Apoorvanand

“ Why did Muktibodh  became uniquely significant in the summer of 1964? Why did …almost all the weeklies, monthlies and dailies started introducing him to their readers?” Fifty years ago, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, asked this question in the preface to Chand Ka Munh Tedha hai, the first anthology of poems of Muktibodh being compiled.

Muktibodh then, was in a state of coma , being brought to Delhi from  Rajnadgaon,a small town in Chhattisgarh, by his young writer comrades – like Harishankar Parsai, Srikant Verma and Ashok Vajpeyi, in a desperate, last ditch attempt to save their beloved elder poet. It was not be . He breathed his last on 11 September, 1964 at the AIIMS , before completing his 47^th year. And in  the words of Shamsher, the story of heroic struggle of his brief life and tragic, untimely death turned him into an event for the world of Hindi literature.

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh continues to be an event of Hindi literature, the full meaning of which is still being discussed. And yet, he as a poet was not interested in portraying events . He was more interested in the drama of the human soul, rather soul of a human being, ravaged, wrecked and fatally wounded by industrial modernity. Living the life of a lower middle class family man, constantly changing jobs and places in search of  a modestly secure life which would allow him to write the kind of poetry he wanted, he witnessed  the humanness and individuality of the people being crushed under the ruthless wheels of capitalist modernity.

Muktibodh always saw people as possibilities, and it pained him to see them turning away from the challenges these possibilities threw at them, allowing themselves to sink in the abyss of ordinariness, a life which lacked courage, a life in which the body became the prison of the soul.

A poet is a collector of the fragments of these  unrealized possibilities. In a poem, titled Ek Antarkatha ( An inner story) the narrator follows his mother collecting firewood , which she explains is not dead. These are precious sensibilities, she explains, which have become dead as they  were left disused for long. People ( trees) have thrown them away. Ruling civility turns us away from them. A poet has to dig them out them from the garbage dumps of this civilization and  light them to bring warmth to dispel the coldness of modern progress and growth.

Atm (self) and Atma (soul), naturally, occur frequently in his poems leading some Marxist critics to conclude that he was  turning away from social realities.

The problem Muktibodh kept grappling with was akin to what the young Marx had posed in his 1844 manuscripts: why this distance between the social and the self? And whenever this distance is erased , why does the social always consume the self ? Marx was angry with capitalism as it never allowed the working, laboring masses to even feel what solitude is, something that had become the privilege of a few. Solitude is social, he wrote, but people are deprived of it.

Human beings are reduced to the status of laboring, producing bodies. The economic side of the being grows grotesquely disproportionate to the living, feeling side of it. Humanness has been sacrificed at the  altar of the God of Profit. It is merely a fuel for the production of a commodity , which is  again nothing but dead , alienated humanity. In a perverse way, reason has won and sensibility has been turned into its slave. Any liberatory project has to have this as its mission: restoration of the human to human beings.

One is not sure whether Muktibodh ever knew about the 1844 manuscripts of Marx. Not that it was necessary. He understood with the wisdom of  a poet, that the responsibility of perpetuating  a system of dead souls cannot be laid only at the door of outside, objective economic and social forces. One has to accept that it was in fact our decisions, or our refusal to take decisions which led to this disaster. It is we who have invited this crisis.

A deep sense of responsibility, responsibility to take decisions, to participate in LIFE  informs his poems. It creates in a sense of urgency to intervene as he , with his knowledge has the foreboding of an impending accident involving humanity. He has to alert them, and also rescue them. It makes his poems sound desperate, full of anxiety.

A poet, living amidst deformed or destructed souls, wandering in their ruins cannot write well formed poetry. Muktibodh realized that the form he had inherited from his romantic predecessors could not contain him.  His literary sensibilities were constructed by the Marathi, Hindi and Russian novels. Ashok Vajpeyi points out that he wrote poetry with a novelistic imagination. He saw with anxiety his poems grow incessantly, refusing to end. He was always uncertain about the reception of his extraordinarily long poems as the ruling poetic sensibility was formed by small, lyrical poetry. Poems , readers and critics were used to had to be finished whereas his poems had always a tendency to break free, postpone the end, keep moving in unknown directions. His constantly beckoned him and it took him years to complete a poem.

Using a formulation proposed by Bal Chandra Rajan in a different context, one can say that that in the poems of Muktibodh is a  possibility of a ‘Form of the Unfinished’. Rajan says that unfinished should not be confused with the term ‘incomplete’, for incomplete is that which ‘ought ‘ to be completed but was not. He warns that any attempt to bring the unfinished to a close is to ignore the resistance of those forces preventing closure, and hence to destroy the essential identity of the work.

Lyrical poetry  creates and conveys a total experience whereas the long, unfinished poem  questions ‘not simply the possibility , but the desirability of totalization.’ We should also consider the suggestion made by  Kapil Muni Tiwari, another scholar of English literature to use form as verb as in ‘to form something’. In this sense, Muktibodh emerges as a worker of poetry. He makes the labour contained in poetry visible and palpable whereas a successful artwork is considered one which does not bear on its body the signs of labour undergone in constructing it. The labour or work part of the poems gets invisibilsed. Imagination is also an act of labour, and the writer sweats  is what we forget and the poem becomes a pleasurable, commoditified   experience to be consumed by the reader.

Muktibodh is, in true sense of the term, a political poet as he, through his work makes us conscious about the politics of the form. Reading his poetry , one realizes that it is an exhaustingly physical act. It involves your entire nervous system, makes you run and stop, climb  steep heights and descend into deep mines,  get surrounded by marching crowds, get thrown in darkness and suddenly emerge in the sweet light of the morning sun. Even in this serene moment, there is no forgetting. This subjectivity which does not or, rather, cannot forget  is what he aspires for. This is a political self he is looking for, an engaged subjectivity, helplessly bound with the fate of all of humanity and living with the full awareness, that life is a never ending struggle and our duty is be in the thick of things.

( A sightly edited version of this article was carried by the Indian express on 11 September, 2014)

https://kafila.online/2014/09/11/gajanan-madhav-muktibodh-put-fire-back-into-firewood/

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Vaibhav Singh: Muktibodh: Hope, Resistance and Dystopia

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The Ultimate Expression: Muktibodh’s Poem, “Andhere Mein”

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917 – 1964) was a Hindi poet and writer, most prominently known as one of the pioneers of modern Hindi poetry. His short life was full of idealism and intellectual rigour, and an equivalent struggle for survival. Even though Marxist ideology and existential thought filled his creative output, his daily life was fraught with financial insecurities and frequent job changes as he worked to provide for his family. Unfortunately, Muktibodh died before he could get his poems published as a book.

One of his final poems–also the longest one–Andhere Mein (In the Dark) is a wide canvas that Muktibodh has used to sketch surrealist imagery, filled with social commentary and profound meditation on the soul and its expression. Although outwardly a criticism of state power in the Nehruvian era in India, it is difficult to impose a single theme onto the full poem. While the complete poem covers a large canvas of socio-political history in India, the excerpts we have chosen speak of the individual human experience. Here, we see Muktibodh draw on his personal tragedies to seek an ideal, the ultimate expression and fulfillment of man’s lost identity.

This allegory–if one looks carefully–offers a lesson, even inspiration, to the reader. It serves to remind us of the existence of an unstoppable life force within ourselves and puts forth a path for a lifelong quest, albeit one that is hard and full of trials. When full of self-doubt and difficulty, this poem serves as a wise reminder for belief in a vast, untapped potential within us.

(…) the ripeness

of my potential, latent brilliance, talents;

the realization of my completeness

the tension of knowledge oozing in my heart

the image of my soul.

Here is a short excerpt from the longer poem:

Andhere Mein

zindagi ke…

kamron me andhere

lagaata hai chakkar

koi ek lagaataar;

aawaaz pairon ki deti hai sunai

baar-baar… baar-baar,

vah nahi dikhta… nahin hi dikhta,

kintu vah raha ghoom

tilasmi khoh mein giraftaar koi ek,

bheet-paar aati hui paas se,

gahan rahasyamay andhakaar dhvani-sa

astitva janaata

anivaar koi ek,

aur mere hriday ki dhak-dhak poochti hai – vah kaun

sunayi jo deta, par nahi deta dikhayi !

itne me akasmaat girte hain bheetar se

phoole hue palastar,

khirtee hai choonay-bhari ret

khisakti hain papdiyaan is tarah –

khud-ba-khud koi bada chehra ban jaata hai,

svayamapi

mukh ban jaata hai divaal par,

nukeeli naak aur bhavy lalaat hai,

dridh hanu

koi anajaani an-pehchaani aakriti.

kaun vah dikhayi jo deta, par

nahi jaana jaata hai !

kaun manu ?

…

vah rahasyamay vyakti

ab tak na paayi gayi meri abhivyakti hai

poorn avastha vah

nij-sambhaavanaon, nihit prabhaavon, pratimaon ki,

mere paripoorn ka avirbhaav,

hriday me ris rahe gyaan ka tanaav vah,

aatma ki pratima.

…

vah mere paas kabhi baitha hi nahi tha,

vah mere paas kabhi aaya hi nahi tha,

tilasmi khoh me dekha tha ek baar,

aakhri baar hi.

par, vah jagat ki galiyon me ghoomta hai pratipal

vah phatehaal roop.

tadittarangi vahi gatimayta,

atyant udvign gyaan-tanaav vah

sakarmak prem ki vah atishayata

vahi phatehaal roop !!

param abhivyakti

lagaataar ghoomti hai jag me

pata nahi jaane kahaan, jaane kahaan

vah hai.

isliye main har gali me

aur har sadak par

jhaank-jhaank dekhta hoon har ek chehara,

pratyek gatividhi

pratyek charitra,

va har ek aatma ka itihaas,

har ek desh va raajanaitik paristhiti

pratyek maanviya svaanubhoot aadarsh

vivek-prakriya, kriyagat parinati !!

khojta hoon pathaar… pahaad… samundar

jahaan mil sake mujhe

meri vah khoyi hui

param abhivyakti anivaar

aatm-sambhava.

In the dark

In life’s…

              dark chambers

                   someone is pacing up and down

                             ceaselessly;

I can hear the sound of his steps

again and again…again and again

I cannot see him…cannot see him

but he goes on wandering

Someone arrested in an enchanted cave

Someone unstoppable

              asserts his existence

                  like the echo of deep mysterious darkness,

resounding nearby, behind the wall.

And the beating of my heart

asks – Who is he

that I can hear, but cannot see?

Then bulging plaster

suddenly falls from the wall

Sand full of lime cracks

Flakes slip

a big face emerges

of its own accord

A silhouette appears on the wall –

Pointed nose,

magnificent brow,

firm chin;

An unknown unfamiliar shape.

Who is he

that I can see, but

cannot know!

Manu? 

…

That mysterious man

is my expression which I haven’t found yet

He is the ripeness

of my potential, latent brilliance, talents;

the realization of my completeness

the tension of knowledge oozing in my heart

the image of my soul.

…

He never sat next to me,

never even came to me,

once I saw him in an enchanted cave

it was the last time!

But he walks the lanes of this world ceaselessly

in tattered clothes

at the speed of lightning

He – anxious tension of knowledge,

abundance of vigorous love

in tattered clothes!

My ultimate expression

wanders in the world ceaselessly

I don’t know where he is

Who does?

So I scrutinize every face

on every lane

and every street,

all actions,

all deeds,

the history of every soul,

every country, political situation and circumstance

every human self-perceived ideal,

the process of discrimination, the active transformation!

I search plateaus … mountains… oceans

where I might find

my lost

ultimate expression,

unstoppable

self born.

Excerpts taken from the book New Poetry in Hindi. Read the full poem in Hindi here

https://daak.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-expression-muktibodhs

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