Precarity against Heroic Virility: Ramkumar Chetankranti’s Veerta Par Vichlit

Prasanta Chakravarty “पावर में एक कमी थी, तन्हाई से डरती थी” ~ आर. चेतनक्रांति (There was but one lack in power, despondency terrified it) ~ R. Chetankranti “Who will say, and in which language, the distance between two bodies?” ~Fernand Deligny Contemporary forms of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unequal political conditions mean encountering new ways of social-existential vulnerability in daily living. The concept of political precariousness—sometimes called precarity— especially in contemporary settings, involves instability, lack of livelihood protection, insecurity and social or economic vulnerability or some combination of these factors. The pervasiveness of precarity is coterminous to the rise of the powerful fascist forces which have spawned across the world, forces which are able to sell the claim that they will be able to address and mitigate such economic and political inequality with greater efficacy than the previous regimes. Their violent and masculinist ways are supposed to take whole nations into a new era of civilizational self-realization. Given such heroic and grandiose right-wing claims, what kind of realities are we actually witnessing at the ground level in a country like India, especially in the urban and semi-urban centres, where labour is radically being informalized and all forms of collective bargaining thwarted? Who are the teeming multitudes in our towns and cities now? What kind of conditions are they arriving from and what are their expectations and ideas of success in a virile, developing nation? What new biological life-forms and relations might develop in the midst of such precarious social existence? On the other hand, to be precarious also denotes an ontological condition. It constitutes a primary form of reciprocal vulnerability to and with our closest interlocutors—lovers and comrades, childhood friends and colleagues—relations from which we cannot will away without ceasing to be creatures of feeling and responsibility. Relational forms of precariousness—ineradicable fruits of human dependency— in fact, may well be the precursor to physical and social precarity or at least may be radically intertwined with the latter. Ramkumar Chetankranti’s long awaited second collection of poems—Veerta Par Vichlit, manages to do something quite incredible: collectively the poems are able to connect and combine our intimate dilemmas and existential vulnerability with a radical critique of the political, conspiratorial and grandiloquent configurations of right-wing masculinity. The latter, by means of intensifying new ways of social disquiet (instead of mitigating), hasten and nurture a kind of pallid and suffused social pathos all around us. This social pathos and anguish, in turn, play back into the hesitations of our inmost relations. This is where poetry can address our current social and material existence. In other words, Chetankranti’s poetic sensibility underscores the scars and bruises of our heightened, harried living —a kind of living that runs the risk of being assessed by history as a colossal endeavour in human hubris and futility. The Boys of Seelampur Have Turned Patriotic There is this mould. The boys of Seelampur (virtually a human scrapyard teeming with life) used to be hungry and unemployed in the days of yore. Disgruntled: with home, family, society and country. There was no blueprint for life. So, they would yawn and take to All India Radio, with nary a clue about whom or what the radio was babbling. School text-books seemed alien and distant. Teachers harrying. The studious ones, dazzling like fire-crackers in the mohalla, would be the boys’ target in every game they played. Education was high idealism—at best a means to bag a government job, a feat that the boys would not dream of ordinarily. Education, if any, was a default mechanism. Evenings would be spent watching feature films at the neighbour’s. And a huge door of fantasy would beckon—which they would bolt and unbolt for years. And then: फिर वह अंततः जब खुला और नब्बे का दशक मुहावरा बनने से पहले चार सौ साल पुरानी एक मस्जिद की धूल हवाओं को सौंप कर खिड़कियां खोलने में जुटा वे अपने अंधेरों से ऊब चुके थे फिर रोशनी हुई सब तरफ़ उजाला सब साफ़ दिखने लगा यह भी की जिन स्वार्थों को बल्लियों पर टांगकर दुर्लभ कर दिया गया था सबके लिए प्राप्य थे जिन्हे धर्मग्रन्थ त्याज्य कहा करते थे वे भी And then, when that door finally opened The Nineties Before it turned into an idiom Got engaged in Unbolting its windows After broadcasting The dust particles Of a four hundred years old mosque To the winds The boys got bored With their darkness And then there was light Every direction beamed Everything was limpid Those desires which were Tied and nailed to the rafters And made rare Were available to everyone Even the ones Prohibited in the Scriptures It was the magic carpet moment for the boys of Seelampur. The horizon felt closer. The soul would unchain itself and the spine, once again, appeared upright. Every new day triumphantly announced that money was not such a bad thing after all. Love was not a sin. Nor was masturbation. Truth was beckoning. And truth was not scary. But the boys still felt ungendered and the mobile phone was not sufficient a toy to impart a sense of power. They wanted a sip of the nectar of virile masculinity that runs the world. In anger and retribution they left many a judge and minister, doctor and engineer rotting in the manholes. वीर्य और रक्त की बाल्टियां कन्धों पर टाँगे वे रात रात भर घूमते कामनाओं की तस्वीरें बनाते बसों, रेलों, पेशाबघरों में और पूलों के निचे लिख लिख छोड़ते रहे अपने सन्देश जिनका कोई जवाब उन तक नहीं पंहुचा Dangling buckets of semen and blood over their shoulders Night after night they would patrol Sketching landscapes of desire On buses, trains, pissing stations Scribbling down their message underneath flyovers The reply to which they never ever received The older language of sacrifice made no sense anymore. Power and machismo ruled. Motorcycles: the answer! (“On motorcycles, up the road, they come:/Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys ,/Until the