Letters from a Young Poet (26 page)

Ichamoti
Thursday, 6 July 1893

Yesterday it was quite clear the entire day. After a long time, the clouds had gone and the new sunlight had brightened up each and everything; nature seemed to have had a bath and was sitting happily drying her wet hair in the desultory breeze with a pleased, contented air, wearing freshly washed clothes of yellow—but my mind was very anxious. Exactly as if it were in solitary confinement. But in the busyness of all the work that needed to be done today, I didn't find the time to nurse that frame of mind. After finishing work at about four or five in the evening, when we set off on the
boat
, a very dark bank of clouds had risen in the east. Gradually we also had some wind and rain. The rain stopped when we entered this tributary. The sandbanks have been flooded—the
boat
had to be towed with a scraping sound through grass as tall as men between forests of jhāu. Further on, there was a favourable wind. I told them to raise the sails; the sails were raised. The
boat
went proudly on, cutting through the waves with a gurgling sound. I sat outside on a chair. I won't even attempt to describe how beautiful the sunset was behind the dense blue clouds and
the half-submerged, desolate sandbanks and the full river spread out up to the horizon. Particularly, at the far end of the sky, right above the Padma's waterline where there was a break in the clouds, it had an appearance so excessively fine and golden and distant, and upon that golden picture, rows of tall, dark trees had been etched with such soft blue lines—it seemed that nature had reached its ultimate apotheosis and turned into an imaginary land. The boatman asked, ‘Should I moor it on the sandbank of the kāchāri ghat?' I said, ‘No, let us cross the Padma.' The boatman set off—the breeze picked up, the Padma began to dance, the sails puffed up, the daylight began to fade, the clouds at the side of the sky gradually amassed themselves densely in the middle of it, the wildly restless waters of the Padma began to applaud from every side—in front of us we could see the blue line of the forests on the shore of the Padma under a pile of distant blue clouds—there were no other boats in the middle of the river but ours—near the shore, two or three fishermen's boats have raised their small sails and are heading home—I'm sitting here as if I were the king of nature, carried along at a great speed in a dancing motion by its restless, foaming-at-the-mouth royal horses.

Shahjadpur
7 July 1893

Yesterday we reached Shahjadpur in the evening after winding our way continuously through small villages, broken-down ghats,
tin
-roofed bazaars, granaries fenced with wooden planking, bamboo groves, jungles full of mango, jackfruit, berry, date, cotton, banana and ā
kanda
trees, castor oil, arum and kacu plants, an aggregation of creepers, shrubs and grass, a group of large boats with their masts raised tied to the ghat, and nearly submerged fields of rice and
jute. Now we shall be stationary here for the next few days. After a long time on the
boat
I quite like the house at Shahjadpur—it's as if one has found a new independence—one suddenly discovers what a vital element of man's happiness is dependent on the ability to move about as much as he wants and to find space to stretch his body. This morning, quite a bit of sun has appeared intermittently, the wind is blowing briskly, the jhāu and
licu
trees are swaying with a creaking, scraping sound, many different kinds of birds have been calling in many voices and many tunes, making the morning concert in the woods hum with excitement—I'm sitting here in this large, empty, secluded, bright and open first-floor room, quite happily watching from my window the rows of boats on the water, the village amongst the trees on the other side, and the slow flow of work in the inhabited regions nearby on this side of the bank. The flow of work in a village is not too rapid, yet not entirely lifeless and comatose either. It's as if work and leisure are both walking side by side in unison, holding hands. The ferries cross the river, travellers with umbrellas in hand walk by the road next to the canal, women immerse their wicker baskets and wash rice, the farmers come to market with bundles of tied jute on their heads—two men have flung a tree trunk on the ground and are splitting its wood with an axe, making a
á¹­hak-á¹­hak
sound, a carpenter works upon an upturned fisherman's boat under an
aśvattha
tree, repairing it with a chisel in hand, the village dog roams around aimlessly by the canal, a few cows lie lazily on the ground in the sun, swishing away flies with a languid movement of their ears and tails before they feed upon excessive amounts of fresh grass, and when the crows sitting on their backs irritate them beyond endurance, they shake their heads at them and express their annoyance. The few monotonous
á¹­hak-á¹­hak á¹­huk-á¹­h
ā
k
sounds of this place, the cries of the naked children playing, the high-pitched tender songs of the cowherds, the
jhup-jh
ā
p
noise of the oars, the sharp, sad sound of the oil mill hitting the
nikh
ā
d
note, all of these sounds of work come together and are in a sort of proportion to the bird call and
the sound of the leaves—all of it seems to be some part of a long dreamlike
sonata
full of peace and enveloped in pity, somewhat in the mould of Chopin, but composed and bound to a very vast, spread-out, yet restrained metre. The sunlight and all these sounds seem to have filled my head to the brim, so let me stop writing this letter and just lie back for a while.

Shahjadpur
10 July 1893

You've received my songs. The tune for the song ‘
baṛa bedan
ā
r mata
' might not be quite appropriate for a performative drawing-room gathering…. This sort of song should be sung in seclusion. I don't believe the tune is bad; in fact, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say it's good. I had composed that song over many days in the bathing room, little by little, along with its tune—there are a great number of advantages to composing a song in the bathing room. Firstly, the seclusion; secondly, no other duty may claim you—if you pour a
tin
of water over your head and spend the next five minutes humming, your sense of duty doesn't suffer too much—and the greatest advantage is that since there's no possibility of an audience one can freely contort one's face as much as one wants. One really can't attain the state of mind in which one composes songs without contorting the face. It's not exactly something that requires logic or argumentation, you see, it's pure excitability. I'm still constantly singing this song—I hummed it for quite some time this morning too, and as you keep singing it a certain intoxication comes over you. So I have no doubt at all about the fact that this song is quite a favourite of mine…. Here, I sing alone, with an entranced and liberated heart, my eyes half shut, and the world and this life appear to me touched by the
sun's bright hands, swathed in the finest layer of tears, coloured like a seven-layered rainbow—one can translate everyday truths into eternal beauty, and sorrow and suffering too become radiant. In no time at all, the khājāñci appears with the accounts for two eggs, one sliver of butter, a quarter litre of ghī and six paisa's worth mustard oil. My history here is like this….

Shahjadpur
13 July 1893

Nowadays writing poetry seems to have become like a secret, forbidden pleasure for me—on the one hand, I still haven't written a single line for next month's
S
ā
dhan
ā, and on the other, I've been receiving reminders from the editor from time to time; not too far in the distance, the joint Āśvin–Kārtik issue of
S
ā
dhan
ā has been standing empty-handed in front of me and rebuking me, and I've been running away into the inner quarters of my poetry to seek refuge. Every day I think to myself—today is only one day, after all—so many days have gone by in this way. I really don't quite know what my real work is. Sometimes I think I can write lots of short stories and not too badly at that—it's also quite a pleasure to write them. At other times I think—there are certain thoughts that come to me that are not exactly appropriate for poetry, but which might work if published as a diary or in some other form and preserved, perhaps that will be both fruitful and pleasurable. Sometimes it's very necessary to fight with our countrymen on social issues—when nobody else is doing so, then it behoves me to fulfil this unpleasant duty. And then again I think, what the hell, let the world take care of itself—I'm quite fluent at composing short rhyming poems set to metre—let me forget about everything else and sit in my own corner and write these. I've become something
like the insanely proud young woman with many lovers who doesn't want to let go of any one of them. I don't want to disappoint any one of the
Muses
—but that multiplies the workload, and in the ‘long run' I might not be doing full justice to any of them. A sense of duty is important even in literary matters, but there is a difference between it and doing your duty in other departments. When you fulfil your literary duties you don't need to think about what will be the most useful for the world, what you need to judge is what you can accomplish the best. Perhaps all the departments of life function the same way. In my own evaluation, it is poetry that I have the most grasp over. But my hunger wants to spread its flame everywhere, over the kingdom of the world as well as the kingdom of the mind. When I begin to compose songs I think it wouldn't be half-bad to continue with just this work alone. Again, when I get involved with some performance, I get so intoxicated with it that I think if one wants then one can spend one's entire life on this too. But then, when one gets involved with issues such as ‘child marriage' or ‘whither education' then that seems to be the most valuable work in one's life. What an impasse I'm at, Bob! And then again, if one swallows one's pride and tells the absolute truth, then I have to admit that that thing called painting—I'm always looking towards it with the lustful glances of unrequited love—but there's no hope of winning it, the age for wooing it is past me now. Unlike the other knowledges, one cannot hope to acquire it easily—to attain it is like breaking the mythical bow; you cannot win its favour until you exhaust yourself with repeated strokes of the paintbrush. The state I'm in is something like Draupadi's—she thought to herself, well, if I am to have five husbands at one time in any case, then why not a sixth, including Karna—that would be great. I'm sure if she had got Karna, she wouldn't have wanted to let Duryodhana or Duhshasana go either. Because you can have either one or an infinite number—there's no natural resting place in between the two extremes. If you say five, then six comes forward on its own accord, and then after six, seven, eight, nine,
ten, etc., are all standing in a line looking at you with unblinking eyes, waiting. So I think it's most convenient if I confine myself to poetry alone—for she is perhaps the one who is under my spell the most—my childhood love, my beloved companion of such a long time….

You have asked me a question about the silent poet, about which what I have to say is that the silent poet and the poet who expresses himself may feel the same amount, but the really poetic is an independent thing. Not only because of the power of language but also the ability to put it all together. Feelings acquire many different forms in the hands of a poet by the power of an invisible, unconscious talent. That power to create is at the root of the poetic. Language, feeling and expression are merely its tools. Some have language, some have expression, somebody may have both language and expression, but there is somebody else who has language, expression and also the power to create—you can call this last person a poet. The first three types of people may be silent or vocal, but they are not poets. The correct word to describe some of these types might be thinkers. They too are very rare in this world and the poet's thirsty heart is always yearning for them.

After reading the preface I've provided above, it might be easier to understand my poem ‘
J
ā
l phel
ā' [Casting the Net]—you've asked me its meaning. If I had it in front of me, I might have been able to look at its meaning properly myself and then tried to explain it to you—still, I have a vague memory of it. Imagine a person standing by the sea at the start of his life and watching the sunrise—that sea is his own mind or the outside world or an ocean of feeling somewhere between the two—that has not been made very clear. Anyway, standing there looking at that amazingly beautiful fathomless sea, the person thinks, let me see what I might get if I throw my net into this sea of mystery. So saying, he throws his net into the sea with a circular motion. Many amazing things begin to come up—some white as a smile,
some bright as tears, some coloured like shame. In his excitement, he continues with this work all day long—he keeps bringing up the beautiful mysteries from the depths of the sea until he has a pile on the shore. This is how he spends the entire day that was his life. In the evening, he thinks, I have enough, let me go and give these now. To whom has not been made perfectly clear—perhaps to his beloved, perhaps to his country. But she has never seen all these amazing things before. She might wonder, what are these things, what is the need for them, will they banish poverty, how much would they be worth if I take them to a shopkeeper for valuation? In other words, this is not science, philosophy, history, geography, economics, sociology, theology or data of any kind—these are merely many-coloured feelings, and we don't even know their nomenclature or description very well. As a result, the person given all the gems collected by throwing your net into the endless ocean says: What on earth are these? The fisherman too then feels remorse, ‘True enough, this is nothing much, just something I dredged up by throwing my net into the water—I didn't go to the market, and I haven't spent any money, I didn't have to pay a paisa in tax or duty on it!' He then picks it all up with a dejected and shameful face and, sitting at the door of his house, throws it all on the road one by one. The next day in the morning, passers-by pick up these hugely valuable things and take them away to their own homes in this country and abroad. It seems that the person who has written this poem thinks that his country, busy with domestic duties in the inner quarters, and his contemporary readers cannot quite comprehend the meaning of his poems—they don't understand their value—so for now, it is all being discarded on the road, ‘you neglect them and I too neglect them', but when this night is over, then ‘
posterity
' will pick them up and take them away to other parts of this country and abroad. But will that help mitigate that fisherman's regret? Anyway, hopefully nobody will have
any objection to the happy thoughts of the poet as he dreams of
posterity
coming slowly towards him through the long night like a lover on an assignation—perhaps she might just reach him by the time the night has come to an end.

I can't quite recall what the exact meaning of the poem about the temple is. Perhaps it's about an actual temple. That is, when you sit in a corner and swathe your god in a lot of artificial ideas, thereby taking your mind too to an unnatural and very sharp level, and then a lightning bolt of doubt breaks down those artificial barriers of so many ages, so that suddenly your place of chanting and ritual and incense and smoke is exposed to nature's beauty, sunlight, and the song of the world, and then you see that
this
is real worship and this is god's satisfaction. Perhaps it was the temples of Orissa that put me in this sort of mood. Inside one of the temples at Bhubaneshwar, the place where the god was placed was terribly dark, closed, and with a suffocating smell of incense—the floor wet with water used to bathe the image of the god, bats flying around—the moment you came out of there into the beautiful light outside you knew exactly where god really was.