Poetry in The Time of Exile
Dr. Shashi Shaikhar Toshkhani
 Well known Kashmiri poet Arjan Dev Majboor now living as a
displaced person in Jammu's Udhampur town, is making ‘Waves' literally for Waves
is the title he has given to the recently published collection of his selected
Kashmiri poems translated into English by Arvind Gigoo. The idea perhaps is, to
present the best of his work to an audience not acquainted with Kashmiri. But
whether a slender volume like this-of just 58 pages and containing 24
poems only - can provide an adequate insight into the dimensions of
creativity of a poet who has been writing for the last 50 years and has produced
five volumes of poetry is rather doubtful.
Arjan Dev Majboor is an important name in contemporary
Kashmiri poetry, not only because he has had a rather long innings as a poet,
but also because he was part of a circle to which poets like Dina Nath Nadim,
Rehman Rahi and Amin Kamil belonged and with them had a role in launching the
progressive moment in the post-independence era. Believing literature to
be a potent instrument to fight what they called "the imperialist
forces" - a term that had a special connotation in the context of the
political situation prevailing in Kashmir - the progressives wrote much
that was propaganda and slogan mongering in the beginning, but with their sharp
sense of realism and a proclivity for experimentation, they definitely helped in
bringing about a change in the sensibility and idiom of Kashmiri poetry which
had got bogged down in the "gal-o-bulbul" imagery. And
when the progressive movement started disintegrating in the late fifties Nadim,
Rahi and Kamil set out to explore new paths for themselves. Majboor did not lag
for behind. Keeping track of the new literary developments, he too started
experimenting quite meaningfully, with new forms and themes, and in the
process succeeded in establishing a distinct idiom of his own. Ironically,
however, four day wonders like Noor Mohammad Roshan hogged more limelight than
poets like Majboor-not for academic or literary but political reasons. He
remained constantly creative and is so to this day, even though Islamic
terrorism has shattered the whole world around him.
One can not be sure whether Waves reflects all these shifts
and developments in Majboor's poetry, but the image that this collection
presents is of a poet deeply disturbed and distressed by the violence and terror
that have ferociously mauled human values and the uninhibited sway of hate-breading
ideologies that have put the future of the entire mankind in jeopardy -
his own people being the worst victims of horrendous onslaughts. But what is
typical of Majboor is his deep faith in the essential goodness of man, which he
believes will eventually prevail. Existentialist problems also surface in
these poems, though occasionally, and then there is that element of romanticism
that cannot hold itself back. But what strikes one most is his optimism which
not even the given circumstances of his and his people's forced exile have
subdued. Perhaps, it is the nostalgia for his lost paradisal homeland that
keep his creative juices flowing.
In poems like The Topsy-Turvy Tree,
Majboor does, however, seem to be upset by the reversal of values that is
creating an upheaval in the present day world. Warning of the apocalyptic events
that could follow, leading to an inexorable end of everything, he says:
"Listen!
There will be no forests
eagles won't fly.
they will walk,
love will wither,
compassion will burn
and man
with the snake
will enter the cave
But in another poem. The Coming Millennium, he
replaces these forebodings of doom with a vision of hope and peace. He dreams of
a new world taking its birth amidst the present chaos, with Saraswati, the
Goddess of Learning. guiding man's destiny and giving a call for reshaping and
purifying everything in a dawn of new wisdom:
Purity will reign.
darkness will vanish
and fear will go.
Love will prevail
peace will flower!
Yet the thought from w -hick this optimism springs leas
a deeper core:
The solitude of beauty
is
dear
but
dearer
the search for a ray
in darkness.
Lover
It appears that though Man Dev Majboor has shed much of the
ideological baggage he carried over from the days of "progressivism",
his imagination is still animated by utopian dreams.
In the poem Chiselled Words, the poet seems to
be facing a crisis of expression. Old words have lost their meaning in the
changed context of things, and new words are needed to deal with the new
reality, he feels:
Give me words
the miracle of words
give me the springs of love
the gray dawn
basketfuls of flowers
the dancing shy moon
fragrant colourful dusk.
They will wash the pale earth
light will cover the world.
But perhaps the poems that have the power to touch us and
engross us most are those that reveal Majboor's passionate attachment to the
land of his birth. The fragrance of Kashmir's soil wafts through these poems
giving them their peculiar flavour. It is the trauma and tragedy of uprootment
from this soil - a fate that the poet shares with lakhs of his other
displaced and dispossessed brethren-that find most poignant expression in
poems like Wilderness, A Funeral, Mind, The Dance is On, Restless, Prison
and To the Swan, which resonate with nostalgia. They reflect his intense
desire that the meaning of his existence should survive through memory in the
nightmarish wilderness of exile:
Now
I am stranded in wilderness
waiting for the tree
the water
and
the light
Wilderness
"Wet memories" of his ravaged home
"transfix" the poet's heart and leave him crippled and helpless:
That city is a litter of
broken bricks
burnt houses
and choked gutters
Their present,
our past
and your future
fall to pieces before the gun
Rootless
Banished from his home, Majboor feels that he and his people
are languishing as prisoners, their heritage destroyed and their past brunt. Yet
there is hope in the core of this sadness and sorrow:
Heritage has gone astray
because
past has burnt.
Blossoms have bloomed
even in the dry sand
To the Swan is a long narrative poem written after
the manner of Kalidas' Meghadootam which Majboor happens to have
translated into Kashmiri. Baring his heart before the swan. the vehicle of
Saraswati, the goddess of Wisdom, he speaks of Kashmir, its past glories, its
culture, the myriad hues of its stunningly beautiful landscapes and the soul
benumbing sense of having lost it all even as death and destruction stalk the
paradisal valley where once "hermits meditated". Pining for it, he
wants the ordeal through which he and his people are passing to end.
"Piety will swill stones", he hopes as "the
soul of the valley is pure"-a rather very naive summing up when the
destiny of a whole people struggling for survival is at stake.
We can not say how reliable is evidence of the translation in
helping us to form an opinion about the poems included in the selection. There
is no introduction by the poet nor any translator's note to guide the reader
about the basis of this selection. Nor do we know whether the selection was done
by the poet or the translator. However, Arvind Gigoo is himself a poet and a
very competent translator, and the general tone and feel of his translations is
good. What he has done in Waves is to recreate a new poem in
English out of the materials of the Kashmiri originals, generally using the
devise of paraphrasing, to bring out the quintessential meaning. And it is in
this attempt of carrying across cultures that his English sometimes fails to
take on the nuances of the original. At such places what slips away in the
translation is the very Kashmiriness of the context. This is what has
happened, for instance, in the poems The Bronze Hand. The Painting and
Chiselled Words - all of which have been taken from the collection
Paad Samayik (The Footprints of Time). In The Bronze Hand,
"the lovely luminous hands" ("khoshivuny shangarafy atha")
of the original, have become the Bronze Hand and the lines
"atha kastam divta sunday yus gomut ruzith dyana mauz/nata Gautam Buddh
anugrab mudra darith" (the hands of some god lost in meditations or of
Gautam Buddha in a posture bestowing grace) have been translated as "or a
hermit's meditating upon the word or Buddha's when he spoke of fire.
Similarly, in The Coming Millenium, Saraswati's vehicle,
"the white winged swan" has been translated as "the white winged
horse", which just does not get with the original. Surely, the translator
should have taken more care, for such things are bound to confuse the reader who
has read the work at firsthand.
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