Harin appeared like a meteor to announce the new spirit in Indian English poetry. It was a turning away from the materialistic stress in English poetry in search of the untold Beyond. Sri Aurobindo discovered him in his teens in the most relevant light: “Here perhaps are the beginnings of a supreme utterance of the Indian soul in the rhythms of the English tongue”. It was a new poetry because it was neither religious poetry nor mystic poetry proper. In many ways it satisfied Sri Aurobindo. Harin’s ear for rhythm charmed him the most. It reminds us of his words in The Future Poetry: “Rhythm is the premier necessity of poetical expression”. No wonder, Harin was a great hope for Sri Aurobindo, who made a detailed review of Harin’s maiden book of poems, The Feast of Youth. Sri Aurobindo draws our notice to a queer Hindu-Persian fusion in Harin’s poetry, an interesting assortment of colours and Vedic thoughts. The Persian influence is obvious in the decorative colours, but the mystic vision of the Sufi saints is also visible in The Feast of Youth and in his later poetry. The mystic sense creeps in from time to time in all his anthologies. Sri Aurobindo picks up two wonderful lines:

I am athirst for one glimpse of your beautiful face, O Love !

Veiled in the mystical silence of stars and the purple of skies.

The lines remind me of a comparatively less powerful line by John Keats in The Terror of Death, which had sought to express the same idea:

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance …

Keats had certainly had an inkling about the idea, but Harin’s lines, to my mind, are more expressive than Keats’s effort to reveal the divine idea of Beauty.

Thanks to Sri Aurobindo, who has drawn our notice to the point of originality in Harin’s poetry. He turned to gimmick later in his life and finally became a fashionable rhythmist. But, none can deny his newness as an Indian poet at a time, when many others were under the spell of Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. Harin taught the Indo-English poets to open their eyes to the inner chambers of the self. He looked inward and sought to write poetry as mantra or incantation. Let us listen to the new manner of expression in remarkable rhythm:

The Rider’s shadow is purple

On the mountain-path that winds

Far and out of the weary world

Of shadowy minds.

Bearing the great burden

Of bundled suns on his back

He keeps on silently journeying

On some unknown track.

Rhythm and the element of suggestiveness set him apart from the religious school. Harin has got a clue and a kind of foretaste of the Infinite. His is not the poetry of great realization, but it has all the charms of the poetry of yearning and aspiration. The lonely rider is on a journey along the virgin track leading to the Unknown. The aspiring soul of the poet is on the move after tasting the misery of this world. The traveler-soul of the poet becomes an ardent seeker in another poem.

I am a seeker seeking along

The grey chill ways the ultimate blush

That is marriage of me, through marriage of song

With the ultimate hush.

This is a mystic quest for some prescient flavour. The poet is seeking along ‘the grey chill ways’. The colour ‘grey’ speaks of the shadowy zones, towards which he is moving silently. The word ‘ultimate’ appears twice within these four lines. It expresses his aspiration in a round about way. Often such yearning shapes out in suggestive fairy tales, as we see in The Mad Man, Wayfaring, Shaper Shaped and The Lonely Tramp. Harin’s ironies are marked by a superior clarity in The Lonely Tramp. The tramp is obviously a self-projection, who walks with a “feeble broken lamp” and faces the odd questions from the world.

Half minstrel and half monk!

Come, tell us, are you drunk?

If so what wine is yours?

Pat comes the reply from the tramp:

The same as in your heart pours.

The gesture of self-mockery is virtually an initiation for man to turn back to his own self to discover the nature of the wine. The psychic being creeps in every now and then in Harin’s poetry, even when he is passing judgments on life. There are times too when his eyes are open to greater things in sudden mystic moments, as we see in the following lines:

I am surrounded by dim-whispering tides

Of unseen evolutions rolling far.

The poet is a conscious pilgrim and is aware of his mystic experiences. Mantric poetry is not simply the poetry of sight; the poet also listens to various sounds with the help of his soul. This reminds us of Sri Aurobindo’s words in The Future Poetry: “… the true creator, the true hearer is the soul.” Mostly, he moves around the flame and does not enter the zone. He enjoys speaking about the flame in various strains, but does not take a dip into it. Yet, his initial perceptions come out in a wonderfully original way with very little trace of Wordsworth and Shelley in them.

KR Srinivasa Iyengar rightly believes that “verbal and metrical facility is Harindranath’s main strength” and that power saves him when his “inspiration is dry and the content thin”. Iyengar echoes Sri Aurobindo when he says that Harin “is not primarily a mystic poet, nor a philosophical poet either” (Indian Writing in English, 607). Nobody can disagree. Also, nobody should deny Harin’s new ways of loving the Divine in poetry. Except for Sri Aurobindo’s and Iyengar’s views, there is not much of “critical study” on Harin. Hope this humble effort will offer some fresh ideas for the critic of Harin’s poetry.     

This article on the early poetry of Harindranath Chattopadhyaya has been taken from Various Voices: Indian Writing in English by Sarani Ghosal (Mondal), published by Subarnarekha Kolkata (2009). Sarani is at Santiniketan and is doing her PhD in the English Literature; she has contributed to various journals and there is a great promise of her showing up as an observant discerning literary critic in the Aurobindonian spirit.