THE RAPTURE OF A SONG: ENKI PAATALU
D. Anjaneyulu
There are some classics of world poetry that move the human heart rather more than the others. Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Kalidas’s ‘Meghaduta’, Jayadeva’s ‘Gita Govinda’, ‘The Rubaiyat’ of Omar Khayyam, Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nightingale’, Shelley’s ‘Ode to the Skylark’, for instance, to name only a few at random. Every student of literature may have his own favourite list of them. The present writer has his. If he is asked to name one from Telugu his choice will spontaneously be Nanduri Subba Rao’s ‘Enki Paatalu’.
“Enki Paatalu” (The Songs of Enki) were written in the metre and style of a folk song. But they are obviously not folk songs in the accepted sense of the term. For one thing, folk songs are handed down to us in the oral tradition. For another, their authorship is, more often than not, lost in anonymity. Artless simplicity and lack of sophistication may be a third characteristic. Certainly of a large majority of them.
Nanduri Subba Rao was by no means an unsophisticated villager singing happily through his reed pipe. He was a lawyer by profession, practising in Eluru till his death in 1957. A contemporary of Basavaraju Appa Rao, Devulapalli Krishna Sastri, Nayani Subba Rao and others in the Romantic group, he found his voice as a poet when he was in his twenties. He was then a student of the Law College in Madras. We do not know what experience in his life or what incident in his observation had provoked him to compose the “Enki Paatalu”. But we could imagine the young law student commuting in the tram car between George Town and his residential district, lost in reverie at the sight of a comely lass and her companion from the countryside. When the heart is young the thoughts of most men turn to love. But it is only a poet who can give them voice in a way that finds immediate response from others who are or were in the same plight. The potential is invested with an intensity similar to the actual. It must have been a memorable hour when the poet’s heart was “stilled in his throat”. Nor would this fever-like feeling let him sit for a while or be at ease.
Nanduri wrote because he must. In this, he was one with great poets the world over. He did not continue to write when the urge was no longer there. In this, he was different from many of his literary colleagues in Andhra. Some of them go on writing, even after it is known that they have nothing to say. There are, of course, coteries of disciples, ever ready to see something profound in anything that goes in the name of their famous masters. Nanduri was lucky in that his output was limited and he had friends rather than disciples out to polish and project his faded image.
There is only one work to his credit “Enki Paatalu”. The first series of songs numbered less than a hundred. To this he added a second series later, calling them ‘Kotta Paatalu’ (New Songs) of a like number. There are two characters in the work - the heroine and the hero. He calls them Enki and Nayudu Baava. We don't know if they are merely lovers or husband and wife or cousins as common in Andhra. Perhaps, they are all the three. They are certainly the eternal lovers. Rustic and romantic, they are simple and sublime - simple in their living, sublime in their impulses. They are elusive, like the rainbow, ethereal like the air. We see them through a glass (Of the poet’s vision) darkly.
Enki is the constant nympath and Nayudu Baava (the suffix has a titillating and tantalising familiarity, with the undertones of friendly mockery and modest flirting that can
be best realised only by those born to the language) the passionate lover, that come on the reader, trailing clouds of glory of an undiscovered world. Their rustic speech and rural background should not set them apart in the faded class of pastoral heroes and heroines. There is nothing conventionally bucolic or arcadian about them. While their passionate ecstasies and silent exultations represent the right of the common folk to live and love in their natural unaffected simplicity, the colloquialisms and localisms of their speech serve to bring us the language of life rather than to confine them to any dialect or district. What sounds like slang has been cleansed of the vulgar tang in the alchemy of the lyricist’s art. The native wood notes wild may remind us of the vigour of Burns (whose highland pieces may be a closed book to those of familiar with the Scottish dialect) and the Gaelic grace of AE (George Russell), but the melodies have a common appeal to all who speak the Telugu language.
The startling simplicity of the language is matched by the spartan spareness of the story and the stringent frugality in etching the background. The whole picture is done with an almost tantalising elusiveness and lightness of touch. The severe economy of expression is in refreshing contrast to the verbal prolixity and woolly versification of adapted ‘Prabandhas’. Magic effects are produced by the simple rhythm that achieves richness and variety, with a native grace. Meaningful mono-syllables from the unminted currency of ordinary speech come tumbling down to produce liquid and haunting melodies.
Nothing is told directly about the hero or the heroine who sound like two strings of a well-tuned lyre, in these songs. From the soliloquies that quiver and vibrate with the gasps of an elemental passion and the ditties and duets that dance with the lilt and tenderness of domestic sentiment, we learn that the heart of Nayudu Bava “is stifled in his throat and struggling in his throat’, with a strange longing that leaves him no rest.
Enki flashes on our mind’s eye (as she does on her hero’s) like a streak of lightning. She builds her abode in his heart. She is simple enough but not too simple, ardent but not artless, loving but not unsuspecting, devoted but exacting in her demands. She can talk with her eyes and suggest with her sighs, mock with her eyebrows and “melt his heart”. No gold or silver to brighten her form for she has a heart of gold and tongue of silver. No mirror to reflect her beauty, which she can see in the pupil of his eye (for, is she not indeed the pupil of his eye?). He is her lover, the lord of her life, the king of her domain, the prince charming of her dreams.
To Nayudu Baava, Enki is not only the queen of his heart but a goddess come down to the earth. We cannot help seeing her through his eyes. She is a child of nature who embodies all the charms of womankind for him.
Kind hearts are, to this constant lass, better than coronets, she asks of him nothing more than a loving heart that knows not another; She sees him not only in her thoughts in the waking hours and her dreams at night, but in all the sights and sounds of nature in its changing moods. He remembers her in many vivid surroundings, rowing a boat that shoots across the gurgling stream, climbing up the steep hill with the ends of her saree wafted by the gentle breeze, that blows but hard on him, having a duck-like dip in the holy waters etc. But there are some scenes that not only live in his mind but haunt his memory at every step.
The earlier set of songs, whose simplicity and directness are combined with a sensuous rapture, ends on a note of good humoured, wifely banter and gentle upbraiding; and poor Nayudu Baava is told off for the nonce. He is asked not to feed her with empty words, but search for new melodies. The new strains of music that follow are marked by a subtlety of workmanship that has not the naivette of the earlier poems.
While the sensuous element is subdued with the mellow restraint of natural emotion, the flights of poetic fancy and imagination reach loftier heights yet unscaled. There is defter inter-play of light and shade in the imagery and the rare skill of a dance on the razor’s edge in presenting the lily without painting it. Nayudu Baava’s happiness has not grown any the less intense as the first flush of youthful passion finds sublimation in a perpetual dream, truer, in some ways, than the waking life:
“Wake me not, Oh Enki,
Wake me not from sleep;
for, a bliss so deep
Had never come my way
Wake me not anyway
Lest the dream should melt away
One ‘me’ alone for you,
But many ‘yous’ for me”.
To the boldness of experiment with metre the poet adds unexpected metaphors that spring upon us with a suddenness of association instinct with worlds of suggestion. The mountain stream feeds on the moonbeam and the gradient slumbers in the bed of the river. The lover, more seasoned, without being less passionate, tends at times to brood on his solitude and sound a note of complaint against neglect, more imagined than real:
The speech of blossoms,
Does Enki know
The mind of garden flowers
Does Enki know
Her friendships with flowers,
Quarrels amidst the flowers,
Will she turn a daisy
Leaving me high and dry
Like a log an oak dreay”?
Often does the hero linger in a mood of self-deprecation, only to let his Enki shine the better by contrast. Ever dazzling with native brightness - and not a reflected glory - she begins to dominate the scene, without a conscious attempt at demineering. The peacock, which avoids him, spreads its multicoloured fan-tail before her, the parrot and the pigeon perch on her dainty shoulders and caress her dimpled cheeks, the calf of the cow and the young of the deer rub against her saree-folds waiting to be fondled with closed eyes. (Shades of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala’ here?) The gentle cow itself, which is a model of meekness before her, gives no end of trouble to him. The bower without her in sight is but a faded flower past the bloom. She is still the soul of his voice, the tune of his song and the light of his world.
Enki is not without her plaintive numbers, either, on her side. He is away and no visible sign of his coming, when she most wants him with her:
“Won’t you come to me
Tonight, Oh King?
Should all the glory of the Moon
Waste itself away
On the mountain stream”?
The world will talk, for idle gossip is meat and drink to men (and, more so, to women) - how he dotes on her, how he meditates on her name as on a holy rubric. But the truth is known only to her. Even when the playful in-laws corner him (it’s all in the family game) about her name, he would not budge an inch:
“Never will he utter
Nor even number
Never for modest shame
Will he say my name
Now it is a bird,
And now a fruit,
A stone perhaps,
A flower at times”.
If he thinks less and less of himself, she yearns more and more for him. If he is not beside her, he should fill her dreams and she babbles out of sleep if he be not met in the dream. If she spots him in a crowd, he should come to her betimes. From the other bank of the stream, he should come to her betimes. From the other bank of the stream, he should take a leap, as if on wings, if he sees the lady with the lamp beckoning him towards her. They have their tiffs that add salt and spice to the food of love and lend a nip to the air of romance. She is doting and biting, soothing and scathing, motherly and mocking, by turns. She is pining and flirting, whining and shining in the interplay of light and shade. She is the faithful woman who can flirt with her man, and the constant nympath, who is inconstant, like the moon, in her whims, fancies and caprices. The lovers lose their separate identity and begin to see each in the other. The poet sees them, as they see each other, as the day and the night, the earth and the sky, nature and beauty, substance and shadow.
In spite of the poet’s tendency to grow a little too metaphysical in some of the later pieces (which seem to take the uninitiated reader rather beyond his depths) there is not, perhaps, enough provocation or justification to entangle oneself endlessly in the circumlocutory and complicated maze of philosophical concepts about the individual soul yearning for merger with the vision of the universal man in love with the eternal woman.
The characters are too vividly drawn and are too throbbing with life to be enveloped in the opaque haze of vague generalisations. Enki has all the smiles, guiles and wiles that are the God-given and man-winning charms of her contrary sex. She changes her moods but not her mind though it is the privilege of her class to do so. She may contradict herself, for she contains multitude. Six decades and more of the din and bustle, of carping criticism and fulsome praise, have not dulled the glint in her eye or stilled the beat of her heart, for age cannot wither her nor custom stale (to borrow a well-worn phrase that had long become stale) her infinite variety.
Even the best and most seasoned of sympathetic critics had, however, felt constrained to point out one or two faults in the songs. viz., lack of sequence in the story (if it is deemed a story at all) and a general sense of incompleteness. There is, also in many of the words and idioms; a new kind of obscurity which paradoxically enough, comes of severe simplicity. Like some of the mathematical propositions of Ramanujan or an Einstein, the songs convey more meaning than meets the eye and we grope in vain for the missing links. Every rift is laden with ore, but one wishes for a wider amplitude, for a better view. The poet himself sets all controversy at rest with a few cryptic words (that may or may not have an autobiographical undertone in a different context:
“Friends praise the workmanship
But the high and mighty see
No path or substance,
The bitter exchanges but crush
The garland of leaves”.
That, of course, is about Enki’s garland of leaves. But so it is about the poet’s garland of winged words with meaning wedded to the music of mountain streams. We can as well try to analyse the rainbow or dissect the butterfly, to get at their beauty and splendour.