From Dulong to Beas: Flow of the soul: A review
FROM DULONG TO BEAS:
Flow of the Soul by Jaydeep Sarangi.
Authorspress, New
Delhi.(2012) Pp. 71 ISBN: 978-81-7273-646-0.
Rs. 95/=.
Rs. 95/=.
It
is a 71-page poetic document of the extra-ordinary journeys both mundane and
metaphysical undertaken by the celebrated bi-lingual young poet from Kolkata,
India, Jaydeep Sarangi. In fact, these are the rare visions granted by forces
beyond the pale of the physical or the rational realms to very few privileged
souls; stark visions that hover over the misty in-between regions of the
immediacy and the meta-physical. They both familiarize and de-familiarize the
everyday; the intensity of the felt immediacy is transformed into remote,
almost exalted glimpses of truth, poetically conveyed to fellow travelers keen
to map out this topography of human soul---a mixture of both earthly and
divine. Jaydeep Satangi, through this slim volume of lyrical meditations,
seer-like, discharges a role denied to lesser poets: A soul-maker. It is his
coinage but very apt: A poet has the capacity to recover the visions given to
early seers who all were poets and early poets who were all seers. Great poetry
is a valiant attempt to re-claim that lost territory, the magical country situated
somewhere between desert and snowy mountains, seen by a striving mind only.
Look at this simple assertion:
LIFE BEYOND
All morning I sat at the arm chair
Hands folded and ponder over limitless waste,
Ratan babu’s ghat falls flat
Hands folded and ponder over limitless waste,
Ratan babu’s ghat falls flat
Between the mundane and the
metaphysical.
A clarion call
From somewhere takes me to strange
part of life
Where I am the instrument among
living divides.
I remain, as the crow
Time keeper for oral narration
For centuries to come. (emphasis
added)
Poiesis
is, on the evidence of the Ancient Greeks, making/ creating something. In the
celebrated Symposium recorded by Plato for the post-modern, rational
skeptics like us who spout agnosticism about the possibilities of the other
worlds seen by the likes of Homer or Hesiod, Diotima speaks of the three
poiesis: natural, urban and in the soul through a careful cultivation of virtue
and knowledge. Highest priority is accorded to third one by the priestess in
this Socratic dialgoue. This distinction is crucial template for any maker of Beauty
in these strife-torn times: Human soul, in poiesis process, can attain a
heightened awareness of the divine---the illuminating site of the virtuous and
logos, the ultimate enlightening experience. Poetry symbolizes that ascent
through the phenomenal world to the spiritual. A poet must constantly strive
for the spiritual contained in the mundane---very much like the Silenus
statues. Jaydeep does that for a whole culture of instant gratification and
quick, deliberate amnesia engineered by the merchants of mass market. He is
poised delicately over the dross and the divine in his wanderings as a poet
with X-ray eyes and inquisitive mind, deconstructing the power narratives,
reversing roles, desperate for a conversation. His empathies are for the
deprived and the downtrodden, a rare province for the poets of Indian English,
more worried about the calibrated response of the Guardian to their
Booker-nominated novels soaked in drug-haze than the plight of the fellow
Indians in an abject caste system that power elite does not want to dismantle
for the expediency of the vote politics:
IF
I WERE A DOWNTRODDEN
To remain harsh,
blunt I stare back.
Your empathy soaks my pregnant womb.
blunt I stare back.
Your empathy soaks my pregnant womb.
I follow footprints of incredible Jogis , I wonder.
Heartless coward in me
Steps back;
Buried alive.
I visualise life at a distance
Not caught in nagging time--
Not caught in nagging time--
I could be a downtrodden!
But
his message is uplifting. Through a careful weaving of racial memory,
history, current politics, naturalism, cultural references, Sarangi creates a
powerful concoction:
LIVING ALONE
(A poem dedicated to dalit
writers of West Bengal)
Sad wings twitter
as my body surrenders
in the snow peaks of Rotang.
I am more strong than ever
I touch the blue sky
And I remember what I loved!
You blame me as ‘weakness’.
I bounce back with my white dress
On the banks of river Beas.
No matter what I do
I experience the ultimate
In the sad terrace of my Kolkata
home.
The ventilator blocks
Air from outside
As my wife wishes me on bed!
I read letters of Swamiji
And take lessons from my dearest one
Near scenic Beas.
I remember
How Kalyani ,Meena and
others
Through hard labour and strength
within
Fight for their right.
They write
As they have no arrow to lift.
My lonely inside
Whispers in a lonely midnight
street
When no bird sing and no priest
chant.
Or, look at this strange blend,
mixing desire with memories:
SAP IS HISTORY
The sap is my nation
History of the land;
How my forefathers settled
On the bank of dulong.
These green fields
These castles of mud and goats
All I owe.
I remember my first day
At school
That was the last.
May father got me a youth of ten
And my love ended on bed.
I sit near the bank of Dulong
And whisper in love lost
Like long trees in autumn
Barren as history books
Where dry hard thoughts
Write their names in black ink.
Alcohol connected
In a finer tune near muddy rain
water.
Suddenly, green turf turned
greener.
All
these are the creations issuing forth, bringing forth in the classic Martin
Heidegger sense of poiesis: Changing the stasis into ecstasies. Jaydeep
Sarangi, in his cult book, From Dulong to Beas, successfully captures the
essence of the Indian experience in all its complexities. Whitman-like, he
hears India singing, and, records some of the precious glimpses afforded to a
soul attuned to such ethereal whisperings from rolling landscapes and temporal
shifts in a geography going back to Vedic times:
YOUR BED!
You crawl on the bed
between stretching hands
between stretching hands
And lay all alone and drink.
Sleeping pills pile up in the
stomach.
A lion looks like a king
In a cage of Patkai-Naga Hills.
My bed is a fossil
Which was true some years back,
In history.
There
are journeys outside the immediate framework also. In a sense, it is a search
for meaningful alliances in shifting landscapes located within the context of
globalization. It is a way of reaching out, to renew tired clichés, to retrieve
the lost narratives.
In
this sense, Sarangi is indeed a unique soul-maker: He renews our chipped souls
running after the tangibles and makes us aware that real wealth lies inside a
beautiful soul, not outside. In this sense, he is a real maker of new
aesthetics for the Indian poetry in English.
---Sunil Sharma,
Mumbai,
India
