Yesterday, I received a WhatsApp message from a friend of mine, Mr Raju, informing me about Sri Sri’s Vardhanti – death anniversary. I opened the video clip attached to the message. At once flared Sri Sri’s voice reciting: Polaalananni, / Halaala dunni / ilaatalamlo hemam pindaga / jaganikantaa sowkhyam Nindaga …
Ploughing all the farmlands with ploughs,
Squeezing gold from the womb of the earth,
To fill the whole world with happiness
They labor relentlessly without a single moment of rest,
Sacrificing their immense strength for the sake of the earth.
The sweat that flows like a river
Across the bodies of these heroic farmers,
This sweat of their labor,
This sweat of righteousness,
This sweat is priceless!
… … …
The blacksmith's forge, the potter's wheel,
The fisherman's net, the weaver's loom,
The axe, the saw, the sickle, the plough
And all the symbols of a thousand vocations—
To my songs of adulatory,
To my songs of outcry,
To my echoing new song,
And to the new style I compose,
It is fitting!
It is a blessing!
It is life!
It is the primordial sound (Om)!"
Listening to those
emotion-charged words, their rhyme, their cadence, my mind at once flew back to
VSR college days… It was 1961, my first year at VSR college, and I was enrolled
in the PUC course. Classes had just begun. Everything was new: It was a transition
from nikkars to pants; from teachers to lecturers; from familiar white Dhoti
lalchi clad teachers to colourful pant/suit
lecturers; from Headmaster to Principal; from teaching in Telugu to
English; from known to unknown faces around; from informal to formal
interactions with fellow students – everything was new…
A boy named Shivaji used to sit
by my side. He was more of a disciplined nature and soft-spoken. He was almost
reserved until after a week, he began to open up. He used to come by train from
a nearby village called Oliveru. Each evening, no sooner than the bell rang, he
would rush out with unusual hurry. I asked him one day where he was hurrying
up.
“I go to the CPI office”, he
replied, to attend to party work until seven, and then rush to the railway
station to catch the train back to Oliveru”
From then on, our conversations
deepened. He started slowly talking about Marx and Engels, of Das Kapital, and
the 1847 Manifesto. In one of those conversations in the lunch interval,
his voice suddenly grew charged with emotion as he recited a poem – Polaalananni,
/ Halaala dunni / ilaatalamlo hemam pindaga / jaganikantaa sowkhyam Nindaga … –his
hands swaying in rhythm with its cadence. That was the first time I heard of
Sri Sri’s Mahaprasthanam.
Then came the summer holidays,
and college was closed. Thereafter, Shivaji disappeared from my daily life. Yet
the impressions he left—his discipline, his passion for Marxism, his devotion
to party work and above all, the beauty of those poems of Sri Sri that he often
recited—lingered. Captivated by those poems, I even bought Mahaprasthanam
for eight annas, the first book I ever purchased outside my prescribed
syllabus. I read it through that summer, carried away by the power of his words
and the energy behind their rhythm.
Those innocent days —a boy’s
hurried steps, conversations around Marx and Engels, poems recited with fire,
and a book that opened a new taste for words —remained etched in memory. Maybe
that was the beginning of questioning the ideologies, seeking meaning in the
cadence of thought itself!
Sri Sri’s Mahaprasthanam is said to be an epoch-making happening in
contemporary Telugu poetry. It was published in 1950. Seventy years old, yet
its appeal is enduring.
Mahaprasthanam
means
‘great Journey’. Indeed, it is a great journey in many ways. It is a journey
toward placing the exploited common man on the pedestal. It’s a journey toward weaving a new
sensibility in Telugu poetry. It’s a journey aimed at enlightening society
about socialist idealism.
Sri Sri begins his Mahaprasthanam
with a clarion call to society –Maro prapancham, maro prapancham, maro
prapancham pilichindi! / Padandi munduku, padandi trosuku, podaam podaam pai
paiki! (Another world, another world, another world is calling! / March
forward, push forward, let's go, let's go higher and higher!) –to march ahead,
“to sprint like the serpent and vault like the Niagara”, and reach a new order
or create a new one, where the thrust of a new purpose will revitalise societal
objectives with new energies.
For Sri Sri’s common man, “Disturbance
is our life. / Agitation is our breath / Revolution is our philosophy”. His
world is “…wet with blood / Or else with tears”. Looking at the
exploited lot, and elevating them as heroes of the human history, Sri
Sri asked: “Who, pray, are the lobourers / That lifted stones for the Taj
Mahal?” Driven by the Marxist philosophy, he decrees: “all human history is the
story of exploitation”.
His poems strike different
emotions at different times: there is sadness, despair, indignation,
self-criticism, self-gratulation, robust optimism, defiance, and whatnot.
For Sri Sri, who wielded pen in
the cause of the hapless poor, “baby dog
/ match stick / Soap piece / … / All are full of poetry!”
In his poems, the common man’s
pains and problems become the poet’s own. Driven by his socialist philosophy,
he even makes one man’s pains and problems simply the problems of the entire
society.
In the Mahabharata of yore, Yudhishthira undertakes Mahaprasthanam, his last journey along with his brothers and wife, accompanied by a dog
– a spiritual journey to heaven. Here in this Mahaprasthanam of the
present-day world, Sri Sri, championing the cause of the lowly and downtrodden in society,
undertakes a revolutionary journey accompanied by an impoverished man.
With an unrestrained enthusiasm
and with relentless fury, he exposed the society’s cruelty—“Mankind’s
bloodhounds” towards the millhand and the farmhand.
Taking the side of the real
heroes of history, the poor laborers,
the sweating working class,
and the common citizens who
actually built civilization with their tears and toil, Sri Sri declares: “The
Alexander the great, the Vikings, the White Huns, The Scythians, the Persians,
The Pindaris and the Thugs are simply brutal hunters driven by power, hunger,
and ignorance”.
His poetry was influenced by
Baudelaire, Poe and Maupassaunt, indeed as he himself once declared they were
his literary Trinity. Swinburne was another favourite of him.
After the 1950s, Sri Sri became a
focal point of political activism. The victim of this undesirable development
was the quality of his poetry. For, it shifted from the existential
emotionality of his 1930s and 1940s writing to direct political sloganeering.
Perhaps, his best was already written.
Sri Sri, the man is dead. But his
poetry, as he once claimed, still directing the course of Telugu poetry.
**
