Friday, August 29, 2008

‘The Route to the Open Sea’- The Poetry of Rita Malhotra

When looking at the whole scenario of Indian English Poetry from pre independence to Post independence, Pashupati Jha’s observation is noticeable:
Although Indian English poetry written by women marked its presence in the nineteenth century with the arrival of Toru Dutt, further reinforced by Sarojini Naidu in the next century; this poetry, despite its strength and importance, lacked a sense of immediacy and intimacy of personal experience. These poets were more concerned with establishing their credential as an Indian poet writing in English than with the exploration of their inner urge…but after the mixed sixties of the twentieth century, a perceptive change was noticed with the emergence of ‘I’- an assertive self in the poetry of Kamla Das and this trend went on gathering strength with Mamta Kalia, Eunice De Souza, Sunita Jain, Lalita Venkateshwaran and Shri Devi. (Jha)

We find that a major shift of ideas and themes from objective to subjective, from self expose to self-identity and from imitativeness to originality. The simultaneous growth and development in the field of woman and her consciousness can not only be discerned in the society but also it is a living reality in the woman literature also. Woman poets have been the true janitors of different heritage and cultures as well as they are the emotional sculptor of civilization. In this context the post independence Indian English women poets mainly Anna Sujata Modayil, Chitra Prasad, Rohini Gupta,Dorothy Sinha, Gauri Deshpandey, Kamla Das, lluxmi Kanan, Lalita Vyankateshwaran, lila Dharmraj, Monika Verma, Ira De, Tapti Barua Kashyap, lila Dalmiyan, Renu Roy, Roshan Alkazi, Mamta Kalia, Mina Alexender, Sunita Jain, Suniti Namjoshi, Vimla Rao, Marry Andasgupta and Rita Malhotra are the pioneers of Indian English women poetry. Unlike their processors, these poets are rich in their sensibility and craft both. Besides, they claim to be categorized in a separate class called Modern Women Poets.
Moving our glance from the whole scenario to the poetry of Rita Malhotra in particular, we will find the velvety woman and caring and caressing poet in her. Sobrato Bandhyopadhyaya aptly remarks:

The ‘poetical- key’ in Malhotra’s poems opens doors to delicate songs with balanced rhetoric and emphasis of conviction a perfect admittance to one’s interior shadows, powerful enough to fly through innovative intuitions. (Blurb)


A reader in Mathematics at Kamla Nehru College and visiting Post Graduate Faculty, Delhi University-, Dr. Rita Malhotra is a PhD in Mathmatics and has been a Post Doctoral Fellow at University of Paris IX on a French Government Fellowship. She has published her two collections previously; the first one is Reflections published by Writers Workshop Calcutta (1997) and the second Images of love published by Virgo publications (2003). She is widely translated, published and awarded. Her poetry carries several imprints of romanticism but does not forsake the plight and challenges of modern life and woman in particular.
In her I am not Your Woman and Other Poems her latest collection, Rita mingles memory with meandering emotions and is seen absorbed in the quest of roots of love in woman’s life. In her opening poem ‘I am Not Your Woman’ when she in the end says:

Today he is synonymous
With absence
Today I seek a route
To the open sea. (1)


We find a blend of past with the present as the warp and woof of her poetry which is synonymous with aerial presence of love that is a light house anchoring the poetry of Rita to the new shores of experiences and meanings. Her poetry, therefore is not merely a document of personal experiences, rather it bears agonies, pains and anguish of modern life in society wherein she with the subjects of child marriages, rape of minors, child prostitutes, hypocrisy of man, homeless children and the hollowness of middle class ethos in urban India and the false babble of politicians. In her poem, ‘Woman’ she metaphorically compares woman to a ‘flowing river/ assuming myriads shapes, shades/ along her journey/ through life’s rocks and stones/ in its fickle twist and turns’ ignoring the ravages of time. She portrays all the images of Kali, Rukhmani or Gauri in her woman and expands her ocean of thoughts and makes the woman to ‘welcome, embrace/ to prayers, sins/ ashes and all.’ Similarly in her poem ‘Bindi’ which is marked as ‘caste mark of profound piety, Rita muses over myriad aspects and journeys through myriad moods and finally speaks in the words of Bindi:

I empower
I endow her with sense of space
As I pave the vibrant way
She remains the soul
Of this day.(20)


In another poem, ‘Cookie Woman’ she mirrors the fate and plight of woman when she says:

Woman, born, reborn
And born, again
All in one birth
A function of man’s desire
Seeking sense in
Sometimes- loved
Othertimes- ignored gestures
Shaped, chiseled,
To suit her master,
Is the manicured cookie
Relished bite by bite until
Dreams defeated,
She is a shapeless mass once more. (39)


Similar thoughts are exposed in the poem ‘Widow’:

Disarray of solitude
Shuts her eyes to lust lies
Brutal desires drowns her sobs of shame
Dignity imprisoned for life
She dies once more, and once more,
Numberless times. (50)

In the poem ‘Words’ she alike Baldev mirza considers words as a potent medium to bring the people close in the words of Mirza who says:
I fling a cord of words
To walk unto me.
Similarly Rita says:
“Words drew us close
Words tore us apart
Light- years hence
We reach out once again
Treading upon the word-path. (108)


The creative genius of Rita is chiefly visible in her poems of love, nature and man and woman relationship where she is both candid and confessional without any inhibition on her part and where she expresses her notions in simple, genuine and human style, displaying a rare emotional maturity, combining tenderness, passion and emotions and her weakness if any is the weakness of entire class. Her sensitive and sober observations are the both penetrating and piercing that can be seen in her poems ‘Untitled’, ‘Infidelity’, ‘Prisoners of Patterns’, ‘Canvas’, ‘Unwed Mother’, ‘ Solitude’, ‘Footstep’, ‘distant’, ‘Devote’, ‘New Son’, ‘Tempest’ and ‘Picture Perfect.’ Besides, poems like ‘Silence’, ‘the Sea Within’, ‘Borrowed Bliss’, ‘metropolis’, ‘ Land- Sea- Land’, ‘tempest’, ‘ Blanket night’, ‘ night’, ‘ Kaohsiung Images’, ‘Earthquake images’ and ‘Like Every Other Day’ are full of the hues of the Nature in which Rita has tried her best to portray almost all the aspects of Nature and life. For example, in the ‘Earthquake images, she says;

The earth quakes in fury
Puts life to a dreadful sleep
Shakes the dead awake.’ (96)
Or in ‘Kaohsiung Images’ she draws a sketch:
“Moments linger
Through reciprocal promises
Of meeting again
Memory-laden
We return
Shut eyelids of the stare-strewn waters
Of the Love- river
Conceal sadness-rears. (95)


In another poem, ’Metro-morality’, Rita gives a realistic picture of the metropolis:

Sultry monsoon-evening
Screeching cars
On angry abused roadsoccupants sport
Latest- in- fashion’ garments
On way to a dinner meet
Deliberations on the Agra summit
And the Phoolan Devi- killing
Follow talks of
Hectic schedules and humid weather.

x x x x x

Curses damn the inhuman city
Warped morality manifested,
Pseudo-compassion warded off
Like a swarm of bees,
The car moves on, A C full blast
The F M channel plays
The next popular number. (101)


And in another poem ‘Freedom Fighter’, she is both realistic and emotional at the sad demise of a freedom fighter:

Today log-stiff, still
Draped in white
He smiled his death smile
The medal shines bright
On his frail proud chest. (86)

Or in ‘Their Tuesdays’ she puts a humorous and ironical picture of the hanuman temple:

The affluence-draped devotee
In white Jasmine fragrance
Falls prostrate
Seeking divinity
In garlanded exaggeration of stone idols
The priest’s vulture-glance gleefully crystallizes in
The generous offerings
At Hanuman’s divine feet. (79)

The short poem or the Tercets appended in the last of the book are no less sensuous, beautiful and poetic in which most of the poems are about love, pain, hope, nature and feminism where the three unities of rhythm, idea and vision can be found predominant.
The metaphoric images, graceful symbols, alliterative phrases, deed ruminations and excavations of heart’s pain, fine arrangement of words, appropriate linguistic use, constitute these short poems. For example, we may take the first Tercet in which Rita creates a metaphor when she says:

Lotus leaf
Trembling water drops
Hint of love. (123)

Or a silent pain can be heard when she says:
“The slow exudation of ironic perspectives the protraction of impulsive labouring and the conception of emotional candour is obvious in these tercets where Rita’s authentic poetic sensibility which is mostly charged with self-indulgence, self-experience and a vacuity which remains visible in most of the poems hits at the genesis and the development of the idea, and the motive of the poet. The Indian ethos and sensibility are nowhere absent nor the deep-rooted Indian rituals have become fetters like other Indian English Women poets who denounce the social bindings’ rather she voices the issues of woman more forcefully than any other current woman poet. She is never dismayed or dishearten in the adverse times when she appears to be saying:

I remember time
In colours of hurt
Yet I dream dream.”(126)
X x x
“Algae- covered pond
Depressed waters
Yet the lotus smiles a fresh pink. (130)

Yet we become reflective when we read such lines:

Can we give the street child
His last childhood by drooping
A coin into his begging bowl?’(134)
X X X
Woman today
Is not a mere mirror
That magnifies the image of her man. (135)

According to her, the human quest and human predicament is much similar to these tercets:

Immense daylight, edgeless
Scorching desert sands, endless
Search for an oasis continues.”135
X X X
Wild grass
In the graveyard
Flower struggle to survive. (Ibid)


She, at times, appear to be breaking all restrictive codes of decorous behavior of poetry but she never cuts across the boundaries of morality and decency rather she remain emotional, poetic, and flowing. A fusion of transmutation of image, symbol, metaphor rhythm and tone with feeling create a high sensitivity and vitality in her poems as well as the intensity of experience and the prominence of feeling and sensuality make her more passionate balanced and celebrated artist. Her ward pictures are lively, vivid as she is gifted poetic artist who uses vivid, crisp, evocative and alliterative phrases: - blank between, melodies, meanders, hired henchman, romantic resides, powerful prostitutes, dew drops, brocade-blanket, anxious anticipation, diurnal dip, deluging desires, falsity ferments, falsehood, whistling winds, glow golden, cheerful chocolate, gamine grin, soft silk, brown buds, permanent probability, earnest expression, colossal cosmos, pattern played , profound piety, soberly splendor, death disguise, seismic storm, fragment flown, bare breasts, shambling seaside, sounds, fragile fabric, monochrome magic dark days and rocking rhythms, (in her long poems) lotus leaf, time trembles, death’s door, still sighs, stone-still shelf and wind-worn (in Tercets).
According to her, when ‘the soul embarks/ upon a journey to fantasy land, / floating stars on dark water / make a poem’ or when ‘dawn smiles / foaming waves lack- hands / in an endless white chain / a poem takes shape’ or when ‘ words weave poems / a nourished soul / spreads its wings’. It is nowhere a ‘sudden outburst / inspired moment’ / or ‘spontaneous overflow’. To her, poetry is a daughter of love and agony. It is a perfect marriage of experience and expression. We find her nowhere vacillating between the two or over weighing the one. She is nowhere away from life’s realities, so she remains interesting and charming. Here the comment of Dragan Pragojlovic worth mentioning:

Malhotra’s poems come into being between love and agony. Her poems do not ignore life’s truths. That is perhaps the reason why her poems often convey very deep emotions and sound honest. The reader cannot remain indifferent and would be able to feel the warmth and pain of Malhotra’s verse in his mind. (Blurb)

Besides, the two poems, the one on Dr. A.P. J. Abdul Kalam and the other on’ Mother Teresa’ are also beautiful because they not only eulogize the two luminaries but also leave a didactic note.
It is our turn now
Deep inside, each one
Is a proved brave heart
Ready to walk along
The path you carve
Beyond thoughts, beyond dreams.
Beyond times. (114)

Therefore from the above observation, we may clearly see that the poetry of Rita Malhotra is pure and perfect in the sense as it dose not leave its readers reflective on account of its suggestive, vigorous and lively images revitalize and recharge the human being should be the aim of the poets to make their readers both passive and active; passive in the terms of human regeneration or disorganization and active in the terms of vivacity of thoughts and emotions.
The collection I am not Your Woman and Other Poems paves the way to open sea on which we find her moving constantly with silent steps. The Indianness, picturesqueness, truthfulness, innocence, viability, suggestiveness, clarity, appropriateness and the accurateness of Mathematics is well reflected in Rita Malhotra’s poems. So she remains graceful, delicate, mature, perceptive, innovative and balanced from beginning to the end of the collection. I personally wish for the long life of such creative genius so that she may continuously bliss her readers with her mesmerizing poetry.




References:
Jha, Pashupati, ‘The Emergence of ‘I’ Among Indian Women Poets’ Indian Writing in English: Tradition and Modernity. Amar Nath Prasad (Editor) and Kanupriya, New Delhi: Sarup and Sons. 2006.
I Am Not Your Woman and Other Poems by Rita Malhotra, Kolkata: Sampark, 2007.ISBN 8-7768-0463, Price- 250/-, pp140. (All the subsequent references are from the same poetry book)

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