Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume X | Issue 6
Mrinalini Harchandrai, Deputy Editor
One of India’s foremost Sanskrit scholar-translators, Mani Rao’s latest release, Saundarya Laharī, translated as ‘waves of beauty’, is a paen to Shakti, the Divine Feminine. The text’s author credit remains open to debate but is generally attributed to the prolific 7th century Vedic scholar Adi Shankaracharya. Mani’s translations are true to the Sanskrit rendition – spare, economic with a staccato rhythm, and densely packed with layered meaning. The aphoristic verses are both a devotional offering to the Goddess, as much as they are a description of sensory lushness, extolling Her domain of Prakriti, the created world, and the physical pleasures within Her realm that includes but is not limited to vivid praise for her form — full breasts, slender waists and a navel compared to a still whirlpool. To add to the sensorium, we present an audio of these verses in Mani’s voice.
Moving from a sumptuous spiritual aesthetic to one of complete self-surrender, we travel to undivided Sindh. Where in 1888, Hasi Bai was born into a wealthy Hindu family, but after becoming a widow, she changed her name for a Sufi male one, Nimanoo Faqir. Her journey of ego sublimation in a quest for the divine led her to consciously shed the overt garbs of religion and gender identity, instead taking on the shimmering cloak of a seeker. It was in this spirit that Nimanoo composed her kalaams, song-verses, that are sung even today by both Hindus and Muslims. Nimanoo herself was a disciple of Abdul Wahab, popularly known as Sachal Sarmast, a Sufi mystic and poet. His musical verses, or kaafis, are more classical in form with a rhyme pattern as opposed to her kalaams that tend to be a more unbound emotional expression. However both are similar in their theme of a divine seeking streaked with self-abandonment. Thanks to co-translators Gayatri Chawla and Lajwanti Jaisinghani, here we have Nimanoo’s work lucidly presented, glowing with the ardent ache of her kalaams as well as a selection of Sachal Sarmast’s fervent compositions.
There’s more song poetry, this time filled with an earthsome drift, from the Ao Naga and Santali. For instance, in several Ao Naga folk songs the moon has agency, choosing to stay away from playing with the children of earth, or humans assume the form of animals to escape cruelty, or star-crossed lovers entreat the wind element to exchange their messages with each other. The songs, some of which take on call-and-response forms, are filled as much with magic as with poignancy, where the details may vary, but the relevant themes remain intact. In this way, as in any oral tradition, the culture didactically imparts its philosophies and lessons down the generational pole. Temsula Ao, one of India’s finest ethnographers of the Ao Naga translates the worldview embedded in its oral song tradition in a series of moving prose poems. As a poet, she adds to the inherent wisdom and beauty in the songs with these translations that play with space on the page and contain poems within the poems.
Like in the song-poems of the Ao Naga, indigenous Santali poetry is replete with the personification of natural elements. In the translations by novelist, translator and doctor Sowvendra Shekhar Hansda, he preserves the tribal origins of the poems of Chinmayee Hansdah-Marandi and Parimal Hansda, and yet, they relevantly effloresce as eco-poetry. For instance, Chinmayee’s Ichag Baha is about a traditional summer festival, however the season itself is being ‘burnt’ due to climate change. In Parimal Hansda’s Lugu Buru, the poet rues the loss of values of the current generation and wants to save a hill, sacred to the community, by bringing it to his ‘clean courtyard’. Suchitra Hansda’s poems Young Lady Who is Going Places and The Mistress of the House are powerful laments about gender imbalance, and yet the women in her poems may be interpreted as earth mothers who are aggrieved for the dishonour meted out to them. The poet’s themes overtly reflect a burgeoning wave of courage in the voice of today’s Santali woman filtered with the tint of a creation-goddess. The poems are contextualised by Sowvendra’s Afterword and their intended lyricism enlivened further with accompanying audio selections.
Heading south to God’s Own Country, Anitha Thampi’s poems translate Kerala with an eye that is at once seduced by its glittering nature and sharp about its cultural echappés. She is innovative in form, preferring to romp in the freedom of a postmodern approach, and yet maintains the narrative storytelling style of a character-driven folk classic. Tropical magnificence is a strong feature in each of her poems, magically serving as a foil to the perceived anti-rhythms of community and tradition. Anupama Raju’s translation of Thampi’s work has the added facet of plucking at the rhythm of a Malayalam mindset – at once unostentatious in word, and yet a mosaic of habit and ideology struggling with local time. Like any translator who has to choose between the literal and the interpretation of an original work, Anupama treads carefully between illuminating the words, or else simply backlighting them.
Just as light can only exist in the presence of darkness, the fingertip of spirituality touches physicality. From the high mountain of the Goddess of the Saundarya Laharī, we descend into a war zone. A world that recently had its mortality explicitly defined in a drawn-out pandemic still watches in shock, imagining themselves in the shoes of the citizens of Ukraine hiding or evacuating between storms of shelling. The disorientation that comes with war reflects in Iryna Vikyrchak’s jagged enjambment. These are definitely war poems, joining the ranks of so many veterans and civilians over the ages trying to make sense of binaries and brutalities, pushing for a personalised resistance. Oscillating between a disbelief of ground reality and the fearful anticipation of the next swathe of heartache, the poet zooms into the emotional grain of shrapnel and zooms out – as all war poetry eventually does — into the eternal question of the meaning of our humanity on earth.
Mrinalini Harchandrai
Mumbai
Founding Editor: Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Deputy Editor: Mrinalini Harchandrai
Poetry at Sangam is supported by art and cultural organisation Raza Foundation and Padmini Divakaran