NEW DELHI: In Kedarnath Singh’s poems, you can see the shape of longing, touch the burden of memory and soak in the stench of lies. The Jnanpith award recipient, who passed away after a prolonged illness at AIIMS on Monday, brought a delicate and distinctive sensibility to modern Hindi poetry and became one of its most distinguished voices. He was 83.
“He was a poet of both presence and absence, of love and loss, of anxieties and questions. And he achieved in his poetic craft that which can be only called Kedar rhythm, a verbal construct uniquely his own but simultaneously communicative,” says culture critic and poet Ashok Vajpeyi.
For Singh, the past was seldom unconnected from the present and the village never unglued from the city. The two created a human condition where ache and hope walked hand in hand, one indistinguishable from the other. It was like the old shepherd’s face that he once saw in his village and forever carried in his heart even on the streets of Delhi, as he wrote in one his poems, Gaderiye ka chehra.
Singh had the gift for capturing the sense and essence of a 2,500-year-old city in a small poem (Banaras). He could be sharply self-critical (Jagarnath). He could personalize the tragedy of Partition in a single totem of memory (San 47 ko yaad karte hue). And he could even make heartbreak achingly desirable, as in Tum aayeen (You came). In the poem, he compared the arrival of love to “the sweetness that fills a green pea pod”, a lover’s laughter to “the sound of water hitting the shore” and the act of abandonment as “the separation of the chaff from the grain”.
Such quality, says culture activist
Satyanand Nirupam, emerged from a painstaking, sometimes whimsical, commitment to his craft. “He would write poems, store them away for days, weeks, months, even years. He would rework, then destroy. Sometimes the particular draft of a poem would segue into another as it happened with Banaras,” he says.
Born in village Chakia in east UP’s Ballia district, Singh started writing poetry around 1952-53. He earned his doctorate in 1964 on “Imagery in modern Hindi poetry.” Singh taught in various colleges before moving to
Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1976, where he later became the head of department of Hindi language. In 1989, he got the
Sahitya Akademi award for his collection of poems,
Akaal Mein Saaras.
“He considered himself the poet of a language that was somewhere between Hindi and Bhojpuri,” says Nirupam. The dilemma is best expressed in his poem, Desh aur Ghar.
“Despite his felicity with words, he would use them sparingly to fashion an original poetic voice. But as a human being he was even bigger and greater than as a poet,” says writer
Sheoraj Singh “Bechain.”
Adds Vajpeyi, “A poet has a limited physical life. The physical life of
Kedarnath Singh has sadly ended but a second life of his poetry has just begun. It would certainly be much longer than his physical life.”
