An unimaginable staircase like a spiral galaxy: Manindra Gupta’s poetry
by Subhro Bandopadhyay
1.
Bengali poetry after 1930s changed forever. Especially the deep image provoking poetry of Jibanananda Das Inspired a generation of poets especially to those came into prominence in the 1950s and in the 1960s. Those who know the story of Jibanananda das would know that he was a kind of rediscovered poet posthumously by the poets of 1950s generation. There is virtually no writer in that generation who was not touched or inspired or shaped by Das's imagery making and the craft of poetry. Most of the major names bear an echo of Jibananda in their work. Manindra Gupta is from that same generation however he almost repeated the story of being discovered by the next generation of poets the only difference is it happened within Gupta’s lifetime.
His first poetry collection Neel pathorer akash (1969) probably did not strike anybody with any originality but the 1974 volume Moupokader gram caught the attention of the readers with its brilliant almost cinematic world that continued throughout his career. He knew that is strength and weakness both are the rural Bengal landscape, visuals created in his childhood spent in Barishal in the 1930s (now in Bangladesh) where Jibanananda Das also was born and spent an important part of his life, the fact that set Manindra Gupta’s trajectory to a more difficult one. The same strength that Das had was Gupta’s heritage as well.
According to Chirantan Sarkar (poet and essayist) He crafted his diction combing his curiosity of “an anthropologist and an engineer” “… sometimes in his memoirs and his poetry Manindra Gupta creates an imago of nature that time resembles that of the myths, as if it is devoured by the ‘cyclical time’ caged in eternal perpetuity.”
THE PHALLUS
Weak-muscled like a starving leech,
straight up like a broken bow,
I lift up my head sans eyes
to smell the faded air around –
the hushed smirk of the netherworld, sluggish shadows,
light from the dim stars – I am sentient to all.
Blind but astute like an archer taking aim –
all of a sudden the entire body kindles up in a
thousand-eyed smile
in the lonesomeness of a sad evening.
The strewn geographical borders and of history too
separating territorial domains of humanity, of time
the exhibition of strength have culminated
at a distance far away from me.
The dazzling presents the cloaks
of gods and anti gods, the beautiful and the ugly
all those golden, silvery, red wraps and brocade
lie in the darkness of the temple alter;
after the sacrifice of human races the well-shaped denture,
pallid pelvic bones of their women lie strewn all over the place –
the mice amuse themselves with the sham coral,
taking those in and out of their burrows: whose is it any way?
The educated flirting tongue trying to spit in a fit of fake rage
noticing in amazement a complete absence of an accomplice.
The bird sits like a compass on a post,
I consume it wholly.
The smashed crust of the universe, yellow yolk of egg
all get muddled up with the rotation, dried up and lay like a vast beach –
the creator, as if like a turtle, after routinely laying eggs
has once again submerged herself in the blue ocean.
I was at that time still in the key flaming star
with the pupa sun and future moon as witness.
I, the blind old hunter, sit in non-meditation than meditation;
on another plane of inattention, insanity
at the slightest sign
I open up the hole in the skull: cannibal’s gullet.
(Translation, Subhashis Gangopadhyay. Source https://www.kaurab.com/english/bengali_poetry/manindra.html)
In 1969 he started a poetry magazine Paroma that attracted the entire generation of the 1970s. Virtually there is no major name that came up later in Bengali poetry was not influenced by Gupta.
2.
I met Gupta for the first time in the late 1990s. My apprentice under him started much later around 2009, the octogenarian master by then started by then started writing his finest later poems that struck us with their simplicity both in the craft and in the images. He kind of restructured his earlier imago mundi that was deeply rooted in Indian mythology, nature and above all the sense of mystery that overwhelmed us. He risked himself to renew his own poetics. The poetics that already had a great presence of the secretive unknown, in the later poetry he recrafted that unknown through our known world and perception. That master in front of me was like an old Zen master reaching the unattainable. In his poems, in his autobiographical texts, we get to the land or maybe an ocean off secretive mystery. We get to know the power of discovery or the wisdom of a poet. One of his early disciples Jamil Sayed wrote “I wonder who that revered poet was who discovered mermaid, unicorn or the golden dear. He is the same who now discovers the tyre-marks of the moon”. The later is Manindra Gupta. He brought the mysterious if not mystic, a sage like imagination, back to the Bengali poetry, away from the immediacy driven poetic world. In that imagination even a diminutive insect occupies an important place. I saw him not disturbing an ant that was feeding on his own blood (while suffering from Psoriasis) like we read in the anecdotes about Japanese sage poet Ryokan. Many a times he said after his death he would rather prefer to be a feast for the animals in forest. With this incredible sensitivity he went beyond the anthropocentric view of the contemporary poetry sowing the seeds of eco-poetry that makes him truly a poet for the 21st century.
SAGE
The sage sat on a stone beside the blue stream like a non-blinking chameleon
As I neared he startled and sprang up as if a snake
Didn’t bite and smiled instead
Didn’t pounce at me but leapt over the stones and across the blue stream
like a leopard
In a flash disappeared without a trace in the woods on the other side like air
Left behind our half uttered words, wonder and relations
necks kaput under the setting sun.
(Translation, Subhashis Gangopadhyay. Source https://www.kaurab.com/english/bengali_poetry/manindra.html)
Sarkar, Chirantan, Manindra Gupter jagat, Ababhash, 2023
Subhro Bandopadhyay is a polyglottic poet who speaks four languages, including English and Spanish and writes in two. Closely connected with a whole generation of contemporary Spanish and Chilean poets, Subhro is also a prolific translator of poetry. He edits Podyacharcha, a Bengali poetry magazine, and is an associate editor of Kaurab. He has published several books of poetry in Bengali and Spanish and a short biography of Pablo Neruda. He was awarded I Beca Internacional Antonio Machado de creación poética (2008) by Fundación Antonio Machado and the Ministry of Culture, Government of Spain. He regularly publishes in leading literary journals in India and Spain. He received Diploma Superior de español como lengua extranjera from Instituto Cervantes, Spain, in 2010 and the Indian National Youth Literary Award (Sahitya Academy) in 2013. Subhro teaches Spanish language and literature at Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi.
