Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali

Here is the first one as I translate it:

BARITONE¹

Let us all move together, one and all,

Together into the cavern of the ribs,

Raise there a song of discordant sounds –

Red and blue and white, kin or alien.

Listen, the groan plays on:

Dreams as if possessed

Swing, like bats on branches;

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Is now the time for the dance?

Come, let us all move together, one and all.

Let the streams meet in the body, one -and all,

Yes, let the bones brighten up still more;

Let us all go around the fire

And scrape and eat of the very Liver, the Muse's self –

Let us go, let us go, one and all.

DIP AK MAJUMDAR

Can you make any sense out of it? This seems to be surrealistic with a vengeance. Anyhow there is no doubt that it is a puzzle, a veritable Chinese puzzle. The puzzle however appeared to me interesting. I felt that the poet, through this cryptic – mantric – collocation of words and images, attempted to give expression to an uncommon experience. It was as though I entered into a Tantric experience – but of the left-handed path (vamacara).

There is a Tantric discipline which speaks of the body-fulfilment (kayasiddhi), a spiritual consummation in and through the body; the body-consciousness, according to this view, is the greatest reality. And whatever is achieved must have its final and definitive expression and manifestation there, in that concrete reality.

The body, the body-consciousness, our poet says here, is to be a confluence, where all the streams of consciousness, all the movements of the being, flow in: movements of life-force, movements of the mind, secret 1.1.rges of the subliminal physical consciousness – pure and impure, things foreign to its nature, things that are its own, elements friendly and unfriendly, all assemble in a market-place, as it were, the result being a huge horrid discordant music, a groaning, a bellowing of a queer orchestra – the bass, the lowest note of the system that the human vehicle is.

There is a call for all the parts of the being to precipitate to the very foundation of the being, coalesce and evoke a wild and weird, doleful and discordant symphony – a painful cry. Unrealised dreams, that had faded into oblivion, are now like possessed beings and hang like bats on darkling branches:

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they are about to begin their phantom dance. Even so, the body, the material precipitate into which they gather, gives them a basic unity. These elements with their ardour and zeal kindle a common Fire. There is a divine Flame, Agni, burning within the flesh, burning brighter and brighter, making the bones whiter and whiter, as it were – the purificatory Flame, Pavaka, of which the Vedic Rishis spoke, Master of the House, grhapati, dwelling in the inner heart of the human being, impelling it to rise to purer and larger Truth. But here our modern poet replaces the Heart by the Liver and makes of this organ the central altar of human aspiration and inspiration. We may remember in this connection that the French poet Baudelaire gave a similar high position – and function – to the other collateral organ, the spleen. The modern Bengali poet considers that man's consciousness, even his poetic inspiration, is soaked in the secretion of that bilious organ. For man's destiny here upon earth is not delight but grief, not sweetness but gall and bitterness; there is no consolation, no satisfaction here; there is only thirst, no generosity but narrowness, no consideration for others, but a huge sinister egoism.

The cry of our poet is a cry literally de prifundis, a deep cavernous voice surging, spectral and yet sirenlike, out of the unfathomed underground abysses.

The cry has nothing in it, very evidently, like the thrill of a skylark's throat.

Something of the purer atmosphere of the heights and heavens we breathe in our second poem. We move no more here in the darker left-handed labyrinthine path, but swim in a lighter clearer air through which passes the right-handed path. Here it is in its serene simplicity:

I EMBARK¹

Trampling my own shadow

on a long, long path I came

And saw a river of gladness.

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I pushed the bank with my left foot

And with my right landed in the boat.

Here a straw canopy over the head,

A wooden floor to sit upon,

A sure helm and an oar within reach

And a sail to unfurl in the sky:

All were there –

A whole lungful of breath

Grew into a flight of white pigeons

That found the sky.

PURNENDU PRASAD

Kasmai devaya havisa vidhema? To which god then shall we dedicate our offering?

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