A glimpse of how hard it is to pin down an actual Rāmprasād comes from an account by Iśvarcandra Gupta, who went in search of poems in about 1853, fifty to ninety years after the poet’s death.
Works of his which had been collected earlier have by now almost disappeared, because in those days people used to guard them carefully like some secret mantra, not showing them to anyone even at the cost of their lives, bringing them out at puja time to decorate with flowers and sandalwood paste, as some people still do today, and though we would have given all we had we were not able to obtain any of the verses. Hidden in this way they have become completely destroyed. Worms and other insects ate them, moisture decomposed them, fire burned them, they were used by the impotent as charms to secure beautiful women or long life. . . .
In this atmosphere legends have curled like smoke through cracks in the courtyard tiles. Poems with a signature line of Rāmprasād Sen continue to show up in Bengal. Their tone doesn’t waver much: petition, complaint, truculent demand, distress, fitful temper tantrum, frustration, childish fury. A long history of ninda-stuti, “praise in the form of abusive reproach,” exists in India, but there are few poems like Rāmprasād’s. His steam with childish fits, thrown to catch the attention of a mother he rebukes for ignoring him—a mother who frequents cremation grounds with her ganja-smoking minions, who dances among jackals and crows, leaving her child unprotected, whimpering, and unfed.
Here, where the secrets of childhood twist in helpless discomfort, is where Kali the dark goddess, stark and unapproachable, appears. Laden with Tantric ciphers and primitive symbols, Rāmprasād’s poems function at psychic levels you can’t approach or recover through “grown-up” emotions. Their greatest effect comes when you, the listener, are shorn like him to a naked, raw exposure.
: BHĀNUSIṂHA (RABINDRANATH TAGORE)
(1861—1941)
1
Spring at last! The amuyās flare,
half-opened, trembling with bees.
A river of shadow flows through the grove.
I’m thrilled, dear trusted friend,
shocked by this pleasure-flame—
am I not a flame in his eyes?
His absence tears at me—
love blooms, and then spring
blows the petals from the world.
In my heart’s grove the cuckoos pour out
a bewildering fountain of pleasure-drops,
jewels of the universe.
Even the bee-opened flowers mock me:
“Where’s your lover, Rādhā?
Does he sleep without you
on this scented night of spring?”
I know he breathes secrets to you—
I can see their perfumes still dispersing
among the leaves of your longing.
Have I no memory of my own?
Besides, your head is full of flowers.
Go wait for him in the last shreds
of your innocence, crazy girl,
until grief comes for you.
:CT & TKS
3
He never came to me.
In the whole long dark he never came
to tend my lacerated heart.
I’m a girl with nothing, a tree
with neither flowers nor fruit.
Go home, poor tragedy. Distract yourself
with chores, dry your eyes. Go on now,
dear tattered garland, limp with shame.
How can I bear this staggering weight?
I’m budding and blooming at once,
and dying, too, crushed by thirst
and the leaves’ incessant rustling.
I need his eyes in mine, their altar’s gold fire.
Don’t lie to me. I’m lost in that blaze.
My heart waits, fierce and alone.
He’ll leave me. If he leaves me, I’ll poison myself.
He drinks at love’s fountain, too,
my friend. His own thirst will call him.
Listen to Bhānu: a man’s love
whets itself on absence if it’s true.
:CT & TKS
10
Your flute plays the exact notes of my pain.
It toys with me.
Where did you learn such stealth,
such subtle wounding, Kān?
The arrows in my breast
burn even in rain and wind.
Wasted moments pulse around me,
wishes and desires, departing happiness—
Master, my soul scorches.
I think you can see its heat in my eyes,
its intensity and cruelty. So let me drown
in the cool and consuming Yamunā,
or slake my desire in your cool,
consoling, changing-moon face.
It’s the face I’ll see in death.
Here’s my wish and pledge:
that the same moon will spill its white pollen
down through the roof of flowers
into the grove, where I’ll consecrate my life
to it forever, and be its flute-breath,
the perfume that hangs upon the air,
making all the young girls melancholy.
That’s my prayer.
Oh, the two of you, way out of earshot.
If you look back you’ll see me, Bhānu,
warming herself at the weak embers of the past.
:CT & TKS
18
How long must I go on waiting
under the secretive awnings of the trees?
When will he call the long notes of my name
with his flute: Rādhā, Rādhā, so full of desire
that all the little cowherd-girls will start awake
and come looking for him, as I look for him.
Will he not come to me,
playing the song of Rādhā with his eyes and hands?
He will not, Yamunā.
I have one moon—Śyāma—
but a hundred Rādhās yearn for moonlight at his feet.
I’ll go to the grove, companion river.
Alone, I’ll honor our trysting-place.
No one will make me renounce it.
Come with me into the dark trees.
You’ll have your tryst,
its trembling rapture and its tears.
:CT & TKS
19
You resemble my Dark Lord Śyāma,
Death, with your red mouth
and unkempt hair, dressed in cloud.
Sheltered in your lap, my pain abates.
You are the fountain of nectar, Death,
of immortality. I say aloud
the perfect word of your name.
Mādhava has forgotten Rādhā.
But you, Dark Lord, accomplice,
you will not abandon me.
Call me now. I’ll come into your arms
in tears, but soon lapse into half-closed sleep,
drowsy with bliss, my pain erased.
You won’t forget me.
I hear a flute from the distant playgrounds,
the city far away—it must be yours,
for it plays my name.
Now darkness comes on, and with it a storm.
Clouds roil, and lightning slashes at the palms;
the desolate path twists into darkness.
I’m fearless now. I’ll meet you there, Death,
in the old trysting-place. I know the way.
Shame on your faithlessness, Rādhā.
Death is not another name for love.
You’ll learn for yourself.
:CT & TKS
21
Who wants to hear the long, miserable
story of Rādhā? Who among you
fathoms love’s mystery?
The world will see my disgrace, my stains of love,
but I won’t care. I’ll abandon my
self
for one caress from Śyāma.
I’ve asked you and asked you, my friends,
not to revile him, for I have risked
everything for him: my family’s honor,
my friendships, my soul.
All these I pour out in sacrifice at his feet.
I know that men from the town slander
my Dark Lord’s name. They know nothing of love.
If my blunt words offend you, then don’t follow me
into my heart’s dark trysting-place.
Now you understand my own heart,
which bore long ago the fire that sears you.
Flames still flare up, in both body and mind.
:CT & TKS
22
I’ve fallen from my life, friend—
my tears since birth have washed my charms away.
But I’ve known pure love.
If I glimpse for an instant
my own Dark Lord on the forest path,
I kiss the dust at his feet a hundred times,
as if each grain were a jewel.
Unlucky, star-crossed birth.
I long to stay within the shadow
of his flute and taste from afar his dark smile.
Rādhā is the Dark Lord’s Mistress!
May her pleasure be endless!
But it’s grief that’s endless,
a river of unseen tears.
Is your indifference endless also, Black One?
Its half-bloomed flowers fall unseen
into the river of human tears.
:CT & TKS
Bhānusiṃha (Rabindranath Tagore)
LATE IN 1875 one of Calcutta’s foremost literary journals, Bharata, published eight poems by a previously unheard of seventeenth-century Vaishnava poet, Bhānusiṃha. The language of the poems was Brajabuli, a Bengali literary vernacular that had gone unused for centuries. Vaishnava poets in past centuries had written in it, but the language had dropped out of use. Over the six years following those first publications, Bharata ran five more poems signed Bhānusiṃha. Scholars were baffled. How had a poet of such note gone unheard of until now?
Only gradually did it emerge that the poems were the discovery of a young man from a renowned, eccentric, artistic family, who claimed to have happened on the manuscript in the Calcutta library of the Brahmo Samaj. His name was Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore had been fourteen when he published the first Bhānusiṃha poems. The name Bhanu Singha (as Tagore anglicized the name in his memoirs) plays on his own name. Bhanu and rabi both mean “sun.” Singha, lion, and tagore (Sanskrit: thakkura, landowner) each hold a secondary meaning: “chief; man of rank.” These poems were, in fact, the work of a teenage poet; no Bhānusiṃha existed.
Was this a literary hoax? A biographical account of Bhānusiṃha published by Tagore in 1884 proved a biting and sardonic parody of Western scholarship. Even more, it exposed the unthinking imitation of that sort of scholasticism by Indian scholars, full of stiff hyperbole and unproven assumptions backed by obscure books, and both slavish and arrogant in manner.
Several worlds meet in these poems. There is the Eastern Indian and Bengali tradition of song cycles dedicated to the loves of Radha and Krishna, a heritage begun by Jayadeva in the twelfth century, adopted by Vidyāpati, Chandidāsa, and other vernacular poets from the fifteenth century forward. But the Bhānusiṃha poems are also the earnest, possibly angry and rebellious, youthful work of India’s preeminent modernist poet, who had spearheaded the Bengali Renaissance. The artists of the Renaissance were well-read and well-traveled, and likely these poems are aligned to modernist (and postmodern) practices in literary pseudonym, the elaborate Dada-style hoax, as well as early ethnopoetic projects of searching out ancient poetries (real or imaginary) as a way to rejuvenate one’s own verse.
Furthermore there is the old, well-documented practice of poets assuming a persona, through possession by a god or spirit power, by being witness to supernatural events, or through receiving a vision. Which of these many possible influences worked through Tagore? His friends William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound both revitalized their own poetry and the poetry of their day by taking on powerful personae. The tangled web of persona within persona, of seriousness within pseudonym or hoax, makes the Krishna-worshipping Bhānusiṃha lyrics both the most backward-looking and the most modern of Tagore’s writing. He was still working on them at his death—which makes them the longest-standing project of his career. Could it be that what began as a hoax, meant to unseat conservative older poets and scholars, ended up the most intimate poems of Tagore’s life?
: SONGS OF THE BENGALI BAULS
My life is a little oil lamp
floating on the waves.
But from which landing-pier
did you set me afloat?
With darkness ahead of me
and darkness behind,
darkness overlaps my night,
while the necklace of waves
constantly rings me about.
The storm of the night
relentlessly flows
below the stars,
and the lamp is afloat
on the shoreless water—
for company.
Gangārām
:DB
A tramp by nature and a beggar at that,
he lives a strange life, almost insane,
with values of his own which are contrary
to those of others.
His home being under a tree,
he moves from district to district
all the year round,
as a dancing beggar who owns nothing
in the world
but a ragged patchwork quilt.
Anonymous
:DB
The scriptures will tell you
no prayers for love.
Love’s record remains
unsigned by sages.
Lālan
:DB
The road to you is blocked
by temples and mosques.
I hear your call, my Lord,
but I cannot advance,
prophets and teachers
bar my way.
Since I would wish
to burn the world
with that which cools my limbs,
my devotion to unity
dies divided.
The doors of love bear many locks:
scriptures and beads.
Madan, in tears,
dies of pain and regret.
Madan
:DB
Human limbs
are held together
by a pair of lotus blooms
growing in the
lower and upper regions
of the body.
But the lotuses
open and shut
as the sun
in the body
rises and sets.
On which of these blooms
is the full moon born,
and on which the darkest
night of the month?
On which of these lotuses
rests the total eclipse
of the sun
and the moon?
Chandidās Gosāiñ
:DB
Now is the time for you
to repeat the names
of Rādhā and Krishna,
the gods of devoted love.
The central beam
of your life is down
and your time is gone.
Your cheeks are sunk
and your hair is slack,
dead as a mop of jute.
Now is the time to repeat
the names of Rādhā and Krishna.
A fading rainbow,
you balance on a stick,
bent as a letter of the alphabet,
knees and head together.
Your time has gone
&nb
sp; and all for nothing.
Your teeth are missing
but your eyes,
through empty holes,
still frown from your brows.
Rāmachandra
:DB
Prepare your heart
day by day
till it is ready
for the rise of the full moon.
Then lay a trap
at the bottom of the river
to catch it.
Pulin
:DB
Bauls of Bengal
GOD’S VAGABONDS,” they’ve been called, and they’ll refer to themselves as “madmen.” Their madness is social, not medical; it stems from a sure-footed disregard of civic or religious convention. Caste they fiercely reject, and contempt they level at the scripture-based religion most Bengalis follow. Though regarded as wanderers, troubadors, street beggars, and vagabonds, the Bauls of Bengal generally live in small farming communities, devoted to a guru living or buried in the near vicinity. Mostly rural, drawn from laboring castes, their beliefs put them at odds with conventional Bengali lifestyle. The most celebrated of Bauls, Lālan (circa 1774—1890), once sang:
What form does caste take?
Brother, I’ve never seen it
not with these eyes.
(DB translation)
Scholar Kshitimohan Sen writes, “They [the Bauls] say, all these scriptures are nothing but leftovers from ancient celebrations. What are we, dogs?—that we should lick these leftovers? If there is need, we shall make new celebrations.” To get what Sen says next, you need to know that pat, leaf, has two uses. It is the leaf of a banana or other plant used in rural areas and on train platforms for a disposable food-plate; it is also the palm leaf long used for book pages in India. “Having lost their faith, men, like dogs, collect together the left-over leaves. Even dogs one day abandon the leaves. Men are still more despicable. Their pride is in showing which among the leaves is oldest!”
The Bengali term Baul most likely derives from Sanskrit vātula—mad, insane, “affected by wind.” The sect has produced hundreds of singers over the last several centuries, forty or more of them well-known. The singers perform seasonally, carrying a small stringed instrument from village to village, returning home to help bring in the harvest.
Love and The Turning Seasons Page 12
