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
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.