Between Genesis and the Apocalypse
is the struggle and the striving and reaching out. Creation issuing out of God
and Man’s fulfilment as his destiny are the subjects of the two Testaments. But
eating of the forbidden fruit f knowledge is another story and it is for the
poets to write about it. Virgil’s “tears in mortal things”, Keats’s “this nest
of pain”, Shelley’s falling on the thorns of life and bleeding, Eliot’s “hollow
men” or the “inoperancy of the world of the spirit”, even the Gita’s “this
“transient and sorrowful world” are a poignancy that has to be borne on this
difficult and dangerous pilgrim’s march. The frustrating endeavour and travail
lie in between the two glorious ends; a tortuous hiatus separates birth and
death. But there is another dimension to this labour and toil, even to death in
the sequence of life, put aphoristically by Sri Aurobindo: “He stung Himself
with bliss and called it pain.” To the woe of our heart He does not consent but
tells us simply that its grief is just another name for joy. The horror of
night about which we complain is but an opportunity to emerge into the day.
Death is after all a passage towards life making the adventure worthwhile.
Nolini Kant Gupta believed that the
entire history of mankind, seen in its essential psycho-spiritual sense, is a
mighty effort of human life, almost a poetry of triumph, transcending itself
and entering into the law of harmony, beauty, sweetness, truth, knowledge, even
power, a wondrous movement born of and sustained by secret delight that is its
own cause and its own effect, a great creative urge touching and pervading
everything. The saga of evolution is an unwritten composition of the invisible
poet and is sung by the bee and the lion and the hero. It is for us to join in
its upward flight and the high-rising note. “We ascend the ascending grades in
our heart and we sing the song of ascension. The journey’s end is the heavenly
A finite movement of the Infinite
…winging its way through a wide air
of Time
is indeed what has been thrown in
this transient and sorrowful world as “a hook to clutch eternity”. If Virgil
was the noble singer of the glory of
But for acquiring the right of
entry to the realms of gold he had to do a long apprentice-ship. A tapasvin of
literature, he had achieved that rare siddhi by arduous effort. To step into
the sunlit continents and kingdoms of the Word’s delight one has to prepare
oneself by assimilating the best of the entire past, preferably in the light of
the future that must illumine it. And what a privilege he had! Master of
English and Bengali, Nolini Kanta Gupta knew several Indian and European
languages. He could read the Vedas in the original; so too The Divine Comedy
and Aeneid. Reminiscing about his
early lessons of the Veda he tells us that “Sri Aurobindo would take up a hymn
from the Rigveda, read it aloud once, explain the meaning of every line and
phrase and finally give a full translation. I used to take notes… His own
method of interpreting the Rigveda was this: on reading the text he found its
true meaning by direct intuitive vision through an inner concentration in the
first instance, then he would give it an external verification in the light of
reason, making the necessary changes accordingly.”
His lessons in literary classics
started under Sri Aurobindo in the same way. He picked up Greek by taking
directly Euripides’s Medea and Sophocles’s Antigone, Latin with
Virgil, and Italian with Dante. Recollecting Sri Aurobindo’s method of teaching
languages to the adults, Nolini Kanta Gupta narrates how he learnt French from
him: “I started right away with a play from this volume [Molière’s Works], L’Avare.
At several places in the margin he wrote out in his own hand the English
equivalents for my convenience. I still possess that volume with the marginal
notes in his handwriting.” What does one get by this method? “One feels as if
one took a plunge into the inmost core of the language, into that secret heart
where it is vibrant with life, with the quintessence of beauty, the fullness of
strength. Perhaps it was this that has prompted me to write prose-poems and
verse in French, for one feels as if identified with the very genius of the
language.” A rare Teacher and a rare student, indeed!
With this grounding in the
classics, with the heart of a Romantic, with the thought-mind of a Modernist,
and living in the Aurobindonian Next Future, Nolini Kanta Gupta looks at poetry
as the fulfiller of man’s agelong aspiration for the Truth-Beauty of Delight.
He has truly acquired the patrimony in the realms of gold. He has done what the
Gita calls in a generalized sense the askesis of speech, vāńgmaya tapa.
Thus for him the Vedic Riks are at once “beautiful things said in a beautiful
way.” The gods themselves are the great creators of the Word, kavis, for
the “Poet is he who by his poetic power raises forms of beauty in heaven—kavih
kavitā dīvi rūpam āsjat.” When he listens to the Rik
Lo! The supreme Light of lights is
come, a varied awakening is born, wide manifest,
or to the Upanishadic power-packed
revelation
There the sun shines not, nor the
moon, nor the stars; these lightnings too there shine not; how then this fire!
That shines therefore all shines in its wake; by the sheen of That, all this
shines,
or to Sri Aurobindo’s translation
of the same śloka
there the sun shines not and the
moon has no splendour and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash
not, how then shall burn this earthly fire? All that shines is but a shadow of
his shining! All this universe is effulgent with his light,
he knows that it is
…the Word that ushers divine
experience.
Here, in the Upanishadic utterance,
is the poetic mantra in its quintessential purity because it is so pure as is
also beautiful.
But the most daring thing Nolini
Kanta Gupta has said is that even the formless can be beautiful. To see a
statue by Praxiteles or a painting by Michelangelo is to admire the beauty of
form in its harmonious measure and perfection, almost to feel the breath and
vibration of the artist’s experience itself; but the massive stone-carved
statue of the Buddha in the cave radiating peace—what Sarojini Naidu called
“the peace annihilate from the world of men”—becomes inspiring and beautiful by
the contours of the ungraspable and the formless. “The form f a thing can be
beautiful; but the formless too has its beauty. Indeed, the beauty of the
formless, that is to say, the very sum and substance, the ultimate essence, the
soul of beauty—that is what suffuses with in-gathered colour and enthusiasm,
the realization and the poetic creation of the Upanishadic seer. All the forms
that are scattered abroad in their manifest beauty hold within themselves a
secret Beauty and are reflected or projected out of it. This veiled Name of
Beauty… has no adequate image… below, na tasya pratimā
Seen from such a consciousness, it
is quite understandable that “the poet is a trinity himself… not only the
revealer or creator, savitā, he is also the builder or fashioner, taşţā,
and he is the organizer, vedhāh, of the Truth. As Savita he manifests
the Truth, as Tashta he gives a perfect body and form to the Truth, and as
Vedha he maintains the Truth in its dynamic working.” It would have been good
had Nolini Kanta Gupta given some examples, but the import is clear: he is
talking about the modes of spiritual poetry.
What is spiritual poetry? and
mystic poetry? “When the spirit speaks in its own language in its own name, we
have spiritual poetry. If, however, the Spirit speaks—from choice or
necessity—an alien language and manner, e.g. that of a profane consciousness or
the consciousness of another domain, idealistic, philosophical or even occult,
puts on or imitates spirit’s language and manner, we have what we propose to
call mystic poetry proper.” This is how Nolini Kanta Gupta distinguishes the
two types of poetry. Thus, if Tagore’s Golden Boat is a mystical and AE’s
Desire on its borderline, Sri Aurobindo’s Transformation by its “poetic
personality” and “stuff of consciousness” is immediately spiritual. Take the
following lines from Savitri. If
Where mind like a moon illumines
the world’s dark
is mystic,
Hearing that listens to thought’s
inner sound
more occult than mystic, and
All the great Words that toiled to
express the One
Were lifted into an absoluteness of
light,
An ever-burning Revelation’s fire
And the immortality of the eternal
Voice
Mystico-spiritual, we have
The Absolute, the Perfect, the
Alone
Has called out of the Silence his
mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless
and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile
sleep
The ineffable puissance of his
solitude
as purely spiritual. Or we have,
coming from infinity and going to infinity, undulating with a tremendous
presence and a power of effectuation,
The riven invisible atom’s
omnipotent force
as the sheer mantra of the highest
poetry, at once intense in rhythm, thought-substance, and soul’s vision, all
bringing with it the supreme realization of what the God of death actually is
in creation.
However, Nolini Kanta Gupta’s
concept of the mantra is not Agastyan; it is rather secular in character. His
attribution of mantric characteristics to poetry does not belong only to the
scriptural genre; it can touch any subject and any matter lifting them to the
intensity and wideness of the spirit’s sky, yet bringing that ethereality as
well as substantiality of soul-vision to material things. Sri Aurobindo
describes the mantra as the “Word of power and light that comes from the
Overmind inspiration or some very high plane of Intuition.” That is what the
Vedic Rishis saw in it and spoke of it so: the Word, received by the heart and
confirmed by the mind, carries the power of creation and of effectuating what
it embodies. But for Nolini Kanta Gupta the Shakespearean or the Modernist’s
Word too is mantra. “Mantra means a certain sum of syllables charged with
dynamic force, creative consciousness.” Perhaps this is more of a Tantric
formula and not so much a definition of that supreme poetic utterance. But let
us take some examples from his writings to illustrate the point he is trying to
make.
In the opening scene of Hamlet
the apparition has appeared for the third time and Horatio is harrowed with
fear and wonder. He charges him to speak but the Ghost disappears. Nolini Kanta
Gupta tells us that in the entire description nothing seems to belong to the
earthly stage; it has another tone and hue, another setting. What Shakespeare
presents to us is all loaded with magical creative power. “It is the creative
force of the articulate sound… mantra”
In the domain of the occult poetry
Blake gives us another vision that was inaccessible to the classical or to the
romantic. The marriage proposed by him is an ideal to be pursued for fulfilment
on the earth. Here “Highest must come down wholly and inhabit the Lowest, the
Lowest must give up altogether its own norms and lift itself into the substance
and form of the Highest.” It is a ceremony attended and sanctified by the all-cleansing
and transmuting power of the mantra. When the poet asks for the bow of burning
gold and the chariot of fire we see that he is ready with the might of the Word
to slay the forces that had built the dark satanic mills. He had received the
command from Vak herself and given expression to it.
Even a Modernist Bengali poet,
Dipak Majumdar, imparts to us, by the “collocation of words and images”, a
neo-mantric experience: the streams meet in the body, one and all; like bats on
the branches the dreams swing as if possessed; it is time to dance and go
around the fire. True to the present sensibility, including its uncouthness and
frightening shape, here the origin of form and substance is obvious in its
intensity of expression. Nolini Kanta Gupta explains that in the
body-consciousness spoken of by the poet there is a definite expression and
manifestation, a “concrete reality”, itself. The mantra in that sense has
succeeded. “The cry of our poet is a cry literally de profundis, a deep
cavernous voice surging, spectral and yet sirenlike, out of the unfathomed
underground abysses.”
When contemporary Greek poet,
George Seferis, asks
O nightingale, nightingale,
What is good? What is not good?
What is in-between?
or tells us,
Suddenly I was walking and not walking,
or when Eliot emerges from the
“still point” we have again a mantric utterance. The reason is, a Modernist
invokes terror and pity “not for themselves but for the sake of purification.”
While the modern sensibility does not give so much weightage to sound-value, it
compensates that loss by thought-substance and boldness of metaphor or simile
or image which can produce a certain impact that could be akin to the effect of
the mantra with its purificatory possibility. This point of view has a certain
merit but in the context of spiritual mantra this may not hold.
The Hymn of Darkness is ancient as
Vedic literature, but it has acquired a new Baudelairean edge and penetration,
a sheen and dazzle to illumine and open out the heart of night to a new day
that lies beyond the invisible Apocalypse. This is indeed the glory of
Transformation. We have here not the simplicity of the pastoral life, nor the
winged ethereality of the world-disdaining visionary, but a complex urbanity
asserting itself in heaviness of the diurnal routines. Its caves are dark, its
waters are dark, its mountains are dark, its modernity is dark. Thus when Yves
Bonnefoy moves
vers l’autre rive encore plus
nocturne
(Towards the other bank still more
a night)
the journey becomes suddenly frightful-Vedic.
In this conception of the power of the Word even the somber hymn becomes
mantric. The contribution of the Modern Age is such that its poetry, its dark
subconscient mysticism, too takes a bold step and throws open the unexplored
domains of the Spirit to build forms of yet another sight-and-sound in its own
figure of faultless beauty. It becomes a means “to break open the doors of the
luminous cavern.”
But Nolini Kanta Gupta does not
linger too long in this Mysticism of the Subconscient. The subconscient
aesthesis can be very dangerous. The horror experienced by Agastya while
digging the abysses of consciousness need not be repeated or tasted. What one
should await in the soul’s delight is indeed raso vai saḥ. In our own
time Tagore is one shining example whose work is “a constant music of the
overpassing of the borders, a chant-filled realm in which the subtle sounds and
lights of the spirit give new meanings to the finer subtleties of life.” Tagore
was a dreamy silver-bright idyllic figure emerging out of the past, a lover of
bird, flower, stream, Nature in her varied moods and seasons, the boatman, the
lonely hut, all that is artistic and aesthetically pleasing, the song, the
poem, the pergola arch, the wide blue sky. His soul was morning glory awaiting
the sunlight. Not only an admirer or appreciator of beauty; his was a psychic
sense that touched and received all that was noble and charming and wonderful.
Through this he saw his one deity, the goddess of beauty. He was drawn not so
much towards Pallas Athene as towards diviner Aphrodite with a cestus around
her waist. Beauty, tells Nolini Kanta Gupta, “is the chief essential thing in
the poetic creation of Rabindranath. He appreciates beauty and makes others do
the same in a delightful manner… Beautiful is his diction. Varied and
fascinating are the richness and intricacy of thought and the firmness and
delicacy of feeling…
The stars drop in the lap of the
sky
From the chain hanging down to your
breast.
The heart is overwhelmed with
ecstasy
In the core of Man’s being:
Blood runs riot in his veins.
Suddenly your girdles give way
On the horizon, O naked beauty.
What a visionary world of matchless
and unique beauty is unveiled before the mind’s eye! That is true Rabindranath,
the creator of such magic wonders. Perfect perfection of beauty is inherent in
the nature of his inner being.”
The search of beauty is an aspect
of the hidden unknown. Rabindranath was a traveler of the Infinite. His was not
the soul of a philosopher or researcher but that of a seeker, of the one who
pursued beauty in her varied moods and guises and disguises. He would rather
chase the colours of the butterfly than the ones coming from the tail of the
rocket shooting out of sight to unseen skies. The intense aspiration led him
on, and on, in search of his ideal that was dream-delicate and dew-fresh. This
itself is a kind of lyrical devotionalism whose constant strain is a total
offering to the beloved of the heart. That is its raison d’être too.
“Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as Beauty, the
spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of ecstasy. This experience is the
very core of Vishnavism and for which Tagore is sometimes called a
Neo-Vaishnava.” Therefore, when Tagore declares, though not in a very new or
original sense, “Mine is not the deliverance achieved through mere
renunciation. Mine rather the freedom that tastes itself in a thousand
associations,” Nolini Kanta Gupta asserts that his was an exploit similar to
Socrates’s who brought down Philosophy from Heaven to the market-place. It was
on the path of the song, the epic of his joy, in search of the Infinite, that
he really went very far. In that quest of soul he made the realities of the bare
transcendental spirit somewhat tangible and visible to our eyes too. His
perceptions have become immortally lyrical. In them it is the song that counts
rather than the silence. Indeed, to quote from Radhakrishnan: “History bears
witness to the power of the human spirit which endures longer than dynasties
and creeds. The political world of Homer is dead while his song is living
today. The splendour of
Naturally, therefore, we cannot put
the two “Shining Ones” on a par. If one was a forerunner of the era of future
poetry, the other was himself its initiator and creator. Tagore derived his
shining light from the Past. But even there Homer and Virgil were Greek and
Latin to him. It is from the tradition of the race that he essentially received
his mysticism and in that whole process what he did was to give to it a new
song and a new lilt. His “honey-laden felicity of expression” is more
characteristic of mystico-lyrical than the full-orbed intensity of the world of
joy towards which he yearned to take us. He had no access to the source of original
sound and lived in its reflection only. No doubt, in Tagore’s poetry “there is
an imponderable element, a flavour, a breath from elsewhere that suffuses the
entire creation, something that can be characterized only as the soul-element.
It is this presence that makes whatever the poet touches not only living and
graceful but instinct with something that belongs to the world gods, something
celestial and divine, something that meets and satisfies man’s deepest longing
and aspiration.” But his is “a breath from elsewhere” and in the turquoise-blue
depth of our heart’s passion and in the calm upward-burning intensity of the
spirit’s diamond glow it thins and pales into a tenuity that cannot upbear the
flight of the golden eagle. The deathless Rose and the deathless Flame remain
unfulfilled in him.
Not the reflected light but the
very sun can be the only shining star of our journey to the high-pinnacled
A last high world was seen where
all worlds meet;
In its summit gleam where Night is
not nor Sleep,
The light began of the Trinity
supreme.
All there discovered what it seeks
for here.
It freed the finite into
boundlessness
And rose into its own eternities.
The Inconscient found its heart of
consciousness,
The idea and feeling groping in
Ignorance
At last clutched passionately the
body of Truth,
The music born in Matter’s silences
Plucked nude out of the Ineffable’s
fathomlessness
The meaning it had held but could
not voice;
The perfect now only sometimes
dreamed
An answer brought to the torn
earth’s hungry need
Rending the night that had
concealed the Unknown,
Giving to her her lost forgotten
soul.
Here we have at once the language
and rhythm of some other infinity, thought-substance and massive luminosity of
the wide-ranging Truth-existent, and the soul-vision in the consciousness of
sheer delight which is the stuff of creation—we have the highest mantra. Or, to
use CM Bowra’s less exalted description, given in a different context but quite
appropriate to the Aurobindonian aesthesis, “the elements of sight and sound,
and even the absence of them, have passed together into the poet’s
consciousness, and the effect is complete and single.” Or what Nolini Kanta
Gupta would have liked to call it, we have the Spirit’s own poetry in its own
matter and manner—svabhāva and svadharma.
Savitri is of course Sri Aurobindo’s
supreme revelation with the full force of his personality behind it. But then
even his lyrical pieces move with the same God-breath. They too bring that
power out of the Infinite’s depths and fulfil specific soul-need in
soul-delights. In his Mother of Dreams what we hear is “a sweet felicity
naturally pleasing to the ear; there is a sense of wideness as in a far-flung
movement of modulated grace; and the whole is surcharged with a rich opulence.”
In the Bird of Fire we perceive the quality of “strength or energy” and
in the Rose of God it is the very embodiment of the Word with its power
of calm clear vision.” Or listen to the prayer when the two ends of existence—
Earth-souls needing the touch of
the heaven’s peace to recapture,
Heaven needing earth’s passion to
quiver in peace to rapture—
Must come together that the divine
progeny be born:
Marry, O lightning eternal, the
passion of a moment-born fire!
Out of thy greatness draw close to
the breast of our mortal desire!
Here is a full-throated voice, in
quantitative metre, supplicating the Dawn of the Eternal to transform our
darkness into her being of light and sweetness. In the greatness of immortality
shall the Immortal in the mortal be born. This is the Word that Sri Aurobindo
sees and creates. But it is “something which appears to the many poetically
intractable, not amenable to aesthetic treatment, not usually, that is to say,
not in the supreme manner. Sri Aurobindo has thrown such a material into his
poetic fervour and created a sheer beauty, a stupendous reality out of it.
Herein lies the greatness of his achievements.” Nolini Kanta Gupta reaches a
high point of poetic appreciation when he concludes his essay Ahana and
other Poems as follows: “And if there is something in the creative spirit
of Sri Aurobindo which tends more towards the strenuous than the genial, the
arduous than the mellifluous, and which has more of the austerity of Vyasa than
the easy felicity of Valmiki, however it might have affected the ultimate value
of his creation, according to certain standards, it has illustrated once more
that poetry is not merely beauty but power too, it is not merely sweet
imagination but creative vision—it is even the Rik, the mantra that impels the
gods to manifest upon earth, that fashions divinity in man.”
A remarkable perspicacity of
thought and vision is what we note in Nolini Kanta Gupta’s writings. To seize
immediately the truth of things is a rare faculty and given only to great souls.
There is a catholicity of outlook, a way of seeing God’s world in its many
moods of joy, an intimacy, even an identity, with the hidden divinity in the
grain and the star, an appreciation leaping over all conventionality, of the
bright as well as the obscure; but it always with the lamp of the spirit that
he moves around. And his is not a search that ends in the futility of a
Diogenes! Nolini Kanta Gupta sees the unmistakable Presence every-where. His
consciousness is spiritual consciousness and therefore his perception of poetry
too is charged with spiritual feeling association, sense, assonance and
consonance, thought, knowledge, intuition. It responds and reverberates with
the full dynamism of its calm; its certitude runs like the laughter of a God. But
his intuition’s eye is not only located in the mind; even to heart and the very
cells of the body it brings that vision of the Far. A heart that calls to the
Heights, a mind that leaps to Silence, a body that quivers with the touch of
the Beautiful are the shining instruments of his soul’s will to live in God and
to let God live in it. Listen tot eh miracle of silence:
In silence move the stars,
In silence mounts the sap within
the plant,
The secret energies of Nature work
and create in the deeps of silence.
Out of the utmost stillness the
whirling universe was born—
All the turmoil and the tumult, the
roar and fry that meet the eye
Flourish upon an unfathomed quiet
below.
In the tranquillity of death a new
birth prepares itself,
The guarded calm of Night’s ending
ushers in the rejuvenated Sun…
And were my wild senses to turn
back, they would face the abysmal silence of the soul.
The cry of the heart shoots up like
a column of silence—
That voice alone reaches straight
to the High throne and moves it to grace.
The gods descend along the path of
luminous silence spread in the farthest spaces of our inmost being.
A silence deepening into
tranquillity that even death in it shall be the harbinger of new birth is a
wonderful Aurobindonian insight we see not only here but also throughout his To
the Heights, a set of prose-poems written in the 1930s. Lucid and direct in
expression and simple in free-verse style here are poems embodying in a low
quiet rhythm the profound philosophico-spiritual knowledge. A plain statement
like
It is the Eye of the eye and yet it
is the object that the eye contemplates
begins with an Upanishadic vision
but immediately brings all the associations and suggestions extending from
Pythagoras to Descartes about the reality of the objective world.
Sometimes the lyrical moments too
get loaded with a mass of mysticism when
White—colour of the moon poised on
high in an autumn night—
The soothing peace, the quiet heave
of an in-gathered rapture
moves on to the
…colour of the lotus… that has
taken body upon earth.
But always the voice rings clear
and loud:
There is a breath that moves
mountains,
There is a touch that makes the
dead arise,
There is a voice that is the doom
of Yesterday
And the radiant herald of Tomorrow.
It is in the last line of Divina Comedia
Love moved me…
Love that moves the sun and the
other stars,
(l’amor che move il sole e l’altre
stele.)
So dear to this mystic-poet, that
he goes on to see the beatific vision which is at once “the culmination and
denouement of an unrolling of God’s play of creation and world manifestation.”
Then the poetic perception lifted to God-purpose becomes the grandest thing of
the creative Word.
If you ask Nolini Kanta Gupta to
explain a line from Savitri such as
In
the griffin forefront of the Night and Day
he will tell you that
In the same way he will tell you
that Narad was a devarshi, that by his spiritual tapasya he had developed into
an immortal divine being. There is no doubt that Nolini Kanta Gupta too had
become such a being in the light of God.
From the Chhandogya Upanishad we
know how Narad as a young spiritual aspirant was initiated by Rishi Sanatkumar.
Having mastered all the worldly lore, the traditional sixty-four Vidyas, he had
qualified himself well to receive the higher or esoteric knowledge. It is in
that knowledge that he then lived and helped humanity to grow in consciousness.
No wonder, Sri Krishna calls him his Vibhuti. Nolini Kanta Gupta also lived
largely and freely in the golden landscapes of Truth. He accepted Sri
Aurobindo’s “Invitation”. The Mother once saw Narad standing far on the
borderline between Overmind and Supermind. That too is the station of Nolini
Kanta Gupta. He lived there, at least he had an access to that wondrous place.
We can therefore well-surmise that it is from some such high plane of
consciousness that he saw true poetry as an utterance of the Spirit. To hearken
to Sri Aurobindo’s mantra
To
love, to love are signs of infinite things
is also to recognize the highest
aesthesis of the creative Word given to us in God’s plenty for that living and
loving, the Vedic plenitude of life. Nolini Kanta Gupta fully imbibed it; he
was one of those poet-seers.
RY Deshpande