its meaning can be speculated upon. There are those who argue that the word is implicit in the meaning, which explodes when the word is uttered. It could be with equal certainty or uncertainty be asserted that the word inheres in the meaning. Are yak and artha as inalienably connected as the parents of the world? Or, is all meaning arbitrary, as some people point out that the same idea or object is represented by different words in different languages?

Like the word in the world: like the world in the word

There seems to be an inevitable indeterminacy in all speculative relationships. If we could prophesy everything about the future, the future wouldn’t be future. Hence futurism, in so far as it can be the subject of our speculation, defines an ambiguous condition. The world cannot be apprehended without the help of words, but the world is not just the words that express it in any particular language. This inherent ambiguity cannot just be wished away.


What, then, sir, is Futurism? It is something that still seeks a definition, even as it defies all the known definitions. It is something that < itself only when it manifests, either in art or in science or in
politics. It is that which loses its identity, the moment it yields to some definitive assertion. It can be identified as that which ceases to be what it is, as soon as it shelters itself in non-speculative, objective, verifiable data base. Futurism therefore is an ideology that continually evolves, without totally surrendering itself to our factual grasp. It is always on the verge of everyday existence, fading away as it enters the space of tangible reality. But it inspires us to engage ourselves in speculative activity, ever
striving for a self-definition, that may elude it for ever. When the future enters the sacred premises of the present, it vanishes of its own accord. Still, it has a great impact on us, on our daily life, as we go on wondering what is there round the corner. Its capacity to elude our grasp permanently s part of its perpetual fascination for us.

 

UTOPIAN-DYSTOPIAN DICHOTOMY IN ROMANTICISM


Ayyappa Paniker



(I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed .. .!f winter comes can spring be far behind?)

Understanding Romanticism has become a very complicated task, thanks to the highly reductivistic and oversimplified formulaic presentations by latter day scholars. With a view to accommodating a large number of writers of secondary inspiration and extending the definition to incorporate the tendencies towards decadence that had become manifest after the floodtide had ebbed away, these scholars diluted the concept and turned it into a gunny-sack to hold all and sundry. In the effort to streamline the movement they forgot or ignored the often self-contradictory features it had fostered when it started nearly two hundred years ago in Europe and a hundred years ago in India. In both countries the movement in the beginning was a vibrant energetic inclusive effusion, capable of containing contrary flows. At the end of the 18th century in England, for example, when Blake and Burns or Wordsworth and Coleridge began to write, the contrary directions of the movement were implicit in the very divergences between Blake and Burns or Wordsworth and Coleridge. This dichotomy may be seen in the two younger writers of the movement, namely Shelley and Keats. The high mysticism of Blake and the pastoral realism of Burns could merge together in the evolution of early romanticism. Wordsworth was free to defamiliarize the real, while Coleridge could familiarize the unreal. Pleasure and pain could alternate in Keats, while for Shelley the sweetest and the saddest went together. Despair was possible only where there was hope. This dialectic was inherent in Kantian idealism, which was one of the basics of romanticism. By the time romanticism had developed the secondaries during the Victorian period, the initial vibrancy had been lost. Some kind of compromise had toned down the nascent energy of the tensions arising from self-contradictory tendencies. In India too the first generation romantics like Robindranath Tagore, Kumaran Asan and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala share the intellectual dichotomy found in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats as well as their contemporaries on the continent, while the post-independence romantics, sometimes christened neoromantics out of generosity, seem at best to have a parallel with the Victorian romantics. American transcendentalists like Walt Whitman share with the early romantics of England and of India the capacity to contain contradictory impulses. Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself:
I contain multitudes.

What distinguishes the neoromantics from the early or high romantics is the latter's reluctance to resolve everything to neat formulas, willingness to recognize the validity of opposite pulls and avoidance of the decadent tendency to settle down to self-imitation. 1bday when we look at the early nascent romanticism and the later decadent romanticism, it is not easy to depend on any single definition; features like extreme individualism, unbounded optimism, total subjectivity, relentless introspection, etc. may be found wanting to help us understand the real nature of romanticism. Romanticism in a state of decline does not provide a vantage point to appreciate the most creative and original aspect of romanticism. When we talk of romanticism in the context of Tagore, Asan and Nirala, we ought not to generalize on the basis of latter day decadent romanticism, but of the early explosion of the sense of wonder, of the first flush of encounter with all the freshness of nature, and of the thrill and excitement of discovering the immense potentialities of the human mind.

Indian scholars have generally emphasized the derivativeness of the romantic movement in India, while East European scholars have tried to describe European romanticism as Oriental Renaissance, to distinguish it from the earlier Graeco- Roman renaissance. The romantic movement in Europe in the 18th-19th centuries was the result of the impact of Europe's discovery of the Sanskrit connection and the richness of Sanskrit-based culture, especially philosophy and literature. The translation of Sanskrit classics into European languages, the attempt to study Sanskrit language and grammar, and the birth and growth of an Orientalism were factors responsible for the breakthrough achieved in Europe as a result of the impact of India. Contrary to the general belief, the dominant power or the conqueror is as much influenced by the conquered as the latter is influenced by the former. In the encounter between two national cultures, it is the superior culture, and not only the superior political power, that makes an impact. The impact of the West on India has been studied almost threadbare, but the reverse is yet to be subjected to serious study. The colonizer is not immune to the cultural impact of the colonized.

In the long-term view this is of greater importance than the reverse, which of course is more obvious. It is heartening to find that books like India and the Romantic Imagination are reversing the trend. But the question is not just how the West goes on defining the Orient, but how we have to look at the romantic movement not as something derived from the West, but as a legitimate attempt to reject the neo-classical accretion in our own culture and to reenergize the very springs of our tradion that had gone moribund because of foreign domination. The return to nature meant not only a fresh look at the nature outside as in the vedas or in Kalidasa or in folk literature, but also the recovery of our nationalist ethos. Just as the European romantic movement coincided with the French Revolution, the romantic movement in India drew inspiration from, and in turn reinforced, the struggle for independence, not just political freedom, but the entire liberatiop. of our past and present. When the impact of the French Revolution fizzled out, the romantic movement in the West became decadent; in the same way, once the struggle for freedom lost its impetus, the romantic movementstarted its period of decline, leading to neo-romanticism. Romanticism in India, too, thus identified itself with national cultural resurgence. Out of the ashes of neoclassicism was born romanticism and out of the ashes of a decadent neoromanticism was born the modernist movement and the post-modernism that follows it.

Every movement in its initial stage releases a lot of intellectual energy: new perceptions of life, new literary forms ?r genres, new styles and new images emerge, and the best minds of the dme are caught up in the birth trauma. Tagore, Asan and Nirala are among the best and most creative minds of India when the romantic movement burst ~pon the Indian consciousness. It is therefore natural that we find contrary pulls in the ideational structure of their works. Irrepressible idealism and belief in progress and the perfectibility of man coexist with irresistible attraction towards death and absolute surrender to the divine, acceptance of the superiority of the imagination over reason and logic, concern for the beauties of nature as manifested in the flower, bird, garden, mountain etc. along with a highly refined social consciousness, as seen in the sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden: all these can easily be identified in the works of these masters. It is the coexistence of these diverse elements in a state of happy collusion that is the source of the irony embedded in romanticism. Writers of the hig)J romantic mode like Tagore, Asan and Nirala, despite their faith in the human spirit and their commitment to humanism, were aware of man's limitations. Their works harp on the themes of human greatness and human smallness. Their preoccupation with the tragic in human existence, their expertise in singing about human unseccess, their consistent evocation of the elegiac, their repeated assertions of the inevitability of separation, loneliness, dejection and failure in human life run counter to the ecstatic idealism championed by their works: it is this double vision that gives profundity to their perceptions. The songs of Gitanjali and other works by Tagore are highly evocative of the union and separation between man and God. It is a strangely hopeful experience of despair, wherein doubt and belief are so interwined that one might say doubt is a kind of belief. Asan's short narratives of Nalini, Leela, Sita, Matangi and Vasavadatta, his lament for a fallen flower and his elegy on A.R. Rajaraja Varma, and his futuristic projection of a union between a Brahmin girl and a Chandala boy express a tension which is implicit in the highly sensitive texture of his romantic vision of life. In the numerous lyrics of Nirala, in his Saroj-smriti, we see this desperate clinging to life. Had there been no tragedy, no pain, no failure, no separation, these poets would probably not have written their most powerful poems. Making a song out of the tragic in life, they triumph over it, and take their readers too along with them.

Utopian and dystopian visions criss-cross in their poetic evocations of human experience. This intertwined perception of day and night, of winter and summer, of disease and health, of life and death may be seen in the writings of most poets of the early romantic period. Here is a poem from Tagore's Fruit-Gathering:

Upagupta, the disciple of Buddha, lay asleep on the dust by the city wall of Mathura.
Lamps were all out, doors were all shut, and stars were all hidden by the murky sky of August.
Whose feet were those tinkling with anklets, touching his breast of a sudden?
He woke up startled, and the light from a woman's lamp struck his forgiving eyes.
It was the dancing girl, starred with jewels, clouded with a pale blue mantle, drunk with the wine of her youth.
She lowered her lamp and saw the young face, austerely beautiful. "Forgive me, young ascetic," said the woman; "graciously come
to my house. The dusty earth is not a fit bed for you."
The ascetic answered, "Woman, go on your way, when the time is ripe I will come to you." (Poem XXXVII) .

Suddenly the black night showed its teeth in a flash of lightning. The storm growled from the comer of the sky, and the woman trembled in fear.

The branches of the wayside trees were aching with blossom. Gay notes of the flute came floating in the warm spring air from afar.
The citizens had gone to the woods, to the festival of flowers. From the mid-sky gazed the full moon on the shadows of the silent town.
The young ascetic was walking in the lonely street, while overhead the lovesick koels urged from the mango branches their sleepless plaint.
Upagupta passed through the city gates, and stood at the base of the rampart.
What woman lay in the shadow of the wall at his feet, struck with the black pestilence, her body spotted with sores, hurriedly driven away from the town?
The ascetic sat by her side, taking her head on his knees, and moistened her lips with water and smeared her body with balm.
"Who are you, merciful one?" asked the woman.
"The time, at last, has come to visit you, and I am here," replied the young ascetic.
There is suffering here, but the suffering is not without cause; there is hope, but hope of a strange kind.

Asan, who wrote a song of welcome when Thgore came to Kerala, and who had studied Sanskrit at Calcutta, and was also drawn to Buddhism and Buddhist tales, wrote the most complex and profound of his poems on the story of Upagupta and Vasavadatta. It is a dramatic narrative in three parts: the first, showing the courtesan in all her glory, yet intrigued by Upagupta's answer to her appeal, "It is not yet time," the second, dealing with her downfall until she is cut up in pieces and thrown into a crematory, and the third, describing Upagupta's visit to her at her dying moment. This is how the poem closes:

He stood fixing his eyes at the heap of ashes

of Mathura's paragon of beauty.

From the great man's eyes there dropped a tear

into the ashes like a gooseberry fruit.

That tear in fact is not bitter with grief,
    for this courageous soul will not weep, that knows the ultimate truth of suffering;

Nor is it a honey-drop of self-gratification
       for the compassionate will not rejoice at the departure of the living,
Nor is it again a tear of atonishment at the quick consummation, for one who knows the root cause of all has no astonishment.
We may surmise it is nothing but the bright mature pearl in the depths of compassion.
Giving no thought to the greatness of the good he did that day, who had given up all pride, wedded to virtue,
Then left the graveyard and went back
the way he came, his steps slowed down by a deep thought.
Salutations to thee, 0 Upagupta, without getting lost in nirvana, come back again to serve the world.
Mother Earth today needs more of such sons as you, whose

compassion reaches the lowliest and lost.

This being one of Asan's later poems, we see here the expression of his social awareness, which does not spare even the monk. The episode that links Nirala to Tagore is the one which says how Nirala got wild with Gandhi for asking the question, "Where is the Tagore of Hindi?" The dystopian element is perhaps more intense in Nirala than in Tagore, Asan or any of the other romantic poet in the different Indian languages. The love-hate relationship with tradition comes up again and again in Nirala's poems. The ironic counterpoint of the romantic is bitter and sharp even as the felt emotion is extremely tender and delicate. "Saroj-smriti" is, in this sense, more than a personal lament : it achieves a public dimension within the romantic garb. Asan passed away in 1924, Tagore in 1941, Nirala, much younger to them, lived on till 1961, and saw the world pass through traumatic experiences like the second world war. His vision was therefore darker, and to a certain extent, it anticipated the modernists. Commenting on Nirala's choice of the title Apara, David Rubin shows how it communicates "the experience (or wisdom) of the world and hence the contrary of transcendental." He adds, "There is doubtless an ironic overtone in this designation, for Nirala apparently belived, like the Madhyamikas and some Vedantins, that the physical universe, though it may be termed ultimately unreal, is nevertheless the vehicle of revelation of the absolute reality and, even, not to be distingushed from it by an enlightened awareness." The consciousness of diverse forms of reality comes through in several passages in "Saroj-smriti


Looking at you one day Sasu said,
"It was our duty to bring her up, but now it's time to give Saroj into the hands
of a good husband with an honourable name - this is
our holy obligation. Take her now
to your own house for a while and seek a groom
worthy of both of you. We'll gladly help
arrange her wedding."
Silently I listened,
reflected, said nothing, neither "no" nor "oh,"
and took you with me, my golden girl, like a beggar
hastening a costly treasure, bright as dawn,
into the darkness of his house. Cast down,
I thought, over and over again,
"These Kanyakubja Brahmans - they burn down
their own houses, they bite the hands that feed them.

 Marrying Saroj to one of them could be
a source of grief, since poisoned fruit alone
grows on the poisoned tree. They'll prove a desert,

and marriage a mirage." But then I thought,
"It's right that I should travel the path travelled
by my forefathers - why should I not fulfill
the accepted ritual?" But I'd never feared to go
against established custom, and how could I
stomach the folly of all those absurd traditions? .

And as the poem draws to a close as gently as dusk enfolds the day or the petals of a flower fold upon themselves, the sober and sombre irony moves to a subdued climax, without any dramatics:

Of me so long unlucky you
had been the one blessing. Deprived of you

two years later, life remains
one tale of woe : how can I tell it now
when I could not before ? Let the lightning fall

on all my work, and if it be my fate,
I'll go on down this road, head bent,
but perish my works like lotuses blasted by the winter.
To you, daughter, I sacrifice the karma
of all past lives as offering to your spirit.


In "Wild Jasmine," written two years later, the bitterness becomes vitriolic, without any saving grace. The tone is prophetic of the modernist mode:

 
"If I had been some prince's son
I wouldn't suffer these disgraces.
Just think how many scholars would be my hangers-on,
heads bowed and hands stretched out for my largesse.
I'd give a little - and take much more.
And all the papers - unanimously I - would chant my praises.
My life story would provide the feature articles -
lavishly illustrated, you may be sure.
Not only that. As the heir of a millionaire
I'd be educated far beyond the Arabian Sea.
My father-what an expert on the morals of the nation!
with a firm grip on his money and - not batting an eyelash
a fervent communist as well, preaching the Revolution;
and the people- how carefully they'd think it through:
would elect him President.
Ten national songs (for a fee) would honor him,
and they'd sell them, singing them in tones
harsher than any jackass's.
And not to be left behind, the Hindi societies
would pronounce them (lest they perish first) immortal.
When the news was flashed to me by cable
what bouquets I'd give the lordlings,
the sprees we'd go on - and in the fashion
I'd manage to layout a mere six thousand per month.

 Then-my education completed - back to my worthy old man.

 I'd step down delicately from the plane,
producing a great effect in the press.
They'd all come running, camera in hand,
hastily getting in their requests,
which graciously I'd accord them.
I'd pose in various stances,
in aspects of some twenty moods, looking up or down.
And then I'd give the country my message,
stem and moving, in which•
only the language would be the country's.
I'd dish up all the new Russian ideas, dir="ltr">

which only the sharpest would comprehend
after they'd read them over and over: again.
Then with my father I wuld swear
a solemn oath to serve the people,
and standing on a podium I'd proclaim
the benevolent Bolshevik line."
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From the Utopian position of "The sky is the limit" to the dusty dungeon of dystopian nightmare, the true romantics covered a wide-ranging vision: starting as a protest against neoclassical inanity, romanticism traversed the entire ground of human existence: it was not all lotuses and rainbows, it found a voice for both the extremes of the Hamletian paradox from the euphoria of "what a piece of work is man! to the disgust of "what is this quintessence of dustl" The neoromantics had made it thin and dilute, single-hued, and lost the larger dimensions which had made it coextensive with life. A critic of Self, a critic of Society, a critic of God, the true romantic shared the greatness of the true classicist (li¥e Sophocles or Kalidasa) and the true modernist (like Yeats or Jibanananda).

NOTES
1. The passage from Tagore's Fruit-Gathering is quoted from Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore (London: Macmillan, 1936)
2. The passage from Asan is taken from Karuna (Compassion), translated by K. Ayyappa Paniker and published in Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. XV (Summer Fall, 1980).
3. The Nirala passages are quoted from David Rubin's translation in the volume A Season on the Earth (New York: Columbia D.P., 1976).