On February 12, we have stepped into the centenary of Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s (1919-2003) birth. Here’s a look at how he chose to engage with the craft of poetry-writing in a world marked by deep fault lines.Eminent Bengali poet late Subhash Mukhopadhyay. Credit: Facebook Personal manifestos can often be clumsy and awkward – they also date easily – and so it is a tribute to Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s genius that his statement of poetic intent, penned over 50 years ago, rings fresh and true to this day:I want to stand every single wordon their own feet.I wish to see every shadowgrow their own eyes.I would like every static wordto walk free. That someone called me a poetI wouldn’t want.I would rather that I couldwalk on with many othersshoulder to shoulder, holding handstill the day I die.Oh! But that I couldlay my pen downby the tractor’s sideand say,Here, I am done now –Brother, will you give me a light? Kaal Madhumash (literally, Tomorrow is Spring) made its appearance in 1966, nearly three decades into Mukhopadhyay’s career. But the humble spoken word of everyday life, with its infinite variety of tone, colour and cadence, had been the body and soul of his poetry for many years already. Here was a consummate artist who, at the peak of his powers, wove his magic out of the sparsest of props. The story of how his craft evolved is worth recalling in the year of his birth centenary.Mukhopadhyay started publishing quite early, and Padatik (The Foot-Soldier), his first book, came out in 1940, as he just turned 21. Urbane and witty, and already capable of coming up now and then with incredibly clever turns of phrase and strikingly original rhyme patterns, he, however, was not to come truly into his own before Agnikone’(The Abode of the Fire God) that made its appearance in 1948. The very first offering of the collection, For the Sake of a Poem, bursts forth with an intensity of tone and a vividness of imagery that take your breath away:A poem is about to get written. For its sakethe sky, like a blue tongue of fire,seethes with rage; over the seaa violent storm flails its wings, the smoky locksof the clouds’ wild hair unravel, the roll of thunderechoes in the forest, in its rootsthe terror of landslides throbs fiercely,lightning cranes its neck to look backand, by its light, over the entire valley,mirrored in dark red blood, at its own image,looks the terrible Moloch.A poem gets written for his sake…………Mukhopadhyay’s weltanschaung was fashioned by the turbulent 1940s, when great political and social upheavals rocked India and, indeed, the world. And he was not merely an onlooker, and plunged headlong into the battle for equity and social justice as a young communist activist, choosing, at the party’s bidding, to live in Budge Budge’s industrial ghetto for several years, where he had to daily shuffle his duties as an agitator and organiser with those of a reporter-cum-column writer for the party’s mouthpiece. In the event, his poetry quickly shed the somewhat self-conscious urbaneness of the initial years and grew mellower, more earnest in tone, even as images from humdrum, everyday lives came increasingly to make up his canvas:The sky is like Babarali’s crazed eyes.Underneath it, walking with a processionand struggling to keep pace,many miles from home,is Babarali’s little daughter Salemon,looking forher mother.Where in the city’s labyrinthof alley-ways and blind lanes,where are you hiding,Salemon’s mother?Where under the skythat looks like Babarali’s deranged eyes,where have you set up home,Salemon’s mother?Do you hearhow, in chorus with other voicesin the procession,the corners of her sticky eyesrunning with tear-dropsand calling out to you,Salemon’s mother,is your daughterborn in the time of a famine,and now staring at another?It is only you, Salemon’s mother,that she is searching for. By now, Mukhopadhyay had clearly outgrown the need to speak cleverly. Or mockingly (‘My love, now’s is not the time to play with flowers / For ruination, stark, stares us in the face./ Gone from our eyes are the blue dreams of pleasure / As a remorseless sun our backsides bakes’). His intellectual commitments had found their moral and emotional equivalents in the bitter struggles, the collective joys and sorrows, the unredeemed darknesses and the sporadic iridiscence of hope in the lives that ordinary Indians lived around him. He no longer felt the need to declaim, or to pontificate (‘Comrade, shan’t we usher in the new day now?…..’) – and while his world view could still quite easily be divined by any attentive reader of his poetry, its compelling quality derived from a clear stream of universal humanism from which men of all ideological and cultural sympathies could drink deeply:‘Where under a cataract-blinded skyHis ancient headSagging to his kneesA scraggy stick in handSits doddering old darknessWhere all through the long nightAnd the entire dayAutumn leaves fall drip drop drip dropOn to the ground Where like the stevedore on a steamerMemory sitsPlumbing the depthOf life’s oceanAll dayTowards thereI knowThe icy winds of winterWill shove me tooOne dayOh, mother EarthMay I neverSee the faceOf that wasted dayBefore that time comesDo take out my eyesAnd tie themLike two jingling ankletsTo my two feet Here simplicity of diction blends magically into startlingly vivid word pictures. The overall impression, however, is one of extreme economy, and this often helps mask the technical virtuosity, the verve at play in Mukhopadhyay’s mature poetry:After drowning the western sky in bloodIntimidating, like a raging banditGlowering all the while at those out on the streetsBack to his formidable denReturnedThe sunA very long while afterTo investigate at first handSo that day could easily be turned into nightIn the policeman’s Black Maria / Came / EveningAs I switched on the lightOut through the open windowLeaptDarknessAnd whenI drew the curtains openLike a startled, frightened deerIn a tight embraceClasped meThe windIt is possible to forget that Mukhopadhyay stood in a line – maybe not in a direct line, though – of descent from Bengali poetry’s great lyricists, including Rabindranath Tagore – till we look a little more closely and come up with verses such as this:I will never forgetHowYou helped erase my griefOn a dark night.The sky outsideWas blinded by the swirling dustKicked upBy the stiff desert wind.In the dark, a pack of camelsTheir bells jinglingWere making their reluctant wayFrom the town to the villageTurning up their noses in disgust.What tree was that on the road’s other side?I did not know.What flower was that in bloom in that garden?I did not know, either.I was a stranger, new To this unfamiliar town.In the distanceThe car lights, shining a little above the roadWere criss-crossing one anotherBreathlessly.They looked as thoughThey were deep furrowsOn the forehead of a manWho had lived a hard life.Suddenly, my tears frozeAnd the invisible coffinThat sat on my shouldersFelt incredibly heavy.That day I realisedThat living was lighterThan death.Memories of an empty lifeCame back to me.I thought of my countryOf the times we lived inAnd I missed it all so badly.I, a complete strangerNew to this townStill held on my wristMy own country’s time.Words of sympathy rolled towards meBut however much I triedI could not hold them in my hands.It was then, in silenceThat you stood up, and walked towards meAnd held my hand.No, you did not say a wordBut how you made me forget my griefOn that dark night –You may one day forgetBut I will not. Words shorn of all ornamentation, words that yet are drawn from the heart of the most deeply felt emotions, combine here to create what can only be described as musical phrases of stunning beauty. Mourning the death, and at the same time celebrating the life, of the great Bengali novelist-storyteller Manik Bandopadhayay, who died at the tragically early age of 48, Mukhopadhyay weaves an unforgettable tapestry of night and day, of death and life:Night after long night I sat awake to watchwhen and how it becomes light.My days were spenttrying to unravel the mysteries of the dark.Never did I, even not for a momentstop and sit still.I squeezed out life’s essencesand left them to settle in many hearts –today they spilled over, every one of them.NoI am no longer content with mere words.I would rather that I could reach outto that one place where all words ariseand also end –that one source of all our wordsthat final destination of all our names,the earth, the water and the wind –I wish now to be one with all of them.Yesput me down nowletloads of firewood embrace me.Let an ineluctable spark of fireallow me to forget for everall the pain that flowers bring. A more moving elegy is unlikely to have been sculpted out of such simple building blocks anywhere.Anjan Basu freelances as literary critic, commentator and translator. He has published a book of translations from the work of the well-known Bengali poet Subhash Mukhopadhayay.