It would be impudent to try and describe Kunwar Narain’s varied and magnificent corpus of work. (Illustration: Subrata Dhar) It would be impudent to try and describe Kunwar Narain’s varied and magnificent corpus of work. (Illustration: Subrata Dhar)

Kunwar Narain, one of the greatest poets India has produced, was a poet of silences. In one of his notebooks, Dishaon Ka Khula Akash, he described silence not as the mere absence of noise. It was a place where one heard different sounds and echoes, perhaps more piercingly than what passes off as sound. One of these echoes is the echo of the eternal/the endless (anant). But these internal sounds of silence, while resonant, can also be unbearable, in his words, like a “black hole capable of absorbing anything.”

It would be impudent to try and describe Kunwar Narain’s varied and magnificent corpus of work. But every single line he wrote had that power to take you to that place where you heard the sound and the echoes of what our normal sounds render inaudible. It was as if you could hear the humming of all of existence inside you, in that silence he created.

This was true of his two great masterworks, Atmajayi and Vajshrava ke Bahane. They are based on the Kathopnishad. But they are not interpretations. They resonantly use Nachiketa as the eternal seeker, yet also our contemporary. Nachiketa questions Yama on Death and Existence. He questions his father on attachment and renunciation. You follow Nachiketa in his meditative questioning. And like Nachiketa, you literally feel the circle of your consciousness expanding till you hear the sounds of all that is immeasurable.

I suspect Nachiketa fascinated Kunwar Narain because of his fundamental honesty; an honesty that tames both Yama and Vajshrava. What strikes you most about Kunwar Narain’s work is exactly that trustworthy and luminous honesty. He was part of many literary movements, and his early work was included in “Teesra Saptak,” a modernist literary movement. He had strong values, often openly acknowledging the influence of the great Buddhist Socialist thinker Narendra Dev.

But what marks him out was that while he assimilated many trends and ideas, he never became a slave to any, nor deeply identified with them. Literary movements, like ideologies, construct the world through their own prism. Once they identify their respective hammers, the whole world begins to look like a nail to them. Kunwar Narain’s honesty was to understand insights, but to always be open to the world in its particularity. In his work you feel the world prodding you into reflection; not the world as an extension of your ideological, literary or aesthetic ego.

This quality sparkles not just in the range of poems on particular emotions and things, laughter, trees, rivers, language, time. It is evident in his elegiac historical tributes. This includes an extended poem on Kumarajiva, the man who literally transformed a whole culture through translation. It is at its striking best in his political and social poems — “Aaj ka Kabirdas,” “Lucknow”, “Gujarat” and many others written in the midst of communal violence and the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. But even in these poems, with their stunning literary qualities, Kunwar Narain successfully gets you to that point of silence, what Shrilal Shukla called his “wordlessness,” where you actually begin to think.

This is the point where language does not bewitch you. Kunwar Narain had strong values, beautifully articulated. But he never confused a display of values with the need to think. He always got you to the point where you began to hear all those inner echoes that the din of conventional politics had obscured. Some might argue that his poems are not, as is true of many Hindi poets, a call to arms. They are performances in controlled contemplation. But this quality also saved him in the end from so much of the misanthropy that creeps in through a superficial engagement with politics.

It is hard not to feel that Kunwar Narain’s passing is also the passing away of a whole literary world. He was of a generation of Hindi writers that confidently understood that in genuine culture and thinking there cannot be any boundaries. He was at home in European literature, and his last published work is translations of European poets. He wrote about European cinema with as much insight as he wrote about Indian classical music. He insightfully drew a series of contrasts between Kumar Gandharva and Pandit Jasraj.

The contrast he drew was this: The former blew the universe away with his rendition of Kabir; the latter probably the best exponent of Surdas. Kumar Gandharva gave you access to an almost blinding incandescence; Jasraj, through sur and the focus on the sagun form, had to perforce, take on the aesthetic world in its particulars. In a way, Kunwar Narain’s great gift was to inhabit, if one might say, the sagun and nirgun entry points into the universe. It paid unusual attention to all aesthetic detail, at the same time as it prepared the ground for a moment where you could transcend it.

This was also a Hindi world radical in its aspirations. The Hindi literary world was always fractious. But it still managed to hold onto deep ambitions. These days it is intellectually fashionable to say writers combined tradition with modernity, or the vernacular with the cosmopolitan, or identity with plurality. But the deeper radicalism was to take you to a point where these categories begin to reveal their limitations.

The aspiration was to liberate you from the trap of categories that mutilate out possibilities. One way or the other, we insist on dividing literature into sects and warring parties; literary criticism is defined more by its resentments than its power to reveal the world. Kunwar Narain always held onto one sign of true literary greatness: He was always unhoused in any of these distinctions.

For those do not read Hindi, Apurva Narain’s No Other World is a splendid bilingual text of his father’s poems. This volume is important because it sets new standards of translating poetry. The Hindi world has suffered from the lack of good translators. Since Hindi literary production is scattered, the anthologies put together by Yatindra Mishra are also immensely valuable. He has been to Kunwar Narain what Henry Hardy was to Isaiah Berlin, tirelessly putting together everything Kunwar Narain wrote or said. That labour gives the picture of the poet as a whole.

These works will resonate. But it is difficult not to feel a sense of silence that his passing away brings. This is not the silence Kunwar Narain brought you to, where new voices become accessible to us. This silence has, more, the foreboding of darkness.

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