Between History and Memory

Sailen Routray

View of Debi Padahara Tank Lear Lingaraj Temple, Bhubaneswar
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

Indian writers writing fiction in English have more often than not received bulk of the critical and popular attention in this country. A consequence of this state of affairs has been the relative neglect of poetry in English being written by Indian writers. This is not to pit one group of writers against the other; often the same author’s fictional output is feted in the popular/scholarly press when their poetic output is treated with comparative neglect. For example, writers such as Sampurna Chattarji or Anjum Hassan have come to the general reading public’s notice (apart from hardcore aficionados of poetry, that is) only after the publication of their debut novels.

Apart from the neglect of Indian English poetry per se, the work of poets from regions such as the North-East and Orissa suffer especially from lack of attention from the reading public because of a host of historical and sociological reasons that we need not get into right now. One such poet whose work has not received the attention that is his due is Rabindra K Swain.  But this is not to merely stake a claim of adequate regional representation; the volumes under discussion are witness to the fact that it is Indian English Poetry itself and the critical literature surrounding it that stand to gain by the inclusion of poets such as Swain in their cannons and narratives. 

Perhaps the most striking fact about Swain’s work is the effortless lightness with which he inhabits his socio-cultural milieu. He never takes the marginality of this universe seriously; and therefore the references to it in his poetry have the surefootedness of wayward dreams. For example in the poem titled ‘The Plight of Gods’ we are offered this deliciously ironic description of ‘bhakti’:

"for all you know/ one even offered to dig out/ one of his eyes to meet/ the shortfall of one lotus/ to make the one hundred and eight/ for worship./ (The followers/ have always in them what one/ might miss, otherwise.)"… (Swain 2008: 12)

Or consider for that matter, the following description of the experience of a pilgrim on coming back from Puri extracted from the title poem ‘Severed Cord’:

"…Back/ home, you revealed shamefacedly, God could/ not be seen there at Puri; instead, roofs/ laden with the creepers of pumpkin/ and acres of an unploughed field." (Swain 2002: 19)

There is no attempt at creating a poetic diction that is exotically made vernacular; at the same time there is also no desire on the part of the poet to flinch away from the differences that mark a specific vernacular cultural experience. This is perhaps one of the most likeable aspects of Swain’s poetry.

Another important aspect of the poems collected in these two volumes is their preoccupation with time, memory and by extension, history. Debates surrounding history in India are routinely held around the tired dichotomies of ‘narrative’ and ‘theory.’ In his poems, Swain, non-ambitiously yet surely, tries to free the process of apprehending our pasts from the clutches of ‘history,’ and uses our contemporaniety as a witness to our collective pasts. Consider these following lines from the poem ‘An Amorphous Time’:

"Tomorrow  maybe another child will jump/ from the top of the temple his father built/ to the receding sea and to the outstretched hands of/ his death/ to prove that what after all his father did/ was not futile in the sense/ that at least it took him there to let him see/  for himself from a son’s height the halo of glory,/ the sense of ignominy in being straddled with/ things/ passed on to him as his values and as his present/ and to live it as it is given and finally/ part with it with the contentment/ of the one, as his father’s true progeny." (Swain 2002: 49)

These lines refer to the story of self-sacrifice of the boy Dharmapada who supposedly jumped into the Bay of Bengal near Konark to save the lives his father and other sculptors who built the Sun Temple there. In the context of our discussion these lines end a poem that starts as a witness to contemporary events, and make the past personally available to us as a fractured narrative that comes into being not by focusing on the inheritance of past, but by making us aware of the multiplicity of the modes of the presences of history. Thus he can write with confidence, ‘So it’s the marauders who make history’ (Swain: 2002: ‘The Road,’ 34).

A major preoccupation of these poems seem to be about narrativising the quotidian and the personal; the narrative voice (which is mostly that of the poet’s himself) seems to work the best when it is acting as a bridge across generations, a presence where the past and the future collide. Let us look at the following sets of extracts:

"Fathers will be always poor to have set adrift/ the paper boats of their sons/ on the muddy currents of rain water/ down the village roads." (Swain 2002: ‘Sons and Fathers,’16)

"Father, it is two years/ since you have gone, and my nights/ are still lit up by your glowing face./ I haven’t asked myself/  if it is the firefly of my guilt/ or the lighthouse of your love./ My daughter knows you well/ but cannot recollect your face.

Her confusion is not certainly mine,/ but her question, “What did you/ learn from him?” is a mirror/ so close to my face I can’t see a thing. (Swain 2008: ‘Mirror Too Close to the Face,’ 17)

Swain’ poems are also genuinely reflexive about the praxis of poetry. This is not to say the poems in these volumes are merely full of meditations on the craft of fashioning poems. They also use the experience of reading and writing poetry as a mode of apprehending varied aspects of our lived reality. We offer the following sets of lines for the reader’s examination:

"They will be splitting the night in their sleep/ as if it were a poem they did not like." (Swain 2008: ‘All the Cravings,’ 25)

They come without asking you in:/ flowers in the trees, pause in the middle/ of a sentence, or sometimes/ unaccomodative long lines of irrelevance/ and an irreconcilable wife." (Swain 2002: ‘The Water Course,’ 24)

"One day one has to declare oneself/ as a lone parent of an orphan poem." (Swain 2002: ‘One Day,’ 52)

These extracts also hint at another important feature of Swain’s poetry, i.e. his ability to fashion lines that get into the ‘susurrus in the skull’ and stay put in the brain. If poetry, in both trivial and profound ways, is an art of stretching language by creating rigid, ‘inevitable’ structures of words, then Swain’s competence cannot be questioned. Let us give a few examples:

"Only in the dark/ do you seek your kind of light/ as in the womb of an unborn child." (Swain 2002: ‘Grace of Darkness,’ 15)

"… The way you/ looked at me, it seemed as if I was the reality/ and yours was only one way of looking at it." (Swain 2008: ‘My Wedding Night,’ 47)

"The rainbows are prayers/ of children…/ the only side the children are on/ is that of the gods/ for the gods are forever minors." (Swain 2008: ‘Children’s Secrets,’ 66)

But some reservations may be expressed here. In one or two places the hold over diction seems shaky. When Swain directly comments on contemporary events (for example the super-cyclone that hit the Orissa coastline on October 1999) the poems lose their way and somewhat meander. But the number of such poems can be counted on both the hands. Overall these two volumes of poetry contain poems that speak beautifully to our experience. Indialog and Authorspress must be congratulated for publishing these two volumes although the cover of the volume Susurrus in the Skull does quite a lot of injustice to the poems that it contains within it.

Books Under Review

Rabindra K Swain. 2008. Susurrus in the Skull. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2008. pp. 68, Rs. 100.

Rabindra K Swain. 2002. Severed Cord. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd., pp. 70, Rs. 120.

Note: This review essay was first published in the 28th issue of the bi-monthly literary web-magazine 'Muse India'.