Dilip.Chitre's profiletrajectoryPhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
August 28 THE DEATH OF BHUJANG MESHRAMLast night I received an SMS from Hemant Divate---friend, fellow-poet and publisher. It told me of the untimely death of Bhujang Meshram, a contemporary poet from the Gond 'Adivasi' tribe that once ruled the forest heartland of India and has now been colonised, oppressed, and is being systematically decimated by our government's 'development' projects dominated by tyrannical economic policies that are paraded as initiatives in liberalization.
Bhujang's poetry rose from his own besieged and embattled world. He wrote and published poems first in the Marathi language that was not his mother tongue. Later, he infused the idiom and vocabulary of his poetry with his Gondi language and dialect. It was a poetry that stood firm on the poet's identity, voice, and location. It was a part of the politics of identity that informs much of today's tribal, dalit, feminist, and even gay poetry. But Bhujang's poetry uses techniques that are bold and innovative.
Bhujang was barely fifty when he died suddenly and in his literary prime. He was close to both my wife Viju and me whom he addressed as Tai ( Elder Sister) and me as Dada (elder brother). He would visit us at short notice or unannounced, late in the evening, and bringing for me my favourite beverage---wine or liquor made from the flowers of the Mahuva tree. We would sit through the night, until I began to yawn or doze. Then he would vanish into the night, as he has vanished now, alas forever.
Bhujang was a heavy drinker. Alcohol for him was fraught with unpredictable consequences. It often brought out all his hurts and his anger against the system that he served. If he was not physically in our midst, he would call on the telephone, often audibly drunk. Sometimes he was paranoid, swinging between feelings of persecution and delusions of grandeur. However, Bhujang was a warm and generous human being, a remarkable poet, and above all a citizen of the troubled time and space of India that we claim as our own despite frustration and alienation. August 23 Poets BirthdaysVinda Karandikar, is 90 Today! August 23 is the birthday of Vinda alias Govind Vinayak Karandikar. Today he is exactly ninety years old. I spoke with him a little while ago on the phone as he is one of my many 'Gurus' in poetry as well as in life. I reviewed his second collection of Marathi poems in 1954 when I hadn't yet graduated from high school. My review was published by the then leading Marathi cultural weekly Mouj. Vinda was so excited by my appreciation of his poetry that he wrote me a postcard using every millimetre of its scant space and invited me to see him in person at his residence in Mahim, a suburb of Mumbai. In the event we met, he a person twenty-one years older than me, and I just deciding that poetry and the fine arts were my true vocation. I took admission in the Ramnarain Ruia College in Matunga, Mumbai where he had recently joined as a lecturer in English. For my B.A. I chose English Literature as my major subject. Vinda taught us English prosody for our Honours degree. He came from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra and his English accent was influenced by his Marathi dialect. Students who came from English medium schools made fun of him for his quaint English accent and his whimsical style of teaching. But they also held him in awe partly because his grasp of prosody and partly because of his booming voice that went far beyond the classroom. As a reader of poetry from a platform---whether in Marathi or in English---Vinda is unique. He is a performer who browbeats his audience with a thundering and sometimes melodramatic voice. Quite theatrical, he injures his own tender and delicately nuanced phrases and lines with an aggressive pitch and volume. However, he is loved by Marathi audiences and readers, and when he recently won the Jnanpith Award the whole of Maharashtra was ecstatic. A.K. Ramanujan, Ramesh Sarkar, and Vilas Sarang have translated some of his poems into English; as have I, and Arun Kolatkar, though Kolatkar's translations cannot, unfortunately, be traced. I wish him a long life. He would be able to use it well. He has donated the amounts received as literary awards to ngos and individuals doing social work. The longer he lives, the longer they all will be able to work in the public interest! August 01 And Now Antonioni Passes Away!Yesterday, it was Bergman; today, it's Antonioni. Two classic filmmakers gone one after the other. As the journalistic cliche puts it, "End of an era." Era indeed! Cinema has changed with digital technology.
Antonioni was a maestro of the art of cinema. He was 94 when he died. I 'discovered' him late. Blow Up was his first film I saw. I saw it four times in Mumbai. Then I saw his earlier and later masterpieces in India and abroad.
One good thing about digital technology: one can possess DVDs of the works of the great masters of cinema---from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. Digital technology allows us the luxury of becoming recluses. |
|
|
