Nivedita, a young yet consummate poet comes from the place, Deccan (Hyderabad) where the Urdu Ghazal learned walking on foots so I confess that she is inherently endowed with the faculty of poetry. Her tour de force, Restless Fingers published from Acquirelle is a delightful jumble of motley poems etching the life’s faces with the quaint Romanticism on the plank of poetry.
The first line of the first poem is an outstanding motif of poet’s romantic approach by which her romantic grandeur of her rest of the poems can be surmised.
“Twirling like she flew in the air,
Played along the little girl with ever less hair” (Pg. 05)
Reading this poem, due to its intensity of romantic approach; a haze of euphoria of the past parades before my eye. By exhuming the past in this poem, poet rouses the palpable emotions of one’s departure and leaves me in trance as I’ve watched a movie recalling my halcyon days. Romantic aspect of her poetry is indeed praiseworthy; another evident of her romantic art is the poem, Vacation which can be assumed an outstanding miniature of a natural panorama. Here are a few lines of the poem:
“When the traffic lights dim
And the voices of the groaning urbanization
Fade into oblivion
Transport to the sea coast
Where the water lightens your head
And you stare at the sky, so blue,” (Pg.6)
Another feature of her poetry that heightens its aesthetic beauty is the colloquial lexicon which easily gravitates the reader’s attention and (her poetry) fills the reader’s voids with felicity. Most of the poems are akin to rhythmic songs consisting different sort of rhymes. She Lied is a cogent example of Nivedita’s lyrical poems:
“His once strong body, now fragile,
his chemo-ed body, frail and agile
…. “You are beautiful,” she said and smiled
still holding his hand,
together, they cried in joy for a while.
Linguistically her poems”
This poem has Masculine Rhyme, Feminine Rhyme, Half –Rhyme, Eye-Rhyme and I’ve frequently found Consonance and Assonance several times in this poem as well as other poems.
A few of her poems leaves grin upon reader’s lips but they are also the reflection of modern life acutely observed by poet’s eye; the poem, Telephone is an adroit illustration for evidencing this fact in which Nivedita has made a subtle scrutiny of mundane life.
Precisely, I manifest that Restless Finger is Nivedita’s magnus opum containing her best poetical mastery which really makes this collection enchanting and enliven.
Review: A Passage to India
Published by Penguin
It is dispensable to
introduce such renowned names as Edward Morgan Foster, a man of letters who is
akin to a halo on the visage of British Literature. Foster, a candid novelist
who, in his novels pictures the drawback of British Colonial Society- examining
the racial rifts and class-difference spread in the British colonial societies and
also he sheds light on the apartheid of India inflicted by The British Raj.
In 'A Passage to India’ , he delineates the India of from 1930s to 1940s when Gandhi had been to South Africa and English invasion was at its crest in India and the natives were exploited and they had to suffer the racial epithets too. Foster makes us feel the miasma of racism, casteism, and social-distinction prevailing in India in the first quarter of 19th century.
The plot of the novel is set in Chandrapur- a fictional city, ‘ Chandrapur was never large and or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between upper India, then imperial and the sea and fine houses date from the period’.
The story sets out with trinity of friends conversing while dining and they wrangle ‘whether or not it is possible to be friends with Englishmen’ Dr. Aziz, Indian Muslim physician, a man of great decorum talking to his friend, Hamidullah who is disinclined to be friend with Englishmen. He proclaims that it is impossible to be their friends in India and says, “Yes, they have no chance here, this is my point”. The English are to insult and minimize Indians in India and to be their friends for the Indians is impossible. Forster has freely interspersed the myriad of sarcasms upon the English in the novel and unveiled the stark reality of English Colonists in India. Britishers had cultivated the seeds of social distinction in the fecund soil of India. For instance- Aziz’s another friend named Mahmud Ali asserted, “… When we poor blacks take bribes, we perform what we are bribed to perform and the law discovers us in the consequence. The English take and do nothing. I admire them”.
I’ve found a great candour in his writing, being himself an English, he never wavers to stir the stark reality of the English in the novel and their exploits in India though he seems to be well-aware of Indians and their culture and often chastises and ridicules their rituals too in this book.
The story walks ahead with the arrival of a young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, Adela visits the city with great gusto and her heart is filled with the curiosity of seeing ‘the real India’. Adela is to marry Mrs. Moore’s son, Ronny Heaslop who is the city magistrate of Chandrapur and a man of imperialistic manner.
Dr.Aziz is regular for praying in the mosque and he is quit religious man who never endures to be profaned his religion by any one weather It is an English. In religious abode it’s prohibited to go in with wearing sandals or shoes because their filth can pollute the aura of the abode. When Mrs. Moore visits the mosque, Aziz is to offer the prayer there. She seems to him coming with wearing her shoes that is intolerable for Aziz. He furiously yells at her,
“Madam! Madam! Madam! Madam!, this is a mosque, you have no right here at all; you should have taken off your shoes; this is a holy place for Muslims"
Foster has shown us a fanatic India where the slightest ignominy of religion can never be tolerated. Indians can never go out of the orbit of their religion and they are fatally fastened with the rope of Custom and Tradition.
Aziz is a modest man so does he behave with Mrs. Moore after knowing that she has not put on the shoes. After having a nurtured acquaintance between Aziz and Mrs. Moore and Adela, he makes a promise to take them to Malabar Caves.
Cyril Fielding, an honest British schoolmaster also visits the caves with them and they all go there. With a guide, Adela and Aziz wander together in the caves which are much dark and enormous in area. The echoing sound in the caves penetrates Adela’s mind and heart and she, leaving the guide, mountain up to the hill alone. Aziz searches her but she finds her talking to her friend and without addressing a single ward to Aziz, she leaves the place. While going back to home in train with Mr. Fielding, Aziz is arrested for the charge of sexually assault to Adela in the cave and he is sent behind the bars. Though Adela becomes confused at Aziz’s guilt and gets repressed. At the trial, she is asked whether Aziz sexually assaulted her. She asks for a moments to rethink the past and flashes the moments spent in the caves with Aziz and the guide in her mind. Breaking her silence, she accepts that she is mistaken and Aziz has not ravished her there, it has been illusion to her because of the horrible echoes in the caves. The case is dismissed and Aziz is released.
In the plot, Foster has thoroughly casted light on Indians exploited by the English and the fuss spread in the India by British Colonialism in 30s and 40s. This plot is too near to the realistic picture of India and he has subtlety absorbed the nuances of the country.
The jumble of Foster’s characters is nonpareil; each character of the novel beautifies the plot. If we take Mr. Fielding- an honest English man who knows the truth and combats for it has been stifled under the imperial power of the English. He is a Foster’s embodiment of liberal English. Aziz must be considered the hero of novel who, in spite of being Physician is an orthodox man in the matter of religion but this also makes him honest and modest. All the characters of the novel have been chiseled by the dexterous hands of Foster.
Pamuk, ‘the Nobel winner in Literature’ asserts in his book, ‘The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist (Pg.66) at the artistry of Forster’s characterization, “The Most generally accepted reason, which also happens to be the one that Foster advocated, is that literary characters take over the plot, the setting, and themes when novel is being written” Forster possesses the mastery at his characterization.
Precisely It can be professed that ‘A Passage to India’ is a painting mesmerizingly painted with Foster’s literary colors which help the reader to surmise to know how India had been before 60s.
© Farhan
