Post Colonial Writings from India
Sujata Bhatt (born 6 May 1956) is an Indian poet,
a native speaker of Gujarati.
She has written many poems,
most prominent of which is the English poem
"Search for My Tongue".
Jayanta Mahapatra
is one of the best known Indian English poets.
Mahapatra was born in 1928 in Cuttack,
the city where he spent most of his lifetime .
All his working life,
he taught physics at Ravenshaw College, Cuttack.
Mahapatra has authored 16 books of poems.
He took to writing poetry when he was into his 40s.
He also writes in Oriya.
His wordy lyricism combined
with authentic Indian themes
put him in a league of his own.
http://www.google.com.sg/imglanding?q=Arun%20Kolatkar%20picture&imgurl=http://www.indianetzone.com/photos_gallery/4/Arun-Kolatkar_645.jpg
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar
(November 1, 1932 - September 25, 2004)
was a poet from Maharashtra, India.
He wrote in both Marathi and English.
His first book of English poetry,
Jejuri is a collection of 31 poems
pertaining to a visit to a religious place.
His early Marathi poetry was radically experimental
and displayed European trends
like surreallism, expressionalism
and Beat generation poetry.
Question:
‘One of the key concerns facing the post-Independence
Indian poet is the problem of displacement.’
Discuss this statement.
Displacement, a key term in post-colonial theory, refers
to both physical displacement and a sense of being
culturally "out of place". Post-Independence poets’
relationship with the metropolis in the post-colonial
condition can be expressed in the cultural paradigm
advocated by Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s three phrases describe
this relationship with the dominant colonial culture:
assimilation, exploring the past and ‘fighting back’
-the desire of psychological freedom from an ex-colonial
mindset. The poems of post-Independence Indian poets like
Sujata Bhatt, Jayanta Mahapatra and Arun Kolatkar
certainly endorse the above sentence: ‘One of the key
concerns facing the post-Independence poet is the problem
of displacement’. Expressed in diverse tones: Bhatt’s
defiant assertion in speaking in her mother tongue,
Mahapatra’s excruciating sense of estrangement or Kolatkar’s
detached and ironic tenor; they all reveal their
distinct sense of displacement and the ambiguity of their
ability to fully assimilate culturally into their society.
Fanon introduces the psychoanalytic concepts of alienation of
the colonised in three phrases. The first phrase is the idea
of assimilation: the native intellectual assimilates the
coloniser’s language and culture. In the second phrase, the
native becomes distressed and is anxious to rediscover his
authentic root. It is in this phrase that the native
intellectual attempts to reinterpret old Indian mythology
‘in the light of borrowed aestheticism’. In the third phrase,
the writer attempts ‘to shake the people’ with a fighting back
attitude. Hybridity, another post-colonial term, refers to the
creation of new transcultural modes within what Homi Bhabha
called ‘third space of enunciation’ (1994:37). Bhabha asserts
that the ‘purity’ of cultural identity that emerges in this
ambivalent space is untenable, however recognizing hybridity
within this space can be empowering. Creative hybridity
breeds when post-Independence Indian poets appropriate the
English language.This involved using the imperial culture:
forms of writing, modes of thoughts and analysis such as
logic and rationalism to articulate their own social and
cultural identities. Bhatt’s defiant tone set her in Franz’s
third phrase and Kolatkar’s hybrid creativity is evident in
his dabbling with western surrealism while Mahapatra seems
trapped in the second phrase: his lingering agony in his
search for self-identity.
Sujata Bhatt’s ‘Search for My Tongue’ is a poem about
her preoccupation with language and her cultural identity.
She expresses her fear of losing her identity as a Gujarati
-speaking Indian. It reveals the dilemma of her diasporic
condition: being Indian and yet raised in a foreign land.
She was caught between two cultures: thinking and feeling
in two languages. When western beliefs take over and
obscure the sacred traditional ones established at birth,
cultural conflict occurs. This anxiety is depicted in the
clash of cultures- the Guyanese interior is hidden by the
British exterior:
‘what would you do
if you have two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.’
The poem is situated in a dream with two sharply contrasting
surrealistic imageries. Nature and harmony represents her
mother tongue as opposed to the imagery of the artificial,
unnatural, foreign language; portrayed as a dry, empty and
still environment - ‘riverbed is dry… sky is empty: no
clouds, no birds./ If there were leaves… they would not
stir…’. The mother tongue is instead associated with
life - ‘rains fell… the river might return… something
green… trees …a forest’. The poet further asserts that
she must find her tongue and that it ‘can’t be here in
this dry riverbed/ My tongue can only be where there is
water’. Water is life and it is linked to creativity
in speech. The contrasting imagery used evokes the senses:
dry versus wet, stillness versus movement and barrenness
versus life and these depict the conflicting mindscape
caused by the two cultures.Bhatt argues that speaking a
foreign language will make the mothertongue ‘rot and die
in your mouth’.A striking metaphor follows in which the
regenerating tongue is compared to a plant stump which grows
back and eventually buds and ‘pushes the other tongue
aside’. In this glorious moment of triumph, Bhatt reclaims
the authenticity of her mother tongue: ‘the bud opens in
my mouth,... it blossoms out’, this flower as a metaphor
depicts the mother tongue as being fresh, fragrant and much
alive.
In another instance, Bhatt refers to a culturally specific
image that cannot be translated precisely into foreign thoughts.
She describes a little Indian girl with a pitcher on her head,
selling water at the railway station. As she was filling her
brass cup with water, she reaches up towards the poet who was
leaning out of the train’s window and the poet says ‘but I
can’t think of her in English’. Bhatt too expresses the feeling
of being distant from someone you are close to when you speak
a foreign language:
‘And my mother in the kitchen,
my mother singing:
(mon mor megher shungay,
ooday cholay dikdigontair panay)
I can’t hear my mother in English.’
Additionally, the exotic, authentic rhythm of Gujarati
towards the end of the poem cannot be intimately translated
into foreign tongue:
dha dhin dhin dha
dha dhin dhin dha
dhinaka dhinaka dhin dhin
dhinaka dhinaka dhin dhin ...
In this bilingual poem, Bhatt displays her creativity in her
hybrid use of Gurajati and English. This creates a textual
competition between the print types, showing the contrasting
and conflicting nature of the two languages. She depicts the
two languages at war and by ending the poem with Gujarati
script and pronunciation ‘dha dhin dhin dha’; Bhatt asserts
her Gujarati identity. Language is essential in creating
the significance, meaningfulness and completeness of one’s
cultural identity. Bhatt is suggesting that language is the
weapon used to reclaim one’s culture.To lose one’s mother
tongue is to lose the ability to speak for oneself and one’s
culture and to lose the innermost layer of one’s identity.
In another of Bhatt’s poem ‘A Different history’, she depicts
the imposing presence of the colonizer’s culture in India. The
first sentence:
‘Great Pan is not dead;
he simply emigrated
to India'
Great Pan symbolizes the Western God: Pan is a Greek god of
pasture and shepherds. This opening suggests that the
coloniser’s culture is not ‘dead’ but very much alive even
after the colonial rule in the new Independent India. Bhatt
introduces the concept of God in India- God is in everything
thus portraying a concept of pantheism :
‘Here, the gods roam freely,
disguised as snakes or monkeys;
every tree is sacred’
Pantheism is the doctrine that God is the transcendent reality
of which the material universe and human beings are only
manifestations; it involves a denial of God’s personality and
expresses a tendency to identify God and nature.
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pantheism). This idea
of pantheism contrasts sharply with the Christian’s concept of
worshipping one God and a God with a distinct personality.
The word ‘disguised’ is suggesting that gods are seen everywhere in
the good and evil; perhaps implying that all people perceive the
truth of things differently.
Her Indian culture imposes a particular kind of thinking and
Bhatt’s preaching tone here demands this specific respect from
the colonisers. Mimicry, a term used by Bhabha, refers to the
way the colonised mimic the coloniser in order to mock the
coloniser. Using ‘sin’ a western concept, Bhatt attempts to
mock the colonizer:
‘It is a sin
to be rude to a book.
… to shove a book aside
with your foot,
…slam books down
hard on a table,
….to toss one carelessly
across a room.'
Bhatt is asserting that India is a place of different history
that one needs to respect its different culture and tradition.
Here we have a sense of someone intruding into a private
territory and distressing the natives by disrespecting
their culture.
In the second stanza, Bhatt again shows her preoccupation
with language. Language to her is not merely a mode of
communication rather language is linked to one’s distinct
experiences, expressions and a sense of authentic identity.
Here ‘murder’ suggests the destruction of the native’s culture.
The imagery of the coloniser as the merciless farmer torturing
the crops (his cultivated produce – the colonised) with a
scythe depicts the natives in a helpless and powerless
situation.
‘Which language
has not been the oppressor’s tongue?
Which language
truly meant to murder someone?
‘… after the torture,
after the soul has been cropped
with a long scythe swooping out
of the conqueror’s face-'
The last two sentences deliver the ironic ending:
‘the unborn grandchildren
grow to love that strange language’.
Here ‘strange’ is associated with the unnatural and
artificial foreign language. Bhatt shows the reality of
Indian tainted culture due to the perpetual forced
assimilation of the colonizer’s language and there is no
escape from it.
Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the best known post
Independence male Indian poets. His Indian English poetry
derives from distinctive mythology, landscapes and rhythms
of Oriya oral poetry in which he grew up with. His
intimations of Indian culture reveal the desire for his
roots. His poems are imbued with sensitivity and the
sharpness of the metaphysical world. Mahapatra seems trapped
in the Fanon’s second phrase: He is ‘disturbed’ by his
estrangement from Hinduism due to his Christian upbringing.
He stated bitterly: ‘There’s resilience in the Indian people.
Maybe its faith. But I don’t’ have that faith. I’d like to
belong to them, yet I don’t. I want to believe, yet I can’t.
(SG, p.39). His poems reveal a deep sense of incompleteness,
fragmentation and depletion about human identity. His
disconnection with the Indian modes of thoughts, feeling
and speech is reflected in a detached, ironic tone.
A Rain of Rites:
The rain I have known and traded all this life
is thrown like kelp on the beach.
Like some shape of conscience I cannot look at,
a malignant purpose in a nun’s eye.
…
Numbly I climb to the mountain-tops of ours
where my own soul quivers on the edge of answers.
Which still, stale air sits on an angel’s wings?
What holds my rain so it’s hard to overcome?
The rain is stirring the poet’s memories, the painful reminder
of his discarded past: his Indian tradition. Rain, the redeemer,
with its therapeutic function here is associated with religious
sanctity and the process of purification. Rain represents
Hinduism, which is being discarded ‘like kelp on the beach’.
The poet feels guilty of his inability to embrace Hinduism
which is opposed to his Christian’s principles.
‘A malignant purpose in a nun’s eye’ is a reminder that
not having fully adhere to Christian principles is sinful.
‘Numbly’ and ‘my own souls quivers’ here paint the poet’s
sense of nothingness, hollowness- a man with no identity.
The inability to embrace your very own tradition when your
mind has being cultivated by opposing foreign beliefs and
values; how would one choose which path to advance with?
The poet ‘quivers on the edge’ of these answers. The
alliteration ‘still, stale’ used here to describe the air
on the angel’s wings denotes the rigidness and lifeless
landscape of Christianity. The poem suggests that the
repressive, rigid view of one religion makes it difficult
to accept the views of another religion. We could sense his
internal conflict between his strict, rigid Christian
upbringing and the outside world of massive religion rites,
rituals and myths; and the density of images, symbols and
their meanings that encircled him. He seemed withdrawn and
silent as he cannot participate in these structures and
layers of meaning.
‘Hands’:
Between them
a silence occupies the whole place.
Slowly my body has walked
into deep water,
…
My old rag elephant is
smothered with small screams.
From the dark surface,
waving like grass-
When the last boat crosses the lake.
A haunting sense of rootlessness and emptiness evoked in the
‘silence’ between the hands. The poet expresses his sense of
purposelessness and aimless existence ‘walked into deep
water’. Existing without a sense of your authentic self
– religion, tradition, history is an agony for the poet.
The ‘elephant’ here is associated with Ganesh, the elephant
-headed god in Hindu mythology. Being ‘smothered with small
screams’ shows his tradition being suppressed within;
screaming to surface. The oppressive mood is evoked through
the sense of drowning below this ‘dark surface’ and ‘waving’
to be saved when the ‘last boat’ passes one by without being
saved.
In ‘A kind of Happiness’, Mahapatra expresses a deep sense
of not belonging - estrangement from his society:
The boat I’ve laid my mind on
is adrift, moving slowly up an ageless creek
through water still and colourless as time
among drifts of uncomprehending silent reeds.
...
I fear it may never reach the promise of the sea.
...
Always it’s this boat that nails me to the water,
Darkening its silent waster and flow,
The reeds merciless like those dead,
...
What would tell me at last where I belong?
The boat represents the poet’s journey in his search for a
sense of belonging: deep connection with his culture and
society. In a surreal setting as if in a dream time seems to
drag very slowly, the poet seems trapped in a timeless sphere
and ‘adrift’ denotes a sense of aimless existence. Water is
‘still’ and ‘silent’ reeds paints a motionless, stagnant,
lifeless scene. The poet fears that he will never be able to
find a deep attachment to his culture, like the boat in the
creek that will never reach the sea. He feels entrapped -
‘nail’ to the ‘silent’ and ‘darkening’ water along with
the ‘merciless’ reeds. Mahapatra expresses man’s loneliness,
his search for identity with vivid images. These enchanting
expressions are meditative, often tinged with helplessness,
hollowness and ambiguity.In another poem ‘of that Love’
Mahapatra expresses his alienation, he feels like a stranger
- ‘in another’s guise’ - in his own country. With western
values under his Indian skin, he no longer recognises himself
as Indian yet at the same time he is not truly a white man.
This ambiguity lingers on and as the years passed, the poet
feels lonelier.
Arun Kolatkar, who writes in both Marathi and English,
displays hybrid creativity by reinterpreting the Indian
tradition through the influences of European trends like
surrealism and expressionism. Jejuri, one of his finest
poems, is a long narrative about a trip to the pilgrimage
shrine of Khandoba. Though set in a religious setting, the
focus is not about gods and faith, instead he ponders on
their nothingness and ambiguities. Every visual detail is
recorded with whimsical accuracy. His tone is mostly neutral,
vague and nonchalant that seems to expunge gods and erases any
mythopoetic imagination. Jejuri is an account of a man who
arrived at the pilgrimage town on a bus with people who has
more devotional intent than his, his is more of an
incomprehensible curiosity. He seems to re-enter a world that
is at once mundane and mystical.
‘Heart of Ruin’ is an unflattering description of a
dilapidated temple once dedicated to the god Maruti, but now
served as the home of a mongrel bitch and her puppies. The
final couplet in this section is:
‘No more a place of worship this place
is nothing less than the house of god.'
In another similar poem ‘Manohar’ Kolatkar also shows that
there is no distinction between a temple and a cowshed.
Temples in India are very much different from the opulent
western churches. Kolakar’s sensitivity and sympathy here is
obscured by his questioning spirit and mock irreverence. His
attitude towards this temple of ruin and neglect is without
any tinge of haunting nostalgia.
In another poem, Chaitanya1:
‘come off it
said chaitanya to a stone
in a stone language
wipe the red paint off your face
i don’t think the colour suits you
i mean what’s wrong
with being just a plain stone'
Chaitanya may stand for universal consciousness: life exists
even in the inanimate and one could communicate even with
stones. Kolatkar seems to rebel against institutionalised
religion and celebrates the spirit of primitive Hinduism
—where every animate being and inanimate object is regarded
with reverence and becomes an object of worship. This idea
perhaps is the foundation of religion but
institutionalization seeps in and erodes it.
In another section,‘ A Low Temple’, it reveals the foolish
obstinacy of the priest in his unshakeable faith. The visitor
enters into the darkness of a temple where faith battles with
scepticism when the priest insists the eighteen-armed goddess
has only eight arms:
‘Who was that, you ask,
The eight arm goddess, the priest replies.
A sceptic match coughs
You can count
But she has eighteen, you protest.
All the same she is still an eight arm goddess to the priest’
Kolatkar represents religion and ridicules it with irony.
Although he wrote with a half mocking tone, his satire rarely
bites, instead he injects it with a sense of humour.
Implicitly, under the guise of the non-religious tone, the
poet seems to be on a spiritual quest to find the divine trace
in a degenerated town.
Post-Independence Indian poets like Bhatt, Mahapatra and
Kolatkar, each deals with the key issue of displacement
differently. Through their tone,imageries and metaphors
their poems reflect their relationship with their culture
and society. Bicultural existence is a traumatic experience
for Bhatt; an excruciating alienation for Mahapatra and for
Kolatkar, under the guise of detached existence is a silent
quest for his past. For Mahapatra, religion represents the
internal conflict of wanting to fit into Hinduism and yet he
can’t; in the case of Kolatkar, religion is a way of observing
his past through western rationalism. Bhatt triumphantly
reclaimed her identity through the power of her mother tongue
while Mahapatra is content with the solace of indulging in his
brooding isolation. On the creative side, Bhatt and Kolatkar,
both bilingual poets and commonwealth poetry winners, have
ingeniously fused the articulation of their mother tongues
with Western influences to create new poetic forms. The
predicament of displacement, an essential concern of post-
Independence Indian poets and their representation of India
and Indianness, whether through humour, detachment or irony
are always deftly and delicately expressed within the sphere
of hybrid sensitivity.
(3016 words)
Bibliography
Offprints Collection: Post-Colonial writings from India and Australia, SIM University, 2001.
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. (2008): The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, Oxford University Press.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, Gareth., & Tiffin, H., (2007):Post-Colonial Studies, The key Comcepts, Routledge.
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