A Poet And The Past

What compels us to re-read a poet or a writer muchafter his time? As individuals we may have very many compelling reasons to doso, but as a community why do we go back to a particular poet or a writer?

I ask these questions because I have before me a 360-page Kannada volume(titled Pratimaloka, published by Ankita, 2008) that 'revisits' thepoetry of M. Gopalakrishna Adiga, arguably among the great poets of India in the20th century. It has been edited by S R Vijayashankar, who is not only acorporate communication professional with Intel, but also a sensitive literarycritic in Kannada.

In his foreword, Vijayashankar does offer a number of literary and a coupleof non-literary reasons as to why we need to revisit Adiga. He speaks in aslightly obsolete literary jargon, but among all the reasons that he offers theone I found most interesting, which needed foregrounding and elaboration, iswhen he says that one of Adiga's most admirable qualities was the manner inwhich he put our tradition through an acid test before accepting it. This istrue because the manner in which Adiga bent and chiseled our puranic metaphorsto communicate an intensely modern predicament and also the manner in which hemade the new democratic apparatus, with a deep hue of self-esteem andself-respect, sink into the consciousness of the people was incredible andunique.

This thing about tradition and Adiga is important for the simple reason thatthe legendary poet was politically identified with the Right. He even contesteda Lok Sabha election on a Jan Sangh ticket in 1971 and lost; yet he never eversuccumbed to the revivalist mantra of the RSS. There is a little anecdote inthis book, which actually reveals Adiga's complex mind: He was once asked to goto the railway station to receive Babasaheb Deoras, the RSS ideologue. Adiga'sreply was that he respected Deoras and would welcome him home, but wouldn't liketo go to the station to receive him. "If Jayaprakash Narayan was arriving,it would be another matter," he had apparently said. Adiga's poem on Nehru(titled 'Nehru Nivruttaraguvudilla' meaning 'Nehru will not retire'), whichspoke of the first prime minister's self-love and unending monologues, made himan icon of anti-Congressism.

How to invoke the past without sounding nostalgic orrevivalist? How to draw a line between history and mythology? How to have acritical engagement with the past? These are some of the most important dilemmasbefore our generation and in Adiga's poetry these are handled with elan. I wishI could present some samples here to substantiate these seemingly baldassertions, but I feel unprepared to touch his magical lines. I am reminded ofthis line in his poem on the Ganges ('Ganges will never go dry') where heridicules the beaten path of the river: 'Although fresh water flows in, there isstill the inebriation of the past'.

If Adiga were to be alive today, he would have been 90 and I wish to believethat he would have turned his back to the Sangh. His anti-Congressism would havematured to see through the shallow game of the Sangh, which has come to believein an opportunistic engagement with the past. Adiga's poems sometimes appear tome as a paradoxical mix of rationality and restless emotion. His creativitynever allowed him to be caught in the dogma of his ideology, but only allowed itto thinly map a righteous world for him.

Besides all these big reasons, I remember Adiga fondly for the small thingsthat he tried to inculcate in aspiring young writers. He was the one who firstemphasised that inspiration apart, one has to carefully chisel one's creativeoutput meticulously and unhurriedly wait until it matures with time. He oncesuddenly pulled out a sheet from a heap of files stacked on his table and said,"Look here, this poem has been waiting to see print for ten years because Iam not happy with the last two lines. Who knows when I rework the last twolines, the meaning of the entire poem may change." This for the first timeconveyed to me that writing was a very sacred act.

Adiga as a person and writer had that uncompromising integrity. He was tooproud to bow before the unworthy. Nor did he have self-pity about his lonelinessin the end, when many of his famous friends abandoned him. He only became moreself-critical. He put his life's actions through a severe final test and quietlywaited for his exit. His last two anthologies (Ba itta itta and SuvaranaPuttali) offer some clues to his emotions.

Adiga never spoke bombastically about his craft or work.In fact he believed that a writer should never talk about his work. As a studentI had once pestered Adiga to tell me how and when he wrote his most famous poem'Mohana Murali.' He had written down that poem for me in his own hand that had ahalting flow since his paralytic stroke. He told me that the temporal origins ofa poem was not important, but not to disappoint a young man he relented after awhile. The poem's first lines had occurred, he said, when he was climbing downthe stairs of Tumkur library after browsing through some philosophical journalsand feeling very inadequate and humbled before the sea of knowledge thatsurrounded him.

Since I am not equipped to present lines from his poetry, let me at leastpresent excerpts from a rare essay that he wrote about his engagement with hisown poetry. It is called 'Me and My Poetry' and what you read below is only aninitial draft of my translation:

"I have never spoken much about my poetry nor have written about it. Inmy view, no poet should attempt to analyse his own work. Not only a poet, acultured and sensitive person also cannot afford to speak much about himself andhis work. What is one's own is very intimate, has a lot of depth and is highlymysterious.

For that matter, how much do we really know about ourselves? Generally, when aperson starts speaking about himself, he speaks about the ideal picture that hehas portrayed of himself for himself. This is not a question of insincerity, buta question of the lack of awareness.

It is my feeling that poetry is a process of understanding oneself. I cannot beprecise about the extent of awareness that it brings about nor can I be sure ofhow clearly it portrays reality. It is such an intimate and mysterious activity.Only others should be able to speak about it, be they our contemporaries orposterity.

I am confident about myself and also about my works. If I get down to explainingthem, the esteem in which I hold myself will be affected. Because no person withintegrity can extol himself. Not to extol oneself may not be the only qualitythat makes a person righteous, but I realise it to be one of the importantqualities of a cultured mind. Besides that, the mark of good poetry is to findfinal shape outside the consciousness of the poet. I mean, however consciouslywe may enter the act of writing poetry, true poetry is created only when anelement beyond one's consciousness penetrates it.

It is for this reason that no poet can take into account the nobleness of hismotives or the sum total of his efforts to measure the success of his writing.He can only make known what he intended to speak in his poem. But it is analtogether different question if what he has written has become poetry.

The special moment when poetry is born was termed earlier as inspiration, adivine gift or the benefit of the deeds of one's past life. In today's jargon,we say it is the releasing of what is present at the bottom of one'sconsciousness. It is hard to explain what really lies at the bottom of one'sconsciousness. A poet also has experiences like anybody else. The blending ofemotions takes place. The dreams try to siphon out the emotional materialcharged in the mind. Emotion is also put out through speech, through writings,through interjections, through abuses, grumbling etc.

A person who tries to understand all this through language becomes a poet. If,by chance, what he writes turns out to be a success, then it becomes a specialhuman incident bearing the stamp of his personality. This should not mean thatthe poem and the unique experience that has bloomed in it is subjective.Because, there are enough elements in it which are common to humanity. All theelements are natural to man and they are humanly possible. Therefore, a poeticwork operates both at the personal and the universal realm.

A true probing into the literary works of the human world reveals that they areformed out of synthesis, adjustment and out of the conflict that exists betweendualities. The dualities could be the inner self and the outer world, the pastand the future, the world of reality and that of illusion, the concrete and theabstract, the emotions, language etc.

To delve into the subject, to fuse the materials are some of the things that thepoet can do consciously. But it is important to know that this alone does notmake poetry. It is possible that the work may turn out to be a bad piece evenafter one has brooded over it for quite some time. It is natural in the literaryworld to think and to continue to live in the illusion that what one hasmeditated and toiled to write is extraordinary. So, it is important for a poetto be detached from what he has created. Because a poem attains an independentexistence after it has been written and published.

Only if a poet accepts such independence can he continue with the independenceof his works. Or else, he will unnecessarily be spending his energy squabblingwith critics and exposing his innumerable flaws and anger. Also, what a poetspeaks outside the realm of his poem is irrelevant from the point of view of thepoem. What a poet intends to say should be said in the poem. A sensitive readerwill certainly respond to it. When a poem is written in a slightly differentfashion, the number of readers who may respond to it may be less, and a poet mayalso be disturbed by this fact. But at such a juncture, a poet should not engagehimself in writing an exegesis of his poems. That job should be left to thereader and, if there is no such reader in his contemporary surroundings, heshould patiently address himself to the future and learn to live with suchpatience, difficult though it may be.

When a poem is effectively communicated through language, it ceases to besubjective. It becomes a part of society, because language is social andcontains elements of the past, the present and the future. A person who can bestexploit this is a poet. When language is used in such a fashion, it not onlycommunicates in the present, but also in the future. Critics who deliverjudgment and write off a particular poem as very complex should note this aspectof language and poetry. The complexity that successfully blooms in language isthe complexity of art and does not remain to be the complexity of the person orthe poet.

I have not taken poetry lightly. I have considered it to be one of the pathswhich leads us to the multiple truths about life. I have endeavoured to attainfulfillment in life by writing good poetry. As a poet I should not speak oftheir worth and meaning. I have written them for the flowering of my own self,as much as for creating delight in the readers and bringing about a trueunderstanding in them; more than anything else to make their minds more generousand cultured by letting them know the complexity of life and its multiplepossibilities.

I have not written my poems as easily as a bird sings a song. I have worked hardto produce them."