The Eliotian experiment in Assamese poetry was taken up by the poets of the (Nineteen) Thirties and the Forties when Assam saw the fury of World War II. Those who were fond of the poetic effusions of Ganesh Gogoi, or Devakanta Barua, had to habituate themselves to a new attitude and acquire a new taste for the new poetry of Hem Barua who had appeared in our poetic horizon with the most unpoetic poem entitled Bandor.
His first poems were very courageous attempts at wholesale renovation of poetic form and content. Like TS Eliot, Barua threw away the conventions of poetic creations lock, stock and barrel into the dustbin of literary history.
The Forties were terrible times for the entire humanity at large. The entire world was passing through the greatest crisis of the century. The spectre of war, famine, disease and all-out economic disequilibrium cast their ominous spell all over. The poets could not keep themselves aloof from this global turmoil, which had affected the entire panorama of human life in all possible spheres. The ivory tower of romantic contentment started tottering on its very foundations, and it was Hemkanta Barua who gave the final death blow.
Romantic by temperament, this terrific rebellion against the out-dated romantic idyll by Barua had come as a great surprise to many who at that time were breathlessly listening to the wonderful tale of Konnoky. It was an attack from the most unexpected quarters. There were reasons, perhaps personal, for this sudden conversion. Disillusioned with the expectations and faced with the obnoxious realities of life, Barua felt the diseased pulse of modern life, for the first time in his youthful life. The world was ‘out of joint’ – perhaps he mused over this many a time when he found hypocrisy, sham sentimentality and commercialised relations of human life all around him. And Hem Barua turned into a rebel with the volcanic impetuosity of his mighty pen. His ruthless contempt and rabid hatred for the status quo were terrible. It was, if anything, venomous, so much so that some of the so called modern poems were nothing but socialistic political tirades, the paragraphs of which were sub-divided horizontally to give them the semblance of poetic form. However much we denounce the puritan adherence to versification, no poet, not even Pound, Eliot or their followers – had ever succeeded in wrenching themselves completely from the older and wider forms of poetic expression.
Cyclic change is the rhythm of our social and cultural existence. Human nature is such that it forever welcomes novelty and hates the stereotyped. The universal function of poetry is always to appeal to our emotions first. This is easily achieved by metrical ingenuity, free verse, sprung-rhythm, speech-rhythm or even Flint’s theory of cadence – all nothing but novel experiments on the perennial capacity of poetry to appeal to the intellect through emotion. Eliot had, to his credit, the urge or rhythm in his poems. Hem Barua did not have that in the beginning and as such, his first poems were nothing but clownish attempts at the achievement of the Eliotian miracle.
But we must excuse Hem Barua for this. For that was the beginning of the poetic phase of his career which was the envy of his friends and foes alike. As the prime mover of modern Asomiya poetry, Hem Barua had a lot to do in the year that followed.
There are two Hem Baruas in our poetry. One is simple, innocent and intelligible. Here Hem Barua is the poet of the people. For here poetry springs directly from life. It has its magnetic appeal of the heart to the heart which is felt along the blood. Here expression is natural and graceful communication is instantaneous.
The other Hem Barua is unnatural, unintelligible and superpedantic. Here poetry limps with over-intellectualisation. Here one will find all the familiar symptoms of the yelling school – I mean, the so-called progressive poetry of the modern adulterated brand. Further, here one will always find a super-conscious effort which is disgustingly obstinate in its pseudo-poetic fervour – the accumulation of unknown allusions, useless references, boring parentheses, senseless quotations, unending processions as well as totally unnecessary echoes of familiar passages at the most unwanted places – brackets, dots and dashes and what not!
The credit of a poet depends upon the expression and communication of something, which he feels or experiences. In his paragraphs of algebraic poetry, Barua has only expressed himself. God alone knows what he has expressed therein. If publication in print means expression, then also, he only half succeeds. Communication is yet to be accomplished. In many poems of the other Hem Barua as a poet, he is a very pitiable failure.
But he achieves the most miraculous effects in his immortal poems like Mor Prem, Jarar Dinar Sapon, Bihur Dinar Gan, Ityadi and Mamatar Chithi. These are some of the very few poems in which the poetic principle of Eliot – that poetry is understood before it is communicated – is amply illustrated.
His first attempts like Bandor or Puja are like adolescent adventures of an ambitious poetaster. In these poems, if poems we may term them, we hear the politician’s merciless criticism of the modern social and political order of life. They are socio-political satires with their fearless exposure of capitalistic tyranny.
Here we find Barua as if he was delivering his magnetic speeches in ruthless spontaneity in Parliament from his socialist political platform.
But, gradually, there came a change as a welcome relief from the poetry of political oratory. We then found Hem Barua, the poet of the man, speaking to his men from the core of his heart. And whenever he wrote from his heart of experiences which he had deeply felt, or of things which he had himself seen during his orbits around the world, then and then alone, we find the real poet in him. In such poems he does not betray the over-intellectualisation of Navakanta Barua. Neither does he produce concentrated poetic pills out of over-squeezed experiences of life, as is sometimes the case with Mahendra Bora or Hari Barkakoti. Here we find the fusion of searching reflection with overpowering emotion – a perfect harmony between intellect and tender sensibility.
His Mor Prem is a grim and painful commentary of the 20th century urbane love. In this poem, Barua has not hesitated to strip off all the marital taboos. In our present mechanised sordid and individualistic human society, love is no longer an ethereal bliss. It is now a diseased emotion infected with mundane material obligations. The barometer of love fluctuates as the monetary weather changes.
Brutal scorn for social sham is another salient feature to be noted in Barua’s poetry. It is vehement and ruthless in expression. He wants the immediate cessation of all that is sham, ostentatious and senseless. He has no mercy for camouflaged social hyprocisy. He has no patience with this nauseating environment around him. For a moment Hemkanta emerges on the precipice of the grimmest pessimism when he finds death and destruction all around him. But that momentary despair yields before his indomitable energy in which runs the plasm for the rebirth of a new generation in the brave new world. Barua looks for the unknown future world, that is to see the light of day. He assures himself that the agony of the present times is but the birth pangs of the unknown future. The message of the Upanishads was there to reassure Eliot of the possibility of fruitful reclamation of the wasteland of our life. Barua’s optimism hinges on the revolutionary fervour of the people who were alive and kicking to bring out a new civilisation out of the chaotic waste and destruction of class struggle.
The feeling of hope of the re-birth of a happy new world out of the embers of the conflagration of cyclic class-struggle is the dominant undercurrent that runs through most of his poems. His Jarar Dinar Sapon, in fact, epitomises everything, whatever he has to say pertaining to the future world. This dream symbolises a far away vision like the Magnetic Mountain of Cecil Day Lewis.
Hem Barua’s technique of poetic composition is basically architectonic. Usually the poem is patterned on a sequence of paragraphic structures. Those of his poems which do not have the overweight of super-intellectual jargon, have in them as their life-breath the magnificent speech rhythm of TS Eliot. In this context, it must be acknowledged that that, to a great extent, Hemkanta was influenced by the technique of speech rhythm, most skilfully and lovingly employed by Devakanta Barua. Most of Hemkanta’s poems have cadenced involutions, stops, exclamations and interjections of ordinary tea-table talk. Sometimes it is a onesided conversation of ordinary life put in black and white. And, in such cases, poetry is often an unperceived by-product, like his famous poem entitled Mamatar Chithi.
Hemkanta had skilfully adopted the techniques of Kenneth Allot and Dylan Thomas for his poetic compositions. Like Dylan Thomas, he created new myths out of ordinary words.
Borrowing of ideas in literature is not a new crime. Literary giants of different ages had occasions to acknowledge it. They borrowed without the least compunction and hesitation, and ultimately lent their own stamp to the borrowed or stolen ideas or even famous phrases of English as well as Indian poets. But they attained a new lustre and radiance when such ideas, images or phrases re-emerged from Hemkanta’s pen. By his echoes, like TS Eliot, Hemkanta also achieved startling effects.
Modern poetry has no room for antiquated traditional images. Through an image, a poet of a particular age critically observes the sensibility of his times. A poetic image is a coloured photograph of the time. In the establishment of modern poetry, traditional images are like dishonoured cheques. An outdated image of a bygone age in the contemporary surroundings is just like a pensioned government official serving again on an honorary lease of service. Hemkanta’s images portray the sensibilities of the contemporary scene. They are usually original with that Hemkanta charm pervading over them. Just as Amaru is best appreciated in his individual Muktakas, Hemkanta can be best enjoyed in his individual paragraphic structures which are laden with a host of novel images. His images are hard, vivid and brutal. Sometimes they are strange, weird or ethereal. Or else, they are dangerously sensuous, appealing to the intellect as well as to hybrid emotions instantaneously by reason of their strong sense of sound and colour.
It is difficult to quote Hemkanta by a single poem or a single paragraphic structure. But phrase images like ribs of dream, the barren Mother Earth, the steel spark of the eyes, procession of rats, a spoonful of the ocean’s blue can hardly be forgotten easily even only with a single reading of his poem. In the interview with his reader the first impression is the decisive factor of success or otherwise of a poet. By his wonderful images Hem Barua creates his first impression. He succeeds at once, and the reader is left with an indelible impression.
Hemkanta’s images have no direct and immediate relation. They are like individual passengers in a railway compartment coming from different stations. Hitherto unknown, they are acquainted in the course of the journey. A few of them light up the compartment with their tales of woe or mirth or anecdotes of humour of variegated hues. The rest are mute listeners or the audience by compulsion of circumstances. Their presence or induction is a necessity in as much as they perform the duties of the unknown extras. In this manner, only but a few of the numerous individual images brighten up the atmosphere of a Hemkanta poem. He puts his images arbitrarily, so as to be able to create an atmosphere which is best appreciated by the synthetic effect it produces. From the technical point of view, his later poems are but examples of the application of the principle of cubism in modern Assamese poetry.
In his sequences of paragraphic divisions, usually one division symbolises one emotional strain. Out of a heap of fragmented images, Hemkanta creates a superb atmosphere. You can’t understand him at the very first reading, he conditions his readers to an atmosphere of his own creation. In the creation of a peculiar atmosphere, in conformity with that particular theme which he deals with, Hemkanta’s hand is as skilful as that of Jibananda Das of Banalata fame of Bengal. In fact one is drawn towards his poetic abode – by reason of the atmosphere that prevails around it.
Like the poetic pieces of Kenneth Allot, Hemkanta’s one paragraph structure comprises many an image, which appear before us in cinematographic rapidity. By these rainbow coloured images, Hemkanta weaves his garland of enchanting poetry.
The shooting star dazzles in our eyes
Yonder emerging, yonder away it dies –
In our anguished hearts
And in the balimahi dances
Furies of the seven seas arise
(Jarar Dinar Sapon)
Hemkanta’s poetry is characterised by a vigorous political consciousness which takes its life breath from Marxian socialism. Like the earlier verses of Stephen Spender, some of his poems are propagandist in element for political regeneration of the entire humanity. His idealism is neither vague, nor ethereal like that of Shelly. In his later poems, there is always a perfect concord between poetry and propaganda. Try as he might to demolish traditions, Hemkanta instructs as he delights. Writing always of society, political regeneration, human uplift from capitalistic tyranny, Barua is strangely individualistic. This social sensibility is allied with a strong sense of individualism that is Hem Barua’s personal note in the personal symphony of modern social sensibilities. Barua’s poems always have an undercurrent of tender pathos, of painful joy and of tearful jubilance. Take any of his later poems, read it half-a-dozen times in an atmosphere of mysterious loneliness. You will discover the hidden spring of tender pathos from which this emotional river originates. Human experiences are always the same in essence throughout the world and throughout all the ages. It is a drama of life and death, of misery and happiness, of love and hatred, of smiles and tears. While giving expression to their variegated experiences of sensibilities, the poets of different ages and countries condition their medium of expression to the spirit of the age. The conditioning is a personal affair. It reflects the individuality of the poet. Hemkanta’s individual note is that of tender pathos– the supreme sentiment– which Bhavabhuti so rightly eulogised.
Hemkanta says:
O Sakuntala
Our rolling rhymes are the anguished
Wails of the present times.
We sing about the times.
Barua achieves maximum effect with minimum expression, like his contemporary Mahendra Bora. In the image of the waning moon, he finds a likeness of the present struggle for existence:
In this night of the Dark Moon.
Look! There the moon fights for its life.
Hem Barua was a man of the common people with whom he was in great love. His love of the common man transcended the geographical barriers of all the nations of the world.
His poems are like Browning’s dramatic monologues. Usually they are addressed to the lady love in the alcove of his romantic imagination. His Sakuntala or Sonpahi – by whatever name he endearingly addresses her – is nothing but the symbolic representation of the people. That is about Love impersonal. As a poet of love, in the real sense of the expression, Barua has the majesty of Bhaba Prasad Rajkhowa. He does not have that dangerously passionate intensity of Devakanta Barua. Hemkanta is totally disgusted with the modern degeneration of that supreme human bliss, which is now totally dependent on the boons of comforts that trail behind economic prosperity which ushers in pelf and power. About the fickleness of sophisticated love he says:
In the Ganga- currents of your body
our love is like paper - boats.
Hemkanta does not want to escape from the miseries of this world like Keats. Neither has he any reactionary tendency, he does not ask his lady love to accompany him to some dreamland of blissful romance, far away from the madding crowd to remain there by the Arcadian bowers enjoying eternal and endless joy. He finds this abode of romance in the dingy market-place and invites his beloved to assist him in the reconstruction of the alcove of perennial happiness out of the mud, dust, smoke, filth, and rubbish of the city slums. With Cecil Day Lewis, Barua has only to say:
Move then with new desires
For where we used to build and love
is no-man’s land.
Barua’s similes and metaphors are original and thought-provoking. He gives only a few hints or clues to be taken up by his radar in order to be able to find a logical sequence in his imaginative thought processes. Sometimes his similes or metaphors do have echoes of Eliot, Coleridge, Louis Macneice, Tagore or even Buddhadev Bose.
Commercialised life has no time for sentimental dalliance or romantic love. Economic independence is the primary need of the moment. Hunger must be satisfied first. Rest may come afterwards. There is no time for dalliance with love. Man is too pre-occupied with the basic problem of earning a livelihood. And so Hemkanta says:
In the zig-zag course of the endless budget of life
you wont find me there.
(Mor Prem)
Describing the fickleness of modern love, he says:
We are milestones on a dark night
In the vicinity of your youth.
The present world-crisis is portrayed by Barua in this beautiful image:
The earth trembles terribly
Like the unknown bride
on the first conjugal night.
The star -spangled night of Uruka before the Bihu festival is described as follows:
The stars shine in the sky
Like electric lights of a city.
Sometimes a single image lights up a whole poem as , for instance, the astonishingly beautiful portrayal in the poem entitled Mamatar Chithi:
In that basin of the clouds
of the sky/The round moon/in
the shape of a boat/Beckoned to us/to go to the land of the shining star.
Whenever Hemkanta writes consciously, with a determination to write in the most ordinary language of life like Wordsworth, he is a total failure there. Then he produces such trash, dull and insipid stuff like boring commercial newspaper reportage.
Rice is very costly/price of fish is very high/we have the hunger of centuries in our belly/Oh the students’ fees are also increased/wherefrom shall pay?
But when this morbid complex of conscious modernisation of poetry is away from his mental world, we find Hem Barua in his jovial and exalted mood. In such inspired moments he created immortal poems like Jarar Dinar Sapon, Ityadi, Bihur Dinar Gan and Mamatar Chithi.
His Mamatar Chithi is a piece of great work of art. It is great for its masterly execution, great for the sentiment. Its depiction is great for universality of appeal. It is a poem written in the form of an ordinary letter by Mamata, the unfortunate young widow, to her dead husband and reveals Hemkanta’s deep insight into the workings of the mind. The analysis of the thought processes of the young widow is superb and wonderful. The poem brims with a pathetic tenderness that appeals instantaneously. His Mamatar Chithi is a curious mixture of romance and realism, of life and death, of vague imagination of the immortality of the soul and transitoriness of matter, of the natural and the supernatural. With its universality of appeal and finesse of execution, it is a great classic challenging comparison with Pound’s River Merchant’s Wife.
In poems like Jarar Dinar Sapon or Bihur Dinar Gan, Hem Kanta’s poetic glance extends beyond the furthest horizon and surveys the entire panorama of human life in an ethereal ecstasy. As in the poetry of Stephen Spender or of the Hindi poet Girija Kumar Mathur, Hemkanta is sometimes intensely lyrical. In such stray passages, the romantic note prevails. In such moments Barua is extremely personal. He dallies with his emotions, as it were, he is on a holiday from his numerous political obligations and assignments.
Poet, politician, educationist and one of the greatest orators of India, Hemkanta has left many indelible marks on the younger generations of Asom by virtue of his various activities and the most lovable and adorable personality till death snatched him away from us when he had reached the pinnacle of glory, fame and made a name for himself and for all of us– the Asomiya. The younger poets of the fifties and sixties were the first to come under his mysterious spell. Barring a select few, almost all the young writers of modern Asomiya poetry have been influenced by him. Hem Barua is to modern Asomiya poetry, what Syed Abdul Malik is to our short stories. Literary prophets like Hemkanta or Abdul Malik are a necessity of times. For theirs is the primary responsibility to mould the cultural life of the people of a region as a whole. They are like generals in the active war zones, giving directions as well as inspiring confidence in the minds of the inexperienced soldiers.
Yet, sometimes, the continued domination of such giants is dangerous for the vital flow of life of the nation as whole. For, like the banyan trees, they cripple the saplings that dare grow under their majestic shadow. Hemkanta has given us the directions. It is upto the poets of the present times to build magnificent poetic mansions out of the materials which are lying all around us hitherto unexplored and untouched. It is upto them to give a concrete shape to Hemkanta’s immortal dream of the winter dawn.
On summing up the achievements of TS Eliot, RA Scott James had said:
“He brought into poetry something which in this generation was needed: a language spare, sinewy, modern, a fresh and spring metrical form; thought that was adult; and an imagination aware of what is bewildering and terrifying in modern life and in all life.”
I repeat the same in respect of Hem Barua’s achievements in the poetic domains of our literature.
