A Deepavali poem

Every year at Deepavali, I read this beautiful poem by Vikram Seth. I had posted this on old CH and even annotated it a little, but thanks to the bug Sulekha will never fix, the formatting is all screwed up. So I will post it here again.

This is one of my all-time favorite poems. Vikram Seth does a wonderful job of capturing the situation of the educated middle (or upper-middle) class Indians who have traveled and lived abroad.

Three years of neurotic
Guy Fawkes Days-I recall
That lonely hankering-
But I am home after all.

Home. These walls, this sky
Splintered with wakes of light
These mud-lamps beaded round
The eaves, this festive night,

These streets, these voices...yet
The old insensate dread,
Abeyant as that love,
Once more shifts in my head.

Five? Six? generations ago
Somewhere in the Punjab
My father's family,farmers,
Perhaps had a small shop

And two generations later
Could send a son to a school
To gain the conqueror's
Authoritarian seal:

English! Six-armed god,
Key to a job, to power,
Snobbery, the good life,
This separateness, this fear.

English: beloved language of
Jonson, Wordsworth's tongue-
These my "meridian names"
Whose grooves I crawl along.

The Moghuls fought and ruled
And settled. Even while
They hungered for musk-melon,
Rose, peach, nightingale,

The land assumed their love.
At sixty they could not
Retire westwards. The British
Made us the Orient.

How could an Englishman say
About the divan-e-khas
"If there is heaven on earth
It is this; it is this; it is this?"

Macaulay the prophet of learning
Chewed at his pen: one taste
Of Western wisdom "surpasses
All the books of the East,"

And Kalidas, Shankaracharya,
Panini, Bhaskar, Kabir,
Surdas sank, and we welcomed
The reign of Shakespeare.

The undigested Hobbes,
The Mill who later ground
(Through talk of liberty)
The Raj out of the land...

O happy breed of Babus,
I march on with your purpose;
We will have railways, common law
And a good postal service-

And I twist along
Those grooves from image to image,
Violet, elm-tree, swan,
Pork-pie, gable, scrimmage

And as we title our memoirs
"Roses in December"
Though we all know that here
Roses grow in December

And we import songs
Composed in the U.S
For Vietnam (not even
Our local horrors grip us)

And as, over gin at the Club,
I note that egregious member
Strut just perceptibly more
When with a foreigner,

I know that the whole world
Means exile of our breed
Who are not home at home
And are abroad abroad

Huddled in towns, while around:
"He died last week. My boys
Are starving. Daily we dig
The ground for sweet potatoes."

"The landlord's hirelings broke
My husband's ribs-and I Grow
blind in the smoke of the hearth."
"Who will take care of me

When I am old? No-one
Is left." So it goes on,
The cyclic shadow-play
Under the sinister sun;

That sun that, were there water,
Could bless the dispirited land,
Coaxing three crops a year
From this same yieldless ground.

Yet would these parched wraiths still
Starve in their ruins, while
"Silkworms around them grow
Into fat cocoons?",

This may as well be my home.
Because no other nation
Moves me thus? What of that?
Cause for congratulation?

This could well be my home;
I am too used to the flavor
Of tenous fixity;
I have been brought to savour

Its phases: the winter wheat-
The flowers of Har-ki-Doon -
The sal forests - the hills
Inflamed with rhododendron -

The first smell of the Rains
On the baked earth-the peaks
Snow-drowned in permanence--
The single mountain lakes.

What if my tongue is warped?
I need no words to gaze
At Ajanta, those flaked caves,
Or at the tomb of Mumtaz;

And when an alap of Marwa
Swims on slow flute-notes over
The neighbours' roofs at sunset
Wordlessly like a lover

It holds me-till the strain
Of exile, here or there,
Subverts the trance, the fear
Of fear found everywhere.

"But freedom?" the notes would sing...
Parole is enough. Tonight
Below the fire-crossed sky
Of the Festival of Light.

Give your soul leave to feel
What distilled peace it can;
In lieu of joy, at least
This lapsing anodyne.

"The world is a bridge. Pass over it,
Building no house upon it."
Acceptance may come with time;
Rest, then disquieted heart.

Now my notes...

Vikram Seth wrote:Three years of neurotic
Guy Fawkes Days-I recall
That lonely hankering-
But I am home after all.

Three years away from India (in the UK). Guy Fawkes Day is a British day of celebration involving fireworks; it commemorates the foiling of the Gunpowder plot in the 17th century. On this day of fireworks, he is naturally reminded of Diwali and home.

Vikram Seth wrote:These streets, these voices...yet
The old insensate dread,
Abeyant as that love,
Once more shifts in my head.

What is this fear that is a recurrent theme in this poem? Is it the fear of the poor rising up in revolt against the English-speaking rich? Is it fear of an India that he has come to not know very well?

Vikram Seth wrote:English! Six-armed god,
Key to a job, to power,
Snobbery, the good life,
This separateness, this fear.

The fear certainly has something to do with the separateness engendered by English. Perhaps it is the fear of the poor. He was writing this in the mid '70s when India was in a political turmoil.

Vikram Seth wrote:These my "meridian names"
Whose grooves I crawl along.

"Meridian names": need to look this up. Tentatively a reference to a poem by W. H. Auden.

Vikram Seth wrote:The Moghuls fought and ruled
And settled. Even while
They hungered for musk-melon,
Rose, peach, nightingale,

The reference here is to the Babarnama where Babar laments the lack of those very things in Hindustan.

Vikram Seth wrote:How could an Englishman say
About the divan-e-khas
"If there is heaven on earth
It is this; it is this; it is this?"

This is from the Farsi inscription in Delhi's Red Fort.

Vikram Seth wrote:The undigested Hobbes,
The Mill who later ground
(Through talk of liberty)
The Raj out of the land...

References to Hobbes of Leviathan fame and to "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill and its influence on the freedom movement.

Vikram Seth wrote:And I twist along
Those grooves from image to image,
Violet, elm-tree, swan,
Pork-pie, gable, scrimmage

Images of England, along the lines of the images of Turkestan from Babarnama.

Vikram Seth wrote:And as we title our memoirs
"Roses in December"
Though we all know that here
Roses grow in December

Reference to "Roses in December An Autobiography" by M. C. Chagla, erstwhile Chief Justice of Bombay High Court. His mother was a High Court judge herself, so he was probably "in their social circle."

Vikram Seth wrote:Huddled in towns, while around:
"He died last week. My boys
Are starving. Daily we dig
The ground for sweet potatoes."

"The landlord's hirelings broke
My husband's ribs-and I Grow
blind in the smoke of the hearth."
"Who will take care of me

When I am old? No-one
Is left." So it goes on,
The cyclic shadow-play
Under the sinister sun;

These lines from a vernacular
newspaper or magazine perhaps? Or simply paraphrasing the common
problems of the day.

Vikram Seth wrote:"Silkworms around them grow
Into fat cocoons?",

Can't place the reference, but most probably to a mid-century poem by a socialist-leaning Hindi poet.

Vikram Seth wrote:"The world is a bridge. Pass over it,
Building no house upon it."
Acceptance may come with time;
Rest, then disquieted heart.

From an inscription on the Buland Darwaza at Fatehpur Sikhri.

charvaka,

I didnt know Vikram Seth wrote such excellent poetry. Your interpretation is an impressive one

I understood the gist of his poem mostly .that of an Indian having once travelled abroad is either back in India or yearning to get there

Missing Diwali the festival of lights... settling for western festivals which dont give him the same satisfaction

Of course his detailing is note worthy

I felt an ache tugging at my heart which I suppose is an expected reaction

moved to tears actually ..*alarmed ...so early in the morning ?

pardon my ignorance on Vikram Seth

nor did I google him since my is comment

His first huge epic was in poetry form .he IS a genius

that's 1st ...not is

long. pome is long.

also, my brain's missing the chip that can process pomes. I do have the chip that can mutilate pomes. Funny how that works.

chameli wrote:that's 1st ...not is

looking at the time of these two posts- here is a tip: after you post, there is a time-window (till someone responds to the post) within which you could edit it - look for the "edit" top right corner

garam_kuta wrote:

chameli wrote:that's 1st ...not is

looking at the time of these two posts- here is a tip: after you post, there is a time-window (till someone responds to the post) within which you could edit it - look for the "edit" top right corner

What can I say gram_kuta ?You have saved me from great danger . Aye!

Happy Deepavali, everyone!

happy deepavali, charvaka and others!