THE POETRY OF BHATNAGAR

Prof. M. S. KHAN

Indian Education Mission, Kabul, Afghanistan.

“The most artistic and poetic problem before the poet of today is not of evolving new techniques of expression or forging new imagery or form but developing a perspective suited to the complex ethos of war-renewed existence supported by the conviction that man is his own consolation” said Bhatnagar in one of his answers to my questionaire on the role and nature of poetry in modern times. That is why his poetry probes into the validities of human convictions against the background of space-oriented rationality. He does not idealize God, nature, religion or emotionality. Instead his poems are rooted in man’s consciousness and intellect. And he goes on to add that, “since poetry is a human product it must concentrate on man and derive its form, structure, syntax, logic and vision from him and for him alone.” He therefore discards surrealism, imagism, symbolism and other poetic movements as anti-poetry and condemns every elitism in poetry.

In “Poetry: An Anti-Literary Stance for Modern Times” he says that “poetry must be unpretentious, simple, relevant and communicative without assuming roles. If at all, it must have collective rather than individual appeal with focus on simplicity. For simplicity itself is an artistic attitude towards life, truth and reality.” He renders his poetry simple by his clarity of thought and expression. He doesn’t search for themes but for meanings that connect experiences to the vision of existence. His poems make one sit up and think of the apparent absurdities of human beliefs and behaviour heightened by an awareness of a delicate irony–revealing itself at the root of things. In this poem “The God-Game” he talks of the different gods who created the same universe in their own ways and pleads for sympathy with the condemned believers:

Is God a sufficient cause

To fight and die for?

The unholy war is over

It’s now a question of building memorials

To the numberless

Mauled and mutilated by their faith. (Oneiric Visions, P. 39)

The fallacy of kindness and love of God towards his devotees and followers is brought out with an equal touch of irony in the tragic death of an innocent boy who worshipped his God everyday.

During one of his innocent prayers

His clothes got all aglow with fire

In a holy contact with the lamp

But with his Lord unmoved by this purification

The tiny self lay in a trance

Never to return to his temporal worship of God.

(The Ritual: Thought Poems, P. 18)

Similarly “A Poem for the Pantheists” deals with nature’s indifferent cruelty to man suffered in the cyclones in Andhra:

An eerie hush reigns

Over the lush paddy fields

Littered with human carcasses

Like rice spluttered by an angry infant

And coconut trees fallen like matchsticks

And dwellings like houses of cards. (Feeling Fossils, P. 25)

In all these poems irony operates like the dazzle of lightning lighting up the dark, the gap between human beliefs and reality. The poet takes a further dig at the beliefs of man when he says in the same poem:

Now is the time to call a miracle-man

Or summon a meditating saint

To show his prowess of spiritual feat

So that we have at least a stick in hand

To beat the waters with. (Feeling Fossils, P. 27)

The concomitant presence of irony in the imagery and description of Bhatnagar’s poetry makes him stand out distinct among the Indian poets in English today. He does not use irony to take a dig like Ezekiel but to reveal the essential nature of human predicament and existence. His view of irony becomes clear from his statement that “Caught up in the centraries of life and death, man’s existence is the most profound irony varying to the extent and intensity of awareness with which the two extremes are perceived and harmonized. Further, the linear perceptions of man inhibit his vision to see the contradictions inherent in the nature of both human and non-human world.” Irony cannot be felt but perceived. That is why his poetry prescribes an intellectual apprehension and view of life. It therefore challenges the outdated mores, values and modes of human conduct and thought into a new awakening of perceptions. The way ethics can be cruel is portrayed in “Of Court and Cancer Ward” where a man not wanting to die is sentenced to death and the other wanting to die is kept alive to suffer:

But deaf to his cravings

The doctors pronounce in hushed silence

Of the painful end to be

And quote medical ethics

For his sufferings

Giving an unsought for hope

To his life. (Thought Poems, P. 6)

How contraries exist and work to a success is exhibited in “The New Scale” where what may be poison for one man may turn out to be another man’s meat:

A simple, honest man

In an outworn mode

May still himself find

Measuring life in value spoons

Bribery, corruption and forgery

For him a bitter poison be

But the clever in it

A meaty situation see

Dispensing poison like a doctor

Normalizing a disturbed balance. (Thought Poems, P. 15)

Bhatnagar is against fear because “It helps the negative forces to overpower the positive, the diabolic, the innocents. More than that, the voluntary surrender to fear frustrates the very purpose of life. Fear is a self-imposed indignity.” For this reason “Who is Afraid of Fear” is a challenging poem in the whole gamut of Indian poetry in English, which is so much warped by its poverty of thought, vision and attitude, especially in the field of our political existence. His mockings at the national leadership and its love for its country is revealed so subtly in his poem “I Have Promises to Keep” the leader vows:

To shake the universe

With the thunder from my throat

And was the last breath of mine

To keep any countrymen awake

With more dying words to reach

Before I sleep.

I love my country

Which loves my voice

And my speech. (Feeling Fossils, P. 12)

The way nations are born at the cost of human sacrifices has been so subtly and touchingly exposed that it has few parallels in description:

She was only thirteen

When she was butchered

On the birth of a nation

So that she could bless it

From above. (Birth of a Nation: Feeling Fossils, P. 14)

In a rare display of economy Bhatnagar recreates the mad race for chairs and positions of power in our country in a remarkably finished poem of high simplicity and depth.

Oh, what a fuss

Over a chair

Of old cedar

And teak!

It only holds.

Eh! It doesn’t possess

It has long given up

Its power of a tree. (Over a chair: Feeling Fossils, P. 21)

The hollowness of our national loyalties is exposed in “Crossing the Bar” imposing a deliberate parallelism with Tennyson’s poem of the same title both for deepening and widening the intent of his irony as observed in his earlier poem “I Have Promises to Keep” invoking the famous lines of Frost. Desciibing the deplorable national morals the poem reads:

Passing national secrets

On cold heights

Thickening conscience to snow

Makes small news in our country:

The big news is floor crossing

To keep our progress moving

Towards unrealized goals. (Feeling Fossils, P. 13)

The poet also sharpens his irony by subtle and gentle understatements and undermodes. Instead of emphasizing the tragic life of a homeless man in a big city he understates the predicament as follows by substitutes:

Although I have no room on earth

I have a place in the sun:

My life is not tragic

For I do not belong to the nobility

Even by way of fun. (What is the Difference: Gneiric Visions, P. 14)

The helpless cry over the pitiable condition of the demoralized self in general has gone so much out of repairs in our country that one has to be a slavish beholder of crimes, corruptions and injustices:

When I see a crowd

Line up for a bottle of kerosene

In tiring queues to light up

Their hungry hours: The numberless

Go blind of adulterated oils

Making a smooth passage to dark

And children thin out to death

For want of milk in the water

Served to them as food

I can’t ask my conscience to revolt

For suffering has become our creed.

(I Can Question only My Dreams: Oneiric Visions. P. 13)

In one of his very provocative and novel poems “Death Must Belong” the poet treats death as a loner and pleads that man must adopt it and that–

Man must give it an abode,

A warmth to feel by,

And a loss to mourn about

Till a lost child it returns

To its fold. (Thought Poems. P. 14)

Living, for the poet, is more important than death. And life is a long living in the exploration of the quality of life. Many of his poems deal with the problem of life and death in a new perspective. In a very pathetic portrayal of a hungry man the choice goes beyond both life and death:

He was not so hungry for life now As for food:

Not so afraid of death

For all its inevitable pull:

He only wanted to die eating

To die full. (To Die Full: Thought Poems. P. 12)

With all these subtle attacks on the worn out mores, modes and morals of human beings Bhatnagar celebrates innocence, which according to him is “the serenity and easy composure of a harmonised mind.” Poem after poem he points and pleads for innocence and innocents. Some of the most compelling lines from “On the Crossroad” read–

Uproot the signposts

That have aged telling faded routes

And bring down the milky way

For the innocents to tread on.

(Oneiric Visions, P. 18)

Like other Indian poets in English, Bhatnagar is also interested in the problem of art, poetry and life. While Ezekiel holds that–

A poem is an episode, completed

In an hour or two, but poetry

Is something more

(A Time to Change P. 13)

He makes a forced and frivolous division between poem and poetry. For, a poem can be nothing but a finished form of poetry. And then, describing a poem as an episode is making it mundane, accidental and casual. Poetry may remain as a flow in man but unless it forms itself as a poem it is not poetry. That is why Bhatnagar regards–

A poem is a smile

That spreads from eyes to heart

Using gestures

That have hidden their meaning

In an ecstasy

Of being beautiful.

(A Poem is A Smile: Oneiric Visions. P. 7)

The poet is against the prophetic in poetry as against the concept of the final meaning of life. Bhatnagar is of opinion that “All that a poet can do is to interpret the meaning of his experience poem by poem.” One of his poems reads:

Poetry is meaning

Like a deity enshrined

Words upon words the edifice built

What is the idea?

Where is God?

Who will tell what the artist sought?

(Round and Round: Thought Poems. P. 5)

Although the reader may not be in a position to understand fully the import and meaning of a poem “the poem must be direct and clear in its meaning after the tradition of Illiad, Ramayana and Bible.” Yet the whole truth or reality of things cannot be exposed to its nudity:

Some hold that a thin veil

Exposing the body

Makes the best overture to beauty:

A young maid unable to admire

A look at her bare body

Holds the veil of a mirror

To separate herself from her body

And looks at it as an artist

Possessed by the grandeur

Of nature’s art.

(The Cover for Beauty: Thought Poems, P. 19)

In a poem of sparking humour the poet resolves the aesthetic dilemma of the copy and original presented by Miss Burr as follows:

She was so delighted

With the fine copy of herself

That she readily proposed

“You are presenting a copy to me.

How about having the origina1 for yourself?”

The artist was puzzled.

He thought of Plato’s idea

Of the original in heaven

Brought so within his reach:

But as an artist

Chose to keep the copy

For himself.

(Of the Copy and the Original: Thought Poems. P. 20)

Bhatnagar’s poetry emphasizes the nature and quality of human life which exists by memories or dreams avoiding reality. It also has a tendency of living by substitutes, the paradox of which is presented in his remarkably condensed poem “Not to Die of Life” as follows;

We hope

Not to die of frustrations

Dream

Not to die of realities.

To die of truth

We have no heart

In order not to die

Of life

We have art.

In a rare achievement of the simplicity of diction and the fluidity of vision this poem can rank as a model of poetic excellence in Indian poetry in English today. It has all the power of a smile that is capable of moving the morose:

Grief over fate

Or pity from heavens

Gather weight like cotton

Soaked in water:

Saints, religion or philosophy

May enlighten him but

Smile alone will lighten his weight

And make his going light

So go with a smile

Bleaching sorrow from your bones.

(Go with a Smile: Oneiriic Visions. P. 52)

This is how both irony and vision, reason and emotion, merge into a smile that spreads from eyes to heart making Bhatnagar’s poetry richly simple, luxuriously clear and magnificently moving. His is a personal voice compelling composure and balance amidst confusion, chaos and contradictions. For him “each poem is an opening out into another, a clearing, a way to a more intense experience like a frogman exploring the depth of the sea.” Both his artistic and human beliefs move in the direction of what he calls “an awareness more aware of itself than awareness.” He, therefore, describes feelings closest to the mind expressed in a directness of urgent exposition without giving into Indian Georgianism. His is a poetry not of lost identity but what prevents identity from being identified. And his best achievement lies in establishing his identity with ease and brilliance in a language of least compromise. There is a winning intimacy in him which refines perception. There is a strength of hope built in his poetry by a secular and rational vision of his poems, thus breaking from the bane of insularity. His is a poetry of growth into manhood and humanity away from regional, provincial and cultural inhibitions. His conversational style makes him accessible to all those who love simplicity and clarity. His poetic powers drown the foreignness of the medium and lend a rhythm and sonority that is native to Indian contexts. Words do not drop like stones in his poetry but turn light and effective with the logic of feelings and rebellions questioning of the outworn modes of belief and conduct and the suspect national character and loyalties, yet he celebrates the personal voice speaking for humanity and his poetic wisdom ends in

…….a smile

That spreads

From eyes to heart

Using gestures

That have hidden their meaning

In an ecstasy

of being beautiful.

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