REVIEW

Selected Poems of
Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar
by Patricia Prime [Newzeland]

In his Preface to the Selected Poems of Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar, Dr. Suresh Chandra Dwivedi says, "Of the many Indian poets whose literary careers were shaped by poetry in the post-independence India of 20th century, the name of Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar is one of them. He is a progressive poet of renown. His poetic career demonstrates his humanistic vision from beginning to end." This is praise indeed for a fine poet, a significant voice in both Hindi and Indian English Poetry.

As we shall see from the poems, Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar seeks a "universal" or "collective" self, uncovered through poetry. In part this takes the form of a search for cultural roots, while producing a literature of revelation and prophecy that speaks in equal terms of the grandiosity of the universe and at times of the self. Bhatnagar's work closely centres on an individual experience and voice. Poems such as "O Winged Steeds of Destiny", "Gift of a Lively Faith" and "Accept Me", lament the transience of youth while celebrating the individual's place in a greater cosmology. Maintaining a tension between human consciousness and the world beyond it, Bhatnagar's poems read as myths of creation and metamorphosis, which bring to mind the poetry of Auden and Neruda. Throughout there is an elegiac quality to Bhatnagar's poetry that while communing with the greater universe, its generation and renewal, allows a subdued lament for the individual's mutability to escape:

I throw open the gates
Of my small habitation
To give shelter to the life and honour
Of those who are hit
Hard by Nature's ironies,
Or, by worldly ridicules.

("Gift of a Lively Faith")

Bhatnagar expends equal energy to his philosophy as to his Indian heritage. His poetry is a combination of sublimity and wisdom, and is a way of exploring the meaning of subjectivity and of pursuing philosophical beauty. The poet figure is presented as a humanist, visionary and compassionate ideologist. Spiritually-minded, and open to the greatness of feeling and experience through such vistas presented by the Indian landscape and its people, Bhatnagar's work offers a relentless and vitalised search for the fullness of human experience, and the fulfilment of destiny, as we see in "the Offshoot", where we are not to stunt the new growth and development of humanity:

So do not come
In the offshoot's way.
Do not interfere
With their growth;
Let them sprout and grow
In the sun,
In the open sky!

"We Know it Well" and "Stop It" are two of the outstanding poems in the collection for their understatement and clarity. "The Dawn" is also a very sharp expression of the pathos and beauty of the poor who dream optimistically of a new dawn:

But they dream of a new dawn
(Can ever groans eclipse faith?)
as increases the cold,
Nearer moves
The ember of a new life;
The eyes will behold a little while hence
A new dawn, a new millennium,
And the passions of a new life!

In some ways a political poem, "I Appeal" speaks more directly to the politicians and bureaucrats on behalf of the exploited:

I appeal today
To the millions of the exploited world;
To the sighs of the starving,
The naked and the oppressed,
The helpless ad the hapless ones -
Do not grope in the dark any more;
Oh, do not cherish in your eyes any dreams
Open your eyes, my friends!

"The Tremor of Trampling Feet" offers a wry retreat from the grander movements of history and struggle of the oppressed to the slighter, though just as meaningful, struggle of the downtrodden:

When the thick walls of the exploiters' citadels
Cracked with the reverberating sounds
Everyone thought -
There rocked the earthquake
But lo! that was the tremor of the trampling feet
Of the downtrodden!

The poem "Many a Man" satirises the man who, although thirsty, refuses to drink the water of the new Ganges, believing it to be poisonous and dirty, or the many men who shiver despite the new breeze of freedom blowing through the land:
The new breeze blows
Through the fields and barns,
There are many who breathe in freedom;
Still many a man shivers and sighs!

For Bhatnagar's politically acute acceptance of life and its inconsistencies, I am left a little humble. Here, political and poetic "truths", give way to the facts of life, the everyday and psychological survival. Some part escapist, some part realist, the speaker is profoundly conscious of humanity's actions and reactions to his environment. It is a politics that centres on the community as much as it rejects hypocrisy. The final image in "An Awareness Within" is as skilfully crafted politically as it is tellingly human and real, and a recognisably truthful and exact presentation of the community where everything is shared: hardship, short-comings and pain:

The clouds
With the deep salty sea
And the destruction beaconing storm
Have knocked your doors,
Extend them
A hearty welcome.
Accept them gladly
Who have brought for you
A gift of pain!
Sustain on your weak shoulders
The great mountains!
Fill deep the heart
With anguish
And the compassionate eyes
With tears!

For his part, as a humanist, Bhatnagar develops a poetry of metempsychosis, by using poetry as a vehicle through which the speaker not simply communes but merges with the natural. Where "The Irony of Fate" acknowledges the desire to cause "the bewitching birds of fancy / - like silken slips of multicoloured cloth / To fly free in the immense sky!" - "How to Suffer Pain: A Point of View" charts the experience to speak of things as themselves, and not as metaphors, within the transformative nature of poetic language, creating a meditation that while desiring realism recognises its impossibility. It is a masterful piece of writing where language and the "real" are set into play evocatively.

Bhatnagar's work is open and vulnerable, but couples this with a sort of ebullience, a hunger for experience that sometimes tips into anxiety, as if signalling the source of his energy. Central to the poetry is the desire to know and understand the self, to place the self in the deeper context of community, history or politics. For Bhatnagar, the poem is often a space of self-interrogation, where melancholy is mollified, and where the persona is an actor on the stage of life as we see in "The Incredible":
Inside the auditorium
There are no spectators
It's only me -
The actor,
The hero!

Some part dialectic, Bhatnagar's poetry affirms a self not at odds with the world but unlocking its rhythms, accepting its limitations and nature, not making-do but witnessing and celebrating. "Submission" and "The Dusk' richly evoke brief moments of the persona's experience and the questioning of how it is we are in the world, and the knowing of its particularity and fleeting nature.

Finally, in "New Life" a short play in verse is taking part on stage where a young man sings in "a pathetic tone". Poems such as this make experience and emotion almost tactile, while drawing the reader into the shared space of the poem, the shared space of being human and knowing helplessness.

Reading Bhatnagar's work is one of those rare moments of discovering a poet whose voice and experience seem wholly integrated, so that in the reading not simply communication but a kind of communion is achieved.

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