This article was written to
celebrate the birth centenary of Amal-kiran (KD Sethna) who is now 104 with a
glowing personality as if some wise God of ancient
On the occasion of Amal-kiran’s
eighty-sixth birthday fourteen years ago Sonia Dyne had offered him a bouquet
of flowers from an English garden:
Send to him snowdrops that the
sun’s cool kiss
Fathered in mossy glades before the
spring;
A riot of poppies scarlet in the
grass;
And every fragrance that the warm
winds bring
From roses after rain—with clarion
daffodils,
First in the van of summer,
celebrate this day,
And golden buttercups from
All these dispatch to Amal…
The bunch is still fresh and
fragrant carrying the authentic inspiration that had prompted her to express
the jubilation which becomes hundredfold brighter and richer today. In the Ramayana there is an episode describing
the garland of flowers the Rishis of the Matangavana had left with Shabari to
put at the feet of the Avatar. It perhaps remains sparkling-new and
sweet-scented even today,—because it was charged with their tapasya. There is
an element of it in the English and that must be very endearing to Amal. His
love for the language is something which, to enter into the spirit of Sri
Aurobindo’s works, into their vastness and spiritual sublimity, we should
always cherish with keener warmth and enthusiasm. We must acquire both
intuitive and professional command over it. All the shades and nuances of
English poetry Amal knows with absolute thoroughness even as they become an
aspect of his creative personality. Everything from Canterbury Tales to Savitri
flows in his blood-streams. Once I told Amal that he would be carrying English
poetry along with him to the next life which he with a confirming smile seemed
to savor. It has become a part of his psychic being. A polymath he is and there
is nothing to doubt in it, but it is only with poetry that his flame of diamond
zeal rises to sky above purple-blue sky in its flight towards truth and beauty
and delight.
Once the Mother mentioned that
Amal’s personal number is 15. It reduces to 1+5=6, the number corresponding to
“The New Creation”. This is symbolised by the commonly known flower tuberose or
Nishigandha. But the Mother considered his flower to be the one she named “
While reviewing Amal-kiran’s collected
poems The Secret Splendour in the Hindu of 27 September 1994 KR Srinivasa
Iyengar has the following to say. Amal is a “lyric genius whose sensitive
responses to English and French poetry have filled his poems with honeyed
delight. He can coerce us into entering the worlds of the spirit with
effortless ease… The pain-defying Ananda that marks these poems is a welcome
gift for a world wallowing in self-pity. Sri Aurobindo’s comments add to the
value of this lyra mystica and give us a clear idea of how fine poems are
shaped on a creative anvil.”
Yes, “creative anvil”. Amal had
graduated himself with flying colours from the poetry department that was run
by Sri Aurobindo during the 1930s. His batchmates were wonderful giants like
Arjava (Arjavananda was the name given to the British logician-poet JA Chadwick
by Sri Aurobindo), Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Dilip Kumar Roy, Nishikanto,
Nirodbaran, Jyotirmayi—just to name a few. Reflecting on a joint photo of Amal
and Harin belonging to this period, this is what Amal says: “Harindranath
Chattopadhyaya, already famous, and Amal-kiran still in the world’s background
but with Sri Aurobindo’s grand certificate in his pocket. Harindranath looks
sweetly satisfied, with a calm smile on his handsome clean-shaven front-face, a
sense of extraordinary achievement happily tracing it, whereas his companion
rather lanky and somewhat taller, with a tiny moustache and a close-cut fringe
of beard, appears to strain his gaze towards a future” which, to quote
Meredith, “lends a yonder to all ends.” Harin, “overburdened with the favours
of the goddess,” was already famous with his Feast of Youth which was reviewed
by Sri Aurobindo himself in the November 1918 issue of the Arya. In the early
time his poetry was full of “imagination, beauty and colour of phrase and a
moving sentiment” with a promise of great mystic-spiritual efflorescence. But
the promise remained unfulfilled. One wonders whether the gift of the goddess
was not frittered away. The mystic possibility was squandered and only the
tinsel gave joy to the emotional-vital. The roots were not deep enough. About
his best mystical creations during the three years of stay in the Ashram, Sri
Aurobindo says that Harin’s “poems came from the inner mind centre, some from
the Higher Mind—other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in
poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what
was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful,—but
surely not mystic…” The domains of spiritual speech or else of the deeper
psychic utterance stayed unexpressed in him.
It is here we see the distinctive
advance made by Amal in the poetry workshop of the Master. When Harin left the
Ashram in 1933 he sold his bicycle to his young poet-friend Amal who used it on
the quiet streets of
Not from the day but from the night
he’s born,
Night with her pang of dream—star
on pale star
Winging strange rumour through a
secret dawn.
For all the black uncanopied spaces
mirror
The brooding distances of our
plumbless mind.
O depth of gloom, reveal your
unknown light—
Awake our body to the alchemic
touch
Of the great God who comes with
minstrel hands!…
Lo, now my heart has grown his
glimmering East:
Blown by his breath a cloud of
colour runs:
The yearning curves of life are lit
to a smile.
O mystic sun, arise upon our
thought
And with your gold omnipotence make
each face
The centre of some blue infinitude!
Sri Aurobindo comments: “The last
six lines… have a breath of revelation in them; especially the image ‘my heart
has grown his glimmering East’ and the extreme felicity of ‘the yearning curves
of life are lit to a smile’ have a very intense force of revealing
intuitively—and on a less minute, larger scale there is an equal revealing
power and felicity in the boldness and strength of the image in the last three
lines. These six lines may be classed as ‘inevitable’, not only separately but
also as a whole. The earlier part of the poem is also fine, though not in the
same superlative degree—the last two lines have something of the same intuitive
felicity, though with slighter less intense touches, as the first two of the
(rhymeless) sestet—especially in the ‘alchemic touch’ of the ‘minstrel hands’.
Lines 2 to 5 have also some power of large illumination.”
The occurrence of ‘alchemy’ in
Amal’s sonnet entitled Sky-Rims has a
fine history which immediately illustrates the care with which Sri Aurobindo
attended to details with respect to mot juste in poetic compositions. He
appreciated the poem very much except, writes Amal, “for the last line which
seemed insufficiently shot with revelatory turn of sight and sound. To fill the
lacuna I invoked the Muse day after day. Harin was a close friend at that time
and he too sportingly took up the challenge for me. Actually the fault of the
non-revelatory was that it ran: ‘To yet another revelatory dawn!’ Sri Aurobindo
found the adjective of my choice ‘flat and prosaic, at any rate here.’ The best
I could do at the end of several experiments was: ‘To yet another ecstasy of
dawn.’ Sri Aurobindo’s comment was: ‘It is better than anything yet proposed.
The difficulty is that the preceding lines of the sestet are so fine that
anything ordinary in the last line sounds like a sinking or even an anticlimax.
The real line that was intended to be there has not yet been found.’ I made one
more attempt and wrote to Sri Aurobindo: ‘I have got Harin to put his head
together with mine. He has come up with ‘lambency of dawn’. A good phrase, no
doubt—but I wonder if it suits the style and atmosphere and suggestion in my
sonnet. After over a fortnight of groping I have myself struck upon: ‘To yet
another alchemy of dawn!’ Do you like my ‘alchemy’? Sri Aurobindo replied:
‘That is quite satisfactory—you have got the right thing at last.’ ” The
Fire-worshipper passed the Fire-test, Agni-Parikshā. What Harin had in his
pocket and Amal didn’t—the “grand certificate”—he now got with letters
calligraphed in gold.
About Agni the Fire-God Amal
writes: “If I visualise in his role of all-refiner as a splendour in front of
me, I thrust my dross out of my body and feel liberated from it. As a Parsi,
dubbed ‘fire-worshipper’ in religious classification, I had been accustomed to
face in temple or at home the urn bearing the golden bouquet of flames flying
up, sustained by logs of fragrant sandalwood. This fire addressed as ‘Son of
God’ in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture, symbolised the Divine Presence
in the midst of the world, in the midst of each living creature, an ‘objective
correlative’ of the ineffable secrecy in the human heart.” The true nature of
this God was revealed to him by Sri Aurobindo after his arrival at the Ashram
in December 1927. Agni is the immortal in the mortal leading us on the upward
climbing slopes of Heaven—even as in the Aurobindonian experience he comes down
into us and shapes our thought and feeling and will in his own splendour and
amethyst sovereignty. He makes those who are receptive to him living centres of
blue-and-gold infinitudes. A conscious effort on our part is needed. But rare
is such a conscious effort and rarer yet the guiding Light leading us on the
path. “The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile” only when is present the
incarnate Divine amongst us.
But the yearning soul of a poet is
always in search of the smile of beauty held in its embrace by the truth of the
creative spirit. Arthur Rimbaud had made a pertinent insightful discovery, that
one must be a seer, that one must make oneself a seer. He held that “the poet
makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the
senses.” The last phrase is somewhat puzzling. Rimbaud’s own life was a
question mark in spite of his association with Paul Verlaine who had introduced
him to the nineteenth century literary circles of
The uniqueness of Sri Aurobindo’s
Department of Poetry lies precisely in its founding a new aesthesis of the
spirit and making it a part of the creative experience itself. He sees its
springs in the grades of consciousness climbing all the way up to the
Overmental regions. These can also plunge into the inner depths and give a kind
of occult density charged with the glow of some hidden sun, meet the “Fire
burning on the bare stone” or, to use Amal’s somewhat surrealistic phrase, be
in possession of a diamond burning upward in the roofless chamber walled by the
ivory mind. Not only does the Master see and locate all these inner and
upward-ascending grades; he also asserts that their powerful or else revelatory
currents have to rush in our well-prepared mind and heart and soul and spirit.
The discipline of poetry itself thus turns into a field of work for making
progress of every kind, literary, aesthetic, occult, spiritual. Artistic
perfection carrying with it authentic emotional felicity at that time starts
acquiring the qualities of the expressive soul itself. Mystical experience then
just becomes one aspect of its rich and many-dimensional possibilities.
We have a good glimpse of it in
AE’s (George William Russell) The Vesture
of the Soul. When he says
…I could not guess
The viewless spirit’s wide domain,
or
…The royal robe I wear
Trails all along the fields of
light:
Its silent blue and silver bear
For gems the starry dust of night
he somehow gets in contact with
that mystical source of inspiration. “AE at his highest inspiration is,” writes
Amal, “as great as Yeats but he hasn’t Yeats’s subtly rich incantation-effect….
AE has his own music even as he has his own moods. But there is a spellbinding
by words, which Yeats commands very often and AE very seldom. AE can be
delicate and intuitive, colourful and revelatory: what he does not have as a
rule is that verbal spellbinding—an art which to those who are sensitive to the
soul of words is most precious…. Yet to make Yeats the touchstone of poetry is
misguiding; for the spell-binding art of subtly rich incantation is one of the
rare modes of poetry and does not comprise all the poetic modes.” Amal the
critic is in his glorious shades here. As a furious critic he can also be
devastating.
But first let us take another
example of this aesthesis of the spirit, of Arjava’s Moksha dated 25 August
1933. Its middle stanza is as follows:
Each man is wildered myriadly by
outsight and surface tone
Engirdling soul with clamour, by
his fragmentary mood,
This patter of Time’s marring steps
across the solitude
Of Truth’s abidingness,
Self-Blissful and Alone.
In his copy of Arjava’s Poems
published in 1939 Amal makes the following note: “I have not been able to trace
the comment, but I remember that Sri Aurobindo praised the poem very highly and
remarked about lines 7 and 8 [lines 3 and 4 in the above quote] that they had
come perhaps from some of the highest levels of inspiration that had been
reached in the world’s poetic history. Afterwards he wrote to me that they
originated in: ‘Illumined Mind with an Intuitive element and a strong Overmind
touch.’ (7 March 1934) These lines can be considered what Sri Aurobindo
regarded as ‘Mantra’ in the spiritual sense.”
But what is Mantra? Let us read
what Amal wrote apropos of it in one of his letters in 1990: “All great
literature is at the same time sculpture and music. In Savitri and The Life Divine there is not only artistic rhythm:
there is also the wing-beat of the Mantra, the significant sound that lives in
a modulated phrase as if it entered it—whether ideatively or imaginally—from a
vast of wisdom above the human mind and a depth of exaltation beyond the human
heart. Without the ear sensitively responding along with the attentively
answering eye, the life-thrill of the superhuman planes from which the words
come will not be sufficiently caught in our being. The Mantra, in order to make
its impact in full, requires to be realized in its vibration no less than in
its message. Perhaps you will wonder if philosophy can be Mantric. All depends
upon the source of it. In the Overmind, whence the Mantra hails, Truth and
Beauty are one and it is Gods and Goddesses that covertly move in the steps of
sentences like the one with which The Life Divine opens its procession of
logical vision: ‘The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thought and,
as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,—for it survives the
longest periods of skepticism and returns after every banishment,—is also the
highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination
of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and
unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality.’ ”
The rustle of movements of Gods and
Goddesses is felicitous and sweet-scented in the sweep of mantric prose, but in
the powerful rhythmic swing and sway of mantric poetry it becomes the charged
Word that ushers in divine experience even in the most objective realities in
which we live. We are not only put in contact with them; we also see that they
bring about a transforming miracle in us. Even the body’s cells respond to
their greatness in luminosity of the truth-existent. Does not incarnate Savitri
stand in front of us in her assuring grandeur and sweetness and beauty in the
following, one who has come as the radiant Word to express divinity in the
world?
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth’s
revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the
gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of
joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled
divinity
Or golden temple door to things
beyond
Immortal rhythms swayed in her
time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial
sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their
intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men’s
lives,
A wide self-giving was her native
act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all
that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened
world:
Her kindly care was a sweet
temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven’s
equipoise…
Love in her was wider than the
universe,
The whole world could take refuge
in her single heart…
At once she was the stillness and
the word,
A continent of self-diffusing
peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin
fire:
The strength, the silence of the
gods were hers.
There is another kind of occult and
densely packed Mantra in Arjava’s Moksha-lines
This patter of Time’s marring steps
across the solitude
Of Truth’s abidingness,
Self-Blissful and Alone.
In spite of the bewildering
conditions of man, his outward-looking viewpoints, surface tones, his
engirdling clamours and fragmentary moods, there is something magical in
This patter of Time’s marring steps
across the solitude
Of Truth’s abidingness,
Self-Blissful and Alone.
In the stillness of our heart let
us read these lines again:
This patter of Time’s marring steps
across the solitude
Of Truth’s abidingness,
Self-Blissful and Alone.
And once more in the stillness of
our entire being:
This patter of Time’s marring steps
across the solitude
Of Truth’s abidingness,
Self-Blissful and Alone.
Such height of inspiration! Such
wholesomeness and integrality of harmony that can give to Time’s marring steps
assuring bliss of the Alone! In the preface to Arjava’s works his yogi-friend
Sri Krishna Prem has the following to say: “For Arjava… Nature was a shrine in
which each form seen in the flickering firelight of the senses was a shadow of
realities that lay within, shining in the magical light of the secret Moon
which was the Master-Light of all his seeing….” How true!
Contrast this to Keki N.
Daruwalla’s tribute to Nissim Ezekiel—A
Poet of the Heart that appeared in the Hindu
dated 1 February 2004: “He was a poet of the heart, of failure, of doubt, of
‘the unquiet mind, the emptiness within,’ someone who revelled in rodent-like
explorations of love. Though he was an academic and read a lot, he was not
‘barricaded from/The force of flower or bird’ by what he read. He showed the others
how to break away from the pseudo-spiritual, pseudo-philosophical poem brimming
with sonorous Miltonicisms. Imagine what would have happened to Indian poetry
in English if poets had followed in the footsteps of Sri Aurobindo, that great
savant and revolutionary, but a terminal poetic disaster?” Here are rootless
self-styled professionals arrogant to the degree who, as Keats would say “standing
apart in giant ignorance” pass judgments about matters for which they have
never developed sensibilities. That great savant and revolutionary but not
reckoned as poet or critic, “the greatest brain on the planet” as Bernard Shaw
seems to have said about Sri Aurobindo, is a challenge to their so-called
academic standing and prestige and therefore must be ridiculed for
self-promotion. Such peddlers of excellence simply take pride in aesthetics
transplanted from the alien soil.
Does one become authentically
spiritual by “revelling in rodent-like explorations of love”? And what is
pseudo-spiritual in Sri Aurobindo? This is neither to understand spirituality
nor poetry. And what is Miltonic in him? Let us take just a few lines with
which Paradise Lost opens and see the
vast difference that exists between the two:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and
the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose
mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and
all our woe,
With loss of
Restore us, and regain the blissful
Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse…
…I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous
Song,
That with no middle flight intends
to soar
Above the Aonian Mount, while it
pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or
Rhime…
…What
in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and
support;
That to the highth of this great
Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the ways of God to
men.
Here is
Long ago Sri Aurobindo himself said
that the rise of Modernism was necessary against the Victorian type. He wrote:
“It is the most unlovely and uninspiring period of the English spirit. Never
was the aesthetic sense so drowned in pretentious ugliness, seldom the
intelligence crusted in such an armoured imperviousness to fine and subtle
thinking, the ebb of spirituality so far out and low... Poetry flourishes best
when it is the rhythmical expression of the soul of its age, of what is
greatest and deepest in it, but still belongs to it and the poetry of this
period suffers by the dull smoke-laden atmosphere in which it flowered; … there
is still something sticky in its luxuriance, a comparative depression and
poverty in its thought, a lack in its gifts, in its very accomplishment a sense
of something not done.” Something had to be done and Modern Poetry attempted
that. But modernism was an out-and-out reaction against tradition, even against
future possibilities. Therefore, when Sri Aurobindo leaps from tradition into
the Overhead, he at once gets bypassed in the current aesthesis. Obviously,
this is a passing phase and the aesthesis will have to change and gather itself
into a future form. Daruawallas and their ilk may fail to see it but it is
inevitable. After all, Modern Poetry has not delivered the goods and man’s deepest
aspirations have remained unfulfilled. “Empty and barren is the sea,” but it
must find new waters and new tides. Kathleen Raine’s realisation that
Behind
the tree, behind the house, behind the stars
Is
the presence that I cannot see
is also her hope. And she is a lady
who never considered Sri Aurobindo to be a poet. In the hasteful modernity what
we have lost is the calm and self-assuring music of the spheres. With the
telescope of the mind what we see are only glimmerings of the distant fireflies,
what we have probed are the surface details of the subconscient. But nowhere is
there poetry. The Western critic is just an adult of the city and is bereaved
of his mother. Indians ape him. For Meredith poetry is the overflow of our
inmost in the sweetest way. Will we get it? Ogden Nashe proclaims that
Brightness falls from the air
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye…
are “some of the most delicately
magical lines in the English language.” Do we respond to their charm? The modern
mind has no patience for that; that is its tragedy.
Sri Aurobindo’s modernism does not
rest at all in the sordid and the ugly. In him there is a kind of assimilated
richness. He exploits, so to say, everything that can tellingly if not
revealingly serve his purpose. Kalidasian moods of seasons and the
featurelessness of Nirvana, for example, are as important to it as Homeric
similes or the correlative expressions of the Modernists. It is so because his
epics or short lyrical verses come from an original source of inspiration
inaccessible to us. That incapacity of ours cannot be a reflection on the
quality of his creations. Thus Savitri
is full of Rasas—Madhura, Karuna, Vatsalya, Adbhuta, Veera, Bibhatsa, Shanta,
etc. Quintessentially, however, it is founded on the Shanta. It is in this
great Silence that the Epic was born—Silence the true home of Overhead Poetry.
To really appreciate it one has to enter into it. Poetry is not only image and
symbol; it is also sound and silence; if there is sight’s sound, there is also
sound’s sight. And when le Musicien de
Silence becomes one with le Musicien
de Son we have an unsurpassable marvel. Listen to Ezra Pound: “When we know
more of overtones we shall see that the tempo of every masterpiece is absolute,
and is exactly set by some further law of rhythmic accord. Whence it should be
possible to show that any given rhythm implies about it a complete musical
form, perfect, complete. Ergo, the rhythm set in a line of poetry connects its
symphony, which, had we a little more skill, we could score for orchestra.” If
one is deaf to these sounds, to these rhythmic accords, to these happinesses
rushing from the creative possibilities of the inevitable Word with their
undertones and overtones, then what can the creative poet do? In the Overhead
Poetry as given to us by Sri Aurobindo what we have are the perfect rhythm and
thought-substance and soul-vision fused into one, the supreme Mantra itself.
Sri Aurobindo wrote prophetically,
long ago, that the future poetry “transcending the more intellectualised or
externally vital and sensational expression” would speak “wholly in the
language of an intuitive mind and vision and imagination, intuitive sense,
intuitive emotion, intuitive vital feeling, which can seize in a peculiarly intimate
light of knowledge by a spiritual identity the inmost thought, sight, image,
sense, life, feeling of that which it is missioned to utter. The voice of
poetry comes from a region above us, a plane of our being above and beyond our
personal intelligence, a supermind which sees things in their inmost and
largest truth by a spiritual identity and a lustrous effulgency and rapture and
its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly
vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy.” He saw five suns of
truth-beauty-delight-life-spirit in the sky of poetry waiting to be born,
waiting for us to receive their glow and warmth. Our creative endeavour should
be to open ourselves to them.
Students who graduated themselves
from Sri Aurobindo’s Department of Poetry received magnificences of these suns
in Sri Aurobindo’s plenty. “The silent wonders of eternity” that were waiting
for the inspired utterance suddenly found in rock-hewn images the quivering
lips that speak of the blue skies and the golden truths. We witness the ear of
ears and the eye of eyes waking to the subtleties of sense and sound,
marvelling at the mystery of God’s creation even in Time. Not only did Sri
Aurobindo himself write seizing “the absolute in shapes that pass”; he also
encouraged actively and positively his disciples who came forward to
participate in such an apocalyptic adventure. Amal-kiran was one among the most
prominent practitioners of this new poetry, Poetry of the Future. He invoked
heaven’s light in the inner chamber and called out the occult fire from the
depths of the being to take the form of the deeply expressive and intuitive
Word. His was the Hymn of Affirmation welcoming the Aurobindonian Muse, a chant
in the praise of Ahana of the Eternal. Glory to the New Dawn appearing on the
poetic horizon!
RY Deshpande