Sunday, September 7, 2003		Books

Signs and signatures
An American poet’s passage to Punjab
Darshan Singh Maini

THE great American poet, Walt Whitman, never visited Punjab or, for that matter, even India, though his celebrated poem, Passage to India has received a lot of insightful criticism both in India and in the USA. Indeed, India figures as a grand metaphor in his poetry, and it appears this distant land of the Vedas and fabulous riches of the spirit had, as in the writings of other Transcendentalist writers, become a land of the imagination where the human soul in search of nirvanaor arrival offered endless vistas of infinity.

Whitman’s poetry has been translated into most of the major languages of the world, but, to my mind, no poet in America or elsewhere in the world ever came so close to the ‘heart-pulse’ and ‘soulscape’ of Whitman as did Professor Puran Singh who had providentially came across Whitman’s Leaves of Grass while training as a botanical scientist in Japan around the turn of the 20th century. That encounter with Whitman was so blessed in effects that Puran Singh’s own poetry in Punjabi became, as though, a direct vessel for the thought of America’s most radical poet.

As Puran Singh dipped more and more into the depths of Whitman’s verse, he became convinced that he was, in a manner, a poetic reincarnation of the American poet whom he later called "the Guru’s Sikh born in America". Now the idea of "poetic incarnation" is not foreign to Indian poetics; it’s certainly something difficult for the western scholars to understand. For, the concept of reincarnation is the fulcrum of Hindu thought, as, indeed, it is of Sikh thought and scriptures. In his book, The Spirit of Oriental Poetry (Kegal Paul, London, 1926), Puran Singh calls his "beloved" Walt that singular flower of America whose verses are "light as the wings of the birds". And he goes on to celebrate the "sweet insanity" of his poetic "guru", "a singing master" of his soul.

In a manuscript Walt Whitman and the Sikh Inspiration which Puran Singh left behind at the time of his death in 1931, and which I had the privilege to edit and publish for the Punjabi University, the Punjabi poet makes an elaborate attempt to establish the theory of poetic reincarnation. This book which I presented to the Walt Whitman House in Huntingtin, Long Island, during my visiting Professorship at New York University (1988-90), when invited to speak on Whitman’s birth anniversary, came as a revelation to the assembled Whitman scholars. For, Puran Singh asserts in this book that Whitman was a poetic prophet whose spirit had mysteriously passed on into his own.

Now theories of poetry and influence have been in great vogue from T.S. Eliot to Harold Bloom who in his recondite and influential critique, The Anxiety of Influence argues that each strong poet must "kill" his poetic "pater" or "forefathers" to create a "space" for his own muses. The Freudian theory of the Oedipus Complex obviously coloured Bloom’s thought. Even Whitman himself echoes this view when he says in Song of Myself, "He most honours my style/who learns it to destroy the teacher." This "slaying" of the "pater" poet, however, is not accepted by Puran Singh who regards the earlier masters as "gurus", worthy of adoration and worship. The Master-chela relationship is a hoary Indian institution, and involves the pupil’s total surrender. Such a surrender becomes a requirement of his aching spirit. In the end, a mystic rapport between the receiving mind and the Master is established, and the energies of vision create craft and skill.

Clearly, Puran Singh is not seeking a theory of poetic craftsmanship, he is set out on a voyage of self-discovery through the Master’s word. To prove that he is not riding a fanciful Pegasus, he goes on to quote parallel lines and passages from the Guru Granth Sahib and Leaves of Grass. He has deciphered the great hieroglyphic hand of America, and he knows the inner truth of it. "We have", he avers, "taken strolls in each other’s company in the gardens of the beautiful". Thus, metaphorically, he traces his lineage to Whitman in his own unique way. As he puts it, "I find the poetic spirit of Whitman identical with the Sikh spirit. It is not so much mental similarity as the psychic unity of the soul-consciousness underlying the Sikh literature and Leaves of Grass."

That’s how Whitman announces his poetic ministry:

And Whitman writes apropos of Leaves of Grass, "Who touches this touches a man". Compare this with Puran Singh’s poetic credo as expressed in The Spirit of Oriental Poetry, "we have our poet rather than his art."

What drew Puran Singh to Whitman was, above all, the volcanic energy and the oceanic undulations of his poetry. Its rapturous excess, its spontaneous flow, its horizontal spread and its vertical insights made up for him a poetry of prophecy. No wonder, in both of them, the imagery of eruption, plunge, swing and flight, is pervasive. Both are bowled over by the sheer sparkle and dazzle of God’s creation, by its opulence, energy, plenitude and extravagance.

Again, both Whitman and Puran Singh were radical poets in the best sense of the word. Both challenged soulless orthodoxies, political tyrannies, and societal iniquities. Their democracy was, then, in the widest possible aspect of the human dream, and is the apotheosis of the spirit of man. This all-embracing democracy is possible because both reject gratuitous pain, suffering and evil as such. Both discard abstraction and systematisation. Similarly, the body-soul bonding, a recurrent theme in Whitman’s poetry, finds a ready echo in Puran Singh’s verse; both find no dichotomy in the body-soul eternal, inviolate relationship. The sexual imagery in Whitman’s poetry serves both as a catalyst and a vehicle. The astonishing fucundity of his verse is directly related to this powerful sexuality. In Puran Singh, on the other hand, there is a more refined sensuousness, and a more controlled eroticism.

And, finally, a word about their idiom, style and prosody. Verse libre or free-verse could have been the only form suited to their muses for emotional release and consummation. To clothe deep feelings or stirrings of the heart and soul in rhymes is to drape them in a fatal livery of adornment. Whitman, in fact, justified the use of slang, patois and colloquial expressions in Primer "All words." he writes, "are spiritual; nothing is more spiritual than words." A similar word-play marks the poetry of Puran Singh also. Buffon’s classic definition, "Style is the man himself" is proved most profoundly and eloquently in both these poets. Here is Puran Singh singing:

Even the titles of Puran Singh’s poetry volume — Khule Maidan, or "The Open Wide Fields", Khule Ghund or "The Open Veil" and Khule Asmani Rang or "The Wide Blue Skies" — affirm his faith in opennesses, in widths, in amplitudes. This sui generis affinity of vision, values and word in both these poets at once intrigues and fascinates the reader.