Sunday, August 13, 2000		Article

MOST of the contemporary Indian poetry in English comes to us from the corridors of university departments. Gone are the days when community used to be the hub of poetry. Thus , contemporary Indian English poetry is passing through a crisis of credibility and authenticity.

M.G. Gandhi, a Rohtak-based political scientist by profession, has no professional obligations to write English poetry as a careerist motive. Poetry simply gushes forth from his soul. The fact that he has published more than 10 collections is evidence enough of his overwhelming, compulsive inner poetic urge.

In terms of the underlying philosophical impulse, Gandhi’s poetry is sustained neither by modern imperatives of agnosticism and empiricism, nor by postmodern poetics of subversion. Entrenched in the Indian tradition of mysticism, the poet does not harbour any of those fanciful, mundane, exotic trivialities that enamour the playful imagination of mainstream Indian English poets. There is no room for external clap-trap in his musing: "In my book of revelation/no delirious delights/no rhapsodies of longing/no songs of affliction. The external is internalised and the mundane is transmuted into divine. In a bird’s tear, the poet see(s) is flicker, his rustling wings/warble with songs. To him "A 10 inch Nataraja/in tandava pose/ is a source of power/to revive a fading flower. The spill from the physical to the metaphysical is epiphanic: I go slamming every door/slip on a plastered floor/none there to attend/save a bloody altar."

Gandhi’s poetry does not succumb to the pressures of imported literary fashions and fads this poetic aesthetic retain the incantatory solemnity of ancient vedic hymns and prayers. His haikus and quartrains could be taken as contemporary equivalents of ancient mantras and sutras in which the poet condenses his apocalyptic prophetic vision though a wide array of creative images, metaphors and mythical co-relatives.

In Gandhi’s metaphysical vision, poetry is neither a facetious improvisation nor a playful caricaturisation of the ideal and the supreme, nor is it an art of the status quo. Poetry is "a serious calling". It is the harbinger of revolutions: Every poem-in-action/suffuses into the sun./The colour of revolu-tion/Parched earth revels in green. There is an intense kinesis in the poet’s mystic outpourings. Instead of brooding in a solitude, the poet-persona, "runs", "sings" "shuttles", "bounces", "swims", "jumps", "rides", "rocks and rolls". There is an unmistakable emphasis on verbs.

True, Gandhi holds a poem to be "a precipitate of pure time", a rosary of thoughts. But his poetry stems from an intense spiritual awareness that comes to him through his constant inter-action with the existential and the human. Existence is not wished away, nor essence is dismissed as a nebulous idea. Existential dilemmas and queries bestir his poetic consciousness thus: Why is a man born? Why does he die? Who ordains/his hell or heaven.../ Who holds the scales?/Who records the deeds?/ Who dispenses the

fruit?" Mortality as an existential fact of life is acknowledged and accepted: "Life is a bubble/on rippling waves/a cross space-time".

In terms of diction and idiom, M.G. Gandhi lends a distinct edge to metaphysical poetry through a deft use of images and metaphors from modern sciences. The title of some of the later poems viz. "Frankenstein", Tissue Culture", "My Radar", "Quantum Jump etc. reveal beyond doubt the poet’s uncanny foregrounding in modern science. In Dying Man’s Declaration", the metaphysical anguish has been conveyed through an idiom which marks a remarkable rupture from the purple-adjectived idiom of his poet predecessors like Aurobindo or Tagore thus: I see many holes,/ozone-layer-like,/in my skinny coat/ I am bleached/asphyxiated/dumb, I write/the dying man’s declaration".

The conventional and stereotypical imagery of snakes and serpents, bells and drums, moons and stars, rivers and lakes, fountains and springs etc. gives way to current coinages.