Kedar Nath Singh

 Few months with your creations

Thank you for teaching me Hindi over these past months. Many evenings I recite your poems aloud – for mumi and I – after, of course, reading them multiple times.

Despite your poems conveying so much they contained few words that I had to seek the dictionary for. This despite my abysmal levels of awareness in Hindi. You helped remove my fear of the language. Emboldened me to go deeper. This way you enabled me to take up another journey with Hindi. A language I love to converse in but for long time have been wary of the written form. As I write I recall going for Gujarati instead of Hindi during school days as well.

You made me realise that poetry could be simply written. That poetry can be close to life, life around us, and not just an intellectual pursuit. Poetry was not only about love, epics, flowers, loss but also about day to day lives. Lives of people around us, trees, and others. Lives perhaps not much talked about. This simplicity made me relook at poetry. Brought it closer. I have since, begun a similar journey with life.

These poems had me relook at our country. Someone wiser has referred to you as the bridge between rural and urban Indias. You wrote with equal eloquence of both Chakia and Dilli. There were allusions to the differences in both the worlds but not the pitching of one world against the other. That perhaps is the prerogative of lesser mortals like me. And yet, in your writings, the trees in Chakia stood out different from the trees in Dilli. I have often wondered how you wrote about rural India, in the manner that you did, living in Dilli.

Banaras was the first poem, of yours,  I read and since I have savoured many others. Banaras opened my eyes to how a city can be expressed in words, in rhyme. Since, many of your creations I have read and re-read. Haath is one of those closer to me. For someone who believes that holding hands is a way deeper manner of expression than hugging and kissing it is close indeed.

I used to be fond of short-stories – mostly by European authors. This during my younger days and often used to wonder why they seldom talked of the not so well-heeled. Years later, your poems talked of them with the panache but without the pathos one associates with classics.

Lines in your poems did not hit. They often have stayed with me long after reading a poem. Many I have visited multiple times. Reading your poems is like having conservations with someone wiser, someone we trust. You would have been that rare species – an adult both loved and respected by the young. One who does not preach but smiles and puts for the options. Neither God like nor on a pedestal but someone near and dear. This has been beautifully brought out by someone who has spent a lot of time with your writing.

I also share your poems regularly. This is a wealth, a joy which I have enjoyed sharing. Some of these to and fro emails I revisited – and came across these lines.

He is perhaps like Dhyan Chand, Sunil Gavaskar, John McEnroe in their prime – that combination of grace, control and flair!

From the mundane to the exquisite, from the stated to the mystically metaphorical he covers it all.

Never ceases to amaze with his mastery over simplicity.

God of drawing parallels. Sees the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.

Your poems warrant a more eloquent description and I seek refuge in Ashok Vajpeyi’s words, “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”.

You have been referred to as the most popular Hindi poet since Nagarjuna. However, one of my regrets today is that during my school and college days I was not aware to your writing. I have often since wondered why I read of flowers and princesses of faraway lands and not of the afternoons and the earth that you write of. And, when I asked a few friends, some time ago, they too were not aware. Friends my age and those who have seen many more moons and including those who grew up in Banaras. Including mumi.

My journey with your words has just begun. I, for example, realized only a few weeks ago that you translated poetry as well. In the days and weeks to come I look forward to more time with your words. Besides the poems and the essays there are translations of your poems, essays on you and much more to read.

 

Some articles on Kedar Nath Singh in English

§  Manik Sharma @ First Post

§  K Satchidanand @ Indian Cultural Forum

§  Priyadarshan @ The Wire

§  Sachida Nand Jha @ The Pioneer

§  Santosh Alex @ SCROLL