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Literary Review
POETRY
Land’s truth
KEKI N. DARUWALLA
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Packed with history and myth, Chitre’s mind is as freewheeling as his verse.
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As Is, Where Is, Poetrywala Publishers, p.346, hardback, Rs. 700.
Even as volumes of collected poems go, As Is, Where Is can be classed as a mammoth book. It contains poems of over four decades by Dilip Chitre, one of our foremost poets in English, as also Marathi. Almost 70, he belongs to the ol
d guard, most of whom have stopped writing poetry. His talents are many. Ace poet in Marathi and English, award winning translator, film maker, columnist and editor, a brilliant raconteur, outspoken for the right causes, Dilip Chitre has been somewhat of a cultural phenomenon.
Chitre’s first collection of poetry (Marathi) was published in 1960, the year he married Viju and left for Ethiopia on a teaching assignment. His first poetry volume in English, Travelling in a Cage (most of it written while he was at Iowa) was published in 1980. Perhaps that explains his omission from all the important anthologies of the 1970s, till I published him in 1980, in Two Decades of Indian Poetry: 1960-80, though that has never been acknowledged by the poet.
Vast gamut
Dilip’s gamut is vast — from startling ambulance rides and hospital poems, to the fairly inane breakfast poems, to unicorns making love, poems about painters, dying or dead friends, post-Modi Gujarat. Then there is the poetry of the later years, smeared with sorrow, when he was stricken with the tragic loss of his son. Dilip Chitre is a poet in the Neruda mould. The gestures are large, often larger than life and there is hardly a subject he is afraid to tackle. He is often wordy, not just in his earlier poems but also in the later ones. And he wears his heart on his sleeve. As you read the poems you can see how his ideas start flowing and get transcribed on the page. ( For instance, from “sipping black coffee” he will jump to smelling “the gradual aroma of slow mortality”.) The reader can almost scan his mind.
Terseness, modern poetry’s key word, is not his strong suit. His poems free-wheel through the cosmos unselfconsciously, and his mind, packed with history and myth, is as freewheeling as his verse.
The volume begins and ends with very personal poems, son Ashay’s birth in Ethiopia, with wife Viju very ill, and ending with the tragic death of his son. Poem 6 of the Ethiopian sequence is the most vivid and affecting, the delivery taking place even as the mother’s “kidneys began to fail, her heart to falter”. Though the poem is dramatic, he still could have tightened it further. The second stanza, detailing how he slept in the arm chair and watched the dripping catheter, could easily have been dispensed with.
Most volumes of collected poems start with a slight handicap — the earlier poems come first and they are not the best. Hence you don’t start with your better foot forward. The Breakfast poems, all 20 of them, in which fried eggs and coffee alternate with Kurukshetra, where he jumps from scrambled eggs to near-scrambled metaphors (“the suspense of cataracts/ In a stilled symphony”), and from tea and toast to the 10th “Avatar of Vishnu” are a little embarrassing. They are also uneven. A good passage like “The only slums/ That remain uncleared are/ Our own souls” will be followed by “I have gone to bed/ with horny females”. To the best of this reviewer’s knowledge, it is males who are horny. For women with similar ardour you have to look for another word.
In his element
In the next section, “Homage to Patliputra”, dedicated to Jayaprakash Narayan, Chitre comes into his own:
Walking through failing forests, subverted soils,
Thirst-cracked, I arrive
At my land’s own truth:
And ask
How a dishevelled line of verse,
Can cope
With the cruel unanimity
Of the universe.
He has telling things to say. Bahadurshah Zafar “died in the effeminate arms of a rhyme”. “The Marathas fought for freedom and won it/ When they rode as mercenaries and plunderers later,/ All they could produce/ was a syphilitic Peshwa”. Coming to our times he speaks of revolutionaries queuing up to “collect crumbs/ From the imperial treasury.” There is cynicism too: “Nothing is going to happen; nothing/ Except that the lean remain lean / And the fat stay fat.”
Patliputra, city of sleepwalkers
Nightmare capital , medieval ghetto of ghosts,
The air full of the traditions of decay,
The Bodhisattva pulls a rickshaw here
And the next uncertain meal is his Nirvana.
Then follow his better known poems, “Tukaram in Heaven, Chitre in Hell”, “Ambulance Ride”, “The Felling of the Bunyan Tree”. During the Emergency, he went off to Iowa and the 17 poems he wrote there formed the book Travelling in a Cage. The Emergency lurks like an invisible backdrop here. “Through tunnels of light we reach out towards the darkness”. From a life of action (Chitre was always politically very active) “I have come to a white page in which I must live”. Poem 5 is remarkably sensuous: “The door I was afraid to open/ Was autumn/ One luminous month of remembering/ Nothing/ The dark smell of rotting leaves in her voice/ while the sensuous shadows of trees burned in the river/ I became an insect of solitude in the grass/ sitting at the very edge of the season.”
Dilip has some visceral poems on Bombay, “Dark city made luminous by our dying/ Fat lights shining like hunks of meat hung/ from heavenly hooks.” As for the people, they are “displaced bastards clustered/ on a shrinking island that can only grow/ heavenward…”
No masks
When Chitre slips up, it is either due to wordiness or an excess of passion. “The Rape of Gujarat”, is an example. Poetry is not made of just feeling or anger or indignation. “No mother is safe, nor daughter, nor wife”. He calls the killers all sorts of names. That can never pass off as poetry.
One can’t cast a cold eye on the poems on the death of Ashay. “Our son was gone/ As suddenly as he had come/ Into the volcanic/ Eruption of life”. One notices a surrender to fate.—“The pianist’s fingers crushed by the composer’s will”. In the same poem (“Plethora”) he asks, “Where does one go from here/ Into the whole vastly helpless universe”. It is sad that the poems end on this bruised and tragic note. But then life bruises and lacerates most of us. Trouble is, Chitre can’t hide his bruises. He was never good with masks.
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