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- Harindranath Chattopadhyay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harindranath Chattopadhyay
MP
In office
1952–1957
Preceded bynone
Succeeded byKomarraju Atchamamba
ConstituencyVijayawada constituency
Personal details
Born2 April 1898
Hyderabad, India
Died23 June 1990 (aged 92)
Mumbai, India
Spouse(s)Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
ChildrenRamakrishna Chattopadhyaya
ReligionHindu[citation needed]
Harindranath Chattopadhyay (2 April 1898 – 23 June 1990) was a multi talented personality as an Indian English poet, a dramatist, an actor, a musician and a member of the 1st Lok Sabha from Vijayawada constituency.[1] He was the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu, the first woman President of Indian National Congress and Virendranath Chattopadhyay, a revolutionary.
Life
Born in Hyderabad (erstwhile Hyderabad State, present day Telangana)[citation needed] in a Bengali Hindu Kulin Brahmin family to Aghornath Chattopadhyay, a scientist-philosopher and educationist, and Barada Sundari Devi, a poetess and singer, he is famous for poems like Noon and Shaper Shaped. His father was a Doctorate of Science from Edinburgh University, settled in Hyderabad State, where he founded and administered the Hyderabad College, which later became the Nizam's College in Hyderabad. His mother was a poetess and used to write poetry in Bengali. His other interests were politics, music, theatre and cinema. He was awarded Padma Bhushan in 1973.[citation needed] He married Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a Socialist and leader of Women, who created the All India Women's Conference, the Indian Cooperative Union and also was the inspiration for the All Indian Handicraft's Board, a body which revived many Indian handicrafts, decimated by the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 19th century. (Pottery and Weaving) their son Ramakrishna Chattopadhyaya is in Banagalore, India, today. Their divorce marked the very first legal separation granted by the courts of India.
Harindranath Chattopadhyay often recited his poem Rail Gaadi on All India Radio (Akashavani). The song was memorably sung by Ashok Kumar in the film Aashirwad. He himself wrote the lyrics, composed the music and sang a few songs, notable among which were Surya Ast Ho Gaya and Tarun Arun Se Ranjit Dharani. He also penned a number of poems for children in Hindi. His poems were appreciated even by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
In 1951 Lok Sabha elections Harindranath Chattopadhyay won from Vijayawada Lok Sabha constituency in Madras State as an independent candidate, supported by the Communist Party of India. He was the member of the 1st Lok Sabha from 14 April 1952 to 4 April 1957.[1]
His most famous acting role was in the movie Bawarchi (The Chef) which was made in 1972 ; it was adapted in Hindi by Gulzar from the Bengali film "Galpo Holeo Satyee", directed by Tapan Sinha. He enacted the role of strict and regimented patriarch of the house, where his sons, daughter in laws and grand children lived in a joint family and still respected and abided by his rules. His cameo in two Satyajit Ray films, "Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne" [as the wizard 'Barfi'] and "Sonar Kella" [as the human encyclopaedia – 'Sidhujyatha] – has etched him in permanence.
He died in 1990.
Works
Poems
•The Feast of Youth (1918)
•The Magic Tree (1922)
•Blood of Stones (1944)
•Spring in Winter(1955)
•Virgin and Vineyards (1967)
"The Lady's Giant breast"
•the Earthen globlet
•salute to R-day
•Tati Tati Tota (in Hindi)
Songs
•Surya Ast Ho Gaya
•Tarun Arun Se Ranjit Dharani
Plays
•Abu Hassan (1918)
•Five Plays (1937)
•Siddhartha, Man of Peace (1956)
Filmography
YearFilmRoleAwards
1962Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam
Ghari Babu
1963Tere Ghar Ke Samne
Seth Karam Chand
GharbarMr. Chaddha
The Householder
Mr. Chaddha–
1964Sanjh Aur SaveraMama, Radha's uncle
1965Teen Devian
Mr. Pinto
1966Pyar Mohabbat
Thakur Shamsher Singh
Pinjre Ke PanchhiFather of Miss India 1965
1967Raaz
Baba
Raat Aur Din
Dr. Dey
Naunihal
Deranged male in Bombay
1968Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne(Bengali)
The Magician
AbhilashaAlbert D'Souza
Aashirwad
Baiju 'Dholakia'
1971Seemabaddha (Bengali)
Sir Baren Roy
1972Bawarchi
Shiv Nath Sharma (Daduji)
1974Sonar Kella (Bengali)
Sidhu Jyatha (Uncle Sidhu)
Aashiana
1976Mehbooba
Rita's father
1978Aankhyon Ke Jharokhon SeMr. Rodriques
1981Ghungroo Ki Awaaz
Nawab Jung Bahadur
1982Chalti Ka Naam ZindagiMastermind behind spooking everyonetwo slaps
1984Horký Podzim s Vuní MangaRádz's grandfather
1988MaalamaalShri Mangat Ram
A rare interview of Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Bawarchi’s grandpa and eccentric poet
http://bombaymann2.blogspot.in/2015/01/actor-harindranath-chattopadhyay.html
Best remembered for his role as Shiv Nath Sharma, the patriarch of the ironically named Shanti Niwas in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi (1972), Harindranath Chattopadhyay to me as a kid was a man of mystery. The tall figure, stern face and almost ancient features—even A.K. Hangal calling him babuji seemed natural—belied that part of his which could melt into childish cackles at the slightest provocation. A passport picture of Harinda, as he was fondly called, would have been far removed from the singing-dancing dholakia, Baiju, of Ashirwad.
But acting was a rather small part of his career. Harindranath, the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu, was a famous poet, playwright, singer, songwriter and politician, and a painter later in his life. Once a beloved children’s poet, his popularity might have receded over the years due to the apathy of the general masses, but it must be noted that once in his praise English poet Laurence Binyon had gone as far as saying “He has drunk from the same fount as Shelley and Keats.”
Here in a rare clip from a Doordarshan interview with Zul Vellani, we see Harindranath seamlessly shuffle between selves. He begins by recollecting incidents from his past, his years of growing up in Hyderabad, that was then “like a city from the Arabian Nights”, in an influential and supremely gifted family. He recollects Sarojini Naidu telling their father, “Father, you know, poetry is the highest science.” And being countered with a reply like “Baby, science is the highest poetry.”
To Vellani’s question of how at his old age he still communicates and identifies with the young, he says, “I am a little boy, I am as old as a child with who I play… I am as young as young man who want to meet me and who can’t believe I am as old as I am.” Going on to add that his age of 88 is just a number and that’s why “calendars are angry” with him.
The most interesting part of the interview is where he lets out Mana, the little boy inside him who “thinks out and feels things like a child does.” The poet asserts that he is a copyist who merely transcribes Mana’s words. “Poetry,” he says, “writes itself.”
https://www.youtube.com/embed/oJ-AdHn9zUQ?rel=0
HARINDRANATH CHATOPADHYAYA: Prof. I. V. CHALAPATI RAO
http://www.yabaluri.org/triveni/cdweb/harindranathchatopadhyayajul90.htm
MAN AND POET
Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, one of the great sons of India – poet, playwright, philosopher, actor and freedom-fighter – ¬was born on April 2, 1898, in Hyderabad in a family known for rich cultural traditions and modern outlook. His father, Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya, was a man of science, teacher and litterateur “with a great white beard and the profile of Homer.” Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, and his sister Sarojini Naidu (known all over the world as the Nightingale of India) are a pair of passion flowers that blossomed on the stalk of the Indian Renaissance.
At the age of eleven his sister wrote her first poem, and he produced his first play “Valmiki” which was followed by “Abul Hasan” and “The Sleeper Awakes.” His juvenile composition, a poem entitled “Coloured Garden”, won Rabindranath Tagore’s praise: “I have genuine admiration for your poetry. I feel sure you have all the resources of a poet in a lavish measure.” His first collection of poems “The Feast of Youth” appeared in 1918 when he was nineteen years old. This brought him instantaneous fame. In his foreword, James Cousins, the celebrated writer, said: “He is, I am convinced, a true bearer of the fire – not the hectic and the transient blaze of youthfulness but the incorruptible and inextinguishable flame of the immortal youth which sustains the worlds, visible and invisible.” Sri Aurobindo hailed him as “the future poet of India” and in his review of the book commented: “Here perhaps are the beginnings of a supreme utterance of the Indian soul in the rhythms of the English tongue…..The genius, power, and newness of this poetry are evident. We may well hope to find in him a supreme singer of the vision of God in Nature and Life and the meeting of the divine and the human…..” His poetry is a pleasing cocktail of Sufi mysticism and Hindu Advaitism and a happy blend of the two cultures.
When he was 19 years old, he went to England where he was permitted by Cambridge University to work for a Ph. D., by writing a thesis on the basis of “The Feast of Youth” and two later publications “The Magic Tree” and the “Perfume of Earth”, the subject being “William Blake and his Eastern Affinities.” He was particularly attracted to William Blake for the ideas of the love of freedom and hatred of tyranny. Another foreign writer who exercised considerable influence on him was George Russell (1867-1952), the famous Irish poet and dramatist. The young poet was highly impressed with Russell’s revolutionary poems which were written when the Irish people rose in revolt against the English. In fact, Harindranath took his title of the poem “The Magic Tree” from Russell’s lines:
“And from the Magic Tree of Life
The fruit falls everywhere–”
He utilised the period of his stay in Great Britain to study Theatre Craft and to get acquainted with outstanding men of letters like Walter De la Mare, Harold Munroe and George Bernard Shaw. To the last-named celebrity he was introduced by Annie Besant.
He obtained thorough mastery of the writings of Sri Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Iqbal. He was offered a teaching assignment in Ceylon but he declined it. He did not stick to any position–teaching or research – because his mind was constantly churned by excitement, discontentment ant eternal quest for Truth.
The fecundity and variety of his literary output and his endless interest in poetic creation are astonishing. The more important titles are “The Magic Tree” (1922); “Poems and Plays” ( 1927), “Strange Journey” ( 1936). “The Dark Well” (1939), “Edgeways and the Saint” (1946), “Spring in Winter” (1956), “Masks and Farewells” (1951), “Virgins and Vineyards” (1967), “Life and Myself” written in 1948 is splendid, though a fragment, containing the core of his life. He describes his all-engrossing passion for poetry. He dwelt more and more in the innermost recesses of his heart from where poetry comes. Words and phrases became an obsession.
On an invitation from the Soviet Union in 1927, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, together with Jawaharlal Nehru and Motilal Nehru, visited Russia in connection with the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was inspired by the new rhythm of life in the first socialist state of the world. This visit enabled him to make an intensive study of theatre craft under masters like Stanislavsky, Granovsky, and Meyerholdt. His rebellious soul caught fire in Moscow and on returning to India, he plunged headlong into the freedom struggle under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.
The poet deals with poverty and the immanence of socialist revolution in India in some of his plays typical of the leftist literature of the ’Thirties. We find his identification with the lives of the poor and the fate of his motherland in his reference to “starving of babies, cruel masters, poor sad women, and people who are shot because they asked for bread.” His poems like “Lenin”, “The Red Army”, and “Stalingrad” show his friendly feelings towards the Soviet people who waged a relentless war against tyranny and poverty.
In the Satyagraha of 1930 Harindranath played a leading role by functioning as the 14th Dictator of the Bombay War Council. He was committed to rigorous imprisonment in Nasik Jail and suffered incarceration for a fairly long period. It was during this period that he wrote his patriotic songs one of which was translated into the Chinese language and sung by the Chinese army on its marches. He composed spirited and soul-stirring national songs like “Shuru Hua Hai Jung Hamara”, “Inquilab Zindabad,” “Nabhmay Patak Nachat Hae”, “Agaye Din Swadhinataka”, “Rakt Gulalse Bharkey Joli.” He could compose lilting music and sing in a charming voice. About his impressive voice Somerset Maugham, the great English writer. said: “His voice is the richest I have ever heard in the East.”
He was a multi-dimensional man. He is a great actor on the stage, screen, radio and television. He rendered many character roles in English, Hindi and Bengali. He played the role of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s “Othello”. His recent role in the T. V. Serial “Aeds Pados” is, indeed, memorable. In the General Elections held in India after Independence, he was elected as Member of the Parliament representing the Vijayawada Constituency (Andhra Pradesh).
In recognition of his versatility and literary achievement, the Andhra University conferred upon him honorary Doctorate. He won the prestigious Dr. B. C. Roy National Award for Literature in 1972. The Government of India honoured him by conferring “Padma Vibhushan” in 1972.
Some literary critics tried to label him and put him in a pigeon hole of narrow classification by calling him “the last of the romantics”. But he was all things to all people in the realm of poetry in which lies his forte. He was primarily a poet and essentially a mystic. He was not an ivory-tower philosopher with an inclination to moralise. His verse has no didactic tinge. However, some of his poetry has its social side. He composed short verses which were satirical of society, ironical in its tone and critical of human foibles. His gentle satire is like the Worm of Nilus “which kills but does not hurt”.
For example, in his popular “Curd Sellers” we find epigrammatic, versified sentences which may be regarded as wisdom in capsules – medicine in small and sweet doses. The following lines may serve as samples:
I am sure God above would
cease to feel a fool
If every temple would become
a hospital or school.
In dust and heat they stand and break
the stern and stubborn stone
But every hammer stroke foretells
the breaking up of thrones.
You fashion ships and aeroplanes
and huge machines of power
Fools, you never dared to make
a single summer flower.
“Prohibition has come to stay”
Is what we would like to think
But we are drunk with ignorance
Which is far worse than drink.
Behold thee the tower of silence
For vultures spread the feast
The graveyard feeds the jackal
And the temple feeds the priest.”
“Behold! the poet writes his rhymes
to suit the public’s harlot needs.”
“Merchants and ascetics both are
crying out their tinselled wares”.
PROLIFIC WRITER
Harindranath Chattopadhyaya was a prolific writer having an output of 200 volumes to his credit. This number is tentative and is by no means final, because many more are yet to be published. He handled every literary form – verse, drama, prose, short story, song, sonnet and biography – with remarkable facility and adroitness. 3000 lyrics and 5000 sonnets comprise his current poetic stock. Writing about him in the “Indian Writing in English” Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar summed up with the comment “In the course of his life he has veered spasmodically between the extremes of Aurobindonian mysticism and Marxian materialism and he has sampled every variety of experience and exploited every possible mood, pose and stance ... And always he writes because he cannot help writing and also because poetry is man’s – the poet’s as well as the reader’s – elemental need; no expendable luxury but the very oxygen of existence”. When this writer interviewed Harin a few years ago on Hyderabad Television, he said : “I don’t write. It writes.”
In his sonnets “Foot Falls” and later lyrics we find that the poet had adopted a mystical and truly spiritual attitude to life. A deep transformation had taken place in his soul. The change is reflected in the following passages:
“Let me retire a while, I have sung long.
And now these lips are aching for the hush;
Withdraw, and leave me to myself O’song!
Come not to me in such a ceaseless rush”.
“I have put out the lamp of my love and desire
For their light is not real”.
“I fix my sight upon a sure
Inevitable goal”
At last, this “world deserting wanderer”, the tireless traveller, got rid of “life’s brief ecstasies” of “Iampless years”. We hear about “new beginnings and forgotten ends”. He had achieved his “union with his highest self”.
He says: “I poet, dip my pen
In mine own blood to write my songs for men
Since every song is but a keen self-giving
To tired life which now and then
Seems but a drab apology for living”
(Prelude to “Edgeways and the Saint”)
It is interesting to note what some of the great writers thought about him because it is a rare privilege for any writer to win applause and accolades from his contemporaries. As Richard Steela said, “There is no pleasure like that of receiving praise from the praise-worthy”.
Rabindranath Tagore: “One marvels while reading Harin’s poetry. Storm clouds of intoxicated richness turn and wonder borne by strange whirlwinds, all night and day and out of them, cleaving through their collected glooms golden sunrises appear suddenly and spread from end to end” (Translated from Bengali). When someone asked Tagore who would succeed him, his ready reply was:
“My mantle falls on Harindranath”.
A. E. (George W. Russell) said in a letter dated 25th May, 1935:
“You have the root of poetry in you. Your poetry has changed in its character, and your mind and imagination, probably as the result of mystic concentration and meditation, now point only to the Great Spirit”.
Alice Meynell commented on his poetry: “It is exceedingly interesting to me to see such a meeting of Eastern and Western imagination, as I think your poetry brings about”.
HIS SONNETS
There are several of Harindranath’s Sonnets yet unpublished.
A good number of them were composed in his spiritual retreat at Pondicherry, the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, over 55 years ago. It is an assortment of his Soul’s mystical and philosophical outpourings in the ’Thirties. It is just a fragment, though splendid. This cluster is culled from a lush creeper of perennial flowers in his literary garden. Harindranath says: “These sonnets may be considered as an expression of my union with my highest self, a sort of intimate journal of my experiences of a constant life within, which has always made me thirsty to reach the River of the Soul ever waiting for all who may care to quench such thirst. The highest self indwells everyone. Only some are conscious of it, while others are not. It may be described as the bride eagerly and patiently waiting to unite herself with her lover. I have been such a lover all my life.”
The sonnets reveal the poet and his faith in the supremacy of spiritual values and the futility of the evanescent pleasures of life which have a meretricious glitter but mean nothing. He says:
“I am an artist full of wondrous things;
My thoughts are boats arrived from many a shore
A rich sensation of unnumbered wings
Is mine for ever, that is why I soar ...
I never look behind. I look before
My inwardness with beauty is afire”
(Vol. I, 38)
His rich imagination, gift of art, vision of man and intimacy with the interior aspects of beauty (which is not skin-deep but soul-deep) are brought out very well.
He explains his contempt for the shows and shams of life (tremendous trifles) in the following lines:
“I cannot sing as other poets can
As other poets do, for wealth or fame.” (Vol. II, 142)
He knows that they are superficial and short-lived. He asserted, “I, authentic poet, sing at day’s opening, day’s close”. In one of his poems he said:
“A thousand gold bags of a Persian King
Are equally balanced with a grain of sand.”
As a seeker of truth, the poet realised that poetry progresses towards “silence” as the soul is impregnated with devotion. Eloquence is the symbol of fermentation of feelings en route to soul-transformation. The idea has been expressed with clarity and sincerity in the following lines:
“Song cometh not of fullness but, indeed
Out of a state that is a little less
Where there is yet an emptiness is need” (Vol. III, 208)
“How foolish of me trying to express
This inner happiness in outer words.” (Vol. III. 240)
Yet the poet needs the medium of song to convey the fullness of his heart and the secret workings of his soul to the seekers. In spite of his seeking, fully aware of the inadequacies and limitations of poetry, he finds it to be an indispensable tool of communication to convey a message or an experience. So he declares:
“Song is to me no pastime, but a need” (Vol. III, 226)
“When have I ever sold my song or art
To a commercial hollow-world that pays? or
bartered in the loud competing mart?
My precious soul for man’s ephemeral praise?” (Vol. V. 491)
Finally, with supreme confidence in his role as Mother’s messenger and the still small voice of the inner spirit, the poet reveals himself in his full glory and panoply of power:
“I am eternal poet Thou didst crown
Before the centuries were handed down
To human Time, with all its fires and songs
And multi-coloured glories that have stirred.” (Vol, III, 343)
The transition of the poet’s love of Nature and Beauty to spiritual quest and “silence” was not sudden. This is aptly described by Sri Aurobindo, who wrote a Preface to his early poems– “Feast of Youth”. The sage-critic commented: “We may well hope to find in him a supreme singer of the vision of God in Nature and Life and the meeting of the divine and the human.” He also calls it the “spiritualising of the earth existence.”
Harindranath sings:
“Nature is calling me, and I must run
Responding to her call that sounds like wine.”
“Slowly O’ Nature! I grow more aware
of your minutest miracles and moods.”
After explaining his deep concern for the mystical aspects of Nature, we are treated to a delicious description of Nature, not “red in tooth and claw” but “to advantage dressed.”
“Wave-heaves of waters, cloud controls of air,
Echoes of mountains, painted calms of woods,
moon-glow, pale twilight shadow noon-day glare
combine in me their separate brotherhoods.”
(Vol. I, 72)
“I go forth into the wide open spaces
And dwell among the waters and the birds”
(Vol. I, 64)
Soon the poet became free from Nature’s chains and charms; he declared his freedom in the following lines:
“For Nature’s joys, I am no more athirst
I have forgotten sea and cloud and, space.”
(Vol. II, 165)
Then it becomes “denatured” Nature – Nature spiritualised and etherialised.
Although Harin liked to avoid the “red and juice of life”, he was not a coward to run away from the realities of life. He was not for “Cloistered and fugitive virtue”. He professed his scornful indifference to hypocrisy and subterfuge in the following lines:
“I do not understand penance or prayer
Nor interested in wise holy cant
Something in me can see Thee everywhere
From the tall mountain to the smallest ant.”
(Vol. III, 242)
“Not for ascetic glories am I here
But to declare Thy beauty in my song”.
(Vol. III, 251)
“Suppression of desires is not release.
Nor yet a life of piety which prays
Wearing a worship-robe of outer peace,
And moving through monotonies of days,
Nay, not to run away with failing breath
From life and its desires, but to control
The moral self, till it renounces death
And turns its myriad passions towards the soul”.
(Vol. V, 454)
Having said that inhibition or suppression of desires is not “release”, he expresses his own perception of what is “ release”. It is not “joy or peace”. It is not “some heaven lived on high”. He defines it in the following passage:
“Nay, it is a fullness, absolute, complete
A total transillumination wrought in body, soul and thought.”
“For God must be in every pulse and beat of every
fibre, else release is nought
I am grown conscious of a growing power
Working towards a wonderful release”.
(Vol. II, 102)
But the poet had to go through a period of loneliness and travail before he attained his release or liberation.
“What solitary cleansing hour is this
Of what eternal rapture, gripping earth
Which must, perforce, suffer dark nemesis
Before the golden spirit can have birth”.
(Vol. I, 13)
It is a loneliness that is refreshing and re-invigorating. It is a loneliness that looks down from the Himalayan heights.
“Ask no questions, let me be alone,
An eagle resting on a lonely peak;
The sea below rolls like an undertone
Of my dark silences that hardly speak”.
(Vol. I, 63)
“My heart is in a home-returning mood
Not any home builded of any brick and mud
But the great home of deathless solitude
Builded out of the rhythms of my blood”
(Vol. I, 64)
I move amidst a world of men and stones
Alone!
(Vol. II, 102)
“I bear a paradisal undertone
In thought and movements, flowing like a stream
All suddenly, I seem to be alone
Bearing the burden of an inner dream”.
(Vol. II, 115)
“I have so many lonely lifetimes”. (Vol. 4, 363)
“Now in this crowded hour I seem alone”. (Vol. 5, 482)
Loneliness is the key-note of the above-quoted passages. It is not the crowded loneliness of the urban residents whose bodies jostle but minds feel forlorn. The poet’s loneliness has a spiritual touch. He is never less alone than when he is alone!
The poet gives a symbolic and metaphorical description of his spiritual journey:
“Calm is the ocean, blue and meaningful
The boat hath definitely now set sail
perhaps on its last voyage”.
Calmness of the mind develops into “stillness” and “silence” of the spirit. The stirrings of the mind need to be quietened. As Tagore said: “If intellect alone were sufficient, Bacon would have been honest and Napoleon just”.
Harin continues:
“The mind is the most mean of human masks
It shall not tempt me any more to trust” (Vol. I, 66)
“For mind is after all a monkey-man
Gaudily turbaned with his monkey thought”. (Vol. III, 257)
“And it is no use thinking with the mind
To understand Thy principles aright”. (Vol. III, 272)
In the pursuit of truth and the spiritual goal, the heart assumes greater importance than the mind. The mind is probing and questioning. The logician “peeps and botanizes over his mother’s grave”. The heart, on the other hand, watches, listens and remains receptive. Therefore the poet rates it hi her than the mind in his scale of mystical judgement. The scales can be tracked and tilted by the mind. As Jaimini said, reason (logic) is a lawyer who thinks that every case is arguable. It will prove anything we wish. For every argument it can find a counter argument. What we need is “insight” (not outsight) which makes us grasp at once the essential from the irrelevant, the eternal out of the temporary and the whole out of the part.
“Fie on all science, fie upon all art
That does not help to make this human heart
A home for you who are the total sum
Of wisdom and of knowledge and of Light.”
(Vol. V, 476)
“Let me not with pride of intellect
Grow completely inane with drunkenness”.
(Vol. V, 461)
When the heart wells up with divine love and is brimful with the presence of the Mother and “Consciousness”, words are weak and expression fails. The seeker is reduced to silence which is more eloquent than song. When song turns inward, it becomes “silence.” Like a veritable maestro who plays variations upon a musical note, the poet produces infinite shades of meaning from this word “Silence”:
“In this wide universe, I am alone
With thee, O’ Silence!” (Vol. III, 237)
“Home, to Thy silence, I return at last
And there in calm exceeding rapture.” (Vol. Ill, 295)
“A spirit whom no shadow ever haunts
A silence which no tempest ever daunts.” (Vol. III, 298)
“I am the silence behind lilting birds
I am the silence behind poet’s words
I am the silence behind thunder-breaks
I am the silence that for ever wakes.” (Vol. V, 432)
“There burns a marvellous silence in the breast”
(Vol. V, 433)
“In moments when I turn away from rhyme
A rhythmic silence starts from my breast.” (Vol. V, 457)
Harindranath is more mystical than metaphorical, more romantic than religious, more individualistic than traditional and as much of an aesthetic as a spiritualist. There is himself in every word of his utterance. Let us see how he has depicted the changes in his attitude towards life as he journeyed along like a passionate pilgrim – a tireless traveller. Seeking to transform “the lingering hungers of the dust”, life must prepare to meet immortal life. “The beggar must prepare to accept the Crown.” In his own words, he is in a state of wide awake-fulness, asleep within a sleep forever wide awake.” Only a person who has actually experienced this state of restful alertness and God-intoxication can understand the poet’s lines wrapped in mysticism. It gives him invincible faith and inextinguishable hope:
“Though winds blow chill and loud
and might be black
My lantern burns with such a
steady flame ....” (Vol. II, 111)
“My faith is like a ship that sails along
The roughest sea which rises, roars and raves
For it is builded very very strong
And understands the working of the waves.”
This passage oozing faith and optimism may be contrasted with what he said in his earlier poem:
“I know not where I am being driven
This barque of mine is very frail”.
He deplores the fact that this earth is inhabited by “songless souls”. However, he takes comfort in realising. He possesses a sensitive and singing soul:
“My soul keeps ever soaring like a bird
Above the crawling mists of time and change.”
(Vol. II, 119)
“Resting a little in the silent inn
Of meditation through the midnight hours
Another journey, we shall both begin.”
This must be a reference to his fellow-traveller and co-pilgrim, whom he calls “Comrade.” He made a brilliant discovery which he is prepared to disclose to his companion
“I have discovered new and sudden ways
Of inner life which is a mighty thing.”
He has understood the true value of self-surrender.
“Surrender has no suffering or care
It is a light that has never cast a shade”. (Vol. III, 207)
“O God! it is so good to be alive
These days of sacred miracles that press
Everywhere. My God! do not deprive
Any of us of the rare consciousness”. (Vol. IV, 327)
After all the difficulties and obstacles of life, he attains peace – peace “that passeth all understanding”.
“A giant reticence begins to come into
my life; ecstatic and sublime”. (Vol. IV, 363)
“This sense of kindled buoyancy foretells
A final liberation from the flesh”. (Vol. IV, 370)
“Great heights are calling me to greater heights”.
The Mother herself calls him. This is indeed a climactic experience.
“Thou callest me towards the Light of Lights
Thou callest, “Come” and I reply, “I come”.
The chains are truly fallen now,
One after one, in rapid wonderment.
I stand, each hand stretched like a quiet bough
Expectant of the beautiful descent”. (Vol. IV, 375)
He hails Her “I am your garden, queen, walk into me”.
Poetry with Mysticism and Advaitism
Writing about his poetry Sri Aurobindo said: “There is a background in it of Hindu Vedantic thought and feeling ... It will be found repeatedly elsewhere and runs through the whole as undercurrent, but the mould of the thought, the colour and tissue of feeling betray a Muslim, a Persian, a Sufi influence ..” Something of the union of the two cultures is visible in all his poems including the sonnets.
The truth of Sri Aurobindo’s appraisal of Harindranath’s poetry is illustrated in the following passages which combine mysticism with Advaitism, and spiritualise what appears to be sensuality or eroticism on the surface:
“Our eyes met and the universe was last.” (Vol. I, 93)
“Beautiful Comrade, hand in hand we go.” (Vol. II, 122)
“Behind the veil of me there is a Me
Dwelling in intimatest touch with Thee.” (Vol. II, 159)
“For everything I do or dream or say
There is a secret mystic counterpart.” (Vol. II, 161)
“What was I but a silent thing of death
Until Thou didst accept me as Thy flute?” (Vol. II, 175)
“Thou art the essence of all beauty, and
I am a hollow cup receiving Thee”. (Vol. II, 193)
“For human life to grow a perfect whole,
Body and soul must in perfection meet
Since body is the bride-groom of the soul. (382)
And there are certain moments when I do
Forget that I am I, and feel that I am you.” (391)
When the mood, the moment and the word coalesce, Harin writes wonderful verse:
“Behold! the hour is wonderful and ripe
Fire-blooms are breaking out of drowsy mind”. (449)
HIS MESSAGE
When the mood of philosophising, one of his rare moments, is upon him, he strikes the right note. Without consciously stepping into the role of a preacher he delivers the message:
“Brief are both human joy and human sorrow
What seems unbearable tragedy today
Becomes a hollow memory tomorrow.”
“Desires are birds of passage dusky-fired
Which for a moment, loom like interference
In the soul’s spaces – but they soon grow tired
A deeper light follows their disapperance.”
(Vol. I, 68)
“To all my brother-travellers, farewell
In separate forms, for now the time draws nigh
When in a single God-light we shall dwell.” (500)
Messages like this come from no printed page but from the book of life. All religions belonged to Harindranath. His poetry is not circumscribed by the sectarian touch. At 90 he wrote in the same strain, never reminiscing but looking forward. His mind was on things to come. His goal was “To Be, not to Have.” He uncorked the bottle of perfume hidden in his heart and sprinkled the contents over all those who came his way. His pen was free to stir men’s hearts and touch their souls in every corner of the earth. Struggle for human brotherhood was still more absorbing to his mind, although it would long remain unwon. There sat forever in his heart the “unfaltering angel of the dawn.” His intense patriotism was happily blended with world humanism. He belongs little less to his country than to the world.
Shaper Shaped: HARINDRANATH CHATTOPADHYAYA
https://shaiyer.wordpress.com/category/harindranath-chattopadhyay/
SHAPER SHAPED
In days gone by I used to be
A potter who would feel
His fingers mould the yielding clay
To patterns on his wheel;
But now, through wisdom lately-won,
That pride has died away:
I have ceased to be the potter
And have learned to be the clay.
In bygone times I used to be
A poet through whose pen
Innumerable songs would come
To win the hearts of men;
But now, through new-got knowledge
Which I hadn’t had so long,
I have ceased to be the poet
And have learned to be the song.
I was a fashioner of swords,
In days that now are gone,
Which on a hundred battlefields
Glittered and gleamed and shone;
And now that I am brimming with
The silence of the lord,
I have ceased to be sword-maker
And have learned to be the sword.
In other days I used to be
A dreamer who would hurl
On every side an insolence
Of emerald and pearl;
But now that I am kneeling
At the feet of the supreme,
I have ceased to be the dreamer
And learned to be the dream.
Harindranath Chattopadhyay
A WATER COLOUR PAINTING: HARINDRANATH CHATTOPADHYAYA
http://www.yabaluri.org/triveni/cdweb/awatercolourpaintingjul90.htm
Half of my inspiration I declare
Attributable to my easy-chair
On which the livelong day I love to sit
With eyelids closed, behind whose darkness, lit
With changing lights, dappled with changing shades,
A thousand pictures rise ..….. Life slowly fades
Into the faery twilight of the mind
Rememoried of beauty left behind
In childhood’s realms, and all prophetic grown
Of future miracles already sown
In the Unconscious, Childhood lives again
In the awakened slumber of the brain,
The treasure-house of myriad, memories, ....
I see once more will woodlands full of trees
And roaming butterflies behind the old
Romantic house, where noonday lavished gold
Upon the bleak bare rocks, and mornings came
Like elfin festivals of coloured flame
And sunset like red music came and went
Struck on some angel’s magic instrument.
I still remember how we chased and caught
Warm butterflies, bright as a poet’s thought.
Winged into lambent liberated flight
And shot courageously into the light;
And how we climbed the branches where we sat
And watched the grey and ruddy squirrels at
Their mid-day meal of fruit which seemed to wait
As though the rich fulfilment of their fate
Depended on their hunger; and I yet
Remember every grassblade dripping wet
At dawn with midnight dews which slipped and fell
Like slow dissolving diamonds in the dell
Marking the moments ….. I remember well
The creaking bamboos margining the glade
Tall and unquiet, and the sounds they made
As though they mourned incalculable loss ....
And then we watched the clouds like camels cross
Unending azure desert miles of heaven
Between the glowing noon and glimmering even.
They all come back to me; the bees, the doves,
The sky, the trees, the stones, my childhood’s loves
To whom I have been loyal to this day
All suddenly out of the far-away
Forgotten past they leap in recognition
Of me, their lover, when the hour of vision
Bridges eternity with time, the vast
Unhappened future with the happened past.
What else do I remember? The queer sense
Of indefinable Omnipotence
Hidden within all things I heard and saw.
Some vaguely-felt, imperishable law
In silent operation everywhere;
I trembled at the blueness of the air,
The whiteness in the lily and the sweet
Coming of rain which, falling in a sheet
Of woven pearl, sent through my heart intense
And nervous tingles, coursing through, each sense
Like scented splendour. Every bird which sang
Went through my being like a sudden pang
Of parting, but from whom, I could not tell!
Each thing of beauty was an urgent bell
Calling my heart to prayer, while childhood was
As beautiful and dreamy as the pause
Of light upon a hill just at the break
Of morning when the first bird is awake.
I yet remember how I used to thrill
When in the rainy time the light lay chill
Sombre and magical, quiet and cool
Upon white lotuses along a pool ...
When overhead the heavy clouds appeared
Like heaven’s drooping eyelids many-teared.
How the leaves trembled in the trembling wind
Like to sweet poems in a poet’s mind,
Poems of life and death and joy and pain
In God’s cool breath which blows before the rain
Of gathered inspiration ... In a while
Each rainfed runnel was as good as Nile
Or Ganges on whose waves we set afloat
One carefully constructed paper boat
And then another boat and then another
Laden with news for our exiled brother
Living in Germany, a place that stood,
According to us, in the neighbourhood,
Perhaps, a furlong from our gardened wood.
But then, invariably O evil luck;
Our boats in a few moments would be struck
Against rough pebbles in the way or stuck
In some obstructing branch lying across
The swollen runnel .... O, our childhood’s loss
Of paper boats .... perchance, intenser than
The loss of real ones to grown-up man.
And when the sun came out again, the trees
Where loud with dark innumerable bees,
Purple reminders of the joy that lives
In never-failing Nature and forgives
The thrice unnatural wretchedness of man
Who hurts her harmony and pulls the plan
Of heavenwardness to pieces man, the traitor
Of the original trust of the Creator
To whom creation with its fire and cloud
Bird, beast and man, bending in silence, vowed
Full, absolute obedience to His word
Ere they, out of travailing chaos, stirred
Into a perfect rhythm of intense
Self-mastery, exalted reticence.
All things and beings, save man, fulfil the vow:
The greeny yellow parrot on the bough,
The scarlet berry and each quivering leaf
Which, had not mortal coloured them with grief,
Had been unsullied rapture. In his pride
Of loathsome ignorance on every side
Man, hurling a blind challenge, wounds and draws
The blood of beauty, breaks the Law of laws
At every turn as easily as a flower ....
Believing that be hath defied the power
Vanquishing It, because It humbly bows
In patience for a period and allows
His hands to trifle with the pledge and tamper
With Its virginity without a hamper.
Until at last in high retaliation
It rises in the wrath of all creation
Against his huge corruption and demands
Full compensation at his errant hands
For all the hideous ruin that they wrought ...
Think you the offended Power remembers not
The offender? … Fool! the broken Law breaks him
Who breaks It … since It is both quiet and grim
And jealous of the wonder It has set
And never never never can forget.
I loved such placid stones as dwell and dream
In the clear silent flowing of the stream,
Stones that are dead to us whose mortal sight
Behold not in their greyness brimming light
Issuing from the womb of heaven which knows
No difference between a stone and rose,
Sweet equal nurslings in the Master’s vision
At the still ancient hour when the division
Of fire and breath and colour was begun ....
In the immortal scales the moon and sun
Weigh equally with worm and dust and herb,
And when man’s inequalities disturb
The harmony, within a little while
The Maker with His unperturbed smile
Comes down to earth in His resistless form
Of retribution, blacker than a storm,
And under lightning’s wrath and thunder’s stress
Resuscitates the broken loveliness
Holding the scales again, and will not rest
Until all things responding to their test
Are equal to each other in the far
Unalterable balance where things are
Evasive essence, undecreed of earth,
Unmanacled of life and death and birth,
Unbondaged of the cyclic wheel which whirled
Incessantly sustains the visible world
But on the surface of existence dwell
Combating contraries which make the hell
Of inequalities around our lives
Wherein harsh exploitation rules and strives
Relentlessly reducing Nature’s house
To a huge sepulchre; Death like a mouse
Lurks in Life’s granaries and nibbles at
The gathered grain, and all the beauty that
Trembles outside of us is as a sleep
In which the canker never fails to keep
Its constant tryst, casting its ugly shade
On the world’s blossom, making it afraid.
Escaped from Singlehood, from shape to shape,
Back to the Singlehood we must escape
Through death and devastation and disease
Inevitable threat of contraries
Continued through the ages … All that’s born
By the sure shadow which it sheds is torn
And twisted into agony and dread
And at the fountains of its own blood fed
Under the fiery crimson-coloured pall
Of time’s enormous shadow covering all.
The lizard pounces on the moth at night,
The kite upon the chicken in the light
Of morning red upon the cottage-yard;
Under the mobled midnight many-starred
The tiger leaps upon the tethered cow,
The serpent on the frog, and on the bough
The blue-black crow feasts on the weak white worm …
Since lo, life holds within itself the germ
Of secret death in which her safety lies ....
Beauty is beauty all because she dies!
Through the dim portals of her myriad deaths,
Between the ceasing of her myriad breaths,
Her shadow into Time’s bare garden thrown
Touches at length the feet of the Unknown.
THE VISION[ONE-ACT PLAY] by HARINDRANATH CHATTOPADHYAYA
http://www.yabaluri.org/triveni/cdweb/thevisionjul90.htm
PERSONS IN THE PLAY
An Old Labourer
His Old Wife
His Daughter
A Labourer Boy
An Old Man, a Vision of twenty years hence.
[Scene: Interior of a labourer’s cottage .. .. .. Evening. The labourer’s wife, an old woman, is cooking her husband’s meal in a dark comer to the right. Her young daughter is seen sitting by kneading wheat-cakes.]
Daughter: You slept a long sleep at mid-day, mother of me, and I all the while keeping watch over your quiet face. Dead and gone to the other life I thought sometimes you were, but then again you smiled in your sleep and I knew you full of life.
Old Woman: Child of me! God in the blue skies were good to us if he would close up our life…for we are poor and poverty they say now-a-days do be a crime! The poor ones suffer while the rich folk hold the whole big world in their strong hands .... and mock our poverty ... It was not this like in days gone by … Ah, child of my bosom! these be bitter times!
Daughter: I have often heard my father say this too, that hunger like a tongue of fire is licking the children’s empty stomachs and of women, he often does be talking .... who hide their pure naked bodies in cold earth digging out graves for themselves, there being no money to buy them their share of clothing .... and he often speaks of their men; God save them from shame .... their men, father says, are hard-worked as if they be bullocks or dumb creatures ... They are flogged till their strong male flesh cries out “Tyranny!” “Blood!” and such like noises!
Old Woman (weeping): And your father is a man too! … He comes to his cottage how often with a dark cloud on his brow, and when I ask him “What be the matter with my child’s father?” he smiles and cools my burning bosom with a cheerful word! ... and when at the deep of night he sleeps, I wake and under his share of tattered shirt, I see stripes like blue flame, and marks like purple flame, and such-like signs of his master’s cruelty, out there among the fields. These are cruel times, dear child of my womb, but we must live somehow till the great Master of all sings “Come to my Field of Glory!”
Daughter: Poor mother! how brave you are, and you so old and broken and that sorrowful... and father, he is a saintly soul the like of him they shall find beyond the great big clouds!
Old Woman: But, my girl, our chains must break somewhere, sometime, if we only wait, for, as I slept at mid-day, I fell into dreaming.
Daughter: It was then you smiled and I knew you full of life! What did you dream, mother?
Old Woman: Fields! green fields! and millions of poor labourers ... The hot sun baking their naked brown bodies, men, women and children … The poor women hiding their shame beneath their tattered breast cloth, and a meagre rag round their pale bodies. The children crying, crying for bread and yearning for a patch of cool shadows ... Among them of a sudden sprung a man, their master, with hard cruel looks of him, cracking his whip in the air ... The cracking sound frightened the young ones who shrieked in themselves, and choked their shrieks in their tired little throats parched and desert-like for want of water. Then again, as of a sudden, dear child of me, I glimpsed your father labouring and wiping the sweat at his brow, among the labourers. The blood of me jumped up like a mad woman and yelled, when the master lashed his body because he saw a tear-¬drop break in the edge of his eye! “O cruel God!” I cry in my dreaming, “Where be justice? Be there justice?” when a voice brake from the trees in the field “Yea! as long as God do be in the blue sky and the heart of the labourer!”
Daughter: Mark you mother! “As long as God is in the blue sky and the heart of the labourer”... and have we not always thought on His mercy?
Old Woman: Then a figure, as of the days to be, stood in the midst of the labourers in the fields and cried “The day is yours! You are all kings! The tyrant shall bend low and drop his eye-balls in the dust!”
Daughter: May be, it is a vision, for we poor people do often see visions ... We dream ... and the dreams of the poor, they say, are born in God’s purple heart-core.
Old Woman (looking out of the cottage-door): The sun is red on the edge of the sky. How like a bit of bleeding flesh! May be your father comes on his roadway home … where he shall rest after his scanty meal ... Child! ... but, God knows, how many new stripes our eyes must suffer on the old trembling body of him in the darkness of night!
Daughter: I shall wet them with my tears, mother, and cover up their flames with the love of my heart ... but who be he coming on the roadway alone ... a boy quietly weeping.
Old Woman: A labourer lad may be; call him in that we may love him and ease his little breast of its vast sorrows. (Exit Daughter)
A labourer-boy ... God have mercy on the labourer and his woman and his young one.
(Enter Daughter with the little labourer-child who is sobbing.)
Boy: O! Grandmother of me!
Old Woman: What hath befallen thee, little angel?
Boy: I have no corner of the world to hide me ... Hide mc in your lap ... O hide me – anywhere!
Daughter: The poor wee soul is trembling … and he so young and lovely! ... who hath hurt thee little lonely angel? ...
Boy: My master ... the cruel master ... His eyes are dark and poison-like, and in his tongue a black scorpion crawl ... He flogs us all day, and with a long long whip; looking serpent-like; His fingers are thick and hard and strong like mountains that we do see ... and we hate him ... He is a bad master … I don’t want to serve a bad master ... A cruel unfeeling master … and he not paying us wages at the end of daylight!
Daughter: Poor tiny sorrowing bosom!
Old Woman: And he is only one of the millions that do be crying ...
Daughter: Have you no father?
Boy: They say he is gone to another land where the fields are fine and the Master that do be there is a good kind Master, and He paying wages to him in silver stars, they, say ... and my mother ... my own darling mother ... (Sobs).
Old Woman: God rest her soul in peace, may be she too has run away from our world of pale shadows ... Poor boy of the bleeding heart! ...
Boy: Gone! ... but not to father. She is gone, no one knows where, and she leaving a bitter tale in the mouths of the labourers.
Daughter: Poor woman! and she brought him into the world to be living by his little self all lonely in this great big world! .. why did she leave thee, little one?
Boy: The master that does be treating us like worse than dogs, the field-folk say he took her with him one evening ... for wages, he said, she, the mother of me, believed his lips that lied ... for we poor folk do be simple and believe the world truthful ... and then, the field folk say, she fled in shame, in a kind of rage ... an outrage, the field-folk say, and I living alone now in this world of many fears. Hide me, O grandmother of me, or send me to my father in the fields that do be fine and the Master do be kind and good doling out wages in silver stars as they say.
Old Woman: Child of me! let us feed this little angel. It is hungry he is ... this boy of the fields ... Fear no more, wee heart. It is you will be with us and call me your mother, you will ... and a father will come to you at the setting-in of dark. Forget the cruel master.
(The daughter sets a plate of evening meal before the lad and a mug of water.)
Boy (eating hungrily): Good folk! I have not supped nor eaten I have for two days past, nor could I forget my share of pride and ask for a morsel, for we poor folk do often be proud and ashamed to beg ... we are ... and we that sore and hungry ... Now God be praised, there do be kind folk among the poor ... O! the wealthy folk are cruel, cruel, no mercy in their hearts, or no heart may be for mercy to enter … For days we hunger and no wages given us ... What are we to do, God save us … Many there do be steal and plunder to keep them full of life … and often it is caught they are and sent to closed rooms with bars, prison, the field-folk call it … and they do be happier there for sure of bread and water it is they be, and scanty work, and a roof to keep the sun-burn from them …
(The boy finishes his meal.)
Old Woman: He is weary and sleep will hush the flame of his eyelids ...
(The daugher spreads apiece of mat in the corner to the left.)
There little boy! sleep till the dawn be red on the hills and a new day begin for your heart that has known sorrow.
Boy: (Goes towards mat to sleep): Now God be praised! there do be kind folk among the poor ... The rich folk are cruel ... cruel ... (falls asleep).
(The stage begins to grow dark. Only a faint sense of approaching star-light is felt pulsing in the darkness.)
Old Woman: His wee body is old with sorrow ... He has stripes too and they do be the badge of the tribe of labourers.
Daughter: Mother! the hills are beginning to sleep too ... and father is still out in the fields ... Punished, may be, and forced to end more work than is his usual share … But there he comes with a quiet splendour in his eyes … Father!
(Enter Father unusually calm and preoccupied as if he were touched with vision and prophecy.)
You come late and the darkness growing on the hillside ... already a star breaks.
Old Woman: Punished may be and worked into the heart of the grey evening.
Old Man (smiling with an inner consciousness of new power): No! Woman of my poverty! a strange thing hath befallen! … I fell asleep on the roadside ... and I coming over the tired fields to our home the labour of tile daylight being done ... my limbs trembling and worn, my eyes closing on the red wake of the sun … and, as of a sudden, a soft touch on my feverish head woke me .. then darkness folding the hillside .. In my dreams I dreamed that we knelt … You, your daughter, and I, ... in prayer to the great Master in the Land of the Stars and of the sunrise, where everything that chanceth do be beautiful ... Oho! but who may you childer be? ...
Old Woman: A labourer child … and seeking that he is refuge in our love and poverty …
Old Man: How like a God he sleeps!
Daughter: But they say that God does never be asleep ... He ever waketh, some say.
Old Woman: And some, that sleepeth. He for certain! ... for there are strange things befalling the world of His own making! no justice in any corner ... But when He wakeneth, the flowers shall blossom once and the desert laugh like a red rose.
Daughter: Let us pray the great God then and wake Him ... (wakes up the sleeping boy) May be, the prayers of four souls do be stronger than of three .... and the fourth a pretty child of pure heart ... That may be will make our voices fill His blue sleep in Heaven ... for the child’s voice is sweet ever ... and God loveth children.
(The boy wakes up and comes to the Old W oman.)
Old Man: Here is your father, dear angel.
Boy: A night of stars to you father, dear angel.
Old Man: How like a God he speaks!
Old Woman: Child of our poverty! Bend low and kneel with us. We shall wake up the sleeping God in the blue skies ... that is.
Boy: That is where my father does be working in fields that are fine ... and the Master is good and loving he is.
Old Man: Pray with us. The prayer of the poor may be heard for once, if they be from the flowering mouth of a child! (They kneel to pray. Suddenly a lightning runs through the room as if to herald the voice of thunder. Then an Old Man, the Vision¬-of Twenty-Years-Hence-appears.)
Vision of Twenty Years Hence: Rise, souls in prayer! I live in the present, I who have always lived in the past ... I Come from the Master of the skies and my lips are flaming with prophecy! People who know me call me “Vision of twenty years hence!” – and many there are who feel my presence day and night ... Labourers! poor labourers, fear not! times are soon coming when you shall be powerful masters! when your race that is now bruised and under the word of fetters, will seek its freedom through you. Labourers! fear not! for the tyrant shall not prosper long! He shall die a bitter death, his eyes shall be put out, and his mouth, closed with a coward’s silence … His limbs will tremble in heavy chains, and all the rich blood that has oozed out of your bodies and the bodies of your women and children shall gush in an eternal stream from out his nostrils ... He shall kneel before each one of you ... man, woman and child, in the garments of a slave, he that was once your hard master ... Rise, Souls in prayer, Labourers! a destiny of kingship awaits you! You are the makers of the future … and at your bleeding feet opens the splendid white Road to Peace and Immortality.
(Disappears. The stage is growing bright, as though a new dawn were being ushered into the world of darkness.)
Boy: God in the blue skies hath woken, mother!
Old Man: My dream of mid-day hath come to pass!
Boy: A fine old being! He cometh from the blue skies and the Master that does breathe there, may be ...
Daughter: Miracle!
Old Man: Twenty years hence! and then a white dawn shall break through the black hills of our sorrow ... This boy may be hath brought vision with him ... I shall go, stand in the midst of the suffering labourers and give them this message.
“The tyrant shall die! ... Ye shall be kings – Twenty years hence!”
[Curtain]
–From “SHAMA’ A”, July 1920
FROM MYSTICISM TO MARXISM: An Approach to Harindranath by Prof. K. VENKATA REDDY
http://www.yabaluri.org/triveni/cdweb/frommysticismtomarxismjul90.htm
When a journalist enquired of Rabindranath Tagore, “Sir, after you ... who?”, he replied at once: “My mantle falls on Harindranath”. And he was prophetically right. Like Tagore, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, who passed away on June 23, 1990, creating a void in the Indian literary world, a void that cannot be so easily filled, is unquestionably a poet born to sing. His domain of song has its own themes and rhythms. Love poetry, Nature poetry, philosophic poetry in which philosophy is the least obtrusive and almost melts into song, satirical poetry – such has been his preoccupation in poetry. He recited his poetry with a marvellous sense of rhythm and it was always a pleasure to listen to his recitations. As lyrical as his sister and more exuberant in his imagery, he does not go in for jewelled phrases like Sarojini who was naturally influenced by her “decadent” contemporaries in England: His lyrics have the spontaneity and simplicity of Shelley’s, with a transparent and easy-flowing diction.
Yet, surprisingly enough, Harindranath has not received the social recognition and the critical attention he deserves. He has not been given his due by the Bengalis themselves, the literary institutions nor by the film-world and the leftists for whom he did so much. The Central Sahitya Akademi never honoured him. The Indian P. E. N. or the Writers Workshop in Calcutta hardly mention his name. Though he was an exquisite singer, none of his songs in his own voice are now available in the cassette market.
Sublime poetry may be born out of creative inspiration and may often be found to be different in quality from the quality of life its poet had lived on the surface. However, there are poets who, instead of leaving themselves at the mercy of the mysterious inspiration, choose to submit their propensity for getting inspiration to a mentally accepted earthly mission or ideal. Harindranath has subscribed to both the principles in his life. Veering spasmodically between the extremes of Aurobindonian mysticism and Marxian materialism, he sampled every variety of experience and exploited every possible mood, pose and stance.
Harindranath had the unique privilege of living in the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry in its early phase, drawing inspiration from the Master for his aspirations as a poet. It is during this period that he wrote nine volumes of sparkling Reflections, the reflections of a many-dimensional sun of consciousness on the mirror-like lake of a creative mind. They inspire in us many a mood and make us wonder afresh on things we thought we knew well and bring issues and ideas, hitherto considered remote, closer to our nearest. One comes across in them impressive flashes which can be linked to Sri Aurobindo’s vision of man’s evolutionary journey:
“Out of the rough black stone of animal desires and propensities man appears slowly but surely, losing the dark hue and chiselled into the higher being by the hand of error whose blows are myriad and terrible ...”
This theme is distinct in one of his early poems, Futurity
Time is Eternity’s womb-hole ensconcedly bearing
Each man like a foetus in projected formation
Warmed into ripeness conceived by some far evolution;
Sealed grave-lids of eyes, strange image of funeral pathos.
Rawness of limb awaiting the strength of a giant
Moment of master-maturity, rounding of motive,
Sidereal substance, stranger to dream and delirium.
All birth is as yet to be born since man is unfinished
And still in the making, the foetus awaiting the birth-time;
All death is as yet to be dead on the lap of that instant.
Couched sometimes in prosaic poetry, sometimes in poetic prose, the Reflections are epigrammatic and aphoristic. They are imbued with a poetic spirit throughout. There is great poetry, for instance, in the sentence in which Harin says:
“I am deepening into a sense of homewardness–
solitude of spirit embarrasses me like a mother.”
To Cowper, the English poet, “solitude is sweet.” To Shelley “solitude is tranquil” and for Wordsworth solitude has “self¬-sufficing power.” But what Harindranath finds in solitude is a truth serene and exclusive, as authentic as his radian conscious¬ness. His revealing observations have matured out of his own experiences.
One of the most versatile and vigorous literary personalities of contemporary India, Harindranath surrendered himself to the magic of poetry at an early age. When he started writing at the age of nineteen, there were no available models for modern Indian poetry in English. People studied the Golden Treasury in colleges and universities and very few had access to Greek or Latin, French or Russian poetry in original or in translation. Harindranath had, therefore, to carve out his own way. He had to plough his lonely furrow.
Harindranath’s poetic career spans a creative period of seventy years or so and presents diverse genres, themes, trends and techniques. He has responded spontaneously, but most creatively, to several shades of life, movements and personalities. Finding in him a spontaneous and inherent poetic gift, Sri Aurobindo greeted him as “a poet of almost Infinite possibilities.” Harindranath’s first book of poems, The Feast of Youth, appeared in 1918. Reviewing his first collection of lyrics in the Arya of November, 1918, Sri Aurobindo observes:
“This is not only genuine poetry, but the work of a young, though still unripe, genius with an incalculable promise of greatness in it. As to the abundance here of all the essential materials, the instruments, the elementary powers of the poetical gift, there can be not a moment’s doubt or hesitation. Even the first few lines, though far from the best are quite decisive. A rich and finely lavish command of language, a firm possession of his metrical instrument, an almost blinding gleam and glitter of the wealth of imagination and fancy, a stream of unfailingly poetic thought and image and a high though as yet uncertain pitch of expression, are the powers with which the young poet starts. There have been poets of a great final achievement who have begun with gifts of a less precious stuff and had by labour within themselves and a difficult alchemy to turn them into pure gold. Mr. Chattopadhyaya is not of these; he is rather overburdened with the favours of the goddess, comes like some Vedic Marut with golden weapons, golden ornaments, car of gold, throwing in front or him continual lightings of thought in the midst of a shining rain of fancies, and a greater government and a more careful and concentrated use rather than an enhancement of his powers is the one thing his poetry needs for its perfection.”
This is, indeed, a great tribute and a rare treat which Harindranath received from the prophet of The Life Divine.
Between 1918, when Harindranath’s first collection of poems appeared, and 1967, when his last volume of poems, Virgins and Vineyards, saw the light of the day. Harindranath published numerous collections of poems and plays – The Magic Tree (1922), Poems and Plays (1927), Strange Journey (1936), The Dark Well (1939), Edgeways and the Saint (1946), Spring in Winter (1956) and Masks and Farewells (1951).
Harindranath reveals the core of his poetic faith as well as his endless interest in the process of poetic creation when he, in his autobiography, Life and Myself (1948), expresses himself:
“I dwelt more and more ... in the innermost recesses of the heart from where poetry comes. Words and phrases became an obsession; thoughts floated across the mind like clouds, some delicately tinted, others stormy, but past all their movement I began to grip more firmly the thought...”
As a born-poet Harindranath makes it clear:
“By right of ages I belong
To the dominion of song
And so from out of everything
I draw a lovely song to sing.”
Poetic thoughts came to him flapping across the wide ocean like light-winged birds. He declares:
“Verses open to me
As blossoms to a tree
As colours to a shell
As seconds to a minute
As circles to a well
When a pebble drops within it.”
Harindranath’s early poetry is full of beautiful soul-stirring imagery and haunting rhythm. Vedantic themes or images directly or indirectly lighted the way for his inspiration to unfold itself exuberantly in poetry. In Noon, for instance, Harindranath uses an original and daring image of the noon as a mystic dog with paws of fire. In other poems there is the Vedantic feeling that man is a traveller on earth and he has, therefore, to cultivate the dispassion and detatchment of a traveller. The Vedantic feeling changes later to one of surrender and other self-absorption in what one is doing. Harindranath shares this feeling with us when he says:
“I have ceased to be the potter
and have learned to be the clay.
I have ceased to be the poet
and have learned to be the song.”
Influenced by Western methods and models, Harindranath took to lyric poetry with ease and grace, and gave it charm, dignity and thought content. The 209 lyrics that make “Spring in Winter” are a poetic record of the efflorescence of love, and have an authentic ring throughout. Like most of his lyrics these are simple, sensuous, direct and neither stale nor startling. The lover’s varied moods and fancies, faithfully rendered in these exquisite lyrics give them something of an orchestrated unity of its own. A personal romantic experience becomes a poetic paradigm of lover’s ways and moods, and aches and joys.
“Virgins and Vineyards” was his most recent and mature contribution to literature. As Harindranath himself says in the preface:
“The poetry has come through at white heat and I have glowed throughout the writing of it, feeling a sense of gratefulness to my ancestors who continue to dream dreams through and in me, never losing touch with modern trends and events of history, which continue to alter the values of me.”
The poet is perfectly at ease here, mixing memory and reverie, fact and fancy, politics and philosophy. There is a mingling of metrical ease and verbal fluency which was Harindranath’s main strength as a poet.
Through all the viscissitudes of his early chequered poetic career, Harindranath has retained his interest in mysticism which he owed mostly to Blake. Like Subramania Btarati, Harindranath was overwhelmed by the mystic vision of the “dance and doom.” For Bharati, it is Kali who destroys the worlds in a frenzy of dance and then creates them anew as Shiva, the auspicious, approaches her and quenches her divine rage. But, for Harindra¬nath it is Shiva who is lost in the “Tandav” – the mystic dance of doom”:
“In a rich rapture of intoxication
Dream-lost you move from deep shadowy deep
Along infinitudes of mortal sleep
Which veils the naked spirit of creation.
Star upon star breaks forth in swift pulsation
And multitudinous oceans swell and sweep
Behind you, and enchanted forces leap
Like giant flames out of your meditation.
Your dreaming done, once more you dance your reckless
Dance of destruction, and from globe to globe.
You wander, fashioning a mystic necklace of
shattered worlds”.
Harindranath’s poetic career underwent a metamorphosis. The mystic poet seemed to have realized that for years and years he was “kept like a hot-house plant, secluded, away from the realities of the world.” He wanted “to move among the poorest and lowly, live among the downtrodden and write about the truths of life as they exist.” So, he promised himself that he “won’t write about God and the birds and the flowers any more,” and that be “will write about starving babies, about cruel masters, about poor sad women, about people who are shot because they asked for food.”
From mysticism to Marxism is, indeed, a big leap. But, Harindranath took it when he moved from Pondicherry to Bombay and produced Blood of Stones (1944) and Son of Adam (1946) and Freedom Came (1947) responding boldly to the political and socialist stirrings of the day. Instead of exploring the inner consciousness and evoking images from the world of dreams and broodings, Harin began to concern himself with stock realities of life from the viewpoint of Marxism.
With early impressions of Hyderabad, and living in Bombay, close to the tinsel world of the silver screen, nearer to slums like Kamathipura and Dharavi, under the shadow of the mafia and its god fathers, corroding crime and carnal lust in excess, Harin could not continue to be a romantic poet. How can he listen only to the “music of the spheres” and not face the music of machines, and menacing men? He becomes an odd man out, a person who finds himself lonelier and lonelier in the crowd. He finds cheating, deception, betrayal and ingratitude at every step. Images of street walkers, blood and wounds, murder and disease abound in his present writing. In Harindra’s poetry, this new noise takes weird shapes like surrealistic painting, mobile sculpture, absurd drama and rock music, all rolled in one.
Harindranath is no longer a prayer-prone theist. For him there are no spiritual solutions, escapades into El Dorado or a blind clinging to dark tunnel. His spirit is completely shattered. His alienation is unmitigated. There is no easy answer to his angst. Like Louis Untermeyer’s Prayer he seems to say–
Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with springs first flutes and drums¬–
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.
Harindranath’s later poetry is very disturbing. It has no contemporary references to any political and international figures of events. We find only an occasional reference to Charles Sobhraj and a personal friend Antshen Lobo who died, but the rest of the references and digs are anonymous. There is no relief, no earlier ecstasy, but this is a long soliloquy of pining and pain, as Shakespeare says in Rombo and Juliet: “One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.” At places, Harindranath, like the beatniks, the angry generation of Bengali poets or Digambara Kavis of Telugu, or the Dalit Panther poets of Marathi, spews very shocking and loud images of poverty, misery and suffering. Small wonder, if Harin, who was greeted by Sri Aurobindo as a mystic poet, is hailed today as a leftist highgospeller.
Harin’s reputation as a poet overshadowed his eminence as a playwright. His dramatic output is by no means negligible, with a score of plays to his credit. And over a dozen of them are “devotional plays” dealing with certain situations in the lives of religious leaders like Jayadeva, Ravidas, Eknath, Pundalik and Sakku Bai. They are all written in verse, and are playlets rather than full-length plays. The criticism generally levelled against these plays is that they are loose in construction and blurred in characterisation with predominance of poetry over action. Tukaram, which is free from these faults, is easily the best of the devotional plays. The hero’s stintly ardour and his sense of humility and detachment are clearly brought out in his mellifluous songs as well as his dialogues with his wife and Rameshwar. The different scenes are, well-knit and the poetry is functional rather than decorative as in some other plays. Its chief merit lies in its being effective as both a closet play and a stage play.
The most significant of Harindranath’s social plays are found in his collection, “Five Plays” (1937), which includes “The Window,” “The Sentry’s Lantern,” “The Coffin” and “The Evening Lamp.” They heralded the emergence of a significant working-class dramatist with innate potentialities. Like Mulk Raj Anand in the field of Indian fiction in English, Harindranath succeeded in bringing a kind of life to the Indian stage that was never there before. For the first time in the history of Indian Drama in English, he introduced working-class characters on the stage. No Indian dramatist in English had ever cut such large slices of the working-class life. Sympathy for the exploited, revolt against stultifying morality, a plea for purposeful writing – such are the themes of these plays which are at once realistic and symbolic.
Harindranath’s plays of social protest were essentially products of an earnest and deep commitment to certain values of life. Like the plays of Arnold Wesker, they are warm, humane, sincere, passionate, compassionate, brave, honest, energetic, out¬spoken, full of enthusiasm and concern. They lay bare the dramatist’s acute awareness of the social problems around him and register his protest against the cruelty of the capitalist factory¬-owners.
Harindranath’s social plays are dramatically more effective than his devotional ones. Though heavily coated with purpose, they have a tautness and intensity that are seldom found in our dramatic writing. With their simple stage-setting, quick move¬ments, limited number of characters and racy dialogue, they can be successfully enacted.
The most ambitious of Harindranath’s plays Siddhartha, Man of Peace (1956) is a simple and straightforward enactment of Gautama’s life and message, in eight Acts. The elaborate plot, the enormous number of scenes, situations and episodes and the large number of characters make for a certain prolexity and ostensible lack of tautness and concentration. In other words, what the play gains in detail, it loses in intensity.
Harin’s writings bear the distinct stamp of the Indian mind. Whether he wrote a poem or a play, it was unmistakably an Indian speaking English. His metaphor and simile were refreshingly new and strikingly Indian. He always wrote because he could not help uniting, and also because poetry is man’s – the poet’s as well as the reader’s – elemental need: “No expendable luxury but the very oxygen of existence.”
Harin has a message to deliver, a message of “sympathy and understanding” between man and man, which one can never miss, even in his repetitive, sometimes self-contradictory and nag¬ging verse-form. Harindranath seems to join Rabindranath Tagore when the latter says:
“The human world is made one, all the countries are losing their distance every day, their boundaries not offering the same resistance as they did in the past age. Politicians struggle to exploit this great fact and wrangle about establishing trade relationships. But my mission is to urge for a world¬wide commerce of heart and mind, sympathy and under¬standing and never to allow this sublime opportunity to be sold in the slave markets for the cheap price of individual profits or be shattered away by the whole competition in mutual destructiveness.”
Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: A Mystic Turned Leftist by Dr. K. VENKATA REDDY
http://www.trivenijournalindia.com/harindranathchattopadhyayaamysticturnedleftistapr82.htm
Greeted some sixty years ago by Sri Aurobindo as “a poet of almost infinite possibilities,” Harindranath Chattopadhyaya is hailed today as “a Leftist high-gospeller.” One of the most versatile and vigorous literary personalities of contemporary India, Harin is a poet, painter, playwright, musician, actor–all rolled into one. Veering spasmodically between the extremes of Aurobindonian mysticism and Marxian materialism, he has sampled every variety of experience, and exploited every possible mood, pose and stance. Small wonder, therefore, if such a literary giant has been chosen for the B. C. Roy Award for Literature for the year 1981. Conferred on such a brilliant man of letters, it is an honour done not so much to Harin as to the Award itself.
Born in 1898, Harin was the son of Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya, a scientist-dreamer and a mystic jester, and of Varada Sundari who was “half-angel, half-bird.” A wide-eyed wonder-drunk childhood had slowly ripened into a manhood of immeasurable potency and promise. When his first book of poems, The Feast of Youth appeared in 1918, Sri Aurobindo found in it “a rich and finely lavish command of language, a firm possession of the metrical instrument, an almost blinding gleam and glitter of the wealth of imagination and fancy, a stream of unfailingly poetic thought and image and a high, though as yet uncertain, pitch of poetic expression……the beginnings of a supreme poetic utterance of the Indian soul in the rhythms of the English tongue.”
Since the publication of his The Feast of Youth numerous collections of poems and plays have come out. Harindranath reveals the core of his faith as well as his endless interest in the process of poetic creation when he says: “I dwelt more and more ... in the innermost recesses of the heart from where poetry comes. Words and phrases became an obsession; thoughts floated across the mind like clouds, some delicately tinted, others stormy, but past all that movement I begin to grip more firmly the thought...”. Thoughts come to him flapping across the wide ocean like light-winged birds. The result is a body of verse that has truly impressive bulk. His poems have been translated into several languages including Russian and Chinese.
Influenced by Western methods and models, Harin has taken to lyric poetry with ease and grace, and has given it a charm, a dignity and a thought-content. The 209 lyrics that make Spring in Winter are a poetic record of efflorescence of love, and have an authentic ring throughout. Like most of Harin’s lyrics, these are simple, sensuous, direct and neither stale nor startling. The lover’s varied moods and fancies, faithfully rendered in these exquisite lyrics give them something of an orchestrated unity of its own. A personal romantic experience becomes a poetic paradigm of lovers’ ways and moods, and aches and joys.
Like Subramania Bharati, Harindranath feels overwhelmed by the mystic vision of the “dance of doom.” For Bharati, it is Kali who destroys the worlds in a frenzy of dance and then creates them anew as Shiva, the auspicious, approaches her and quenches her divine rage. But, for Harin it is Shiva who is lost in the “thandav”, the mystic dance of doom:
In a rich rapture of intoxication
Dream-lost you move from deep shadowy deep
Along infinitudes of mortal sleep
Which veils the naked spirit of creation.
Here Harin is susceptible to mystical states and is responsive to mystical intimations, thereby proving to be a mystic poet.
Virgins and Vineyards is Harin’s most recent and most mature contribution to literature. As Harin himself states in his preface, “The poetry has come through at white heat and I have glowed throughout the writing of it, feeling a sense of gratefulness to my ancestors who continue to dream dreams through and in me, never losing touch with modern trends and events of history, which continue to alter the values of men.” The poet is perfectly at ease here, mixing memory and reverie, fact and fancy, politics and philosophy. There is a mingling of metrical ease and verbal fluency which is Harin’s main strength as a poet.
Harin’s reputation as a poet has overshadowed his eminence as a playwright. His dramatic output is by no means negligible. He has nearly a score of plays to his credit. And over a dozen of them are “devotional plays” dealing with certain situations in the lives of our religious leaders such as Jayadeva, Ravidas, Eknath, Pundalik and Sakku Bai. They are all written in verse, and are playlets rather than full-length plays. The criticism generally levelled against these plays is that they are loose in construction and blurred in characterisation with predominance of poetry over action. Tukaram, which is free from these faults, is easily the best of Harin’s devotional plays. The saintly ardour and the sense of humility and detachment of the hero are clearly brought out in his mellifluous songs as well as his dialogues with his wife and Rameshwar. The different scenes are well-knit and the poetry is functional rather than decorative as in some other plays. Its chief merit lies in its being effective as both a closet play and a stage play.
Harin seems to have undergone a metamorphosis, as it were, in his poetic career. The mystic poet seems to have suddenly realized that for years and years he has been “kept like a hot-house plant, secluded, away from the realities of the world.” He now wants “to move among the poorest and lowly, live among the downtrodden and write about the truths of life as they exist.” So he promises himself that he “won’t write about God and the birds and the flowers any more”, and that he “will write about starving babies, about cruel masters, about poor sad women, about people who are shot because they asked for food.” This may be only an intellectual approach to the misery and the tragedy of the slums, the workhouses, of the exploiters and the exploited” and yet, he feels, “that is the first step, that is better than singing about lies, about God and the soul.” This transformation of the mystic poet into a committed writer is manifest in Harin’s social plays of protest.
The most significant of Harin’s social plays are found in his collection, Five Plays (1937), which includes The Window, The Parrot, The Sentry’s Lantern, The Coffin and The Evening Lamp. They heralded the emergence of a significant working-class dramatist with innate potentialities. Like Mulk Raj Anand in the field of Indian fiction in English, Harin has succeeded in bringing a kind of life to the Indian stage that was never there before. For the first time in the history of Indian drama in English, Harin has introduced working-class characters on the stage. No Indian dramatist in English had ever cut such large slices of the working-class life. Sympathy for the exploited, revolt against stultifying morality, a plea for purposeful writing–such are the themes of these plays which are at once realistic and symbolic.
The Five Plays are essentially products of an earnest and deep commitment to certain values of life. Like the plays of Arnold Weskar, they are warm, humane, sincere, passionate, compassionate, brave, honest, energetic, outspoken, full of enthusiasm and full of concern. The enthusiasm is largely enthusiasm for paving the way for an egalitarian society. The concern is mainly concern for the well-being of the worker. They lay bare the dramatist’s acute awareness of the social problems around him. They register his protest against the cruelty of the capitalist factory-owners, the conventional and stultifying morality and makes woman a caged-bird, and the irresponsibility of writers to social problems!
Harin’s social plays are dramatically more effective than his devotional plays. Though they are heavily coated with purpose, they have a tautness and intensity that are seldom found in our dramatic writing. They are eminently actable on the stage unlike the majority of Indian plays. With their simple stage-setting, quick movement of action, limited number of characters and racy dialogue, they can very successfully be enacted. They are satirically very powerful with well-knit plots and life-like characters. Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar rightly describes them as “manifestoes of the new realism.”
The most ambitious of Harin’s plays is Siddhartha: Man of Peace (1956), an historical play in eight Acts, a simple and straight- forward enactment of Gautama’s life and message. The elaborate plot, the enormous number of scenes, situations and episodes and the large number of characters make for a certain prolexity and ostensible lack of tautness and concentration. In other words, what the play gains in detail loses in intensity. Anyway, taking into consideration, the bulk of his dramatic output the vast variety of themes he successfully handled and, above all, the poetic heights to which the verses often rise, it must be admitted that Harindranath is a very significant dramatist whose contribution to Indian drama in English is praiseworthy.
To conclude, Harindranatb Chattopadhyaya is essentially a lyric poet, a mystic turned Leftist. Whatever he has written bears the distinct stamp of the Indian mind. Whether he writes a poem or a play, it is unmistakably an Indian speaking English. His metaphor and simile are refreshingly new and strikingly Indian. He is a poet every inch. He always writes because he cannot help writing, and also because poetry is man’s–the poet’s as well as the reader’s–elemental need: “no expendable luxury but the very oxygen of existence.”
When Andhra was a Left bastion: Hindu report on Harindranath
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/article295348.ece
G. V. Ramana Rao
Bengali poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay was elected to the Lok Sabha from Vijayawada in 1951 with CPI backing
The undivided CPI won 16 seats in 1951, eight of them from the old Madras State
He was a Bengali English poet and the brother of Sarojini Naidu. His father was a scientist-philosopher, mother a poetess. He was married to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who is credited with creating the All-India Women’s Conference, National School of Drama and the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore saw him as his successor.
He was also famous for the diverse roles he played in some classic Bollywood movies.
The legendary Harindranath Chattopadhyay was the first to represent the Vijayawada parliamentary constituency in the Lok Sabha. He trounced his nearest rival and Indian National Congress candidate Rajyam Sinha, wife of Benoy Kumar Sinha, a colleague of Bhagat Singh, by 74,924 votes in the 1951 Lok Sabha polls. Also in the fray then was Gogineni Bharati Devi, wife of N.G. Ranga, and atheist leader Goparaju Ramachandra Rao, popularly known as Gora. Both of them lost their deposits.
Mr. Chattopadhyay contested the election as an Independent with the support of the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI). Krishna, East Godavari and West Godavari districts were then citadels of the CPI.
The Left party won 16 seats that year — eight from the undivided Madras State, five from West Bengal, two from Tripura and one from Orissa.
The performance of CPI candidates in the region that later became Andhra Pradesh was better than that of their counterparts in the rest of the State. While seven candidates won in the Andhra region, only one won in the Tamil Nadu region. The CPI candidates who contested from Kakinada, Rajahmundry, Eluru, Masulipatnam (Machilipatnam), Gudivada (later abolished) and Cuddapah Lok Sabha seats won with comfortable margins.
The lone CPI candidate to win from the Tamil Nadu region of the Madras State was Cannanore candidate A.K. Gopalan. Koratala Satyanarayana, who later became CPI(M) State Secretary, lost by a narrow margin of 1,388 votes in Tenali.
The CPI was behind the victory of all the three candidates who contested in Krishna district. While Chattopadhyay won with the support of the party, other candidates — Sanka Bucchikotaiah (spelt in Election Commission’s records as Sanka Butehikottaiah) won the Machilipatnam seat with a margin of 47,000 votes, while Kadiyala Gopala Rao won the Gudivada seat with a margin of 56,000 votes.
Corrections and Clarifications
* * An article "When Andhra was a Left bastion" (April 1, 2009) had theblurb "Bengali poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay was elected to the Lok Sabhafrom Vijayawada in 1951 with CPI backing." The first Lok Sabha met for thefirst time in May 1952. Lok Sabha records give Harindranath Chattopadhyayaas an independent candidate from Vijaywada (Madras). (The tenure of thefirst Lok Sabha was from April 14, 1952 to April 4, 1957.)
The sixth paragraph of the same report said "The Left party won 16 seatsthat year - eight from the undivided Madras State, five from West Bengal,two from Tripura and one from Orissa." Nine Left candidates (CommunistParty - CP) won that year from the undivided Madras state - Masuliipatam(Madras), Cannanore (Madras), Mayuram (Madras), Ongole (Madras), Kakinada(Madras), Gudiwada (Madras), Rajahmundry-SC (Madras), Eluru-SC (Madras) andCuddapah (Madras). The Left won 17 seats.
Poetry Time: 26 December 2009—Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: The Poetry of Yearning and Aspiration by Sarani Ghosal (Mondal)
by RY Deshpande on Sat 26 Dec 2009 03:30 AM IST | Permanent Link | Cosmos
Poetry Time: 26 December 2009—Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: The Poetry of Yearning and Aspiration by Sarani Ghosal (Mondal) by RY Deshpande
http://archives.mirroroftomorrow.org/blog/_archives/2009/12/26/4404988.html
Harin appeared like a meteor to announce the new spirit in Indian English poetry. It was a turning away from the materialistic stress in English poetry in search of the untold Beyond. Sri Aurobindo discovered him in his teens in the most relevant light: “Here perhaps are the beginnings of a supreme utterance of the Indian soul in the rhythms of the English tongue”. It was a new poetry because it was neither religious poetry nor mystic poetry proper. In many ways it satisfied Sri Aurobindo. Harin’s ear for rhythm charmed him the most. It reminds us of his words in The Future Poetry: “Rhythm is the premier necessity of poetical expression”. No wonder, Harin was a great hope for Sri Aurobindo, who made a detailed review of Harin’s maiden book of poems, The Feast of Youth. Sri Aurobindo draws our notice to a queer Hindu-Persian fusion in Harin’s poetry, an interesting assortment of colours and Vedic thoughts. The Persian influence is obvious in the decorative colours, but the mystic vision of the Sufi saints is also visible in The Feast of Youth and in his later poetry. The mystic sense creeps in from time to time in all his anthologies. Sri Aurobindo picks up two wonderful lines:
I am athirst for one glimpse of your beautiful face, O Love !
Veiled in the mystical silence of stars and the purple of skies.
The lines remind me of a comparatively less powerful line by John Keats in The Terror of Death, which had sought to express the same idea:
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance …
Keats had certainly had an inkling about the idea, but Harin’s lines, to my mind, are more expressive than Keats’s effort to reveal the divine idea of Beauty.
Thanks to Sri Aurobindo, who has drawn our notice to the point of originality in Harin’s poetry. He turned to gimmick later in his life and finally became a fashionable rhythmist. But, none can deny his newness as an Indian poet at a time, when many others were under the spell of Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. Harin taught the Indo-English poets to open their eyes to the inner chambers of the self. He looked inward and sought to write poetry as mantra or incantation. Let us listen to the new manner of expression in remarkable rhythm:
The Rider’s shadow is purple
On the mountain-path that winds
Far and out of the weary world
Of shadowy minds.
Bearing the great burden
Of bundled suns on his back
He keeps on silently journeying
On some unknown track.
Rhythm and the element of suggestiveness set him apart from the religious school. Harin has got a clue and a kind of foretaste of the Infinite. His is not the poetry of great realization, but it has all the charms of the poetry of yearning and aspiration. The lonely rider is on a journey along the virgin track leading to the Unknown. The aspiring soul of the poet is on the move after tasting the misery of this world. The traveler-soul of the poet becomes an ardent seeker in another poem.
I am a seeker seeking along
The grey chill ways the ultimate blush
That is marriage of me, through marriage of song
With the ultimate hush.
This is a mystic quest for some prescient flavour. The poet is seeking along ‘the grey chill ways’. The colour ‘grey’ speaks of the shadowy zones, towards which he is moving silently. The word ‘ultimate’ appears twice within these four lines. It expresses his aspiration in a round about way. Often such yearning shapes out in suggestive fairy tales, as we see in The Mad Man, Wayfaring, Shaper Shaped and The Lonely Tramp. Harin’s ironies are marked by a superior clarity in The Lonely Tramp. The tramp is obviously a self-projection, who walks with a “feeble broken lamp” and faces the odd questions from the world.
Half minstrel and half monk!
Come, tell us, are you drunk?
If so what wine is yours?
Pat comes the reply from the tramp:
The same as in your heart pours.
The gesture of self-mockery is virtually an initiation for man to turn back to his own self to discover the nature of the wine. The psychic being creeps in every now and then in Harin’s poetry, even when he is passing judgments on life. There are times too when his eyes are open to greater things in sudden mystic moments, as we see in the following lines:
I am surrounded by dim-whispering tides
Of unseen evolutions rolling far.
The poet is a conscious pilgrim and is aware of his mystic experiences. Mantric poetry is not simply the poetry of sight; the poet also listens to various sounds with the help of his soul. This reminds us of Sri Aurobindo’s words in The Future Poetry: “… the true creator, the true hearer is the soul.” Mostly, he moves around the flame and does not enter the zone. He enjoys speaking about the flame in various strains, but does not take a dip into it. Yet, his initial perceptions come out in a wonderfully original way with very little trace of Wordsworth and Shelley in them.
KR Srinivasa Iyengar rightly believes that “verbal and metrical facility is Harindranath’s main strength” and that power saves him when his “inspiration is dry and the content thin”. Iyengar echoes Sri Aurobindo when he says that Harin “is not primarily a mystic poet, nor a philosophical poet either” (Indian Writing in English, 607). Nobody can disagree. Also, nobody should deny Harin’s new ways of loving the Divine in poetry. Except for Sri Aurobindo’s and Iyengar’s views, there is not much of “critical study” on Harin. Hope this humble effort will offer some fresh ideas for the critic of Harin’s poetry.
________________________________________
This article on the early poetry of Harindranath Chattopadhyaya has been taken from Various Voices: Indian Writing in English by Sarani Ghosal (Mondal), published by Subarnarekha Kolkata (2009). Sarani is at Santiniketan and is doing her PhD in the English Literature; she has contributed to various journals and there is a great promise of her showing up as an observant discerning literary critic in the Aurobindonian spirit.
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১) অমন গুণী লোকের মধ্যে একটা fun loving ব্যাপার ছিল। উনি মেহমুদের "ভূতবাংলো" ফিল্মে ভিলেন এর রোল করেছিলেন ( যাতে মান্না দের গলায় আও-টুইস্ট-করে গানটি রয়েছে)।
২) আর জুলি ফিল্মের সুপারহিট My heart is beating গানটিও ওঁরই লেখা।
৩) মিঃ করঞ্জিয়ার ইংরেজি সাপ্তাহিক BLITZ পত্রিকার তিনটে আকর্ষণ ছিলঃ
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কী আমাদের জাত আর ধর্মই বা কী! : প্রতিভা সরকার(লিখছেন... অমিতাভ চক্রবর্ত্তী, Sumitra Sinhachowdhury, Prativa Sarker)
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বার্তা : Rouhin Banerjee(লিখছেন... Kishore Ghosal, :|:, Rouhin Banerjee)
আর্ট ভাট যত কথা : ei nin(লিখছেন... &/, সিএস, &/)
এক ছাত্রের স্মৃতিচারণা : দীপ(লিখছেন... Kishore Ghosal)
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- আপনি কি কম্পিউটার স্যাভি? সারাদিন মেশিনের সামনে বসে থেকে আপনার ঘাড়ে পিঠে কি স্পন্ডেলাইটিস আর চোখে পুরু অ্যান্টিগ্লেয়ার হাইপাওয়ার চশমা? এন্টার মেরে মেরে ডান হাতের কড়ি আঙুলে কি কড়া পড়ে গেছে? আপনি কি অন্তর্জালের গোলকধাঁধায় পথ হারাইয়াছেন? সাইট থেকে সাইটান্তরে বাঁদরলাফ দিয়ে দিয়ে আপনি কি ক্লান্ত? বিরাট অঙ্কের টেলিফোন বিল কি জীবন থেকে সব সুখ কেড়ে নিচ্ছে? আপনার দুশ্চিন্তার দিন শেষ হল। ... আরও ...
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- টইপত্তর, ভাটিয়া৯, হরিদাস পাল(ব্লগ) এবং খেরোর খাতার লেখার বক্তব্য লেখকের নিজস্ব, গুরুচণ্ডা৯র কোন দায়িত্ব নেই। | ♦ : পঠিত সংখ্যাটি ১৩ই জানুয়ারি ২০২০ থেকে, লেখাটি যদি তার আগে লেখা হয়ে থাকে তাহলে এই সংখ্যাটি সঠিক পরিমাপ নয়। এই বিভ্রান্তির জন্য আমরা দুঃখিত।
গুরুচণ্ডা৯-র সম্পাদিত বিভাগের যে কোনো লেখা অথবা লেখার অংশবিশেষ অন্যত্র প্রকাশ করার আগে গুরুচণ্ডা৯-র লিখিত অনুমতি নেওয়া আবশ্যক।
অসম্পাদিত বিভাগের লেখা প্রকাশের সময় গুরুতে প্রকাশের উল্লেখ আমরা পারস্পরিক সৌজন্যের প্রকাশ হিসেবে অনুরোধ করি।
যোগাযোগ করুন, লেখা পাঠান এই ঠিকানায় : [email protected] ।
মে ১৩, ২০১৪ থেকে সাইটটি
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