P S KANWAR : A SEASON OF NIGHTS

     

     Punjabi Poetry

Puran Singh Kanwar (1942-96): A Non-ideological Radical

That is how some one has described Dr Kanwar as a poet: a non-ideological radical. Dr Kanwar's first and only collection of poetry, "Rattan di Rut" was published in 1984 and hailed as poetry of "a unique individuality and unique paradigm". My translation of his poems from Punjabi titled "A Season of Nights" was published in 2006. Here are a few of his poems in translation and an extract from my introduction to the collection, to give you an idea of the uniqueness of Dr. Kanwar's poetry.

LINES ON MY PALM

Bhrigu is dumbstruck -

Thrusting my eyes

Into his

I laugh through them.

He starts -

The mad man might

Suddenly charge

And strangle him

In broad daylight

He is the master of his art

And has peered

At the innumerable lines

On my palm...

One of them

Spells suicide

And hundreds

That speak murder.

When I was born,

People tell,

My mother

Had laughed and laughed

That laughter

Was her death-knell.

In my childhood

During his sleep

I had slit open with a knife

My father's jugular vein.

He has been asleep since then...

I have let him sleep.

At our mansion

Nuptials are performed

Everyday

The family barber dresses me

In the royal bridegroom robes

The palki-bearers

Seat me in the palki

And move in a trance

As if snake-sniffed.

Everyday I sleep

With the living corpse

Of a new queen.

At dawn the priest

Calls...

O prince

Wake up

You have to be ready again

For the nuptials...

---

THE DAZZLE OF AN OYSTER- SHELL

Eyes...

From these eyes many a time he had taken off his glasses

And in their deep oceans

He had found an oyster-shell.

From then on nothing else had stirred his heart

He steered clear of his friends

At home he sat idle doing nothing

For hours on he would pluck out

And send floating into the air

Plumed seeds from the dry milkweed pods

Even a hundred entreaties

Would not shake him.

In his wailing one could hear the howling of jackals

In his yelling one could hear the roar of lions.

In his childhood,

His mother tells,

He used to thrust his hands into wasp nests...

That oyster-shell

That he used to flaunt in front of his friends

He has now flung away into the sun!

Why does the brilliance of that shell

Now dazzle his eyes?

In this brilliance

His eyes see flying at once

Now silken plumes

Now yellow wasps...

---

POSSESSED

Lulled to sleep

In the cradle

My ungrown hair

Washed in curds...

I wake up

What's this?

My mother died long ago!

My yards long hair

All white

Wrinkled skin

Bare hairy chest

Virile and masculine -

Signs of manhood...

My younger brother's little daughter

Pulls the hair on my chest

And teases: Uncle, aren't you a bear?

No? She repeats she taunt.

Silly girl! Can't keep her mouth shut.

I shake off my body

Shake off? No! No!

I tear my body

Limb by limb

And fling it away.

Dismembered thus

I'm complete.

Look, Vandana, run!

Look at uncle

He's possessed

His limbs lie scattered

On the floor

Look at his head

Severed from the trunk:

It blesses us

Shanti...shanti...shanti...

---

THE JUNGE OF RELATIONSHIPS

My friend!

The riddle you have propounded today

About the tangle of relationships

Is yet incomplete.

Today someone has bound me to her honour...

I'm innocent, I'm shamed, may I be damned...

Whenever from the distant horizon

I sensed her presence

I started - and I ran

But my way was crossed

Sometimes by a black cat

Sometimes by a black brahmin

Sometimes a stranger sneezed, unwittingly,

And every time, instantly, I retraced my steps

Holding my head in shame

I'm innocent, may I be damned...

We drift and grope around, unrelated,

In this jungle of relationships

Deadly snakes haunt our ways

And flying snakes...

If I sleep I'm stung by scorpions

While awake I'm tormented by my pledge

My chest huffs and puffs like the bellows

My thoughts flicker like the glowworm's light

My hopes are unfounded, my desires impossible

My neighbours resentful

Scheming to drive me from the neighbouthood...

But why has this flight of cranes landed

In my courtyard today?

A flight of cranes!

Flying snakes!! Scorpions!!!

While awake I'm tormented

By the same thoughts - my word of honour...

---

A SEASON OF NIGHTS

I have the voice

Of words

To create meaning

But the words I utter are

Dumb

Empty

Lifeless

Signatures of my being

I have nothing

Only an attempt

That goes on

And on...

When shall the voice of words

Create silence?

My friend

Has just now shown me a mirror.

Have I laughed at my own reflection?

My black image

Has borrowed its blackness

From the darkness

Of a jungle of leafless trees

And you are looking

For a ray of light!

After endless supplications

Shunning the company of friends

Depriving myself of my father's wealth

Turning my back on my mother's love

Scoffing at the rays of the sun

Extinguishing all the lamps

For my own joy

I have nurtured

Within the jungle of my heart

A season of nights.

I have the voice of words

My words are dumb

Signatures of my being

I have nothing...

---

Here is an extract from the introduction to my translations of Dr Kanwar's poetry:

"... Dr Kanwar’s poetry seems to fit into the Surrealist framework quite well. The title of his collection - A Season of Nights – is extremely suggestive. It conjures up a mysterious phantasmagoria of nightly images. Night, of course, is associated with sleep and dreaming, when there is a ‘lowering of resistance’ created by the superego against the repressed and secret world of the unconscious, and when desire has free play – desire in all its manifestations, desire to love, to murder, to destroy, to inflict pain or enjoy its infliction, delusions of grandeur and grandiose wishes and infinite longings that rise from the depths of the primal experience and float on the surface to find expression in dreams. There’s a breakdown of barriers erected by the waking state leading to a free flow of what has been repressed and hidden.

Almost every poem of Dr Kanwar’s is a first person narrative-cum-theatrical presentation of a non-ordinary state of mind - a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy, a trance, a delusion, a hallucination - each poem diving into the bottomless pit of the unconscious and bringing out the forbidden and subversive elements that surprise, shock and overwhelm the reader and shake the ground beneath his feet earthquake-like. Each poem illustrates a way of seeing the world that is radically different from the sanitized framework through which the world is perceived in terms of categories of thought devised by the intellect, the world given shape by the whole range of philosophies and ideologies invented by man. It comes close to a rejection of the rationally apprehended world of Sancho Panza by the fevered imagination of Don Quixote – what are windmills to Sancho Panza are fearful monsters to the Don, to be subdued and conquered but with little success.

Dr Kanwar’s poetry is thus a subversion of the commonsensical and neatly categorized world of everyday reality in favour of the primal world of the collective unconscious, the mountain heap of human experience – uninhibited, undefined, chaotic, and ultimately inexplicable to the human intellect.

It is this aspect of Dr Kanwar’s poetry that makes it unique and sets it apart from all literary movements in Punjabi poetry. His poetry is not a turning away from one movement and trend in favour of another. It is rather a rejection of all movements in poetry, and anti-poetry and anti-tradition in that sense. There is no conscious attempt to cultivate style or form; no attempt to use or reject rhyme or rhythm or to deliberately construct; no attempt to clothe or dress the poem in a literary mould. All this, in spite of the fact that Dr Kanwar was so well read in the modern European literary criticism, more particularly the American New Criticism (his doctorate was on its influence on Punjabi literary criticism) which saw poetry as pure form and hardly as content. Although Dr Kanwar was an admirer of the American New Criticism and its theoretical formulations, his poetry is almost their complete negation. Dr Kanwar’s poetry has no form in that sense; it is all content and closer to Blake’s prophetic poems, amorphous rather than crystallographic – though often exuding the brilliance of a crystalline object. Or, rather its form is determined by the dialectical relationship between the conscious and the unconscious states, between intellect and desire, which results in a dynamic interplay between irreconcilable forces, often generating a tension to the breaking point..."

---

Dr. Puran Singh Kanwar: A Biographical Note

Dr. Puran Singh Kanwar was born in 1942 in a land-owning Rajput family in Jodhanagari, a small village in Amritsar district. He began his education in the primary school in Dehriwallah, a village about 2 km from Jodhanagari. He passed his high school from Guru Tegh Bahadur High School in a small town, Tarisikha, about 4 km from his village. It was during his stay in this school that he imbibed great reverence for the Sikh Gurus and a view of Sikhism as a liberating force. It is said that, later, whenever he visited his village he used to lecture on the true meaning of Sikhism in the village Gurudwara.

 He came to live in a city for the first time when he joined DAV College Amritsar in 1960 to do his intermediate. In 1962 he came to Delhi and did his graduation from Dayal Singh College in 1964. In Delhi University he came under the influence of Dr. R.K.Das Gupta of the Department of Modern Indian Languages, who dissuaded him from going for English literature, and encouraged him to work in his mother tongue, Punjabi. Dr. Kanwar did his MA in Punjabi from Delhi University in 1966. He joined as lecturer in Punjabi in DAV College Chandigarh in 1967. It was perhaps during this period that he flirted with radical ideologies and turned an agnostic, but he retained, throughout is life, his deep reverence for the Sikh Gurus, and mystics and Sufis. He was hostile to all varieties of bigotry and communalism. He was dismissed from service in 1970 for his radical views, being accused of showing irreverence to the pictures of Swami Dayanand, and defying the strict DAV code of conduct. He taught for a brief period in Arya College Ludhiana too.

He returned to Delhi in 1973, where he came in contact with Dr Harbhjan Singh, poet, critic and a professor in the Department of MIL Delhi University and who was emerging as a leading critic in Punjabi by introducing the newest trends from European literary criticism into Punjabi. Dr Kanwar developed a special interest in Russian Formalism, the Prague School and the American New Criticism. Because of his mercurial temperament and outspoken nature, his fierce egotism, defiant attitude and subversive views he failed to develop a positive relationship with anyone who could help him to get a teaching job in Delhi University or set him on a smooth career in research. So, for nearly ten years he remained out of job, unanchored, defiant, lonely, living on translation and journalistic work and support from his family.

During this period of self-exile, as if, he did maintain a love-hate relationship with the Punjabi literary circles. He was also an occasional visitor at the residence of Amrita Pritam, the queen-bee of Punjabi poetry those days. Amrita Pritam published at least two of his poems in her magazine ‘Nagmani’, in1976 and1977. Publication in ‘Nagmani’ was then considered a stamp of authenticity in poetry. He translated, for the National Book Trust, Aurobindo’s biography into Punjabi, and also translated one of Amrita Pritam’s novel, ‘Sippi te Samundar’, into English, which was serialized in an Assamese daily newspaper from Gauwhati. Sometime between 1965 and 1975 he was traumatized by a love affair with a girl of his own community. Because she belonged to a sub-caste into which he could not marry, the girl’s parents absolutely ruled it out. This set him on a course of irreconcilable hostility towards his father and family and the society at large.

 It was only in 1982 that he got a permanent job in Deshbandhu Evening College in Delhi as a lecturer in Punjabi. Dr Kanwar published his first and only collection of poetry ‘Rattan di Rut’ in 1984 and it was dedicated to Amrita Pritam, and Dr Kanwar’s friend Raj Gill, a journalist. He obtained his doctorate in 1986 for his work ‘New Criticism and its Influence on Punjabi Literary Criticism’. Dr Kanwar married in 1985. A permanent job and marriage stabilized his life to a great extent but perhaps also tamed the restlessness of spirit that had led him often to tilt Quixote-like at the windmills of commonsense and conventionality. May be it also destroyed his urge to write poetry. In 1995 he was found suffering from lung cancer, and he died in July 1996. He is survived by his wife, Mrs. Usha Kanwar.