We are awash in eulogies for the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee – and with good reason. Just think of the present occupant of that high office, and the concomitant coarsening of public discourse.
However, when the valedictory excess is sought to be extended to Vajpayee’s poetry, it is time to stop. After all, words – literature – are sacred. Shabda Bramha, my tradition proclaims. Words matter, truth matters. This becomes particularly relevant in a time when, in fact, the most horrifying acts are being perpetrated in the name of the sacred.
It is in that spirit that I have dug up my modest attempt to tell the truth about Vajpayee the poet some 20 years back. With respect.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Meri Ikyawan Kavitaayein
One could have said, we have not lost a prime minister, we have gained a poet. After all, Atal Bihari Vajpayee makes the usual noises about how the demands of public life have forced him to neglect his muse. Well, now he can make amends to her. Auden counselled that poets must consort only with powerful men who whisper secrets of state into their ears and beautiful women into whose ears they whisper, well, sweet nothings. By all accounts, Vajpayee is well-positioned – but how good is the product?
He is a rhetor of a high order. Many people will go long distances merely to hear him speak. His prime ministerial swan song was a command performance. He can appear Olympian one instant, a knife-wielding streetfighter the next – he can be arrogant and winsome, classical and popular, moving confidently and flexibly over the cultural range to move his grateful listeners at will. It is this flexibility which is missing in his poetry. It might almost be as if he needs an audience to get him going, to thaw him from the frozen postures prescribed by his preferred shade of cultural nationalism.
To understand how this happens, it is necessary to step back into history. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Brahmins of the Hindi heartland (with a sprinkling of other savarna classes) were seeking to muscle in on the cosy dominance exercised by the ‘Avadh elite’ which was hybrid, cosmopolitan and feudal-aristocratic. And perhaps the most insidious strategy which they devised for this was the appropriation of the gloriously mixed common tongue of the common people. The end product was what we recognise today as High Hindi: Brahminical, Sanskritic, purified of ‘alien’ influences. So, there are at least two Hinds: the common one that swept the country in centuries past; and the synthetic one, which was invented in the early 20th century and which so many of us have encountered. Vajpayee the poet is, finally, a prisoner of the second.
Not that the vocabulary is limited. There are many words which would be Urdu if he hadn’t excluded those dreaded agents of contamination, the nuktas. But the affiliation cripples him at a deeper level. Writing on Nazism, George Steiner noted how its authoritarian, goose-stepping beat had perverted the dense and thoughtful music of classical German. The savarna elite which had pioneered Brahminical Hindi had an analogous need to stamp out the confusion of history, to forget the past even as it sought control of the future. The linguistic consequence is a kind of ‘soundproofing’: words are used to arrest the wayward and playful rhythms of natural language, and chain-ganged into parade ground drills. The literary concomitant of this is a kind of posturing, a histrionic performance against a mythical/historical backdrop, from which the materiality of actual history is carefully filtered out.
Many will have a painful familiarity with this kind of poetry; declamatory verse, patriotic stuff suitable for earnest schoolboys. This is marked by a kind of loud attitudinising, abstracted from context and specificity:
Main Shankar ka vah krodhanal kar sakta jagat kshaar kshaar
Damru ki vah parlay-dhwani hoon jisme nachta bhishan sanhaar
Ranchandi ki atripta pyaas, main Durga ka unmatt haas…
This complex of abstract rage, abstract enemies, abstract fulfillments best expresses the historical urge of the savarna classes which are in flight from history. Nursing their victimhood, they are ill-prepared for the complexities and ambiguities of actual situations. It makes for a peculiar, ‘platonic’ poetry – a sort of sketch or diagram, minus the substance of experience. As against all this declamation, poetry must happen in a normal voice – ruminant, flexible, ironical.
It is a pity that poet Vajpayee rarely allows himself to drop his voice to a humane level. But he does sometimes, and the results are pleasing enough, albeit in a minor mode – not enough though, too many inherited and automatic ‘poetic’ moves. He appears to have a genuine feel for the music of the common tongue – rubbed down and softened in the run of time. This is very evident in the Emergency poems, but it is missing in the patriotic stuff that he produces when he is not incarcerated:
Ujjwaltar ujjwaltam hoti hai
Mahasangathan ki jwala
Pratipal barhti hi jati hai
Chandi ke mundon ki mala.
There is another interesting cycle of birthday poems: Vajpayee shares December 25 with another. I looked for one dated December 25, 1992. I can imagine the kind of loud and bullying thing that the imitative Jammu boy, ‘mini-Atalji’, would dish out for his BJP audiences. I like to think that the occasionally adult Vajpayee could sound different: it would be some compensation for the alarming glimpses of his RSS face, ‘Hum Hindu’ set against ‘Ghori ki santati’.
Alas, the birthday poem for 1992 simply wasn’t there. Just like the Babri Masjid.
Alok Rai is a writer who doesn’t teach in Delhi any more
