Junior Research Fellow (State), Department of
English, University of North Bengal
Abstract:
Topography or landscape has been a major aspect of English poetry since 17th
century. The genre called topographical poetry was established in 1642 with
Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill”. Since then the whole corpus of English poetry has
been overflowing with brilliant examples of landscape poetry right from Pope’s
“Windsor Castle” to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”. Indian Writing in English too
abounds in several examples of topographical poetry – from Jayanta Mahapatra’s
Orissa, to the pristine hills and rivers of Mamang Dai’s Arunachal Pradesh,
diverse landscape of India has been featured in its poetry. However, readers
will be thoroughly mistaken in believing landscape poetry to be merely picturesque
portrayals of geographical reality. This paper attempts to study the works of two
poets from two geographical extremes – Arun Kolatkar from western and Jaydeep
Sarangi from eastern India – tracing their different attitudes and observation
of the topography they set their poems in. The analysis is directed towards how
topography or landscape is just the pretext for these poets to articulate
different ideas and emotions – while Kolatkar takes up the postcolonial project
of subcultural resistance in his Jejuri
poems, Sarangi in his Jhargram poems reverts to nostalgia and connectedness to
one’s roots.
Keywords: topography,
culture, subculture, postcolonial, nostalgia, scepticism
The lover’s quarrel between poetry and philosophy is
as ancient as the history of philosophy, or the history of poetry or of both. Plato
in The Republic banished poets from
his ideal commonwealth since according to him poetry was twice removed from
reality. If poetry is an illusion, the poet, the illusionist is the greatest
impostor whose influence is pernicious to the health of the ideal society.
According to Plato philosophy and not poetry can be regarded as the ideal
source of wisdom. Plato’s arguments against poetry have been subjected to
centuries of critical enquiry and debates by poets and philosophers alike.
Aristotle in his Poetics formulated a
proper theory of poetry, the tragic art, and reworked the mimetic theory.
Horace in his Ars Poetica defines
poetry as an art form that imparts wisdom through delight, which is the best
form of pedagogy. During the English Renaissance Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) drawing
heavily on the classical thinkers like Horace and Aristotle takes the defence
of poetry a step further and becomes the pioneer text of literary theory.
Though initially written as a response to Stephen Gosson’s attack on the
English stage in The School of Abuse,
Sidney eventually takes up some serious allegations against poetry, makes his
defence by showing how poetry combining the liveliness of history and the
wisdom of philosophy stands out as a better medium of imparting knowledge than
both. Sidney emphasizes poetry’s power to move people to virtuous action and
takes the bull of Plato’s allegation of poets being liars by the horns by
saying that poetry never makes false claims but only hypothetical or
pseudo-statements.
The first generation of Indian poets in
English tried to resolve this binary in their writings. Poets like Rabindra
Nath Tagore, Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo found a meeting ground between Indian
philosophy, mysticism, spirituality and poetry. However as Aravind Krishna
Mehrotra in the introduction to his anthology of Indian English poetry writes,
Henry
Derozio, Toru Dutt, Aurobindo Ghose, and Sarojini Naidu were courageous and
perhaps charming men and women, but not those with whom you could today do
business. The poets of the post-independence period had therefore to make their
pacts elsewhere. Some were made in their own backyard (with Kapilar, Paranar, Basavanna, Allama
Prabhu, Kabir,Tukaram, Nirala, Faiz) , and some overseas (with Browning, Yeats,
Eliot, Pound, Auden. Williams,Stevens, Lowell, Ginsberg). (Anthology 2)
Overcoming
the linguistic challenge by developing what Mehrotra would call the continuous
language or ‘ideolect’, such as Mahapatra’s English-Oriya or Kolatkar and
Chitre’s English-Marathi or Ramanujan’s English-Kannada-Tamil, or Adil
Jussawalla’s polyglot linguistic imagination (Anthology 6), the Indian English poet like an iconoclast has
shattered the romantic notion that poetic expression is possible only in one’s
mother tongue. Kamala Das’s outspoken protest against this romanticization of
one’s native language as the most suitable medium of poetic expression in her
most anthologized and frequently quoted poem “Introduction” deserves special
mention here:
Don’t
write in English, they said,
English
is not your mother-tongue. . .
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
. . Why not let me speak in
Any
language I like? The language I speak
Becomes
mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All
mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian,
funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It
is as human as I am human . . . (n.pag.)
When
Das writes her language is half English, half Indian, she is not only making a
postcolonial statement, but also emphasizing the importance of topography in
shaping the Indian English poet’s idiolect. This paper attempts to look into
how topography or landscape influences not only the Indian English poet’s
linguistic but also his/her socio-cultural and political expression.
Landscape or topographical poetry, as a
genre was established in the seventeenth century with John Denham’s “Cooper’s
Hill” (1642). Dr. Johnson in his Lives of
Poets mentions Denham as a practitioner of what he calls ‘local poetry’ of
which “the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically
described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by
historical retrospection, or incidental meditation” (qtd. in Banks 269). Dr. Johnson’s views of historical
retrospection to be an embellishment and meditation or introspection as merely
incidental in topographical poetry does not hold good in the light of Denham’s
poem and stands challenged in several other instances of landscape poetry in
English literature as nature, description in a more generalized sense, serves only
as the pretext to socio-political commentary and philosophical reflections. From
the “auspicious heights” of Cooper’s Hill, overlooking the river Thames and the
Windsor castle, and the city of London at a distance, the speaker ruminates on
distant city and reflects on the political turmoil of seventeenth century
England as his gaze turns to the Windsor castle. In the Romantic Period,
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” stands out as an example of landscape poetry as
the poet’s imagination not only brings the river Wye and the Abbey alive, but
also employs the landscape as a pretext to philosophical musings. The outside
view stands out as Nature as a whole which is for Wordsworth, and all the
Romantics for that matter, the greatest influence on their poetry. The visits
to the Abbey in the past and in the now of the poem mark not only a difference
in the poet’s attitude to nature, but also his growth as a poet. So the
landscape in Wordsworth’s poem becomes more than just the description of
external nature, rather his looking at the landscape is instrumental in shaping
his poetic theory. There are several
other instances of landscape poetry in English literature such as Pope’s
“Windsor Forest”, John Dyer’s “Grongar Hill”, Thomson’s “Seasons”, Matthew
Arnold’s “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Dover Beach” to name few.
Landscape or topography has played a
significant part in Indian English literature. Appropriating this genre from
the English practitioners the Indian English writers of both prose as well as
verse, manoeuvred it to their postcolonial purpose of articulation of their
society, culture, critiquing as well as asserting it in a language which is
modified to fit their own purposes. In fiction Indian writers have made
brilliant use of topography to articulate socio-cultural reality and the crises
of modern India. In Raja Rao’s Kanthapura
the writer’s mythopoeic imagination transforms the fictional village into a
background for discussing the Gandhian political wave of the 1930s. The locale
ceases to be only an embellishment adding local flavour and colour to his
writing, but through the narration of his ‘sthalapurana’, the legend of the
land, Rao chronicles the social and political turmoil of contemporary India. R.
K. Narayan’s Malgudi, a fictional any town of Tamil Nadu, coming to life
through Narayan’s vivid portrayal of such landmarks as Albert Mission School
and College, the river Sarayu, Jagan’s Sweet shop, the streets like Lawley
extension and Kabir Street and a gradual narrative of the town growing and
developing from his earliest work Swami
and Friends in the 1930s to The
Vendor of Sweets of the 1960s, is a microcosmic representation of
postcolonial, post-Independence India caught up in a tussle between tradition
and modernity. In poetry we have beautiful verses steeped in the lived day to
day reality of the poets’ place of origin as can be seen in the poems of master
poets like Jayanta Mahapatra and later poets like Mamang Dai. Mamang Dai’s
poems through their pristine images of mountains and rivers try to shape a new cartography
for Indian poetry. Writing Arunachal Pradesh into the topography of India through
poetry is a way of combating cultural alienation and neglect which looms large
in the works of several poets from the North East. This paper focuses on the
work of two poets from two distinct geographical and cultural locations within
India – Arun Kolatkar and Jaydeep Sarangi, thus bringing the West and East of
Indian poetry together for the purpose of analyzing how differently topography
is looked and treated by these two poets in their works.
Indian English poetry in particular, and
Indian English literature, like all other postcolonial literatures in general,
developed through the three phases – adopt, adapt and adept. In the beginnings
during 1850-1900 it went through the adopt phase of imitation of the models of
English Romanticism as can be seen in the works of Toru Dutt. In the second
phase or adapt phase came the assimilation of western influences into the lived
reality of colonial experience during 1900-1947. During this period English models were
adapted to Indian usage, as we see poets like Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath
Tagore negotiating influences of English Romanticism with Indian nationalism,
mysticism and spirituality. Poetry in the post-independence phase became
experimental, what K. Srinivasa Iyengar considers the ‘new poetry’, which was
the outcome of a sensibility shaped by the political and economic uncertainties
of the thirties. Iyengar calls these writers revaluating and re-thinking the
incumbent literary models as ‘progressives’ or ‘proletarians’ writing the
“literature of protest”: “there were poets who were disillusioned enough about
everything to make them turn away from romance to satire, from idealism to
cynicism. Even some of those that had begun as ‘traditionalists’ were soon
infected by the new movement, and started writing in a new style” (Iyengar
643). Arun Kolatkar is a product of this literary current and as Rajiv S. Patke
observes, is a true modernist of Indian English poetry “lean, dry and spare in
outlook” (Concise History 287). An
efficiently bilingual poet with a modernist outlook, Kolatkar’s Jejuri poems are not only a novel take
on the traditional model of landscape poetry as discussed above, but also
highly postcolonial as here he turns an English model into the artistic purpose
of articulating the modernist Indian sensibility and the subversion of dominant
normative culture by enacting a tour of the pilgrimage town in words.
Jejuri
is a loose narrative sequence of poetic fragments depicting a trip to the
pilgrimage shrine of Khandoba, situated in the rugged terrains in close proximity
to Pune (Concise History 287). Traditional
criticism has always seen Kolatkar’s take on the temple, its rituals and
devotees as that of an urban elitist scoffing at the innocent subaltern steeped
in its own system of beliefs and a way of life different from this Bombay bred
observer. To some, it is a kind of indigenous orientalism which perpetuates the
binary between urban and rural, mainstream and subaltern. However a closer
reading of the poems reveals what Huzaifa Pandit would call a poetics of
subcultural of resistance (Pandit 354), which in a way attempts to subvert the dominant
normative brahminical parent culture of the nation. The speaker of the poems,
the tourist is more of an observer and the central idea of this sequence of
thirty one poems is all about how one looks at what is already sanctioned and
approved as a cultural given. The tourist’s flaneur like dispassionate looking
without really getting immersed or attached into the sight or even in the act
of looking gives him a different kind of awareness of the surroundings than
that of Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey”. In the introduction to Kolatkar in his
anthology, A. K. Mehrotra thus observes, “Jejuri's
lines are acts of looking (the sun) at
the physical world (the railway track). They name and observe, isolate and
magnify, and by so doing radically transform – or in Rilke's phrase, ‘make glorious’ – everything they see” (Anthology
54).
In the first poem “The Bus”,
as the pilgrim’s progress to the temple town begins, Kolatkar performs with
words the act of looking which is to be repeated throughout the sequence, as
You look down the roaring road.
You search for signs of daybreak in
what little light ·spills out of the
bus.
Your own divided face in a pair of
glasses
on an old man's nose
is
all the countryside you get to see. (Anthology
62)
The act of looking is limited by the illumination from within,
the little light spilling out of the bus and what is seen is a reflection of
the onlooker’s own image projected on the glasses of the other – the old man
bearing caste mark. Here comes Kolatkar’s first blow on the brahminical
representation of mainstream Indian (read Hindu) masses. When he writes “You
seem to move continually forward/ towards a destination/ just beyond the caste
mark between his eyebrows”, the
tourist-speaker-onlooker makes his purpose of looking clear, it is to look
beyond normativity. About his dry commentating poetic voice, mixed with humour,
cynicism, irony and satire, R. Parthasarathy writes, “Kolatkar expresses what
he sees with the eye of a competent reporter in a language that is colloquial
and spare. The result is a poem of unexpected beauty and power” (Parthasarathy
40). Kolatkar’s tourist-onlooker sees ruins in the ruins of Jejuri, there is no
attempt in his part to see god in every shrine – he is too detached to get into
some soul searching spirituality. Unlike Wordsworth at the banks of Wye he
fails to seek a divine presence in the stones of Jejuri, even for poetic
inspiration. A part of him prefers to remain outside the temple and smoke as we
find in the poem ‘Makarand’ (Parthasarathy 51), another part ventures into the
“Heart of Ruin” (Anthology 63) where
the god Maaruti doesn’t mind the building falling apart. Neither does the
mongrel bitch with her pups care about the precariousness of the structure – as
long as she is sheltered, she doesn’t mind the roof coming down. By juxtaposing
an effigy with the mongrel family in the holy ruins, Kolatkar steals divinity
out of god and places him in the realm of the immediate, the worldly. The
temple then is reduced to but the house of god and nothing more: “no more a
place of worship this place/ is nothing more than the house of god” (Anthology 63). Another instance of such
juxtaposition can be found in “Manohar”(Anthology
66) where the distinction between temple and cowshed is lost on the visitor at
first, the cow staring at his face exorcises him of the frenzy of his god
quest. In Jejuri “scratch a rock/ and a legend springs” (Anthology 68), there is a very thin line between a god and a stone,
just as there is one between faith and scepticism. In another poem “Chaitanya”
Kolatkar makes this point with haiku like precision
sweet as grapes
are the stones of
jejuri
said chaitanya
he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods (Anthology
66)
Contemporary Indian English poetry too
abounds in numerous examples of topographical poetry. In his recent book of
collected poems titled Faithfully, I Wait
Dr. Jaydeep Sarangi, bilingual poet, translator, and editor from West Bengal
reverts to landscape poetry as is obvious from the very subtitle of the book
“Poems on rain, thunder and lightning at Jhargram and beyond”. The title sweeps
the reader of his/her feet as a topographic reality “Jhargram” is juxtaposed
with “beyond” which adds an abstract ring to it. There are several poems in
this volume which not only portray Jhargram, a district in southern part of
West Bengal known for its forests, ancient temples and royal palaces, but also
are very much a harvest of their topography.
A tourist attraction and a place often in news for torrential rains and
heavy thunderstorms, Jhargram is a perfect example of the fierce yet beautiful.
The first poem in the collection “Love and Longing at Jhargram” (Faithfully 7) encapsulates nostalgia and
a sense of rootedness to one’s originary community, its culture-scape and
history which is central to Sarangi’s poetic philosophy. The epigraph where he
quotes from U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan: “Every successful individual knows
that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together”
(Faithfully 7) expresses the poet’s
communitarian vision of life. The poet epigrammatically asserts that wherever
one goes one can never drift away from one’s origins: “My laurels are made of
forest leaves” (Faithfully 7). A
similar emotion is invoked in the poem “For My ancestors” (Faithfully 15), a poem in which the poet like Wordsworth’s
skylark. Just like the bird soars high
but always has his eyes fixed on the nest, so does the poet always come back to
his roots, no matter how far he drifts from the home in spatial distance.
Throughout the collection there are
several poems that take us back to the landscape of Jhargram through the poet’s
imagination, his memories and his longing for his roots. In the poem “Mango
Tree” (Faithfully 12) there is no
elaborate description of a landscape, but a cluster of memories as sweet as the
fruit of that tree invokes a landscape in our mind. The earliest teaching
lessons that he took and the first flashes of creativity he experienced here make
the reader assume that the mango tree is the same sapling which the poet
planted in the first poem. Two other poems which require special attention are
“Dulung” (Faithfully 22) and “Temple Kanakdurga” (Faithfully
32), the two landmarks already mentioned in “Love and Longing in Jhargram”
which bring the topography of Jhargram to life. The temple, the forest
landscape and the rivulet beside it all overwhelm the senses with nostalgia;
the poem is more about the effect the temple and its surroundings have on the
poet than about the temple itself. A recurrent metaphor in Sarangi’s poems is
the river, and “Dulung” explains why. The river symbolizes a corridor between
past and present; it also symbolizes the passage of time. River imagery serves
the important purpose of forging connections. In the poem “Sailing through
Ichamati” in the collection The Wall and
Other Poems, the river Ichamati that separates India from Bangladesh has a
cartographic significance of demarcating the topography of two separated
nations, at the same time the river acts as a corridor to the past when there
were o borders:
Ichamati
is the corridor
Into
things we can design.
We
are twins.
Our
veins have one blood
Even
when we are separate souls on map. (Wall
13)
By
forging such connections the river here challenges cartographic realities and
re-arranges topography.
Topography or locale serves two different
purposes in the poetry of these two poets. While for Kolatkar the temple town
of Jejuri serves as a medium of articulating his scepticism and putting forth
his subcultural resistance to the hegemonic mainstream brahminical culture of
religiosity and holiness, for Sarangi, the landscape of Jhargram is an attempt
to re-connect to his origins. Kolatkar looks at Jejuri rather dispassionately,
his gaze constantly shifting. Sarangi on the other hand locates his self –
personal and poetic – in Jhargram. His looking is a kind of turning the gaze
inward, which leads to moments of nostalgia and contemplation. The physical
landscape acts as a bridge between the present and the past of the poet, while
Jejuri defies any sense of continuity or connectedness as it brings the very
moment of looking, without transforming the surroundings or being transformed
by it, to life.
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