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Majboor and His Poetry
Trilokinath Raina
WAVES is a collection of thirty poems of Arjun Dev Majboor,
selected and very ably translated into English by Arvind Gigoo of the Camp
College for Migrants, Udhampur. J&K. This book won an award from Poets
Foundation. Calcutta, which was presented to Majboor by Chief Justice Shyamal
Kumar Sen of the Calcutta High Court on 20 December, 1999. Before this he had
received an award from the J&K Academy of Art, Culture and Languages in 1993
for his collection of poems, Pady Samayik ( Footprints of Time). However, awards
do no make a man; they are only a visible and legitimate recognition of the
stature that he has already attained.
Arjan Dev Majboor ( real name Arjan Nath Koul ) of Zainapora
in Pulwama District (b.1924 ) saw many vicissitudes in his early life. His calm
exterior, which Moti Lal Saqi has called deceptive, belies the turmoil his heart
has passed through. He has had a chequered career. Orphaned very early, his life
was a courageous and determined struggle against want. Having to keep the
kitchen fire alive when he matriculated, lie worked for some time in a co-operative
bank, then got a job in the court but the experience was not very encouraging.
In desperation he left for Lahore, where he gained in two ways: he started
learning Sanskrit, and meetings with Rahul Sanskritayan gave him a knowledge of
Marxism, and both these stood him in good stead. He appeared on the literary
scene in a turbulent time when a new age was being born, an age which all the
writers hailed as the promised millennium. The consequent change it fathered was
visible in poetry not only in the mental attitude but also in form and
techniques. The ghazal was being dropped and some western forms were ushered in.
In fact it looked like Kashmiri literature was casting off the slough of old,
ossified decadent traditions of thought and technique and acquiring a
resurgence of life it had never known before. Not that great poets and writers
never existed in the happy valley. In fact the history of our literature starts
with a poet who has always remained and will perhaps ever remain unmatched for
all time, i.e, Lal Ded. What I mean is that never before did the whole community
of writers and all artists, collectively, have a rejuvenating bath at a new
helicon, a new fountain of the muses. It is this atmosphere that Majboor found
himself in and was led most powerfully into the vortex. True, from Rahul
Sankritayan he had acquired a knowledge of how matter shapes mind, but a
knowledge of dialectical materialism is not enough to make you a poet. In the
new environment he found himself very powerfully influenced by the creators of
the new age - Mahjoor, Nadim and the other writers of the new community
of progressive writers, and he also plunged in. On his return from Lahore he
worked in Prem Nath Bazaz's standard till it closed down and unemployment
greeted him again till he equipped himself with a teaching degree and was
absorbed in the Education Department.
But despite joining the Progressive movement-in fact he
also worked as an assistant editor of its journal Kwong Posh for some
time-he never actually belonged to the movement as a committed
progressive writer like Nadim, Roshan, Zutshi, etc. but was like most followers
of the movement, drawn in but always outside the ring of political commitments,
though his firm belief was that literature cannot be divorced from society. His
involvement with the problem of the workers and the peasants was unquestionable
and always remained, but not in the sloganeering manner. The sighs of the poor
and beauty of nature-forests, rivers, meadows, mountain peaks-are
blended in his poems.
His poems, short stories and critical essays have been
published in the various journals in Kashmir and outside. He has translated
Kalidasa's Meghadootam into Kashmiri (Obra Shechh published monographs on
Krishna Razdan and Rahul Sankiritaya; ( Sahitya Akademi ), to mention only the
most notable of his compositions. He is not only a poet but also a seasoned
scholar and writer who has a number of published material-books and critical
articles-to his credit.
“The publication of Waves bears testimony to
Majboor’s serious concern as a scholarly poet for the projection of Kashmiri
literary works across the globe. The present volume is a laudable effort
especially to serve the objective of reaching a wider relationship across the
country and abroad. This give, an access to the cultural content of the original
poems." AN Dhar.
This is what any poet writing in a language with limited
readership would invariably desire. But before focussing on the poems presented
in this selection, it would be appropriate to have a look at all his poems from
the day he wrote his first anthologized poem Shongaan Yeli Raat to
the present day and how he has evolved as an artist during the last half century
.
He has experimented with various forms and emerged as an
essentially nazam writer. And he is most certainly a nature poet.
His deep rooted love for the sights and sounds of this paradise on Earth ( which
bewitched Jahangir once and continues to leave lesser mortals too spellbound) is
easily understood. I find it necessary to mention it right in the beginning to
emphasize the fact that it forms the basic theme of whatever he wrote. It
remains the backdrop even when he is talking about something else.
His first collection of poems Kalaam-e-Majboor
was published in 1955. This was followed by Dashahaar in 1983. Dazavuny
Kosam in 1987. Pady Samayik in 1993 and Tyol
in 1995. His creative talent did not confine itself to the field of poetry alone
but ranged from short stories to literary criticism, his most notable set of
essays being Teltqeeq. However, at present we are concentrating on
his evolution as a poet. It was a long journey from Kalaam-e-
Majboor (1995) Dashahaar (1983 ), in which we find Majboor
having matured as an artist and having developed a liking for the short poem,
which the great poets like Nadim and Rahi had already inaugurated in Kashmiri.
You find in this collection, simplicity of ideas combined with technical
dexterity. One of the significant poems in this series is Tamashaa
(presented as A Juggler's Trick in English translation in Waves).
The juggler comes with the usual tabor and entertains the spectators with what
is essentially an illusion. The poet wants to convey that life itself is an
illusion, a grand show compared by a master juggler.
The poems translated by Arvind Gigoo bear ‘eye catching
and appropriate titles' and have been selected from the various publications of
Majboor. Prof. A.N Dhar says that "the translations capture both the
essence and broad details of the original pieces. Happily the author of the
poems and the translator complement each other. As a final fine product, Waves
not only reflects the rich content of the originals, but also reproduces the
free verse form of most Kashmiri lyrics."
The very first poem, Portrait of a Child, where
he presents a contrast between innocence and experience is strongly reminiscent
of William Blake:
Grown-ups don't remember purity
and
children don't know defilement.
The Topsy-turvy Tree is a picture of the
present urban culture depicting a steady collapse of time-honored values.
The following satirical lines convey the poet's idea of the The topsy-turvydom
of a system with people facing urgent problems like deforestation. water
scarcity and pollution:
The tree said:
‘Why need water
when all are mad?
Henceforth,
flowers will bloom up in the sky,
a whirlpool will trap all,
it will rain acid,
beauty will be auctioned,
the wise will multiply,
greenery will disappear,
stones will cover the fields,
the lakes will turn into sand
and
moans will resound.
Even memory will end.'
In fact the poem doesn't look like a satire but an
unembellished dark prophecy. The Fowl presents the stubborn
irrationality of the Kashmiri intelligentsia which provides an excellent
opportunity to the sensible practical man to have a field day. There are quite a
few poems referring to the poet's loss of home, the land of his birth, the land
of his culture, the land of his forefathers. He has for the last eleven years
now lived a migrant's life at Udhampur, just as others of his community too were
uprooted on a fateful black night in 1990 and flung across the Banihal to the
arid land beyond. The Prison is one such place, a migrant camp in
Jammu with two neighbours by its side-the state prison and the cremation
ground. The condition of those in the camp is worse than that of those who
inhabit the other jail, where fellows are sent for a specific period after
having committed crimes, and are set free after that to join their families.
Those who come to the camp are absolutely innocent, but their imprisonment is
for life, and there is no hope of them going back to where they belong. The
"blossoms" mentioned in the poem are Kashmiri Pandits in exile, living
in ‘the dark cells' in the camp. Having left the valley when the ‘marigold
was the last flower of the year in bloom', they have been a monument of patience
in exile. The Snowman is a picture of their condition. It keeps on
melting slowly and silently.
In Wilderness the poet has a hope that the
period of this ghastly existence in the wilderness will end one day. The
City gives you briefly a picture of what happened when "the wisest
among the people" said:
"Now everybody is to himself;
I am no one to show the way. "
It is a fact. It happened in Srinagar. It was this rather
than the strong arm of the militant that created a community of refugees. And
this community is doomed to exist in a rootless state. The only thing that
floods ones mind is endless nostalgia:
Each warm evening
wet memories
transfix my heart
and
cripple me.
Hopelessness floods the room,
objects shiver.
My existence is a knot.
Home and river and rustle
flit and pass.
To The Swan is part of a poem in Majboor’s
collection entitled Tyol. The swan is the mount of goddess
Saraswati and has the magical faculty of seeing and knowing everything, and
sifting truth from illusion. It is of this mythological character that the poet
employs to reveal the present predicament of the suffering people. But more than
anything else, the poet describes the beauty of the valley which he has lost.
In Chiselled Words the poet speaks as the
literary craftsman. One sees his preoccupation with the problem of language and
meaning. It depicts the poet as a conscious craftsman operating as a non-conformist
in the realm of language, wrestling with words to accommodate them to his
purpose. So also in Sign he dwells on the evocative power of
words.
In the end, I would quote Prof. Dhar again : “Many poems
employ words (as phrasal clusters) that function as images and symbols - a
fact that also accounts for their tautness and density of meaning. The poems
reflect the poet' s broad humanitarian outlook and his serious concern for the
preservation of our age-old culture. Waves is most welcome as a volume
that is innovative in several respects. A lovable book, it makes pleasant
reading."
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