Hindi review
Remarkable senstivity
Harbans Singh

Nirvachit Kavitain of Bhagwat Rawat
Edited by Vikas. Itihas Bodh Prakashan. Rs 65.

THE selected poems of Bhagwat Rawat are not only representative of the private experiences and responses of the poet but also of his times. From the village that bears the scorching heat, which makes the earth open up in a thousand cracks, to the fields that get washed away by the fury of the river, everything comes alive in the crisp phrases and images that he creates. His poems deal not only with the world but also with the minds of the people who inhabit it.

The editor has done well to select the poems marking different phases of the poet’s life and place them in different sections. The hallmark of all the poems remains the sensitivity with which subjects like domestic violence and the lost childhood of the rag-pickers are treated. And, as if to assert that a poet has to respond to the changes that are taking place around him, he writes about not only the Bhopal gas tragedy but also to the Babri Masjid episode and the communal riots that followed it. Rawatanguish at the fact that socialism has failed can also be clearly discerned. This apart, there are a number of evocative poems inspired by urbanisation, for instance, Tutlane ki Awaz, though the dominant theme remains a curious mixture of Munshi Prem Chand and Fanishwarnath Renu, as is evident in poems like Bailgadi and Suno Hiraman.

This collection is also remarkable for the realistic manner in which love has been treated. In the earlier poems there is the harassed housewife, caught in daily chores, and a willing prisoner of her small world, who does not afford the luxury of love, but later in the collection the reader finds that the affection of the poet, too, is being increasingly bestowed on humanity in general. While the poem Wah Ma hi Thi is remarkable not only for the economy of words but also for the evocative image it builds of the suffering of a mother and the transformation that takes place in the child. Reasonably priced, the book is worth a place on the shelf.

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