The Return of the Stone Age
[R. Chetankranti, Aatmadroh: New Delhi, Rajkamal Publications, 2023] Nothing catches the pungent flavour of masochist masculinity — and the helpless, misplaced obverse of such a state—which flags our schizoid times, as does the poetry of Ramkumar Chetankranti. His third volume of poetry आत्मद्रोह (Self-Mutilation) arrived yesterday by post. And everything else has receded to the background since. The power of what is pent up right now is given a ruthless channel in his phrases and metaphors: a torrential flow of politico-psychosexual-garish-melancholic-self-defeating desire. A world of relentless self-flagellation, which drowns itself in a cocktail of vengeance and carnival mania—hoping to arrive at an ever-elusive somewhere. This is a greatly risky zone to traverse, for the language and world that the poet shows us will not be easily digested by the kind of people who wish to stay ostrich like, scared of entering the zone of vengeful, amoral outbursts of the immediate quenching of desire which occupies our times. The first lines of the title poem have already turned into a prophetic epigram of sorts:और फिर देश यातना के लिए हाथ जोड़कर खड़ा हो गया सब एक आवाज़ में बोले, हमें दुःख दो और ज्यादा दुःख और ज्यादा यातना और ज्यादा पीड़ा वे सुख से ऊब चुके थे… (And then the country , beseeching pain, with folded hands, stood up/ And uttered in one unified voice/ Give us torment/ Afflict us with agony/More stinging agony/Even more pain/ They were bored of happiness…) Slavoj Zizek, his curiosity piqued about the industrial production of testicle-crushers in Nazi Germany which were used against Jews and gypsies, tries a Google search, and is bemused to find that there are all kinds of ball-crushers available in the market—stainless steeled, diamond-studded, spare, ornate or custom made. Pleasure in renunciation is a deadly mission. Genuine puritans are able to master it to the hilt and spread it among the people. Chetankranti has been showing us the mirror right from the piercing utterances in शोकनाच /Shoknaach. A generation (or does it really change every decade as claimed sometimes?) is coming into being after the 1990s and its contours are becoming more pronounced as the new century moves forward—“we were not revolutionaries/we were merely restless beings”: हम क्रांतिकारी नहीं थेहम सिर्फ अस्थिर थेऔर इस अस्थिरता में कई बारकुछ नाजुक मौक़ों परजो हमें कहीं से कहीं पहुंचा सकते थेअराजक हो जाते थेलोग जो क्रांति के बारे में किताबें पढ़ते रहते थेहमें क्रांतिकारी मान लेते थेजबकि हम क्रांतिकारी नहीं थेहम सिर्फ अस्थिर थे This applies to all hues of ‘revolutionaries’ of our times (barring very, very few resolute exceptions). His readers know that this very realization has led to Chetan’s Seelampur—a representative metaphor for the masochist location of pent up and self destructive desire. The educated are totally alienated from those who are being used, are dangerous, are preyed upon, are trapped, are naïve too—in Seelampur. Those who read books look at the denizens of this other world, and instead of walking halfway and offering a helping hand, turn themselves into numb ostriches: पढ़े-लिखे लोगों के लिए/वे पहेली थे/वे बैठे उन्हें बस देखते रहते/उनकी समझ में न आता/ की वे कब कहाँ और कैसे बने/क्यों हैं कौन हैं क्या हैं! To describe this class of the petty bourgeoisie, happy in its world of self-gratification, Chetan deploys a lovely phrase: छोटे छोटे बड़े लोग (Little big people). But as hinted earlier, this zone is an amorphous one to get into. For there cannot be any clear answer as to how much the poet listens to the sound and tenor of such self-mutilated bands and how much he castigates such mass ardour. Is his poetry a realist assessment of deep psychic turbulence? Or is it laid out to provoke and shake us from our slumber? Are his utterances being read by the people he addresses, beyond the polarized universe? This much is certain though: he is less forgiving of those who are managing the show, the magicians who stay in the background rather than the puppets who walk into their hands. For the former are the demagogues who enjoy most the conversion of people’s happiness into the black rain of blood and semen over very changing seasons. For the God stands aloof, with a purpose: एक हाथ में शिशन और एक हाथ में चाकू लिए खड़ा हो | (Penis in one hand, knife in another). To use James Joyce’s pregnant phrase, used in a different context: “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Such all engulfing desire for holding on to power has only one dread, a singular worry— पावर में इक कमी थी, तन्हाई से डरती थी (‘वीरता पर विचलित’ से उद्धृत ) | Power fears aloofness. This is the lyrical zone of detachment which Chetan has kept aside for the kindred. The outside. Only this much. Is aloofness poetry then? Beyond dreams and greed: वह तुम्हारे झुलसे बालों में/ बारिश करेगा/ वह तुम्हें रोने की जगह देगा| Not unlike in his previous anthologies, here too, Chetan takes us to the nadir of expectations, but his poetry never despairs about the future, for one day—all news cycle, busy printing presses, television anchors, rapt spectators –everything must fall silent: for everyone shall understand what is going on, with a collective sense of helplessness. On that day: हैरानी हैरान /और शैतानी निस्तब्ध| (Bewilderment shall be bewildered/ And devilry cold). One can stop at this point. But it needs mentioning that there is another track of poems blossoming in all three anthologies which acts as a balm to readers who dare to pass the volcanic lava and soot of his generational outcry. This set of poems shows the other side of Chetankranti—softest of souls that he is: and that line wrestles with fathomless love and pain. On pain, for instance he says: वह भीतर कहीं बो दिया होगा /बहुत पहले कभी /और सींचा नहीं गया होगा /इसलिए पानी-पानी पुकारता रहता है | (Not irrigated, the embedded seed of pain cries: Water, Water!) But that story must be saved for some other day. *** adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Equitable Force of Destitution
HUG reviews: Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir by Abir Bazaz. Cambridge University Press, 2023 What happens to the one who has drunk the nectar and found taste in wild vegetables? The same one is seized by the leopard that is death in life itself. And in solitude such a being can hear the rumblings of a day when the sky shall melt like molten copper and mountains look like fluffs of wool. Abir Bazaz has crafted a tapestry of patient, utopian and life affirming possibilities by explicating the inner workings of affirmative negation that is non-dual gnosis; in this particular case, that of sahaja Islam, as felt and realized in the many utterances (especially through the shruk—a quatrain that expresses a single thought) of Nund Rishi (1378-1440)—Kashmir’s most revered saint-poet and founder of the Rishi Order. Once he has given us a sense of what might be the contours of the sahaja vath (path) in Kashmir and what its similarities and differences are with other such traditions on the subcontinent and in wider South Asia, Bazaz delves deep into three intimate ideas and their relationship with each other in shaping such a sahaja world: the trope of ‘death before dying,’ the unity of negation-affirmation, and the apocalypse of the ‘afterworld’ which is also immediate and political. Love is taking a Beehive into your Coat What is syncretic in gnosis is also esoteric. The fragrant secret of the subtle knot is not to be divulged always in ecstasy. One of the finely-drawn threads in this work depicts how Nund Rishi was carefully trying to finding a way through the Shari’ah (from shara-road) and more ecstatic Sufi utterances (shath). It is not easy to place him. Indeed, for Nund Rishi, Shari’ah is the sahaja path. It is a bank to the river of human action. What is important is creating the common conditions of self transformation. The transformation is at once within selves, and also a possibility open to common humanity if it can realize the workings of such gnosis. All charlatanry in teaching and accepting knowledge must be abandoned if one has to enter such a zone of transformation. One cannot pretend to be an elder in the exchange of knowledge—Bazaz introduces a sense of radical equity right there. Decoding the hermeneutics of the shruks is not only about the pyrotechnics of kalam. The authentic faqih (jurist) and alim(scholar) must invoke the idea of amal (action) and other practices of the self. The book is about achieving a difficult sobriety. Bazaz tells us about the ecstatic utterances and martyrdom of the Sufi saint poet— Mansur al-Hallaj. He was maimed, quartered and stoned to death. Hallaj’s divine realization is beyond doubt but his error was in divulging the inner truths of gnosis, and the fragrance of unity was thus dissipated. He could not “bear the blow of the divine flash” and got “his windpipe shattered.” Nund Rishi, by contrast to such an ecstatic Sufism, seeks a more “simple, navigable path.” The ‘way of going” is rather a patient and difficult talk, he suggests—a commitment to a universalism that has to be earned from the pain that is love and total abandonment. Only the one who is cast out turns into a sahajia. At this point Bazaz tries to tackle one of the unresolvable but productive dilemmas of such gnosis: after such knowledge, does the vath lead to a supraconscious state of void (sunyata) or to a total immersion in life’s flow and trans-religious variegatedness? At times Bazaz (with cues from the likes of Rahman Rahi) seems to suggest that the latter was the path of Lal Ded (and is she therefore more poetic?) rather than Nund Rishi. The former is sweet and ecstatic, the other, serious and heavy. But more often than not in the book, the two of them are placed as carrying forward the same tradition. Shops after Closing Time Death is a stealthy thief: “that which leaves nothing intact.” The shruks are aporetic knots. These are ‘touchstones’ that are often paradoxical and therefore cannot be reduced to a belief-system. Feeling the power of each shruk is a mode of living, a process of transformation. They burn down the ego. One realizes that the night is dark, and death, imminent—for death has “shattered our youth”—“the way water is absorbed by new clay channels/the way shops are abandoned at closing time.” One waits in the abandoned bazaar—for ruination and complete desolation. Since death is universal, no one will be cured without dying. Death is a sense of the passage of time, and preparing for death is such a realization. A powerful shruk tells us about the intimidating quarters of the rich, who shoo poor people away. Beautiful women singing in the palaces, until “dust is being swept with chowries,” and “people grow cotton over there.” Time elapses. It leaves its mark. Ruination is equity. Hence, death before dying is freedom—since to live in such a cataclysmic condition of the outcast leaves nothing intact. But in the process, the ruined one gains a second life in eternity: which is a process of kenotic self-emptying. Dying before death joins us to one another. The political question of fraternity is passed through the bridge of equality. This is the power of living in death—in transforming individual and common living. Show me Your Face in the Clay La Makan (no place) is the address of the outcast. Solitude is a form of preparation. Slow ruination gradually leads to no-place or nothingness. Ruination is therefore an invitation to poetry—which celebrates the temporal movement in and through life. The bereft is bound to all creatures and to every substance around him—“abandoning existence, I found presence/Thus have I reached the place-less place.” In this section on place-less place in the Rishi tradition, Bazaz deals most intricately and intimately with the question of what is affirming in negative theology—about the relationship between nafi and isbat (a discussion he had already initiated in the introductory pages