Expenditure, Insolvency and Recovery in Manmohan’s ‘The Morsels of Ignominy” ( ज़िल्लत की रोटी)
_____________________ Prasanta Chakravarty The poems that make the collection ज़िल्लत की रोटी—The Morsels of Ignominy (Rajkamal Prakashan: 2006) must count as one of the finest that has come from the subcontinent in the past few decades. The collection itself is rather late in the career of its poet: Manmohan, who has been writing poetry since the 1970s. Much of that remains unpublished. There is a kind of near mythic status that is often ascribed to the poet—for his rather oxymoronic existence—as a recluse and as a rooted social and organic intellectual at the same time. It does not fall in my ambit, nor is it my intention, to speculate on his influence on the Hindi poetic and thinking world. My interest lies elsewhere—with one particular aspect of his poetics, namely, a form of general economy that he deploys in his poetic language. By the singular use of a particular form of expenditure is he able to effect an ascetic starkness which is the seal and sign of this particular collection. There are a hundred odd poems in this collection. But I shall concentrate on a few representative ones. The opening poem of the collection, that sets the stage, reads like this: इन शब्दों में __________ इन शब्दों में वह समय है जिसमें मैं रहता हूँ ग़ौर करने पर उस समय का संकेत भी यहीं मिल जाता है जो न हो लेकिन मेरा अपना है यहाँ कुछ जगहें दिखाई देंगी जो हाल ही में ख़ाली हो गई हैं और वे भी जो कब से ख़ाली पड़ा हैं यही मेरा यक़ीन हैं जो बाकि बचा रहा यानी जो ख़र्च हो गया वह भी यहीं पाया जाएगा इन शब्दों में मेरी बची खुची याददाश्त हैं और जो भूल गया है वह भी इन्हीं में है In These Words ___________ In these words The time In which I live If one can discern, The signs of that time could also be traced here Which absent Still are mine One can see some spaces here That have been vacated of late And those too Which are long left vacated That is my belief The leftover which is left That is to say, those spent and expended Will also be found here. In these words The vestiges of my memory And whatever has been forgotten Stay here too. This is a meta-commentary about the poetry that is to come in the following pages, about the self of the poet and also about his times. The modernist minimalism works deftly. At the most outward level one can see how the self is scattered—across three vectors—the lyrical I, the historical I and the crafted words themselves. In the very first three lines these three coordinates are mapped: these words catch my time, which in turn is what makes me, declares the poet. A triangulation happens: Words. My time. And my self. This is my time—the contemporary. You may not see that time in a pronounced manner always in these pages but you can glimpse the vignettes, if you are a careful enough reader. But my time has not been smooth. It has been jagged and fractious. All solidarities, every promise, every friendship may not have been fulfilled. Hence, there are vacated spaces—both recently emptied and also other festering gashes. I walk in poetry therefore. And therefore the necessity of the distancing the lyrical I from the historically constructed I. Hence also, the necessity of poetry in the first place so that you, the reader, can have a sense of both history and my detached condition, filtered through the sieve of time in these poetic pronouncements. It is immediately clear that the poet reserves a tremendous confidence in the permanence of the art-form—in words and language that can capture and husband time. It is only the enunciated words which are able to store memory as well as etch that which is gone. This is a singular claim: that the words will be able to capture that which is not there anymore: the ever-receding I and my receding times. How can poetry capture an economy of such bankruptcy? Make sense of an endurance that is provided by the spaces that are left vacated? How does someone craft the poetics of this triangular exchange? The Poetics of Inverted Equivalence To have a sense of that process we must go back to the particular stanza in this poem which says: यही मेरा यक़ीन हैं/जो बाकि बचा रहा यानी जो ख़र्च हो गया/वह भी यहीं पाया जाएगा That is my belief/The leftover which is left That is to say, those spent and expended/Will also be found here. In many of the poems in this collection, Manmohan works through a specific form of inversion and equivalency. Inversional symmetry is used in musical set practice. It relies on the concept that intervals and other sets of pitches are identical when inverted. The sets that are inverted can have remote connections to one another, but if the axis of symmetry is rightly measured and twisted, then one can draw equivalence in and through diametrically opposite modes or ideas. Inversional equivalence can work if two conditions are fulfilled: one, an oblique or contrary motion should predominate. And two, the counterpoint must begin and end in a perfect consonance. In this case both the conditions are eminently fulfilled. And this is but one instance among numerous. The poet’s beliefs are often placed in and through a series of counterpoints in this collection. In this case the remarkable inversion happens between what is leftover and what is spent. The inversional equivalence is drawn between what is gone and expended with whatever has been shored. This is a truly momentous claim—that which is salvaged is perfectly equitable to what has been depleted. There is no loss. No gain. The key metaphor of expenditure is something to be marked. If we carefully look again at the poem now we shall see that this particular stanza about the belief