Sixty years after his death, remembering Muktibodh’s poetry — and his refusal to simplify reality

Often, what doesn’t get sufficiently noticed about Muktibodh is his deeply emotional and visceral engagement with thought, and not just thought in abstraction, but the sheer performative quality of it. This dimension comes most strikingly to the fore in a remarkable text, Ek Sahityik Ki Diary (A Litterateur’s Diary) — a series of articles that Muktibodh wrote in the form of diary entries for the progressive literary magazine Vasudha at the invitation of its editor and his friend Harishankar Parsai — published posthumously in the year of his death. Structured mostly as conversations with friends, Ek Sahityik Ki Diary sets out to offer reflections on the aesthetics and process of writing poetry. Many of these reflections “perform”, contest and negotiate thoughts as they emerge and take shape. Friends appear and reappear as conceptual-personae through which thought as action is claimed and elaborated into a literary form of life, at a time when the pragmatics of nation-building sat in favour of tempering thoughts to give them more instrumental and palatable forms.

This was no easy task, as the poet sought to lay bare his process for future readers, many among them aspiring poets. Displaying the process meant that poetry was rendered not as a trick up a poet’s sleeve, but a deeply transformative process to be lived through. What shone light on this process was the epistemology of behes, ie, argumentative dialogue with friends. Often heated, yet never short of warmth, these discussions extending over years, were also meant to serve a pedagogical function in displaying not only “what is literature”, but how the life of a litterateur (sahityik) is to be lived. No other essay in the text exemplifies these qualities better than the classic Tisra Kshan (The Third Moment), a masterpiece on the phenomenon of creative process.

Muktibodh faced cruel neglect in the literary world, barring the last few years of his life when some measure of recognition came his way. Experimenting with language and form, cognisant of the deep cosmopolitan spirit of the times, Muktibodh is perhaps unique in his contemplation of the “method” of poetry. This preoccupation comes not only from his personal proclivities but also from the urge to respond to the Nehruvian call for scientific temper. In fact, in an essay titled ‘Vaigyanik Drishti aur Uska Kon [Scientific Vision and its Perspective’, Muktibodh mentions Jawaharlal Nehru’s exhortation to litterateurs to construct their work in keeping with the realities of the age, and tries to interpret “scientific temper” and how one might endeavour to put it in practice. This emphasis on method was to ensure the right form of impersonalisation and universality — values held in regard in science — was infused into the arts as well. This became a fulcrum on which the work of two great poets of the age, Muktibodh and Agyeya (7 March 1911 – 4 April 1987), could be compared.

Both Agyeya and Muktibodh recognised the importance of impersonalisation in art. Muktibodh’s quibble with Agyeya was that he did not sufficiently elaborate on the process through which it could be achieved. Agyeya mentioned genius (pratibha) and effort (ayaspurvak), and their right combination in the poet’s mind (manas), as the catalyst, thus visualising the role of the creator as a medium while Muktibodh placed greater emphasis on will. He was more concerned about understanding how the path from bhokta (consumer) to srishta (creator) could be traversed. Uncovering this labour was important for Muktibodh, because one of the aspects of science which fascinated Muktibodh was the idea of method or paddhati. Muktibodh envisioned not only a place for poets in the Indian republic but an active and integral role for them. It’s hard to fathom this today when poets and journalists are jailed for raising their voice against the powers that be, but at the same time underlines the importance of remembering a voice which itself faced the most bizarre form of censorship when his book of history, Bharat: Itihas aur Sanskriti, was pulped on account of being “obscene” and “offensive”. He refused to cower down.

Thus, Muktibodh’s oeuvre offers a meditative lesson on complexity. That literary engagement is not to be confined within the narrow bounds of “messaging” and that no amount of “posturing” can replace the hard task of peeling a layer at a time of an onion-esque reality was central to his work. Muktibodh never sought to court success by simplifying himself; his words embody the “difficulty” of “reality” to the fullest, particularly for the age where thoughtless solutionism and accessibility dominate the horizon for both science and literature.

Malviya is a Hindi poet and assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Mandi