Rev.-1

 Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 1. May 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094



From Dulung to Beas: Flow of the Soul 



From Dulung to Beas: Flow of the Soul: Jaydeep Sarangi, Authorspress, 2020. pp 83. ISBN: 978-81-72736-46-0, Price: Rs. 295

--- Emilie Collyer


Before reading Jaydeep Sarangi’s From Dulung to Beas: Flow of the Soul, I turned to the internet. As an Australian writer only slightly familiar with India’s geography, I learned that Sarangi places his collection, and his readers, between two rivers, hence the notion of flow. This is an apt word for the experience of this book. It carries the reader from internal meditations to social commentary and winds through personal memory and philosophical reflection.

 

          Sarangi commences in a place of dark contemplation. ‘Shall I Speak Again’ (p. 17) immediately raises questions of voice and persona: who is speaking, why do they hesitate, what has caused the melancholy of ‘Voices unmet, longings dislodged’ so that the speaker has no choice: ‘Finally, I withdrew.’ The epigraph from Naruda provides a hint: ‘Love is so short, forgetting is so long.’ While it may be tempting to interpret this as romantic love, Sarangi’s poem keeps the possibilities open. It may be a reflection on any kind of relationship: familial, social, political, historical, where one person feels unheard and unable to find connection.

This shifting sense of voice and persona is a feature of the collection and makes for lively and pleasurable reading. While there is a sense of the writer - a body and voice from which the poems emanate - there is equally a sense of inhabiting other bodies, being curious about many voices and shifting perspectives to build a rich world of human experience.

 

          In ‘Life Beyond’ (p. 18) we are presented with the image of a person contemplating their place in history, what they have inherited and what they have to pass on.

 

All morning I sat at the arm chair
hands folded and ponder over limitless waste.
I smell its loneliness. Desiring stones
gather all ancient shadows I visited.

 

The tone is one of reverie but the stillness is balanced with curiosity and a sense of active engagement with the universal dilemmas of life. The speaker contemplates their position ‘between the mundane and the metaphysical’ and goes for ‘A quiet walk’ ‘to a strange part of life.’ Point of view shifts swiftly while remaining anchored by the initial placement of the sitter in the arm chair. The speaker is at once like ‘the crow / time keeper for oral narration / for centuries to come’ and also a humble mortal, addressing their ‘Dear Mother’ with a simple promise to keep watch as night turns to day.

 

There are many poems of this nature, where Sarangi demonstrates an impressive skill for taking the reader through several perspectives and philosophical ideas, while also remaining grounded in the experience of lived reality. Further, the poems in this collection are economical in scale; large ideas are expressed via finely wrought texts. Many poems sit on a single page, providing an experience of reading that has a measured rhythm, opportunity to pause and breathe between each page turn.

 

The musicality and rhythm of the poems must be noted. Sarangi often employs the technique of parsing lines, punctuated with lines that are end stopped. In this way, the structure of the poems reflects the title and overall experience of reading the collection. The reader will enter the ‘flow’ of Sarangi’s language, as here, in the first two stanza of ‘When Door is the Margin’ (p. 28):

 

This calm evening, you know, I am awake
With my thoughts and the wind.
The room looks solitary
As a dejected lover,
Down under heavy hammer!


There were days
When I gave her company,
Wrote words with pen and a rose.

 

The choice of line length and enjambment even has the visual effect of the flowing water of ideas. The first line of the next stanza is end stopped:

            Pain grew tall in me.

The effect is one of both summary and pause; a way for the reader to feel the measure of sorrow, but sorrow that has been processed and considered; a reminder of the continuous ebb and flow that is the experience of grief. The poem concludes with a couplet, where the speaker is active, waiting for the next moment to occur. The meter is measured, a gentle rhyming technique is used, as a way to indicate, again, the ever-present continuity of this experience: the grieving, the waiting:

 

I remain on the door stranded
Waiting for it to be opened.

 

 When Sarangi expresses a more overt political message the meter of the poems reflects this urgency, a more declarative use of language as in ‘21st February’ (p. 32):

 

The police opened fire
on 21st February 1952
Unarmed peaceful protesters
After their heroic attempts
Accepted their spring.

 A frankness of expression is used to punctuate these poems, in an almost journalistic style, as in this line from ‘Pain Across the Salt Desert’ (p. 37):

Tea or no tea, many of them lost their job.

 

It is not just linguistically, aurally and rhythmically where Sarangi flexes his muscle. He also uses the visual and sensorial to great effect. There is almost a filmic quality to the poetry at times, as if we, the reader, take the point of view of a camera sweeping across various landscapes and vistas. Within a single poem (‘BRIGHT MORNING!’ P. 38) we might begin by inhaling deeply:

 

Here it goes –
The scented early sunshine,
From the river and high mountains,

 

Go on to feel the ‘caress and kiss’ of ‘perfumed morning breath’ and then land in the reality of: ‘the day’s hard work’:


In my stuffy suburban den,
Near the vigorous metro railway bridge
Between offices and homes.

 

This dexterity is also present with point of view, who is speaking and who is being addressed, as Sarangi uses poems much like the lens of a kaleidoscope, shifting and turning to capture small glimpses of different aspects of humanity and society. He may explore an experience such as homelessness: ‘I go down the green lane near Krishnagar station / hour by hour after a spell of regrets’ (p. 25); address a younger generation: ‘You need strength like an arrow / Of determination’ (p. 24) or trace the evolution of social change:



The college girl stands first
In University Examination.


History is re-written in black ink (p. 26)

 

Reading the collection brings to mind poets such as America’s Frank O’ Hara, Ireland’s Seamus Heaney and contemporary Indigenous Australian writer Tony Birch who also move between the personal, the social; between everyday observations, astute political commentary and more philosophical musings. Writers who use the music of their voice to capture the ordinary and, by attending to it, elevate the minutiae of human experience to that of hymn or prayer.

 

Sarangi delivers on the promise of his early poem (as quoted above) as he keeps transporting the reader ‘between the mundane and the metaphysical’ in poems such as ‘When the Lamp is Lighted’ (p. 36):

 

When my burning mind merges with my within
Who am I? What is my Being?
Longings and passions no more stir
Grief and aches no longer grip
It’s neither dream nor deep sleep
No sense of time but am aware

 

It can be risky territory for poets to engage in philosophical concepts – might the reader drift off, might the poems become generic ponderings rather than, as many writers, including William Carlos Williams have expressed: a machine made out of words? That is, a poem should have a sense of function, of movement, of making something happen between poet, text and reader. In this regard,  Sarangi has a knack for pulling the esoteric into the embodied, so that his poems fulfil that notion of active wondering rather than static pondering, as with the final line of the above poem, where the reader is grounded firmly in sensation: ‘A flow of cold fire runs through blood.’

An international awareness opens up with a section of poems where the reader is invited to visit a range of geographical and historical locations including New Zealand, Bangladesh, and a dancing reference to Australia’s Murray Darling river basin, looping in the overall themes of the book that we are all connected by the rivers of time and history. Commentary on issues such as colonisation are sharp and land like a plosive in poems such as ‘Recent Trends (p. 42):  

 

Dearest, You mustn’t forget,
Most of the time
We do not speak our mother tongue.
We only learn the languages that pay:
C++, Java and English.

 

There is a sense, as the collection swells into its full momentum, of an entwining of the epic with the specifics of human, lived experience; of exploring the world via small moments and encounters with friends, family and even mentors. A poem contemplating the notion of Advaita is chased by a poem about a simple, yet profound, encounter with a sister:

 

She has decided
Today we shall talk of the
Sweet little things only (p. 54)

 A wry tone emerges at times, bringing these poems alive as small portraits of the ordinary intimacies of life:

My close friend, steeped in astrology
remarks, “You needn’t worry.
Things will evolve
To solve all your problems.” (p. 47)

 

Of note, is the return towards the end of the collection, of similar sentiments to where the collection begins. There is an echo of loss and grief in some of the final poems, but the experience for the reader feels like is has become deeper. It is almost as if meaning has been made, for the poet and for the reader, by working through some of life’s existential quandaries with words.

 

Also included in the collection is a conversation between Sarangi and scholar Sutanuka Ghosh Roy. I will not review the specifics of this, suffice to say it provides unique insights into the mind and the work of the poet.

 

Throughout this admirable collection, there persists a sense of the serious contemplation of a mature person who is making sense of their life and seeking moments of stillness in among the constancy of emotional and social challenges. A poet who is alert to the here and now as well as their inherited legacies. To conclude with the poet’s words, rather than mine, I refer to ‘Soil of my birth’ (p. 68). Here we are returned to a sense of place and a communion with the mother but this time, instead of an armchair, the speaker is standing, feet in soil as if more alert, and also more grounded – not waiting or contemplating but living deep in life to its full:

 

When I stand near the soil of my birth                      
I remember my aging mother.
I see long breath on naked letters
For hunger, food and honour
My eyes are wet for mid night consoling.