POEMS OF PRATIM BARUAH

Book review

Lines Written on the 

Anvil of Melancholy

Pratim Baruah: Sodhahe nohol tuk o bokul 

Published by Aank Baak, Guwhati. 2016. 

Price Rs.       100/-

      Jyotirmoy Prodhani

       Noted critic and translator, Pradip Acharya, in his keynote speech in the National Poets Meet of Eastern Languages of Sahitya Akademi in Shillong (19 march, 2016), had particularly mentioned the name of Pratim Baruah as one of the most promising young poets from Assam and while speaking about the second collection of his poems, Aru Nirobota, for which he had received Munin Borkotoky Award in 2014, Prof. Acharya said, “Pratim’s poems are inscribed with the intimate resonances of silence”  For the present collection Pratim Barua begins with a small foreword with a reference to one of Orhan Pamuk’s  statements where he had said that a poet was one with whom God used to converse. When Pamuk felt that God was no longer in speaking terms with him he had left writing poems. Pratim Baruah then writes why he does write poems. You tend to wonder what he actually meant to say? Why does he write poems then? That God speaks to him? One would find this rather arrogant. He, however, would confide, despite having taken Pamuk’s view as true, he was clueless as to why he did keep writing poems. He is, by his own admittance, overwhelmed by an endless sense of disquiet and pain and when it comes to his own poems he has his deepest desolation. Despite the relentless turmoil around him, he remains ever indebted only to his loneliness and silences. Poetry for him, as he writes, is a ritual for an intense interface with his disquieting unease and perpetual dismay.

His this collection Xodha he nohol tuk o Bokul (2016) unveils an inner world of intense solitude and reverberating silences. For a young poet, his poetic landscape is rather deeply unsettling and intimately personal. Born in 1983, Pratim has been a witness to the aftermath of momentous histories of the land, therefore, more than the pathos of a romantic, his poems are distinctly characterised by the predicaments of an insane time and the deranged logic of violence where he, by default, finds himself as an unceremonious insider, a desolate onlooker. The only way for him to recover from this overwhelming time is to write, the only therapeutic act he can access to.   His poem, “Swadhinata” (“Independence”) resonates this exigency with disimpassioned intensity:

                I gorged out my two eyes,

                Cut my blue veins to drench me in red.

                I encountered thousand wars,

                Inside me.

                Handed down to all of them

                The pennons of mutiny

                And like an insane soul,

                Kept searching for sovereignty.

                The predicament of Frarooq is equally tense, who had left his native soil to evade the armed forces after being branded a terrorist for having hosted the militants for a night. He came back once again crossing seven shores to bid the final adieu to his beloved on the day of her wedding.

     That night Farooq came

      ...
     Who was brought back again by his love                                               

      To face death once more. (“Farooq”)

               

He does not necessarily nurse any inhibition if the flight of his imaginations finds inspiration from the landscapes of the great bards who are a part of a formidable legacy, the likes of Navakanta Barua, Ajit Barua et al. Therefore without trepidation he could confide:

   At night I opened my door

   Navakanta entered in

   And asked me

   “Was there a river here?”  (“Events”)

                What makes his poetic oeuvre adimiringly varied and multi layered is his equal proficiency and intensity to try his hands with narrative poetry as well.  “On Schizophrenia” is one such poem. The story of a neurologist, Dr. Saikia, who is embroiled in the clumsy negotiation with his own sense of persona, split into two, where the poet finds himself unwittingly linked in an aporiac double bind:           


The burning cigarette butt slips off my hand.
I am slowly throttled by this complex chemistry of crisisIt turns grim the exuberant hours of all my evenings
And I pick up a pen to write a poem-
My dear reader
Tell me what should I do now?

                Being a young poet the depth of his nostalgia is not expected to be that deep, yet his personal history evokes a serene sense of melancholy as he recounts how the ideal hero that was personified by the image of his father slowly blurs into a slough of despondency:

                
When I was young

My father was the hero

Of my imagination and my dreams

 As I reached my youth

 Those dreams crumbled into pieces. 
                             (“When I was young”)

                The poems in the collection are divided in three sections. The second and the third sections largely comprise his short poems. The second section is a mix of his metaphorical and pastoral compositions. The first group of poems, “Parampita” (“The Divine Father”), are a deep longing seeking spiritual refinements, in the second group of short poems Hemanta (“The Late Autumn”) recurs as a season of pastoral intimacy and also a reference to make him aware of his urban anxiety:

The wall clock is

Ticking by

 All around

This is exuberant silence

The autumn whiff of wind

 Keeps asking

Who is lonely

The clock or me?

                The third section comprises some of his finest short poems written with the sharply chiselled lines which have been his abiding hallmark as a young poet. One such poignant composition is:

In your shadow

I build my house

The shadow

You left behind

So many years ago.   (“Your shadow”)

               

                Pratim Baruah as a young poet is rather deceptive, for he writes with an amazingly seasoned hand and refreshing maturity. He receives the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in Assamese language category for the year 2017. He rightly deserves so. What makes him stand out among other young voices, is his unexpected felicity with measured reticence. He would not fancy a word extra if he could manage to say it with the bare minimum, and this is where he sounds  exceptionally seasoned, beyond the boyish urge to show off with which most poets begin their career as a poet. His profound emotional pain in relation to his mother almost finds a thick physical tangibility when he writes:

I got stuck, O my mother,

No matter how much I write

Pouring blood from my heart,

All seem so inadequate (“For mother”)

The shorter  version of the review was published in the Assam Tribune