Poems that Turn the Pages of History

By Lakshmi Kannan

Radha Chakravarty is a poet, critic, translator and a former academic, all of which have a healthy influence on her writings. Our Santiniketan by Mahasweta Devi, Rabindranath Tagore Four Chapters, and Selected Essays by Kazi Nazrul Islam are some of her well-known titles. Translation is a creative engagement with a work that enriches a writer’s sensibility in subtle ways and enlarges her/his use of English. Chakravarty’s previous book Subliminal (Hawakal, 2023) not surprisingly, was mentioned as one of the best poetry collections in South Asia by Ars Notoria (UK) in 2024.  The remarkable restraint which belied the sobriquet ‘debut’ governs her second collection.  

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The poems take us to a wider arena with themes that fan out of memory – personal, less than an inch away from the political, memory about the historical recalling civilizations that eroded with the ruthless march of time, along with whispers from the earth with its memories of being grievously hurt by forces beyond its control.

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To begin with the poem that lends the title to the book, the poet looks back at her father’s migration to Kolkata (In Your Eyes a River)

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You never left Shyamsiddhi/In your heart you carried a home, / in your eyes a river, in the soles of your

feet, /the swing and shift of a bamboo sanko, / narrow bridge of precarious crossings  

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She adds, the highway of history/is a one-way route to the point of no return. A sense of displacement follows people stranded on a strange new shore/ driftwood dream of home- for the un-homed migrants (Driftwood Dreams).

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Memory is more than what we remember. A house can remember as much as the people who lived in it, once. “The Old House Remembers” in the ancestral home where everything was impossibly big, the rooms, the windows, the kitchen, marking an end of an era. Old homes held “untold stories” (Keys to Lost Secrets), with a pun on the word “keys” describing the way Bengali women of a certain generation wore their sarees in a distinct style, the pallu thrown over their shoulder with a bunch of keys.  

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“Grandmother’s Gramophone” takes you back to His Master’s Voice with the unforgettable Nipper. Food is not just memory; it is an emotional journey. The popular TV channel Raja Rasoi aur anya kahaniyan shows food historian Pushpesh Pant re-introducing us to delicious food prepared in the kitchens of India. Chakravarty’s poem “Chutney” is a mouth-watering experience for anyone who has tasted and smelt the five-fold fragrance of paanchphoron-/ cumin, nigella, fennel, fenugreek, mustard-

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Memories of war cannot be erased (War Scars), nor quell questions that rise about our benumbed senses (Ceasefire). Earth erupts in pent-up rage in protest, as it were (Etna Erupting) and from Mount Vesuvius in the Gulf of Naples, frozen forever in public memory (When Time Stood Still). One is thankful that the Majestic massif, lofty outpost/ for three neighbouring lands is holding on to inspire the poet to walk the air. (Kanchenjunga). Closer to home Bullets lodged in stone/bear witness to the bare-chested rage/of a host of unarmed men (Wounded Walls, Jallianwala Bagh, 1919).

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There is also war within a country, between the greed of merchandise and the manual labour that goes into it. With a brilliant title to match the contrastive images juxtaposed in a contrapuntal poem, presented visually in two columns with lines that evoke powerful responses, it should be read as a whole to get the rhythm of the poem.  Quoting a few select lines could be pardoned for   paucity of space:   

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Indigo, colour of peasants’ pain      

                                                  Indigo, blue, the planter’s gold

Neel, the toiling peasant’s bane                  

                                                    Indigo fera, the planter’s treasure

Famished farmers, forced to toil

                                                   Ruthless masters brandish whips

Farmers suffer the burden of need

                                                  The state and Company pay no heed

A receding flood, the peasants depart

                                                   The Company confronts a dying art

And so, the tide of history turns

                                                  As Empires blue gold dream declines.

Yet the craze for indigo never fades

                                                  It lives on now in denim shades. (Blue Gold)  

 

                                                                                    

Wit, pun, at times a bitter irony that curls around humour lend movement to the structure of her poems. The changes now in our lifestyle, with screen time, phone time, laptop hours are presented with a very current diction in the poem “Plan B” that roots for a new, daring route/ to doing no expected thing. There are brief poems written in a minimalist style, remarkable for their verbal thrift that works because of how she writes them (Singed, Love, Spin, Blind).

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Pun in the title unfolds with the tragic circumstances that surrounds a stone sculpture of ‘The Heart’, attributed to Rabindranath Tagore around the fragment of legend inscribed/in eloquent silence of stone. The poem has silences which communicate with the reader to infer his/her own significance to this fateful relationship. Love can bloom anywhere for Tagore and Kadambari, like the edelweiss flower in chilling alpine conditions. (Heart of Stone)

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Poems which are women-centred carry a liberating spirit. Gargi, whose guru is Yajnavalkya, has an insatiable thirst we relate to:

At the holy yajna in Janaka’s court/my queries spiralled in widening circles, /like a wheeling eagle in the vast blue sky…until we reached the limit of human knowing. (Impossible Question). 

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Chandrabati (1550-1600), a subversive medieval Bengali poet, declares:

 

For my story is meant for female friends, not for men in royal courts…    

                                                                                     

Not Rama, but Sita takes centre stage. Because she questioned the unquestionable, her temple in Patuari is gone. (Another Story) The Note says ‘her version of Ramayana, told from Sita’s perspective’ draws upon oral traditions, focusing on women’s experiences.

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Bitan Chakraborty’s cover design is lush and dreamy, showing a water body in the mind’s eye. It takes us back to Shyamsiddi in the title poem, the river in the eyes of her father. 

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History remembered, yes. We know these things happened. In the poems they are evoked as undead memories (Undead).  What marks the book is the way Chakravarty’s poems turn the pages of history in nuanced structures which sharpen our perspectives. If only the poems were arranged in thematic sections, perhaps the book may facilitate a more focused reading.

One could conclude with one of her minimalist poems.

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Time’s wheels turns/life into story/story into myth/now into then/then into once upon a time (Spin)    

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Sanko Bengali word for a narrow bamboo footbridge                                                         

Shyamsiddhi A village in East Bengal (now Bangladesh)