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Shivangi Sinha 132 Vth Semester IIIrd Year BA English (Hons) Indian Writing in English Translation

Muktibodh as the poet of fantasy

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, a prominent poet of Nayi Kavita (new poetry) and pragativad movement (progressive literary movement) combines reverie with reality, fantasy with social truth as he weaves his verse in organic totality against the backdrop of class antagonism. The use of fantasy that he employs in his poetry is what distinguishes him from other poets. For him, fantasy is the daughter of experience that he incorporates in his poems to negotiate between consciousness emerging from experiences and reverie. He uses fantasy as a tool, as a technique to mould realities out of imagined situations which he borrows from legends, myths, folktales and stories from Indian literary sources. Muktibodh uses the ancient literary sources and Sanskrit aesthetics to create such sensibilities which express and explain the dissenting voices in different tones. Muktibodh beautifully explains the process of putting fantasy into words and he further adds that how new elements merge into fantasy constantly amending and reshaping it into a new consciousness since for him “fantasy is born out of experience and is projected through experience.”1 So, his usage of fantasy is not far removed from reality.

1 Muktibodh, Gajana Madhav. Eik Sahitiyak Ki Diary, New Delhi: Bhartiya Jnanpith, 2011.

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Moreover, there is an anxiety of consciousness in his use of fantasy which foregrounds its background in his battle towards his ideal of a classless society since he was influenced by both by Marxist philosophy and existentialism. In order to depict the battle between the personal and the political, he turns to fantasy to breathe words to the anxiety that haunts him. He tries to uncover the truth through the world of dreams using surrealistic techniques in his verse. In his poem, ‘So Very Far’ Muktibodh attempts to evoke the grim figure of a scavenger that is synonymous to the figure of a death reaper who will lead utter destruction in order to create a new world which will be rid of unjust social order as evident with the line – “to sweep the whole world clean you need a scavenger.” The element of fantasy becomes more expressive in his long poems like ‘Brahmarakshas’ especially. In the Kathasaritsagara and Panchatantra, the Brahmarakshas belongs to a class of demons but Muktibodh’s Brahmarakshas is a wanderer found at the edge of a “city near ruins” towards “an abandoned, empty well” where he sits like a gatekeeper as he chants hymns of “strange strotras, mantras fevered curses in chaste sanskrit.” So, Muktibodh’s Brahmarakshas is an erudite man who has been shunned by society. Critic Nikhil Govind in his essay, The Inner Horizons of Words astutely unpacks the idea of the fantastical as madness as the figure of the “genius is also the freak, the madman”2 since by demonizing this erudite man because of his wealth of knowledge, society has labeled him as the other, as a monster. Society cannot live up to the ideals of this erudite man who shows the mirror to oppressive institutions of power that thrive on corruption and exploitation of those that are at the bottom of the social heap . This archetypal imagery in his narrative uses the myth of Brahmarakshas to show how authoritarianism crushes poetic individuality which becomes evident with the death of the Brahmarakshas who “within

2 Govind, Nikhil. The Inner Horizons of Words. Alochana Issue 55, 2015.

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the dark room kept his arithmetic/ and died…/ in dense barbed undergrowth/in a dark cavity/dead bird like/ departed.” Poets like WB Yeats mention that when poet struggles outside of his self then fiction literature is created and this holds true for Muktibodh as well. His poems echo dually with ‘gyanatmak samvedna’ and ‘samvedatmak gyan’ in which they brim with gyan, the knowledge and samvedna, a sense of deep rooted empathy it takes to combat against oppressive power structures. Another poem of his, ‘The Void’, a surrealistic poem which resonates with Eliotean isolation sheds light on the mayhem and violence that a materialistic and capitalistic society breeds. The void or nothingness signifies the moral and spiritual vacuum which has led to barbarism and cannibalism. This void is depicted as a terrible monster that resides in all of us. It is spiritual sterility and hints at what a collapse of human values can lead to. This void is visualized like a vampire with huge jaws containing flesh eating carnivorous teeth. These are the vampires of capitalism, industrialism and hedonism which are making men more self absorbed and empty. “ The void inside us/has jaws,/those jaws have carnivorous teeth;/those teeth will chew you up/those teeth will chew up everyone else” – the opening lines of the poem indicate that the emptiness and growing self-absorption in man has made him barbaric in his material pursuits as nothing is enough to satiate his hunger. Thus the poet creates a fantasy of void as a frightening monster that lurks inside humans. He also portrays the void as fertile as it breeds anarchy, corruption and violence. Further, he juxtaposes death with birth – “death is now giving birth/ to brand new children.” This paradoxical imagery of death which is supposed to kill is giving birth to fresh new children becomes grim as the birth of the new generation does not symbolize the celebration of life but the ever growing emptiness in society that only seems to become more

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contagious with each generation. Interestingly, the ideological framework of Eliot’s Wasteland and Muktibodh’s The Void is the same as they both symbolically reflect the theme of human alienation and loss of moral identity. Through his prayogvad style, Muktibodh depicts the status of the proletariat versus the bourgeois in his poetry as he attempts to stir the hibernated consciousness of people while creating a surreal world of ritual and dream. By doing so, he establishes himself both as a poet of commitment and a poet of fantasy as he dually holds the subversive power to dethrone status quo; and the use of fantastical elements to reconstruct reality out of imagined scenarios in order to depict the sense of urgency needed to address these issues as the imagery of the Brahmarakshas, carnivorous jaw, scavenger and more haunts the reader to develop a proletarian consciousness. Conclusively, in all his poems Muktibodh’s voice of protest emerges from the agonies of people at the bottom of the social heap and so his verse is a scalding criticism of unjust social and political order. He brilliantly uses allegory, myth, drama and fantasy as different methods for poetic and aesthetic effect as his poems do not dwell in ambiguity rather they become a trajectory towards the truth as the poet guides the reader from one fantasy to another until the reader snaps out of false consciousness.

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WORKS CITED 1. Muktibodh, Gajana Madhav. Eik Sahitiyak Ki Diary, New Delhi: Bhartiya Jnanpith, 2011. 2. Govind, Nikhil. The Inner Horizons of Words. Alochana Issue 55, 2015....