A Life Misspent
Page 9
13 Goddess of the path.
14 Nehru’s residence was a centre of anti-colonial political activity, hence the speaker’s suggestion of an alternate name for the residence.
15 Minister of local self-government in UP, 1937–39. Sister of Jawaharlal Nehru.
P.S.
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Bhavbhay Darunam:
Terror of Being
Satti Khanna
Bhavbhay Darunam: Terror of Being
Satti Khanna
Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ had turned forty-one when he composed the eponymous autobiographical accolade to Kulli Bhaat (A Life Misspent). He was residing in Lucknow at the time, cobbling a living from copy-editing and proofreading, and from small payments for original poems and essays. He had gained something of a reputation, as he says. His dense existential poetry had dynamized Hindi letters. He was a hero to many young poets and critics. And yet he was living hand to mouth, making futile attempts to solve crossword puzzles in Saraswati in hopes of winning the much needed prize money.1
His elegy, Saroj Smriti, on the untimely death of his daughter Saroj, offers glimpses of the dire poverty in which Nirala maintained his sense of purpose. The poem is a lament for the privations he unwittingly inflicted upon his daughter. At the same time, in restraint and simplicity, it is unbearably beautiful:
Daughter, I was a worthless father, did
nothing for you. Although I knew some ways
of earning, I would always let them slip
away, knowing as I well knew the wrongs
attending the path to wealth. I always lost
the struggle for success. And so, my dear,
I couldn’t dress you in silk or even give you
enough to eat. But I could never snatch
the poor man’s bread or bear to see him weep.
In my tears I always saw reflected
only my own face and my own heart.2
Nirala was born in Mahishadal, a hundred miles south of Calcutta, on Basant Panchami, 1896.3 His family hailed from the Baiswara region of Uttar Pradesh, a region well known for its hardy peasant stock. Many farming families supplied broad-chested soldiers to the Indian army. When the princely estate of Mahishadal passed from a Bengali raja to a raja from Baiswara, opportunity opened up for young men from Baiswara to serve the Raja of Mahishadal. The new raja wanted a security detail from among his own people. Nirala’s father, Ramsahay Tripathi, found employment as a member of the raja’s ‘army’, seven hundred miles away from his ancestral village of Garhakola in Uttar Pradesh.
The ‘army’ was quartered in mud and thatch houses some distance—across ponds and orchards—from the stately palace of the raja. Nirala grew up fluent in the local language of Bengali, but his schooling was interrupted by family visits to Garhakola, and later, by the customary early marriage. He never graduated from high school.
He was married at the age of twelve to a girl a year younger than he was. They began living together when he was sixteen. His wife and many members of his extended family died six years later in the influenza pandemic of 1918. Nirala’s mother had died when he was three. His father had passed away in 1917. Nirala was, in many ways, alone in the world, having four nephews, a four-year-old son, and year-old Saroj to look after.
Of me so long unlucky you
had been the one blessing. Deprived of you
… life remains
one tale of woe.4
In consideration of Nirala’s father’s service, the Raja of Mahishadal offered Nirala work as scribe and accountant. A Life Misspent informs us how this spell of employment ended. Nirala returned to Garhakola in 1921 and looked for work with publishers and literary magazines. Prospective employers paid little attention to his self-education in Hindi, Sanskrit and Bengali. The lack of academic degrees proved to be a signal disadvantage. He elected to go back to Bengal later that year when the Raja of Mahishadal repeated a request for his services.
He stayed in Mahishadal only a few months. Through his interest in Ramakrishna Parmahansa, Nirala had come in contact with publishers of the spiritual magazine Samanvay in Calcutta. He was happy to move in with the sannyasis and edit Samanvay without any arrangements about salary; the legal and accounting work in Mahishadal had become meaningless.
Once in Calcutta, Nirala made the acquaintance of Mahadev Prasad Seth, owner of Balkrishna Press and printer of Samanvay magazine. Mahadev Prasad wanted to start a humor magazine in Hindi, and found in Nirala and two other associates a core group sufficient for the purpose. They called the magazine Matwala (The Intoxicated One) and filled it with poems and commentary written under assumed names to suggest a much larger staff. One of the assumed names Nirala used in the magazine stuck. He had previously been known only by his family name of Suryakant Tripathi. Now the pen name was added to the family name.
Henceforth, he was Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’. Nirala shared lodgings with Mahadev Prasad Seth and the two associates, but again there were no arrangements about salary. Mahadev Prasad Seth was host; the associate writers for his magazine were welcome guests.
Nirala wrote poetry for Matwala in the Khari Boli his wife introduced him to. He chose to write in blank verse, relying for evocative power on the beat of words rather than on end-rhyme. His poems challenged the decorousness of courtly poetry in the Braj language of Mathura, which dominated Hindi poetry at the time.
By his own example, Nirala wanted to strengthen Khari Boli so it would be adequate to the philosophic and aesthetic needs of the new nation. He felt that great leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru lacked acquaintance with the depth of Hindi literature and with the vigour of Nirala’s own practice. He had opportunity to meet them both and to try to convince them of the great progress Hindi had made. Some of the satire directed at them in A Life Misspent may derive from Nirala’s failure to persuade either Gandhi or Nehru in this regard.
A poem of Nirala’s published in Matwala indicates the romanticism which acquired the name of Chhayavad (shadowiness). It is an early poem, born of word music and deep receptivity to nature. It hints at but does not undertake the existential inquiry Nirala’s mature creativity was to make. In Sandhya Sundari5 (Evening) the poet’s heart aches for the loveliness of the evening. It aches also because the weary are lulled. They are soothed to forgetfulness; the conditions that bring on weariness haven’t changed.
Day’s dying–
Gathering clouds–
In gauze like angel’s wings
Evening slowly, very slowly,
Comes below.
Red lips and
Somber darkness.
A single star pinned to her raven hair
Marks her as queen.
Arms round her girl friend silence
On undulating umber path
Soft bud on vine–
No trembling of sitar strings from her touch,
No tintinnabulation from her feet,
Only her finger at her lips: Hush! Hush!
Hush! Hush! Like thoughts before they find a form.
Hush! To the stream, hush! To the mountain top,
Hush! To the turbulence of ocean waves,
Hush! Hush! The fire and the flowing air.
She draws the weary
Stroking face and hair
Pouring dark wine for sweet forgetfulness
Merging into the stillness of the night.
Restless and ardent
From the poet’s throat
A song breaks forth–
Raga of endless aching.6
A Life Misspent, in contrast, is a mature work. It brings bhavbhay darunam (terror of being) into consideration. The tone is ironic. The movement from scene to scene is often abrupt. Nirala’s despair when he returns to Dalmau is left to the imagination. The novel breaks off without leave-taking. The concision of the prose reminds one of Dante’s Francesca: ‘A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it; that day we read in it no further.’7
When Nirala encountered opposit
ion to his ‘rough’ style, he said he suffered from being an outsider. Had he been born to a princely family, he said, his innovations would have been celebrated as Rabindranth’s were in Bengal. He was right that better credentials would have eased his life. But could his achievement have been possible without direct knowledge of Sisyphean struggle?
1 Sharma, Ramvilas. Nirala ki Sahitya Sadhana. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1990. (1: 303).
2 Nirala, Suryakant Tripathi. A Season on Earth. Trans. David Rubin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. (89).
3 Basant Panchami fell on Sunday, January 19, that year.
4 A Season on Earth (95).
5 Nirala, Suryakant Tripathi. Rachanavali. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1998. (1: 77–78).
6 Translation mine.
7 Dante. Inferno. Trans. John Sinclair New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. (79)
About the Book
Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, the first modern Hindi poet of India, is all of sixteen and not conversant with the Khari Boli Hindi of the litterateurs yet when his father gets him married and sends him off to his in-laws’ in Dalmau to fetch his bride. There he meets a strange man called Kulli Bhaat who claims descent from a family of bards and, despite his mother-in-law’s reservations about Kulli’s sexuality, Nirala finds himself drawn to Kulli. Then an influenza epidemic breaks out, claiming numerous lives, and Nirala’s bereavement leaves him without mooring. Adrift on the boat of time, he seeks employment in various places but finds himself unable to stay away from Dalmau for long. Kulli, in the meanwhile, has taken a Muslim wife and become a champion of the untouchables.
Set in pre-Independence India, A Life Misspent is as much the account of an unlikely friendship as it is a coming-of-age story. A memoir on the making of one of the greatest poets of all time.
About the Author
Suryakant Tripathi Nirala (1896–1961) is associated with the Chhayavaad movement in Hindi poetry in the first half of the twentieth-century. He was a prolific poet and essayist, who altered the landscape of Hindi letters by the range and intensity of his art. Some of his most important works are Parimal, Anaamika, Gitika, Tulsidas, Sandhya Kakali, Chaturi Chamar and Ravindra Kavita Kaanan.
Satti Khanna is Associate Professor at Duke University, USA, where he teaches Indian Cinema and Modern Hindi Literature. He interprets the lives and works of contemporary Indian writers to an international audience through a series of documentary films and translations. He has translated Vinod Kumar Shukla’s novels Naukar ki Kameez (The Servant’s Shirt, Penguin, 1999) and Khilega to Dekhenge (Once It Flowers, HarperCollins, 2014) and Mohan Rakesh’s travelogue Aakhiri Chattan Tak (To the Farthest Rock, HarperCollins, 2015). He has also translated Shukla’s novella for young adults, Hari Ghas ki Chhappar Vaali Jhopdi Aur Bauna Pahadd, to be published by HarperCollins later this year.
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First published in India in 2016 by Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © Amaresh Tripathi 2016
Translation and P.S. copyright © Satti Khanna 2016
P.S. section photographs copyright © Vivek Nirala 2016
Front cover photograph of Dalmau house of
Nirala’s in-laws © Satti Khanna 2016
Back cover author photograph © Kanti Chand Sonrexa 2016
P-ISBN: 978-93-5136-476-4
Epub Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 978-93-5136-477-1
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Suryakant Tripathi Nirala asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover design: HarperCollins Publishers India
Cover image: Dalmau house of Nirala’s in-laws © Satti Khanna 2016
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