The Poet and the Place: Two Poems on Patna and Gang

Displacement of people, it seems, is a mediating strategy of history complying with the people's urge to look beyond their umbilical-places. One of the  nobelists of  recent years, V. S. Naipaul recounts his childhood in his Nobel Prize Lecture, celebrating this sense of displacement   with a "sense of two worlds" living "in our own fading India" and again with a profound sense of darkness that surrounds his ancestor's slow and lingering disconnection between  their homeland and their descendant's present day   "dispossessed" rootedness to  a particular place  when he says, "   when I became a writer these areas of darkness around me as a child became my subject". All of us, who have traveled beyond our umbilical-places, have "brought an "India" with(in) us whom we could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat land". But the diasporic landscape is not flat, divided by the sea of darkness, now and then, can be glimpsed through the deep mountains of memories.

Like people, places have a lingering luminosity in the fading memories farther and farther we move,  distanced by darkness. They burgeon with every extra mile of going ahead with the twinkling tenacity of stars from a million mile distance soothing us even in "pitch-black darkness".  We hear the prayer-chants of a grandmother going to and returning from a local Ganga, smell the savoury tasty days which can only be recreated through writing, liberating oneself from the moths of sentimentality with the distancing effect of darkness without whose presence stars cannot be stars, then they will, perhaps, be devoid of their magical metaphoricity.

Our city, Patna is not only  our city but is  a meta-city in the sense urbanization has made all the cities a place where homeostatic and humane  relationship between man and environment and between human and human  is deplorably disrupted by an imbalanced approach to life as a result of  massive migration  to the urban centres of great material expectations  by bringing about a complete attitudinal change with regard to class (caste!) consciousness leading to   conflicts, poor housing facilities and other overlooked civic amenities howsoever, geared up  with high aspirations of a consumer culture making it a   place  basking  in the rhetorical  verbosity  of its elected  representatives, ignoring the disconcerting stench corroding  its natural and cultural  environs, mythical or modern,  with a unique self-centered detachment! 

We have been playing our roles and watching the scene at the same time.  One can watch things better, from far, from a vantage point, while traversing the ocean of time as if from a distant lighthouse when waves of memory and desire simultaneously touch it and remind it of its isolated existence. Ships will pass and go on to their destinations. We must better be guided by the stars, though far, can be visible, can be inspiring, can be steady, and can guide us all the way through darkness.

We express our sense of belonging to Patna and Ganga through "word-work", done originally in Hindi, which is the result of our year-on-year visits to our "beloved land" for the last fourteen years. 

1. The Crumbling walls of Pataliputra
(By: Jyotsana K Prasad)

Like a lovely charming  lady
Was this our beloved land  
In the past appeared amazing
From the high sky- touching
Peak of a mountain.
As if morning had compressed herself
Into all her heavenly grace and pride!

No one was here hopeless ever
Never was here pitch-black darkness.
Tell me, what have we given to our land?
Only we have  taken from her .
But we could not keep her safe
Could not protect our precious heritage.

We pierced  our own selfish nails into our own land
Snatched from her each and every jeweled beauty.
In no time we made her old in her youth
Today here no one is blessed
Today no adornment is left.

In the midst of everything
There is wilderness here
There is only skeleton
Left in the body
Its blessedness was
Once at its high point - this land
Was in the past a paradise.


Today there is only despair
Groping, staggering, stumbling,
Restless  running  despair.
Falling  are the strong walls-
Clogged are the doors
Of stunted growth.

Smoke   smoke everywhere
Effluence is today's rich colour.

Deep darkness has shrouded the hearts
The atmosphere is rend
With the calls of gloom
There is no hope -
No prospect from any corner
Ganga is also in a sad  state
Mandakini is soiled and abandoned-
Like a poor widow - waiting.

(Author's note: Pataliputra , the ancient name of Patna, the capital of Bihar state, was founded by  king Ajatshatru  in the 5th C BC ). Mandakini : another name of Ganga, when  flowing in paradise.)

2. Ganga
(By: Anil K Prasad)

once upon a time
flowing in paradise
slowed  down  by
the matted  hair  of Mahadeva

Mandakini -  bursting forth from
the thigh of  a sage
cleaned the sons of a king
from the curse
coming up on the surface
near the Himalayas
on earth

He Gange! you
gratified for centuries
gods, demons, humans,
animals, birds, plants –
sometimes drowning them
now and then giving them a new life
with your purifying waves;
renewing their lives
by taking them in
your  life-affirming waters

i stayed in your immediacy
for more than two decades -
i got bliss near you –
living in the vicinity
i used to go to see you
shining with
the morning rising sun

now while sitting on the ghats
my frame of mind is 
like those dying out
evening lamps which are
offered in your honor 
perhaps  by the women
of the neighbourhood

Vidyapati  too  sang
inimitably   of  the pain  of
his separation from  you
not like him are my eyes 
flowing with tears  but, of course,
my heart is sore –

then i think
now i will be
moving away
from you yet i can see you
from the bridge while during the
holidays  going
and returning back
from home -

the people   have been
making you mucky –
for centuries  soiled you
exposed you 
for centuries to the filth
washing their dirty linen
publicly in your holy waters
and now  have made  you
an issue in the interest
of the state –

but this gives me consolation –
when i think thus
perhaps from the bridge the filth
will appear less, due to  distance,
from afar, from a moving distance
for the one who is sitting
inside a taxi or a bus  –

or i will try to come to
the ghats before sunrise
or after the sun hides his face
in the sands–

but i am worried about 
the offensive smell of
those sulabh-goers 
who holding their chins
in the cups of their hands
seemed contemplating
about the far future –
but not able to see -

Ganga
the salvaging mother
is  flowing two steps ahead
(Mokshadayini Ma Gange !)

and on the steps ahead
is the centuries' old
slippery slimy slick ! 

 (Author's note: Ganga : the holy river in India; Mandakini: another name of Ganga when  flowing in paradise, she was so forceful that it was difficult to bring her on earth to wash the sins of the sons of a king. (According to religious tradition she was again taken out of the thigh of a sage, hence her another name Jahnavi)  So the belief   is this that her force was made less when she was made to flow through the matted hair of Mahadeva, the destroyer, one of the Gods of Hindu trinity. He Gange = O Ganga; Ghats = terraces made on the banks of a river; Vidyapati = a famous poet of Bihar state who sang in praise of Ganga; bridge= the famous Ganga Bridge, connecting Patna, the capital of Bihar state in India with other parts. It is the longest river bridge in Asia. Sulabh-goers= Sulabh International is an organization that started building lavatories for the common people all over India and also in many parts of the world; Mokshdayaini Ma Gange= the mother Ganga who will wash all the sins and after that one can achieve salvation. According to the Hindu belief moksha is the goal of life and people take bath in the holi waters of the river Ganga because it will help them attain   moksha =the spiritual goal, of  release from reincarnation.)