K L Chowdhury
A crisp and lyrical preface to Maharaj Kaul’s latest poetic collection, The Rhapsody of Kashmir, sets the tempo for the reader as one dips into the nectarean spring of his poetry, a distillation of his soulful outpourings that encapsulate his love for Kashmir.
Kashmir is in the poet’s blood and bones; nay, through his poems, he is Kashmir in microcosm, for that is where the ‘first fragile sprouts’ of his ‘consciousness’ grew and created the ‘architecture’ of his mind. He describes Kashmir as a ‘sigh of nature / a tapestry of time (Stirrings of Kashmir’s soul) which has remained a ‘mosaic of enigma and endurance’ in the face of the evil that has erupted there and the dance of death that is being choreographed by her enemies from across the border. Kashmir has both been his ‘beloved and mother at the same time’ with whom his ‘love affair is ancient’ (People ask me why I go to Kashmir so often). The lofty mountains of Kashmir provide him ‘the window between this and the other world’, and that window is open in his imagination even as he chose to live thousands of miles away in Suffern, a town in New York State that people in literary circles have come to associate with him. He is waiting for the soul of Kashmir to heal after the devastation that has been wreaked there.
The Rhapsody of Kashmir is a tapestry of twenty seven poems written over nearly as many years – a random medley of love and romance, violence and terror, history and mythology, faith and ritual, and of loss and nostalgia. The title poem sums up the mesmerizing effect of Kashmir where ‘Shavites and Sufis dance to the tunes of the invisible Drummer’. It is because of the ‘elemental pull to gravitate to ones origin’ that the expatriate poet travels back to Kashmir to seek his roots, to relive his childhood when ‘wonder turns into thought / desires into dreams / the vision gets uncluttered /and conflict takes root’ (Roots). But it breaks his heart to find the place plundered, ravaged and defiled through ages and nearly the whole of his community driven into exile, even as he is hopeful of regaining his lost identity and reclaiming history and to ‘reset the balance between nature and mind’.
Maharaj Kaul emerges from the poems as a lonely soul, his childhood and his first love lost somewhere in the lanes and by lanes of Srinagar where his nostalgia takes him again and again to rediscover his formative years. He is essentially a nature poet, imbued with a sense of spirituality, a vision of eternity and the wonder of an inquisitive child, at the same time as he is a poet of love, of hope, of reconciliation. Even as he has grown up with a scientific temper (he is an engineering graduate) he is at peace with, and takes delight in, the simple albeit poorly understood rituals of life that connect him to ‘something larger than us / something within us but beyond the ordinary reach’, that provide an opportunity to ‘celebrate life and to feel its miracle’ (Upon Waking Up on my Birthday). He is a dreamy youth who grooms himself with great care for his daring romantic rendezvous on the famous Habba Kadal Bridge, with his flame whom he has never spoken with, just to gaze-cross with her and carry back with him that ‘pair of eyes’. Of evenings, he turns into an impetuous teen out for some fun at Tarakh Halwoy’s shop in the bustling chowk of Habba Kadal, to savour the famous recipes of naedir munjas, pakoras and samaosas and the delectable speciality of dodhu olav, as much as to look at the bevy of ‘nimble, love-filled’ girls passing by, and a chance encounter with Bimla, his ‘dancing heart-throb.’ And much later, when he grows into an irrepressible college student at Amar Sing College, to experience the magic of those years filled with romance, academics, games, and a brush with the professors and examiners.
However, at times the poet turns rather didactic (The Miracle of Maharajini Khir Bhavani), and prosaic that does not fit well into poetry of his class (Irrepressible Youth, The Agony of Dal Lake, The glory of Exile). These poems could be trimmed to get rid of the flab and retain the flashes of brilliance that dot their landscape. They provide a glimpse into history and the near extermination of the Kashmiri Pandit community from the valley who now wander ‘in silent grief / to find a mooring / to rekindle the fire that bound it together’ (The Anguish of Kashmiri Pandits).
Maharaj Kaul often returns to his Mother Kashmir which beckons him to gaze at the changing moods of Dal Lake – ‘scintillating, serene, sublime, sad and saucy’, – to ramble along the Gulmarg meadow where ‘God is eavesdropping’, to hear the music of the Liddar that has ‘frothed and frolicked for a thousand years’ (I have come to see you, Mother). When ‘the world is cruelly indifferent’, the poet goes to Nishat Bagh to ‘resolve’ his problems in that ‘floating island of serenity and fullness / where angels dance invisibly / and His presence is all around’,/ where ‘Chinars beckon to eternity / Daffodils have shed their shyness / Bleeding roses skew perception… and then he wanders off to nearby Pari Mahal whose ‘compelling mystery bares a whiff of the mystery of the human soul’. It is there the poet divines that ‘Time backward and time forward / are one continuous ribbon of history / relative in significance / but constant in cosmic totality.’
And he takes you again to another garden nearby at the foothills of Zabarwan – Shalimar, ‘a gift of love / a sigh floating on the wings of time’. For there the lookout on the Dal Lake is ‘a reverie immersed in an enigma / a dream in the throes of its still nascent birth / a vision still struggling in its message (Meditating in the ruins at Pari Mahal) where humans ‘are just middlemen in the vast enterprise of nature’ (A spiritual miasma above Dal lake).
But tragedy strikes when the poet ventures out for a rendezvous with his newfound love in the fearful alleys of Srinagar city reeking with the foul stench of misplaced religious frenzy. She emerges burka-clad for an ephemeral meeting, when fear wrenches the heart as human hands strike him down into a gutter – cuts and bruises, blood and gore – while he hears her sobs, sighs and screams as they curse and castigate her, and drag her into the misty crevices of the shadowy town for her daring trespass. And yet the optimist in him believes that Kashmir, which has been reduced to ‘a defiled flower and a weak shadow of gods, will be ‘reborn’ to illumine the world around her again.
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