Muktibodh wrote unusually long poems and used to despair about their length, reluctant to send them for publication to literary journals, some of which sought them eagerly.
Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh breathed his last on the late evening of September 11, 1964, in a private ward room at AIIMS New Delhi. As a young poet, I watched from the window his breath slowing down. I had never seen a man dying before my eyes, the experience was traumatic. A few minutes later, I rushed to the PTI office on Parliament Street to break the news to the world. I had to teleprint it since the person in charge had already left, it being rather late.
Muktibodh was yet to turn 47. His first collection of poetry Chand Ka Muh Terha Hai and his classic long poem ‘Andhere Mein’ were yet to be published. All this happened 60 years ago. On his final journey to Nigambodh Ghat, he was accompanied by a large number of writers and artists including Agyeya, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Nemi Chandra Jain, Mohan Rakesh, Raghuvir Sahay, Shrikant Verma, Ram Kumar, M F Husain. Husain took to walking without shoes in the funeral procession and gave up wearing shoes for the rest of his life from thereon. With a few exceptions, nobody expected that Muktibodh would have a most illustrious afterlife in which he would emerge as a major poet and critic, inspiring several generations of writers. Muktibodh now is widely acknowledged as a master of modern Indian literature.
His first book of poetry and his classic poem were published in 1964, posthumously. His complete works appeared in 1980 in six volumes. A film relating to him, Satah se Uthata Aadmi, by Mani Kaul, was much admired at Cannes in 1981. A Muktibodh Fellowship for young writers and a Muktibodh Chair at the University of Sagar were established by the Madhya Pradesh government. Though a Marxist, Muktibodh came to be widely acknowledged as both a major poet and critic in Hindi even by non- or anti-Marxists.
Muktibodh wrote unusually long poems and used to despair about their length, reluctant to send them for publication to literary journals, some of which sought them eagerly. His poetry was complex as well. He was deeply interested in Gandhi, Marxism, Indian tradition, modernism, democratic politics and its tensions and contradictions in the Nehruvian era and their gradual fading. All the experiences of life, the insights gathered from a vast span of ideas, his own locale, circumstances, anxieties and disappointments made him a poet of both hope and horror. A poet of “the terrible news”, someone, who in a famous Joycean formulation “went into the smithy of his soul to forge the uncreated conscience of his age”. He evolved a vision of life and literature in which the real and the surreal, the social and the moral, questions and acknowledgments, experiences and ideas, conscience and responsibilities, the creative and the imaginary coalesce to inspire poetry, complex, in many ways weird and disturbing, but full of human warmth, empathy, and solidarity.
Muktibodh wrote of the dark underworld of his times by identifying the conspiratorial connections between politicians, mafia and other criminals, obedient intellectuals and tongue-tied poets and artists, ex-army generals, and ideologues for subverting democracy. It fostered shallow heroism and dismantled the conscience. In fact, to his undoubted commitment to ideology, he added the concept of human conscience at a time when the full range of Stalinist violence and killings had not yet surfaced. He lamented the shrinking conscience in our time. Though written almost 65 years ago, his poetry seems a realistic narrative of our own troubled times when violence and murderous tendencies, hate and lies, injustice and inequity have expanded disastrously. Muktibodh’s poetry saw all this coming. He turns out to be a poet of both his times and ours. The surreality of his poetry when it was written becomes the reality of present-day India.
Muktibodh did not believe in poetry being written from a vantage point, from a distance. His poetry enacts a reality in which the poet is complicit — not a witness but a participant. The “here” and the “there” merge seamlessly. The self, while assertive, also melts into the other. He called the poet “a spy of the soul”. This conception has a rich ambiguity: The poet not only spied on behalf of the soul but also, equally, searched and investigated the soul.
Muktibodh believed that poetry is also a civilisational critique. He expressed cosmic concerns and images and insisted on human responsibility. His poetry is a simultaneous exploration of the creative and the critical — the creative is critical as well; the critical has creative edges. A poet who gazes at the stars while finding himself in the gutters.
Muktibodh stands alone and aloof in the poetic tradition of Hindi: He has no predecessors nor any followers. His vision was truly epochal in its dimensions and was firmly rooted in his times. He wrote hardly any love poetry nor any about mortality. It is widely believed that there can be no major poet who does not explore these polarities of total presence and total absence — love and death. Despite avoiding these themes, Muktibodh emerged as a major poet who did not attract the attention he deserved during his lifetime. But he remains a stalwart, unavoidable, standing tall, and unconstrained by time or age. A poet of dissent and dissonance, a poet of darkness, and despair but also a poet seeking and pining for light, a poet who affirms, in complex ways, human conscience, creative courage, and responsibility.
The writer is a poet and critic
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First uploaded on: 11-09-2024 at 06:55 IST
