Rajnish Mishra: A Poet in Exile
Rajnish Mishra is a poet, writer, translator and blogger born and brought up in Varanasi, India. He is the editor of PPP Ezine, a poetry ezine. He has three blogs: one on his city < https:/rajnishmishravns.
Rajnish
Mishra: A Poet in Exile
The poet in him
is of a later birth than the exile in Rajnish Mishra. At first he did not know
the name of his affliction, but gradually became aware of his un/dis- ease
being neither new nor unique. It is the pain of exile. The word exile carries
with it the historical association of persecution and uprooting. The tradition
of the literature of exile is older than history. The theme and poetry of exile
are found in the Old Testament of the
Bible (ergo in Koran):
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
(Psalm 137; King James Version)
The poetry of exile is found in the Hindu purans. Given below is Shiva’s yearning for the city of Varanasi (Kashi) from which he was exiled:
What all the ice on this mountain is inadequate to do, That burning will surely subside If even the breeze coming from Kashi touches my skin, Once I was separated from my wife- Sati- That pain was allayed when she came back as Parvati. Alas!the pain of separation from Kashi torments me more. Ah Kashi when again shall I get thy gratifying touch, When will thy cooling touch cure me of this fever instantly? Oh Kashi, who wash the sins of men, the fire of separation from thee Has made the moon at my head burn like fire with ghee It took the daughter of the Himalayas to cure my previous separation If I don’t get your darshan o Kashi I shall always be tormented.
(Kashi Khand, Skandmahapuran, 44.14-19)
[Translation from Sanskrit by Rajnish Mishra]
The theme of
exile is found in poetry from all over the world. Poetry of the pain of
separation from one’s place of origin has a rich tradition. It entered the
stream of modern poetry during the transition of the socio-economic systems
from agrarian to industrial. The hunter-gatherer had less opportunities of
getting rooted to his place. A farmer could stay rooted to a place from his
birth to death and roots, once sprouted, went deep into the soil and connected
the man to his place. The strength of his bonding was such that uprooting could
only be effected by a natural or geopolitical change of extreme nature. So, the
exile, uprooted and pining, is not commonly found in poetry of that time. As
the Industrial Revolution altered the socioeconomic structure of the European
(and later world) societies, brought in its wake urbanization and rural
emigration, and the literature of exile was born. The most well-known example
of this genre is from nineteenth century England, John Clare.
May it be mine to meet my end in
thee;
And, as reward for all my troubles
past,
Find
one hope true—to die at home at last!
(‘Helpstone’)
An equally
well-known example from Urdu poetry is his contemporary Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’, the last Mughal Emperor who
spent the last years of his life in exile in Burma wrote a moving ghazal in the memory of his home (land).
Nothing
appeals to my heart in this deserted land.
How
can it find peace in these times on this land?
O
my yearnings go, dwell elsewhere,
Where’ll
you live in this besmirched heartland?
I
was given four days of life to live. Two were
spent
in yearning for, two waiting for my land.
O
Zafar, the unfortunate for your
burial,
Two
yards were not to be had in your beloved land!
[Translated from
Hindi by Rajnish Mishra]
Clare and Zafar,
both died in 1860’s. The theme of exile lived on. In fact, the twentieth
century saw the number of artists in exile increasing. Bertolt Brecht, a German
exile, beautifully captures the irony of hope in transience of the state that
ends up being permanent in his poem ‘On the Term of Exile’:
No
need to drive a nail into the wall
To
hang your hat on;
When
you come in, just drop it on the chair
No
guest has sat on.
Don’t
worry about watering the flowers—
In
fact, don’t plant them.
You
will have gone back home before they bloom,
And
who will want them?
If
mastering the language is too hard,
Only
be patient;
The
telegram imploring your return
Won’t
need translation.
Remember,
when the ceiling sheds itself
In
flakes of plaster,
The
wall that keeps you out is crumbling too,
As
fast or faster.
Translated from the German by
Adam Kirsch
<
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/54759/on-the-term-of-exile>
The twenty-first
century did not witness any change in the geopolitics of the world, hence in
the state of the exile. The same pain is found in poems of exile from Tibet,
Kashmir, Albania, Afghanistan, Sindh, Bangladesh, Greece and the list goes on. Let’s
talk about Aga Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet in exile in the United States. His
poems of exile have a haunting simplicity of images.
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ll enter
our last world, the first that vanished
(‘A Pastoral’)
It is this
tradition of poetry to which much of Rajnish Mishra’s work belongs. He is an
exile, but unlike in most of the poems mentioned here, not from his nation but
from his city of Varanasi. His poetic oeuvre and imagination have been shaped
by pain and separation. His poems show his place and times very vividly and
clearly yet his city is not restricted to one place or time, as in ‘My City and Yours’:
My city, is your
city, and theirs.
My city is stuck
with what it’s given.
My city as
shown, as true, as real,
yes it is all,
and not.
The spirit, the
life,
the transience,
the sorrows,
the joys, the
filth of flowers,
and all that’s
seen or not, at all hours,
For the world to
see, is my city simplified,
palatable,
presentable, made easy.
Multifaceted?
Never.
Simply, ‘city
for dummies’.
His devotion to
details, and his transcendence of the same make for a curious combination of
contraries, as in ‘Time and Life to Death’:
Disgusting, the filth,
reflected sometimes, on faces.
Cow dung, house waste,
refuse and grime,
Scattered, removed,
then scattered again,
repeat performance,
seen and felt
on skin, in nose, on feet through eyes.
Yet feet go on,
undaunted, eternally,
as time and life run to death,
from flesh to fire to ashes.
His is a city generally devoid of things
natural, with the exception of his river: the Holy Ganges. His poems bring the
river back, or go back to the river repeatedly, as in ‘My River Rests’:
My river rests, soundless;
no wind blows.
Darkness, a distant din,
wave-twinkling bulbs –
Those bulbs, the stars
and the distant glow
of city lights, orange-red
over silver-black sands.
Rajnish Mishra
belongs to the tradition of exile, and lives at a time and place that are not
here and now.
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