[Reader-list] Poet Dr HK Kaul - displaced and in exile

[cashmeeri]

‘In my ancestral home
Of smoked wood, thatched shadow
The dead meet every night
And die again
In distress
When the sun rises.
…
The dead open all the doors.
As time goes by
The new dead have begun
To join the old dead.’
 
 
http://apostrophe-o.com/?p=659
 
Apostrophe’O Profiles: Dr H K Kaul
 
Jul 2, 2010
By Suhas Munshi 
 
In reply to the question – ‘What is poetry for?’ Judith Palmer, director of  the Poetry Society, said “One of the things poetry gives all of us is a way of developing an attentiveness to life, a way of observing the world, of noticing things and seeing them differently.”
 
Dr. H.K. Kaul has spent his life observing the world very closely, and because he has a way with words, the wisdom is not lost. His side of the world, the side away from the sun, is vigorous and disheartening. Melancholy memories from Kashmir present themselves throughout his work and haunt the reader by their sheer hopelessness.
 
‘In my ancestral home
Of smoked wood, thatched shadow
The dead meet every night
And die again
In distress
When the sun rises.
…
The dead open all the doors.
As time goes by
The new dead have begun
To join the old dead.’
(-From ‘When the dead meet’)

 
The poet started his career as a yoga teacher in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh in early 1960s. After spending some years there, he moved on to further his education and later found a job at the Indian International Centre (IIC) as a librarian. Books moved him and occupied most of his time, and he discovered the joy of poetry. In 1984 Kaul founded the Poetry Society of India.
 
Kaul, a librarian, author, poet and bibliographer has authored anthologies (Historic Delhi: An anthology, Travelers India: An anthology), bibliographies (Sri Aurobindo: A descriptive bibliography), poetry (In The Islands of Grace, Firdaus in Flames), and books on library keeping (Library Resource Sharing and Networks).
 
I started the conversation by asking Kaul for his opinions on the present state of poetry in our society. “The situation isn’t most promising. Take a look around the bookstores and you’ll know.” I have and I know. Bookstores in my city maintain a very limited poetry collection, if any at all, and the collection is often relegated to a dusty and morose corner.
 
“Poetry takes its own sweet time to seep in,” he said, I added that it also does not reveal all its secrets in a nail-biting climax; both being serious impediments to pleasure for a reader accustomed to instant gratification. As the Hungarian poet George Szirtes said, “Nobody reads a poem to find out what happens in the last line. They read the poem for the experience of traveling through it.”
 
He blames our schools for their unscrupulous approach and misplaced priorities. “Teaching is done out of manuals that clearly state the wrong and right answers. A student is awarded with marks when he regurgitates ‘intentions of the poet’. Poetry doesn’t work this way. It is somewhere in these classes where young poets are lost.” But Kaul hasn’t given up on them yet; he continues to organize workshops, lectures, book readings and competitions (winning entries of which are published in ‘Poetry of the Young,’)
 
After a little while I tried to direct the conservation toward his own poetry, a subject on which, at his insistence, we didn’t spend much time. But he graciously gifted me some of his books, with which I spent a few quiet hours afterwards.
 
Like a lot of other writers, Kaul is besieged by loss of his roots as he, like thousands of other Kashmiri pandits, saw Kashmir, their home, burning. Loss of identity, cultural degeneration and exile are predominant in his verse:
 
Endless web of planes
And angles that connect
To thought and action
To time gone, time coming
In a map of unchosen roads
I hold on to the key
To infinity within, infinity without
(-from ‘Crossroads’)
 
As one goes through Kaul’s poetry, one can almost feel him trembling in a prolonged nightmare of bullet-ridden homes, charred bodies and terrified eyes.
 
His critically acclaimed poem, Firdaus in Flames, is storyteller’s first hand recollection of the fall of Kashmir. That the subject in ‘Firdaus in Flames’ overpowers his language is undeniable, however Kaul, at times, succeeds in evoking emotions. Its narrative is smeared with tears of a Kashmiri Pandit overwhelmed with emotions, who expresses:
 
Anguish of a helpless pandit
‘While bombs and cracklings sparks leap up from rags,
The watchdogs hide behind piled up sandbags’
 
Anguish at seeing one’s people fall
‘The old colleagues took a teacher’s life
Burnt his roots, stole fragrance of his wife’
 
Anguish at having to run away and encapsulating one’s cowardice in it
‘This is the way to keep and hold
Our great culture in our own fold’
 
And a final hopeless display of impotency, curse of the crushed
‘They must be acquainted with what the dead feel here and know
The wind blows among the words that the dead utter below’
 
Kaul has devoted his life in understanding and disseminating, what he calls, “the creative impulses and acute perceptions of reality,” echoing Judith Palmer’s response to the question about the function of poetry.
 
“Poetry will never die,” exclaimed Kaul, reassuringly, as our interview came to a close. I nodded silently. The interview couldn’t have ended more beautifully. And it is typical of Kaul who has a habit of concluding his pessimism with a promise to resuscitate.
 
But woods I have are all afire
I have to grow my woods again
Mission is big and time so short
Work I will and never retire
(-from ‘Woods I love’)