11 Memory/Voice

Abdul Mubid Islam

Introducing the poets:

Attipak Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born into an orthodox Hindu Brahmin family in 1929 in Mysore. After receiving his education at Maharaja’s College, Mysore, he went to the United States in 1962 with a Fulbright Scholarship in the prestigious Indiana University. He then obtained a Ph.D in Linguistics in 1963. Later, he became the professor of Dravidian linguistics in the University of Chicago. Ramanujan’s literary tastes had their origins in the multi-lingual culture of his family which familiarised him with the literary traditions of the South such as Kannada and Tamil besides Sanskrit and English. Ramanujan’s poetry is basically philosophical in outlook as one finds a fusion of the contemporary scientific outlook with the peculiarly profound Hindu awareness of the spiritual and the metaphysical in human nature. He consciously keeps himself away from elaborating sentiments in his poems which intensifies the repressed quality of his poetry as there is always a deliberate intent to keep a powerful inner turmoil under check. The precise and tight structure of his poems gives the idea of a quiet tone that is further beautified by the use of minimal imagery. His published works include The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), Selected Poems (1976) and Second Sight (1986). Apart from poetry, he has also co-edited The Oxford Book of Modern English Poetry with the additional credit of being a fine Tamil translator which is to be found in Fifteen Tamil Poems (1965), The Interior Landscape (1967), Speaking of Siva (1972), Samskara (1976), Poems of Love and War (1984) and a famous novel by U.R.Anantha Murthy. He received the prestigious Padma Shri award in 1976. He settled in Chicago where he continued teaching till his death in July 1993.

Breaded Fish

Specially for me, she had some breaded

fish; even thrust a blunt-headed

smelt into my mouth;

and looked hurt when I could

neither sit nor eat, as a hood

of memory like a coil on a heath

opened in my eyes: a dark half-naked

length of woman, dead

on the beach in a yard of cloth,

dry, rolled by the ebb, breaded

by the grained indifference of sand. I headed

for the shore, my heart beating in my mouth.

(A.K.Ramanujan)

Critical Appreciation

In the poem Breaded Fish, Ramanujan recaptures and gives expression to the way he recoiled at the sight of a breaded fish served to him by a lady who had prepared the dish especially for the poet. Ramanujan’s treatment of nature in his poems has a revolting nature and is never serene and pure like that of Sarojini Naidu. In this poem, nature is first represented by the fish meant for consumption and later by an extended metaphor of the cobra and its devilish nature bent on action.

Although the fish is edible and common to both an Indian and a Western, there is a difference in the way it was prepared for consumption. This is evident from the manner of sprinkling bread crumbs on the fish before baking which clearly indicates that the lady in question is Western. It was therefore not similar to the way the poet was habituated to having fish. Besides, it was not only the preparation of the fish according to western appetite and taste but also the look of the dish that prejudiced the poet from having the breaded fish. According to the speaker (who in all probability is the poet himself), the sight of the dish was as horrible and gruesome as the sight of a dark half-naked woman lying dead on the beach which he had witnessed on a previous occasion. The intensity of the gruesome look of the half-naked woman “…a dark half-naked/ length of woman, dead/ on the beach in a yard of cloth” contributes to the degree of the poet’s abhorrence at the sight of the fish.

The poet’s intention to sketch a horrid picture of the breaded fish assumes greater dignity when he describes the flashing image of the dead woman screening his memory in terms of the hood of a cobra. The flash of the memory was as quick as the rapidity with which cobras set their hoods into action. The emphasis is intensified further when he compares this memory to a “coil on a heath”. Just as the fish is sprinkled with bread crumbs, likewise the body of the dead woman too was disjointedly covered by a yard of cloth and sand. The expression “breaded by the grained indifference of sand” refers to those tiny sand particles or granules that appear on the surface of the body and that are indifferent to the lady. And it is this indifference that the poet locates in his picturization of the breaded fish. That he finally headed for the shore with his heart beating in his mouth establishes the contrast between the East and the West not only in their food habits but also in whatever constitutes social milieu and culture.

The observation that Ramanujan’s Breaded Fish is a recollection in emotionalised untranquiltiy is worth the study as the poet’s emphasis is on one of his past experiences having its bearings on the present. The emotion is not tranquil because neither the sight of the dead woman’s body nor the look of the breaded fish generates feelings of rehabilitation. Both the sights trigger horror and disgruntle the poet. The contention that the memory of a moment of horror can be transmuted into a disturbingly vivid poem is thus firmly established.

From the technical angle, Ramanujan’s untranquil emotion is clothed in an imagery that shocks and frightens. The images in the expressions “hood of a cobra”, “coil on a heath”, “half-naked woman”, “yard of cloth”, “rolled by the ebb”, “grained indifference of sand”, “heart beating in my mouth” are interwoven to sketch a horrible and uncanny picture of the breaded fish.

Introducing the poet:

Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir in February 4, 1949. He was educated in the University of Kashmir, University of Delhi and upon arrival in the United States in 1975, in the Universities of Arizona and Pennsylvania. It was in the University of Delhi that Shahid Ali befriended the noted Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh and the bond of friendship grew so strong that in his parting moments Shahid Ali entrusted Ghosh to remember him through the ‘living records of memory’. Hence, to commemorate the eternal bond of their friendship, Ghosh wrote a moving essay “The Ghat of the Only World” which is now prescribed as a text in the Indian high schools. Shahid Ali was a poet known for the pure lyricism that beautified his poetry. Being greatly influenced by Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Begum Akhtar and Firdausi, one finds a true blend of Urdu and Persian poetry in his work. It was in fact Shahid Ali who made an honest attempt to introduce the Urdu genre of the Ghazal as a significant creative genre in English poetry. In a sense, Shahid Ali’s poetry breathes the finer air of the quintessential artistic expression that goes to the making of an aesthetic experience of reading world literature. His published works include Bone Sculptor (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other poems (1979), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Walk Through the Yellow pages (1987), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003) and The Veiled Suit: Collected Poems (2009). He passed away leaving a void in the artistic world on December 8, 2001 after being diagnosed as suffering from brain tumour.

Learning Urdu

Form a district near Jammu,

(Dogri stumbling through his Urdu)

he comes, the victim of a continent broken

in two in nineteen forty-seven.

He mentions the minced air he ate

while men dissolved in alphabets

of blood, in syllables of death, of hate.

‘I only remember half the word

that was my village. The rest I forget.

My memory belongs to the line of blood

across which my friends dissolved

into bitter stanzas of some poet.’

He wanted me to sympathize.

I couldn’t, I was only interested in the bitter couplets

which I wanted him to explain. He continued,

‘And I who knew Mir backwards, every

couplet from the Diwan-e-Ghalib saw poetry

dissolve into letters of blood.’ He

Now remembers nothing while I find Ghalib

at the crossroads of language, refusing

to move to any side, masquerading

as a beggar to see my theatre of kindness.

(Agha Shahid Ali)

Critical Appreciation:

Agha Shahid Ali’s constant preoccupation with the theme of “dislocation” and “identity’ is best reflected in this poem where the poet tries to assert the prime significance of a language as not just a means of reciprocity between people or groups of people in the communication of ideas or correspondence but also to formulate the historicity of a socio-political climate that has resulted in the fragmentation of identity along the prescribed rules of borderline conflict. In other words, the poem is an attempt at documenting the pitfalls of the great Indian tragedy of Partition in 1947 that has resulted in the creation of two distinct countries—India and Pakistan. The poem is also a subtle statement on the kind of violence emanated in the creation of an independent territory which is affirmed through the register of memory. Shahid Ali’s brilliance in voicing out such delicate memory is commendable because he does not express his favouring of the legitimacy of such division but goes on to chart out the uncongenial political atmosphere that has wrecked the universal bond of fraternity. This is achieved by the sheer application of his poetic ingenuity in pitting political ideas of fragmentation against the strictures of morphological validity of language.

The poem begins much in the manner of Shelley’s Ozymandias with the speaker’s meeting a “victim of a continent broken” who comes from a district near Jammu. The expression ‘stumbling through his Urdu” is significant because it foreshadows the horror unleashed in the political division of nineteen forty-seven while at the same time also reveals the inability of the stranger to re-enact the lived experience of such a phantasmagorical memory. The idea of “mincing the air” draws the reader’s attention to the fragmentation that has violently uprooted the notion of amity and fraternity. The speaker’s attempt at formulating a discourse of violence gains credence with the idea of men “dissolved in alphabets of blood” and the rest of the expression goes to demarcate the morphological nature of such conceptualisation.

The stranger friend of the speaker states that he could half remember the name of his village. He also says that his memory is dipped in blood. This is a ghastly image that projects the nefarious consequence of partition. Kashmir which has been the bone of contention since the Partition between both India and Pakistan has tries to assert her independence from both these begetting nations at the cost of blood. One has to take into account the political ideology employed by the government of Kashmir in maintaining its integrity by deciding to remain an independent principality. Given the harsh reality of such times, the stranger in the poem feels demoralised in seeing no promising future. He therefore does not want to fade into the bitter stanzas of the dead poets who tried their best to highlight the rampant disregard of amity in a climate of hate and factional divide. The reader should not raise his/her lens of perception in analysing the poem as a political statement on communalism. It is there but this aspect is not reflected in the poem as the speaker is more concerned with the memory of the political divide rather than on the idea of forming identity along communal lines.

The stranger wants the speaker to sympathise with him on the pathetic plight of his people. The speaker says that he is unable to do so because he is more interested in explaining to him the cause of such a political impasse. The stranger assures the reader of his knowledge and his ability to decipher poetic meanings by updating the speaker of his familiarity of Ghalib who happened to be one of the most celebrated Indian poets in Urdu. The stranger’s observation that Ghalib has fallen into the abysmal pit of violence and that his poetry neither have the strength nor the power to draw the reader out of that abyss illustrates the intensity of the trauma that the stranger has experienced. The expression “every/couplet from the Diwan- e-Ghalib saw poetry/ dissolve into letters of blood” is an instance in point.

Quite on the contrary, the speaker finds Ghalib to be the sole survivor of such a political debacle which is highlighted in the expression “while I find Ghalib/at the crossroads of language”. The speaker however concludes the poem with an optimistic note as he sees in Ghalib and by extension his poetry as having the potential to remain in the state of perpetual flux. This idea of not falling into any standard category that would finally restrict individuality by allocating it a distinct geographical territory in terms of language resemblance is what the speaker tries to exude and it is here that one finds a vindication of the intrinsic character of art—art for art’s sake. Shahid Ali’s own diasporic position has to be taken note of because his identity is not just formulated along the register of memory; it is more often coloured by it.

Ali remains an Indian poet throughout his life; although dislocated, he continued to breathe Kashmir and feel her finer air even in the sturdy and busy American city traffic of Manhattan and Brooklyn. He never conceived himself in terms of a hyphenated existence—as a Indian- American poet, a Kashmiri-Indian or a Shiite-Muslim—rather this variegated notions of identity granted him the power to rise universally and to be counted amongst the finest among Indian lyrical poets who for the very first time introduced the genre of Ghazals into English poetry.

Introducing the poet:

Jayanta Mahapatra born in Cuttack, Orissa in 1928 was originally a Professor of Physics at Ravenshaw College. He started writing poetry when he was about forty but this late advent into the creative world further enabled him to inscribe the stoic acceptance of pain and suffering of the Oriya life as part of the cosmic agenda. He has published many volumes of poetry and that too in a rapid rate of which mention may be made of Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father’s House and A Rain of Rites (both in 1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start and Relationship (both in 1980), Life Signs (1983), Dispossessed Nests (1986), Selected Poems (1987), Burden of Waves and Fruit (1988) and The Temple (1987), A Whiteness of Bone (1992), Shadow Space (1997), Bare Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005). Apart from poetry he has also published a collection of short stories called The Green Gardener and Other Stories along with editing his Journal Chandrabhaga which ceased publication in 1985. Although much of his poetry can be claimed to bear close resemblances with the modernist poetry, yet Mahapatra himself never acknowledged any such influence of the great modernists like Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot. The early obscurity and ambiguity in his poems arise from the bold juxtaposition of abstract and concrete words and in the syntactic experiments, mostly disjunctions. Nevertheless, the reader finds a challenge in his poems for coherence which makes them more endearing. The surreal world that permeates his poetry along with the conceits and mind boggling imagery are representative of the qualitative merits of his poetic craft. He has earned the honour to be the first Indian English poet to receive the Sahitya Academy Award for Relationship (1981), an epic poem in twelve sections that meditates on Orissa’s mythology and monuments.

The Captive Air on Chandipur-on-sea

Day after day the drunk sea at Chandipur

spits out the gauze wings of shells along the beach

and rumples the thin air behind the sands.

Who can tell of the songs of this sea that go on

to baffle and double the space around our lives?

Or of smells paralysed through the centuries,

of deltas hard and white that stretched once

to lure the feet of women bidding their men goodbye?

Or of salt and light that dark and provocative eyes

demanded, their shoulders drooping like lotuses

in the noonday sun?

And what is it now that scatters the tide

in the shadow of this proud watercourse?

The ridicule of the dead?

Sussurant sails still whisper

legends on the horizon: who are you,

occupant of the silent sigh of the conch?

The ground seems only a memory now, a torn breath,

and as we wait for the tide to flood the mudflats

the song that reaches our ears is just our own.

The cries of fishermen come drifting through the spray,

music of what the world has lost.

(Jayanta Mahapatra)

Critical Appreciation:

Jayanta Mahapata’s The Captive Air of Chandipur-on-sea is a poem that enumerates the ongoing struggle between Man and Nature. In a nostalgic vein, the poem re-lives the conflict, the labour and efforts of man’s predecessor in establishing his supremacy over Nature. The poem is an attempt on the part of Mahapatra to project the magnitude and immensity of Nature in contrast to that of human lives. The memory of the past is powerful; but equally powerful is the realisation that Man is bound to an infinitesimal time and has little power to change the course of life.

The poem deliberately projects the dilemma of humans in countering the vicissitudes of a life spread in spatial exactitude. The poem begins with the speaker’s acknowledging the might and élan of the drunken sea which has perpetually baffled human minds. The inability of the human in gauzing the proportion of Nature is revealed in the speaker’s realisation of the unexplained mysteries of Nature and the near to impossible chance of the humans in unearthing them. That the humans are limited to unravel the burgeoning mysteries of nature is bolstered in their collective failure to address the questions about the songs of the sea, the reason of the hardness of the deltas and its whiteness that spread like a sheet. The speaker comes to a narrow estimation of man’s ability when he dubiously ponders on the trajectory maintained by Nature. The expression “ridicule of the dead” is an instance in point.

The idea of personifying the sea in terms of a drunkard and the act of spitting out conch shells not only beautifies the panoramic essence of the poem but also highlights the seascape at Chandipur of which Mahapatra himself is privy of. Again, the idea of women with drooping shoulders bidding adieu to their husbands is a clear cut statement of the nature of occupation that has been the chief identity marker of the Orriya people. Mahapatra’s poetry breathes the finer air of Orissa as it is a part of his “spiritus mundi” (borrowing from W.B.Yeats). It is engraved in his consciousness from which it is impossible to extricate.

The speaker of the poem makes it a point to examine the legends that have sprung silently regarding the struggles of man on high seas. The distant memory of the past struggle serves to be a cultural conglomeration of the people inhabiting the coastal areas of Orissa as it narrates a history in which all people have had played active roles. The memory here is not an individual memory; it is a cultural memory with all its variations. The speaker lends a personifying trait to such mystifying legends which has not only troubled his mind but also that of the entire community. In the expression “who are you, /occupant of the silent sigh of the conch?” the conch becomes a powerful symbol as it conveys the idea of a conglomeration.

The poem concludes with the speaker’s anticipation of a flood in which the songs sung by those struggling in the high seas in the past would naturally be re-enacted and thus provide the present people with a scope of understanding their predecessor’s tale of conflict. Unfortunately for the speaker, the memory has to be negotiated as the prospect of re-enacting it is impossible which is highlighted in the fishermen’s worrying about their own fortune. The present condition is too harsh for the fishermen and being so obsessed with it gives them little scope to prune into the registers of memory in order to relive the experience of their predecessors. The song sung on the high seas is again heard and felt but it has lost the tragic touch. The mutual cries of the fishermen trapped in the inundating areas of Chandipur drifts down like logs in a flood with a music of their own. The past music is forever lost in the dim spaces of memory. Thus, the poem is a brilliant exposition of Mahapatra’s churning of context-relevant imagery and symbolism and firmly vindicates his position as a poet who has rejuvenated Indian English poetry from the dismissive understatement of being a mimetic derivation of the European standard.

Ash

The substance that stirs in my palm

could well be a dead man; no need

to show surprise at the dizzy acts of wind.

My old father sitting uncertainly three feet away

is the slow cloud against the sky:

so my heart’s beating makes of me a survivor

over here where the sun quietly sets.

The ways of freeing myself:

the glittering flowers, the immensity of rain for example,

which were limited to promises once

have had the lie to themselves. And the wind,

that had made simple revelation in the leaves,

plays upon the ascetic-faced vision of waters;

and without thinking

something makes me keep close to the walls

as though I was afraid of that justice in the shadows.

Now the world passes into my eye:

the birds flutter toward rest around the tree,

the clock jerks each memory towards

the present to become a past, floating away

like ash, over the bank.

My own stirrings like the wind’s

keep hoping for the solace that would be me

in my father’s eyes

to pour the good years back on my;

the dead man who licks my palms

is more likely to encourage my dark intolerance

rather than turn me

toward some strangely solemn charade:

the dumb order of the myth lined up in the life-field,

the unconcerned wind perhaps truer than the rest,

rustling the empty, bodiless grains.

(Jayanta Mahapatra)

Critical Appreciation:

This poem is a powerful evocation of the memory of death explicated by the choice of a distinctive image—“ash”. The poem can be seen as a vindication of the eternal truth of human life and Mahapatra brilliantly illustrates this view by employing the contrast of the bliss that life guarantees and the incomprehensible fear of death. On the normative level, the poem is set in the manner of a funeral service that is reflected in the image of the ash after the cremation of the dead. The horror unleashed in the act is toned down by the use of striking images of nature that not only highlights the difference between life and death but also serves to justify its inevitability. Mahapatra weaves into the fabric of the poem a memory of excruciating pain—the death of the father—and fuses it with his artistic brilliance to render substance to the inevitability associated with death. The poem is elegiac in tone but is also a colourful portrayal of human emotions in graphic reality.

The poem begins with the speaker’s holding the ashes of his father which he thinks is all that is left of him. The dizzy wind that blows assures the speaker that the soul of the departed has already undergone transmigration which is a typical Indian belief in the afterlife and rebirth. But even in the midst of such abstract metaphysical and transcendental thoughts, the speaker is assure of his liveliness due to the palpitation of his heart which further accounts for his dejection. That he and his father is distanced and are worlds apart is proved by the sullen costumes of mortality that has finally got hold of his father. The glittering flowers, the immensity of rain and the wind sadly assures his presence in this mortal time-bound world.

In the midst of such serious thoughts, the speaker realised the spell of life that is ubiquitous and is found in the swaying of the leaves with the slightest touch of the wind. Everything appeared as magical—as if nature herself is conspiring to lure the speaker and ensnare him in this world of mortality. The ripples on the water caused by the wind as indicated by the expression “ascetic-faced vision of waters” is an illumination to the speaker that life is transitory just like the ripples that will cease to exist in due course. The images are so powerfully crafted and exert such an influence on the speaker that he is soon gripped in the fear of the “justice in the shadows” which is death lurking near, ready to appear at the opportune moment.

The speaker states that memory is a fragile thing that naturally fades and that everything in the present becomes eternally trapped in the past. That memory floats like ash is the speaker’s awareness of its evanescent nature. The metaphorical idea of “the dead man who licks my palms” is a grim reminder of the death of the father whose ashes the speaker has yet to drain off in the water. However, this act which might serve to justify the rights of a son in offering eternal liberation to his father from all earthly bondage is more of a heart-rending task on the part of the speaker as it increases the fear and trembling that death ensures in every mortal.

The speaker concludes with the Indian mythical dimension of an afterlife which has long defined the contours of culture. The indifference and impartial nature of the wind that flickers the ash is the speaker’s coming to terms with such a memory that flattens all notions of life eternal. The last line of the poem is significant as it serves to highlight the contrast in the form of the speaker’s highly emotive act of attending the funerary rites of his father who is now in the form of ash as against the unconditional nature of the wind that keeps blowing the “empty, bodiless grains”. The wind is unbiased and so is indifferent to the ash. On the contrary, the speaker accords due honour and respect on the ash because it is all that is left of his father. The speaker states that it is the wind and not him who truly pays the last respect that his father deserves as it is indifferent and oblivious to any string of relation with the dead. The poem is thus couched in a transcendentalist perspective.

Introducing the poet:

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was born at Entally-Padmapukur in Calcutta on April 10, 1809. He attended David Drummond’s Dhurramtallah Academy where he proved himself to be a bright pupil and read extensively of the French Revolution and Robert Burns. This early initiation into the academy gave him the freedom and instilled in him the passion for learning and rational thinking. At the age of 14, he left school and shifted to Bhagalpur which provided him with the inspirational base to compose poems. The panoramic plenitude of Bhagalpur worked wonder in the young mind of Derozio and he soon found himself publishing his poems in Dr. Grant’s India Gazette. He attracted attention of the critical circle with his review of a book by the distinguished German scholar and philosopher Immanuel Kant. In 1828, Derozio was appointed as an English faculty in the Hindu College which proved to be the turning point of his academic career. His brilliant lectures and enthralling presence fascinated the students and filled them with a gusto so passionate that most of his colleagues began to doubt his zealous engagement. The sensation was so great that it created a batch called Derozians. He always considered his students as young budding rose petals and took delight in observing the gradual opening of their mind. And it was his legendary free and unorthodox thinking that finally landed him with the gravity of facing an expulsion. Yet, he continued to exhibit his free thinking more forcibly and vigorously till he contracted the fatal disease of cholera which nipped him in the bud at the age of 22. He died on December 22, 1831 leaving behind a legacy worthy to emulate and inspire generations of young spirited Indians. Although much of his poetry were conceived in the romantic vein, one can however find traces of originality in his poems which marked the true worth of a budding poet. His only great achievement is the long lyric poem The Fakeer of Jungheera (1828) which involves the melancholic narrative of a mendicant in saving the life of his lover from burning on the pyres of her husband. The poem becomes more significant due to the subtext of the social practice of the Suttee which was later abolished by the initiative of Raja Rammohan Roy and Lord William Bentinck in 1928. His other works include The Song of the Hindustanee Minstrel, and Poems (1923).

To My Native Land

My country! In thy days of glory past

A beauteous halo circled round thy brow

and worshipped as a deity thou wast—

Where is thy glory, where the reverence now?

Thy eagle pinion is chained down at last,

And grovelling in the lowly dust art thou,

Thy minstrel hath no wreath to weave for thee

Save the sad story of thy misery!

Well—let me dive into the depths of time

And bring from out the ages, that have rolled

A few small fragments of these wrecks sublime

Which human eye may never more behold

And let the guerdon of my labour be,

My fallen country! One kind wish for thee!

(Henry Louis Vivian Derozio)

Critical Appreciation:

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio’s fiery patriotic spirit coupled with his unflappable rhetorical ability gets indelibly stamped in the texture of this poem which is conceived in the form of an impassioned plea to the fabricated romantic notion of Mother India to free herself form the stultifying shackles of foreign domination. The reader can easily see the influence of English romantic poetry and make the necessary connections with respective poets such as Shelley and Byron of whom Derozio was a staunch advocate. Derozio’s prime concern in the poem is to contrast the qualitative standard of India as a country that has attained the stature of a deity in the past with the present colonial condition that has mercilessly brought her down to the general plane. The note of patriotic outburst comes full circle in Derozio’s yearning for the lost glamour of Mother India.

The poem unfolds with the speaker’s lament explicated in his visualisation of India as a country configured in terms of a deity. The halo circling around India is a personifying criterion that speaks of the unchallenged obeisance the Indian have had for India. The speaker now questions the viability of such a glory because the present is quite dismal. The reverence shown by the Indians is now a thing of remote past as India is reduced to a mere reptile grovelling in the dust. The reptile image is significant as it offers a contrast to the previous concept of deity. The colonial history of India begins with the advent of the British East India Company in 1699 which obtained trading license from the then Mughul emperor Jahangir. With the passage of time, the British Queen eventually took over the administration of the company and assigned portfolios by changing the trading agreement into a political expansion project. The Imperial project of colonialism has a history that is replete with violence.

It is this history that is offered as a subtext in the poem. The reader must familiarise him/herself with the political history of India that has accounted for the drastic change in the conceptualisation of India as a deity. Implicit in the speaker’s interrogative tone is a deep seated disgust which portrays the mentality of Indians afflicted with the rigorous prescriptions of a colonial rule. The expression “save the sad story of thy misery” pinpoints the gravity of the colonial condition which demoralises not just the general masses but also the minstrels (or the poets/bards) to utter anything substantial. The speaker therefore implores this deity to grant him the permission to delve deep into the depths of time in order to bring forth certain glorious episodes from the remote past that would assure her once again of her glory and prime. The speaker wants to undertake the onus as the present generation might never have the chance of seeing the glorious days of India as a country free of all foreign control and dominion, thriving with the honest efforts and labours of her own people. The expression “My fallen country” is offered as a refrain in the poem in order to mark the speaker’s coming to terms with the present reality of demystification as against his romantic fabrication of the country in terms of a political deity in the beginning of the poem. The adjective “fallen” also suggests the regret of the speaker on witnessing the crumbling of the original glory of the country.

Conclusively, the poem is a powerful statement on the colonial plight that has thwarted all possible valorisation of India as a country having a glamorous and infallible history. Thus, Derozio’s patriot zeal and anti-imperialist concern gets duly reflected in the poem.

A.K.Ramanujan: Life and Works

• Attipak Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born into an orthodox Hindu Brahmin family in 1929 in Mysore.
• Went to the United States in 1962 with a Fulbright Scholarship in the prestigious Indiana University. He then obtained a Ph.D in Linguistics in 1963.
• Ramanujan’s literary tastes had their origins in the multi-lingual culture of his family which familiarised him with the literary traditions of the South such as Kannada and Tamil besides Sanskrit and English.
• Ramanujan’s poetry is basically philosophical in outlook as one finds a fusion of the contemporary scientific outlook with the peculiarly profound Hindu awareness of the spiritual and the metaphysical in human nature.
• The precise and tight structure of his poems gives the idea of a quiet tone that is further beautified by the use of minimal imagery.
• His published works include The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), Selected Poems (1976) and Second Sight (1986). Apart from poetry, he has also co-edited The Oxford Book of Modern English Poetry with the additional credit of being a fine Tamil translator which is to be found in Fifteen Tamil Poems (1965), The Interior Landscape (1967), Speaking of Siva (1972), Samskara (1976), Poems of Love and War (1984) and a famous novel by U.R.Anantha Murthy.
• He received the prestigious Padma Shri award in 1976. He settled in Chicago where he continued teaching till his death in July 1993.

Themes and Issues explored in the Poem: Breaded Fish

• Ramanujan recaptures and gives expression to the way he recoiled at the sight of a breaded fish served to him by a lady who had prepared the dish especially for the poet.
• The treatment of Nature in his poems has a revolting nature and is never serene and pure like that of Sarojini Naidu.
• There is a difference in the way it was prepared for consumption
• The sight of the dish was as horrible and gruesome as the sight of a dark half-naked woman lying dead on the beach which he had witnessed on a previous occasion.
• The flash of the memory was as quick as the rapidity with which cobras set their hoods into action.
• It establishes the contrast between the East and the West not only in their food habits but also in whatever constitutes social milieu and culture.
• The emotion is not tranquil because neither the sight of the dead woman’s body nor the look of the breaded fish generates feelings of rehabilitation.

Agha Shahid Ali: Life and Works

• Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir in February 4, 1949. He was educated in the University of Kashmir and University of Delhi.
• Shahid Ali was a poet known for the pure lyricism that beautified his poetry. Being greatly influenced by Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Begum Akhtar and Firdausi, one finds a true blend of Urdu and Persian poetry in his work.
• In a sense, Shahid Ali’s poetry breathes the finer air of the quintessential artistic expression that goes on to the making of an aesthetic experience of reading world literature.
• His published works include Bone Sculptor (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other poems (1979), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Walk Through the Yellow pages (1987), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003) and The Veiled Suit: Collected Poems (2009).
• He passed away leaving a void in the artistic world on December 8, 2001 after being diagnosed as suffering from brain tumour.

Themes and Issues explored in the Poem: Learning Urdu

• Preoccupation with the theme of “dislocation” and “identity’ is best reflected in this poem.
• The poet tries to assert the prime significance of a language as not just a means of reciprocity between people or groups of people in the communication of ideas or correspondence but also to formulate the historicity of a socio-political climate that has resulted in the fragmentation of identity along the prescribed rules of borderline conflict.
• An attempt at documenting the pitfalls of the great Indian tragedy of Partition in 1947 that has resulted in the creation of two distinct countries—India and Pakistan.
• The poem begins much in the manner of Shelley’s Ozymandias with the speaker’s meeting a “victim of a continent broken” who comes from a district near Jammu.
• Kashmir which has been the bone of contention since the Partition between both India and Pakistan has tries to assert her independence from both these begetting nations at the cost of blood.
• The reader should not raise his/her lens of perception in analysing the poem as a political statement on communalism.
• The stranger assures the reader of his knowledge and his ability to decipher poetic meanings by updating the speaker of his familiarity of Ghalib who happened to be one of the most celebrated Indian poets in Urdu.
• The speaker finds Ghalib to be the sole survivor of such a political debacle which is highlighted in the expression “while I find Ghalib/at the crossroads of language”.
• He never conceived himself in terms of a hyphenated existence—as a Indian-American poet, a Kashmiri-Indian or a Shiite-Muslim—rather this variegated notions of identity granted him the power to rise universally and to be counted amongst the finest among Indian lyrical poets who for the very first time introduced the genre of Ghazals into English poetry.

Jayanta Mahapatra: Life and Works

• Jayanta Mahapatra born in Cuttack, Orissa in 1928 was originally a Professor of Physics at Ravenshaw College. He started writing poetry when he was about forty.
• He has published many volumes of poetry and that too in a rapid rate of which mention may be made of Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father’s House and A Rain of Rites (both in 1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start and Relationship (both in 1980), Life Signs (1983), Dispossessed Nests (1986), Selected Poems (1987), Burden of Waves and Fruit (1988) and The Temple (1987), A Whiteness of Bone (1992), Shadow Space (1997), Bare Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005).
• Published a collection of short stories called The Green Gardener and Other Stories along with editing his Journal Chandrabhaga which ceased publication in 1985.
• The surreal world that permeates his poetry along with the conceits and mind boggling imagery are representative of the qualitative merits of his poetic craft.
• He has earned the honour to be the first Indian English poet to receive the Sahitya Academy Award for Relationship (1981), an epic poem in twelve sections that meditates on Orissa’s mythology and monuments.

Themes and Issues explored in the Poems: The Captive Air on Chandipur-on-sea

• In a nostalgic vein, the poem re-lives the conflict, the labour and efforts of man’s predecessor in establishing his supremacy over Nature.
• The poem is an attempt on the part of Mahapatra to project the magnitude and immensity of Nature in contrast to that of human lives.
• The poem deliberately projects the dilemma of humans in countering the vicissitudes of a life spread in spatial exactitude.
• The poem begins with the speaker’s acknowledging the might and élan of the drunken sea which has perpetually baffled human minds.
• That the humans are limited to unravel the burgeoning mysteries of nature is bolstered in their collective failure to address the questions about the songs of the sea, the reason of the hardness of the deltas and its whiteness that spread like a sheet.
• The distant memory of the past struggle serves to be a cultural conglomeration of the people inhabiting the coastal areas of Orissa as it narrates a history in which all people have had played active roles.
• The speaker lends a personifying trait to such mystifying legends which has not only troubled his mind but also that of the entire community
• The poem concludes with the speaker’s anticipation of a flood in which the songs sung by those struggling in the high seas in the past would naturally be re-enacted and thus provide the present people with a scope of understanding their predecessor’s tale of conflict.
• The mutual cries of the fishermen trapped in the inundating areas of Chandipur drifts down like logs in a flood with a music of their own. The past music is forever lost in the dim spaces of memory.
• The poem is a brilliant exposition of Mahapatra’s churning of context-relevant imagery and symbolism and firmly vindicates his position as a poet who has rejuvenated Indian English poetry from the dismissive understatement of being a mimetic derivation of the European standard.

Ash

• This poem is a powerful evocation of the memory of death explicated by the choice of a distinctive image—“ash”.
• The poem can be seen as a vindication of the eternal truth of human life and Mahapatra brilliantly illustrates this view by employing the contrast of the bliss that life guarantees and the incomprehensible fear of death.
• On the normative level, the poem is set in the manner of a funeral service that is reflected in the image of the ash after the cremation of the dead.
• The horror unleashed in the act is toned down by the use of striking images of nature that not only highlights the difference between life and death but also serves to justify its inevitability.
• The poem begins with the speaker’s holding the ashes of his father which he thinks is all that is left of him.
• That he and his father is distanced and are worlds apart is proved by the sullen costumes of mortality that has finally got hold of his father. The glittering flowers, the immensity of rain and the wind sadly assures his presence in this mortal time-bound world.
• The ripples on the water caused by the wind as indicated by the expression “ascetic-faced vision of waters” is an illumination to the speaker that life is transitory just like the ripples that will cease to exist in due course.
• The speaker concludes with the Indian mythical dimension of an afterlife which has long defined the contours of culture.
• The last line of the poem is significant as it serves to highlight the contrast in the form of the speaker’s highly emotive act of attending the funerary rites of his father who is now in the form of ash as against the unconditional nature of the wind that keeps blowing the “empty, bodiless grains”.

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio: Life and Works

• Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was born at Entally-Padmapukur in Calcutta on April 10, 1809.
• He proved himself to be a bright pupil and read extensively of the French Revolution and Robert Burns.
• At the age of 14, he left school and shifted to Bhagalpur which provided him with the inspirational base to compose poems. The panoramic plenitude of Bhagalpur worked wonder in the young mind of Derozio and he soon found himself publishing his poems in Dr. Grant’s India Gazette.
• In 1828, Derozio was appointed as an English faculty in the Hindu College which proved to be the turning point of his academic career.
• It was his legendary free and unorthodox thinking that finally landed him with the gravity of facing an expulsion. Yet, he continued to exhibit his free thinking more forcibly and vigorously till he contracted the fatal disease of cholera which nipped him in the bud at the age of 22.
• He died on December 22, 1831 leaving behind a legacy worthy to emulate and inspire generations of young spirited Indians.
• His only great achievement is the long lyric poem The Fakeer of Jungheera (1828) which involves the melancholic narrative of a mendicant in saving the life of his lover from burning on the pyres of her husband.
• His other works include The Song of the Hindustanee Minstrel, and Poems (1923).

Themes and Issues explored in the Poem: To My Native Land

• The poem is conceived in the form of an impassioned plea to the fabricated romantic notion of Mother India to free herself form the stultifying shackles of foreign domination.
• The note of patriotic outburst comes full circle in Derozio’s yearning for the lost glamour of Mother India.
• The speaker questions the viability of such a glory because the present is quite dismal.
• It is the colonial history of India that offers a subtext to the poem.
• The expression “save the sad story of thy misery” pinpoints the gravity of the colonial condition which demoralises not just the general masses but also the minstrels (or the poets/bards) to utter anything substantial.
• The poem is a powerful statement on the colonial plight that has thwarted all possible valorisation of India as a country having a glamorous and infallible history.

Poetic Devices/Structure/Stylistic Features:

• In this poem, nature is first represented by the fish meant for consumption and later by an extended metaphor of the cobra and its devilish nature bent on action.
• Just as the fish is sprinkled with bread crumbs, likewise the body of the dead woman too was disjointedly covered by a yard of cloth and sand.
• The expression “breaded by the grained indifference of sand” refers to those tiny sand particles or granules that appear on the surface of the body and that are indifferent to the lady.
• From the technical angle, Ramanujan’s untranquil emotion is clothed in an imagery that shocks and frightens. The images in the expressions “hood of a cobra”, “coil on a heath”, “half-naked woman”, “yard of cloth”, “rolled by the ebb”, “grained indifference of sand”, “heart beating in my mouth” are interwoven to sketch a horrible and uncanny picture of the breaded fish.
• The poem Learning Urdu reveals the inability of the stranger to re-enact the lived experience of such a phantasmagorical memory.
• The speaker’s attempt at formulating a discourse of violence gains credence with the idea of men “dissolved in alphabets of blood” and the rest of the expression goes to demarcate the morphological nature of such conceptualisation.
• The poem with an optimistic note as he sees in Ghalib and by extension his poetry as having the potential to remain in the state of perpetual flux.
• The idea of personifying the sea in the poem The Captive Air on Chandipur-on-sea in terms of a drunkard and the act of spitting out conch shells not only beautifies the panoramic essence of the poem but also highlights the seascape at Chandipur of which Mahapatra himself is privy of.
• The idea of women with drooping shoulders bidding adieu to their husbands is a clear cut statement of the nature of occupation that has been the chief identity marker of the Orriya people.
• Mahapatra’s poetry breathes the finer air of Orissa as it is a part of his “spiritus mundi” (borrowing from W.B.Yeats). It is engraved in his consciousness from which it is impossible to extricate.
• The memory here is not an individual memory; it is a cultural memory with all its variations.
• In the poem entitled Ash, Mahapatra weaves into the fabric of the poem a memory of excruciating pain—the death of the father—and fuses it with his artistic brilliance to render substance to the inevitability associated with death.
• The poem is elegiac in tone but is also a colourful portrayal of human emotions in graphic reality.
• The images are so powerfully crafted and exert such an influence on the speaker that he is soon gripped in the fear of the “justice in the shadows” which is death lurking near, ready to appear at the opportune moment.
• That memory floats like ash is the speaker’s awareness of its evanescent nature.
• The metaphorical idea of “the dead man who licks my palms” is a grim reminder of the death of the father whose ashes the speaker has yet to drain off in the water.
• The poem Ash is thus couched in a transcendentalist perspective.
• The reader can easily see the influence of English romantic poetry and make the necessary connections with respective poets such as Shelley and Byron of whom Derozio was a staunch advocate.
• Implicit in the speaker’s interrogative tone is a deep seated disgust which portrays the mentality of Indians afflicted with the rigorous prescriptions of a colonial rule.
• The expression “My fallen country” is offered as a refrain in the poem in order to mark the speaker’s coming to terms with the present reality of demystification as against his romantic fabrication of the country in terms of a political deity in the beginning of the poem.
• The adjective “fallen” also suggests the regret of the speaker on witnessing the crumbling of the original glory of the country.

Reference

• Kulshrestha, Chirantan. “The Self in A.K.Ramanujan’s Poetry” in C. Kulshrestha (ed.)
• Contemporary Indian English Verse: An Evaluation. Arnold-Heinemann: New Delhi, 1980.
• King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Revised Edition. Oxford University Press: New Delhi, (1987) 2001rpt.
• Maqbool, Iffat “If There Is a Poet, It Is This, It IS This: Agha Shahid Ali—Chronicler.
• of Pain” The Criterion: An International Journal in English. Vol. III, No. I, March 2012.
• Naik, M.K. The History of Indian English Literature, Sahitya Academy: New Delhi, (1982), 2004 rpt
• Prasad, Madhusudan. (ed.) The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study. Sterling: New Delhi, 1986.
• Zaidi, Nishat “Center/Margin Dialectics and the Poetic Form: The Ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali” The Annual of Urdu Studies. University of Rajasthan, 2008.
• www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17449858108588673.
• www.irssh.com/yahoo_site_admin/…/22_IRSSH-349-V3N1.131231535.pdf.