Tuhin Bhowal

Recipient of the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize 2022, Tuhin Bhowal’s poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Oxford Anthology of Translation 2022, adda (Commonwealth Writers UK), Poetry City USA, nether, Parentheses Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Ovenbird Poetry, and elsewhere. Tuhin lives alone in Bangalore, India and tweets @secondhandsins.

Translator’s Reflections

Mokshdhara, consisting of the words मोक्ष (moksha) and धरा (land) means ‘Land of Salvation’. As the former word is already popularly anglicized via the Anglophone diction, it’s a beautiful paradox that I, as the translator, have considered not translating this title primarily because it has been used as a proper noun in the context of the entire collection of poems. Mokshdhara is Sudhir Ranjan Singh’s second collection. Published after more than two decades since his first, some may agree that Singh was patiently trying to discover a deeper, immediate voice; I differ. I believe a world was being constructed inside Mokshdhara. That takes time. The narrator in the title poem (which is also the longest) has embarked on a journey through Gaya (Bihar, India), a place where the last paternal rituals after death are performed. The narrator seems lost but evokes histories, both personal and social, and myths associated with the small ancient city with a precise taste of nostalgia and travel. Mokshdhara is not only a meditation on death, desire, and disease but also a study of memory and body, longing and belonging intertwined with the politics of loss. Myths keep running amok not just via the tool of referentiality but woven so seamlessly as poetic intertextuality that one experiences different worlds between one stanza to the next, or an enjambment. Some of the legends invoked are the first poet, Valmiki’s witnessing the killing of the male crane during mating as he lashed out angrily at the hunter which became the first shloka in Sanskrit and Hindu literature, the tale of Vikram-Betaal based on the Betaal Pachisi, and the epic Ramayana itself among others. “The ambiguity employed by Singh is truly dexterous in this avant-garde Hindi collection.” which very well glints in these two poems as well. Also, the greatest living Hindi literary critic, Singh’s scope of poetic influence is eclectic ranging from Dante, Pound, Goethe, Eliot, Ginsberg, Kabir, and Nirala to psychoanalysis in poetry by Lacan. Mokshdhara and its poems form a new benchmark in Hindi poetry; its translation necessary more than ever.