Introduction
By ART John
I have just been asked to write an introduction to a collection of poems the writing of which has been very much a part of me. This is not to state that I am specially qualified to speak about them. This is merely to affirm that good poetry, like the Songs from Delhi , will survive despite the indifference of its day. The collection comprises two sections: Songs of Love and Songs of the City , which are not merely lyrics of love specific to the historical city of Delhi; taken as a whole, they embody a vision that embraces the topical and the particular even as it aspires to evoke what I call essences or 'ideas' that are not the substance of one life but of many generations. Specially, these are the essences/ideas of love, sadness, beauty, decay, death and bereavement.
However, the poems articulate these abstract universals only in terms of the contingent - the here and the now. The Delhi the songs celebrate or give over is undoubtedly the city girded by the Yamuna and comprehended within such abiding physical properties as Kilokhera, Nigambodha, the subway, the confessional, the Old Fort, the apartments. It is thus helpful, though not necessary, if the reader is already acquainted with a few or all of the attributes of Delhi . However, more than possessing historical or geographical information about the city, to approach these poems it is imperative that one be critically sensitive to the sensibility that undergirds them.
The sensibility that informs these songs is rooted in a long tradition of orality which, unlike literacy, may be defined as a culture where the spoken word is privileged over the written word. Unlike a poem in print, an oral work like this collection comes into being precisely when it is performed. Characteristically, these songs were first introduced to members of the Bard (a literary community based in Delhi ) when the poet himself read them aloud. The present writer, for one, has heard these poems many times more than he has read them.
That these poems have been called Songs calls attention to their distinctive oral pedigree: their kinship with traditional oral forms such as the epic, ballad, the dirge, drama, and bhakti songs. In calling these poems songs, the poet is articulating a paradox - that of an oxymoronic song-poem, which hovers between the orality of the song proper and the literacy of the poem proper. However, the paradox illuminates a time-enshrined truth - poetry, if it wishes to survive must be vigorous enough to engage the reader in a way in which the bards of yore enthralled their diverse audiences.
The paradoxical song-poem illustrates another paradox that of Indian writing in English. Significantly, these song-poems are markedly distinct from typical Indian English poems which are either professedly 'native' where stylistic properties are neglected at the cost of 'pure subject-matter' or so puristically English as to be preoccupied with matters of form at the expense of theme. The song-poem that opens the collection illustrates this:
Collected in slow measured draught
From each petal every weighed wind
To nourish the perfect song
Which waits
Imperious
In the very heart of the hive
Queen like.
The motif of the bee while calling attention to western writers such as Virgil, Bacon, and Swift remind one of the role of the messenger that the bee plays in classical Sanskrit poetry and Hindi poetry alike.
From the classical Western literary perspective, the bee combines
The industry of the ant and the self sufficiency of the spider as the poet for his poetic explorations, equally importantly, solicits it. Indeed the bee as used here offers us a preview of the nature of the collection, suggesting that the songs owe their 'nectar' to 'unkempt gardens' and 'intractable plains' alike. Obtained by gradual labour ('slow measured draughts'), these drippings are the ailments for the perfect song which awaits release. The expression or 'release' of the spirit of the perfect song is the subject of the next song-poem:
There has been
Much talking between us
Stripped of topical trappings, After Words intimates the essences that lie before and beyond words. The inability to find the right language for love engenders the necessity to refrain from circumlocutory speech. Silence is enjoined as it serves as a most appropriate medium for the reception of the five basic elements:
Today I bring
Only Earth
Sky
Air
Water.
Words are undeniably markers of meaningful sound upon the blank page, so any attempt to verbalise silence may appear foredoomed to sophistry.
However, where the song-poems incorporate words, suggestive of silence and its attributes to the words, the words are sometimes to be construed as admissions of the sheer impossibility of employing an apt language to express certain shades of thought or sentiment:
I have been too
Too long nameless
And wordless
Almost bodyless. ( Words before Autumn )
Love see, and desire these
In me. ( After Words )
Sometimes words denotative of silence register absence as a felt quality
Be by my side silent
A moment alone and quiet
........................
When the heart is still like the lotus
And the ears abuzz like the bees. ( Lines on Feb 3, 1997 )
In addition, sometimes they are suggestive of the calm that follows turbulent excess:
After thunder
There comes now to land and sky a quiet
Resignation. ( Siddhartha )
Where language sometimes founders as an organ of clear expression, other modes such as perception and contemplation emerge. After
Words , Siddhartha and The Night of Krishna highlight respectively, immediate sight, prophetic sight and contemplation as viable modes of insight into essences that language cannot encompass but sight can:
Far away is his gaze
Siddhartha the prince sees with lids lowered half
Some man lotus-eyed ( Siddhartha )
Around my Krishna
Dark hued, blue breasted, purple plumed
Who with a knowing smile upon his lips
Looks down at what is beautiful
And what is not
And contemplates ( The Night of Krishna )
Speech shades into sight; sight fades into silhouettes. The progress of these song poems uncovers one of the themes that lend unity to the collection. The theme may be characterised as the ephemerality of oral art at a time when audiences are loath to lend their ears. These songs, as I have indicated before, come into being only when read aloud and heard. It is only at the bequest of recitation that the survival of a song poem is assured. And given the widespread indifference to oral art, these song poems are painfully aware of the shortness of their life-span, but far from despairing, they, like the heroes of epics, wish to die in their own fashion or rather (as in John Again ) embrace the destiny that the poet decrees for them:
Remember to come when I am dead
And though the ashes some kith or kin
Should have washed in the milk waters of Ganges ,
Forget not my songs and my tales
Which gathered in some old bag (you could do without)
Take to the dark banks of Yamuna
And, weighed by a heavy stone
From the walls of old fort,
Let sink where the waters are deepest. ( To John Again )
In sentencing the entire collection to death by drowning, To John Again admits not only the unreliability of memory and the inevitable helplessness of oral art but also the predicament peculiar to the song poems contained in the collection. The predicament may be defined as the sheer inability of a poet like Arvind Joshi to communicate to a people who are not only divorced from their oral heritage but also clearly hostile to the presence of oral art. It is this veritable hostility or indifference to oral poetry that creates the possibility of misinterpretation if an oral work is cast into writing. Hence, To John Again repudiates the lapidary permanence of the written hinting at its (and the collection's) liability to mis-writing and mis-reading. Such a poetic renunciation of the immortality attendant upon the printed word may appear a contradiction (for the collection including To John Again is now in print) and should therefore be read as a mere reinforcement of the orality of the song poem - a reminder that the reader must read them as if s/he were listening to them and attention must thus be paid to onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, repetition and pauses. Repetition, to examine one feature, is, as in The 7 O Clock Woman , employed to recover and renew past experience. The first half of the poem narrates in the present the experience of encountering and going to bed with a woman:
That side, crumpled folds
Clothes in tousle, the curve,
The small of her back,
The open halves of the oyster shell
And therein the teeth white pearl
To prize.
The second half (in the future tense) looks back on the experience:
Someday over cups of tea
Acting the parfict gentleman with a lady
Of pearl-white teeth...
.......................
Between the fragrance of cologne and talc
I'd recollect the smell of her underarms.
The 'oystershell' and 'white pearl' of the 7 O clock woman mutate into the 'pearl white teeth' of a lady of society (notice the repetition of 'white' and 'pearl' albeit in opposite order); the smell of the underarms (first stanza) is now sensed in the fragrance of the talc and cologne, demonstrating that a past experience is regained in the immediacy of a later time and place. Importantly, both experiences are related in a more fundamental way - in being evocations of the essences of love and loss. Just as the evocation of love is bodied forth through a woman of the city, so in Delhi III the mythical and historical Yamuna bears witness to the persona's sense of bereavement:
My love is in Delhi among the domes
And she's cold and she mourns for you.
Contemporary images of Delhi jostle with their historical and mythical counterparts. The Old Fort , The Subway , Delhi IV make obvious use of geographical features whereas in Mirriam (as only members of the
Bard would know) the confession box is the rear-part of a blue line bus. Not that such information as this would enhance one's understanding of the song poems. However, certain literary references and the creative way in which the poet engages with them would no doubt enrich one's enjoyment and understanding. Names such as ‘ Krishna ', ‘Miss Havisham' and ‘Mirriam' are unequivocal signposts to mythical and literary traditions. Krishna (along with Yamuna) is in the poem a perennial symbol of Delhi 's youthful vigour and permanence. Miss Havisham and Mirriam evoke respectively specific sections of Great Expectations and Sons and Lovers in order to not only orient the poem's meaning in specific ways but also to re-view those sections in the light of the poems. Hence, the juxtaposition of the original literary contexts (which the names bear) with the Delhi of the poems, renews our understanding of Miss Havisham and Mirriam even as they inform our understanding of the two song poems.
Perhaps I have spoken too much and too tediously about these song poems and it is time that you read for yourself. It is the best way to know the poet and the best way to learn his city. And may I venture, Arvind Joshi continue to be read and seen as bearer of a tradition that is less personal than historical or less historical than archetypal - that has more to do with a tribe or a race than with any of its individual representatives. Indeed, I am adverting to those ‘essences' I began with- those intangible properties that any sensitive reader of this collection will glimpse at, even if darkly as from a silhouette. To have caught a glimpse of those essences in these writings is to have fulfilled the end of poet and his poetry. |
