Poet as Deviationist

V. Mohan Prasad

After a long silence, Yeats felt the need to speak and felt it right “That we descant and yet again descant upon the supreme theme of Art & Song”.

Pattabhi the poet also felt the need to descant against the fiddle – de –dee of the fulsome romantic Telugu poetry by the time he was preparing himself to sound the devil’s dozen “Phidelu Ragala Dozen" in 1939. He was utterly disillusioned by his own feudal background, the altruistic Calcutta University days, the swollen heads of the haughty and mighty ones and more specially prosodic poets dissociative of the common human yearnings.

What was Telugu poetry like before the publication of his so called 12 concertos? Way back in 1926, Pandita Uma Kanta Vidya Sekhara in his introduction to his impassioned but authentic book ‘Neti Kalapu Kavitam’ wrote:

“The present day poetry in Telugu is more versification than poetry Just a well a well-sounding mass of word profusion with scanty meaning. The poetic vision that can see through ages giving outstanding universal sentiments is hardly to be seen in it… “Much of the present day poetry is love-soliloquy straight and round about and it presents very little beyond personal erotomania”.

The angry scholar gave a wholesome critique quoting copiously from the poems of Devalupalli Krishna Sastry, Basavaraju Apparao, Venkata Paravateeswara Kavulu, Nayani Subba Rao and the like. Against such a poetic scenario Pattabhi came out with his first poem, his ‘Manifesto’ which he later expounded saying, “I wanted to do something different. That is why I rebelled against tradition. Not that I wrote to become a rebel but I wrote to be distinct and different and to be distinct and different necessitates deviation – you call it rebellion or revolution”. He started walking a new walk, talking a new talk! And in that he was quite alone. Sri Sri had at least the Comradery of communism. For Pattabhi Socialism had not yet been born. Pattabhi had no mentors. Till today he has no protegies either. He knew he didn’t have any nor would ever have one. So he said “I am neither a prophet nor an orator, but may be I am an inspirer, a motivator because I am unconventional. And may be because of it I am also original".

Not many Telugu poets have gone out of their native districts except Rayaprolu and Mallavarapu Visweswara Rao in those days who reached out to Shantinikethan like Pattabhi. In fact the Telugu poets had no city of their own by then except Madras. Apart from the juicy, syrupy romantic lyrics and cowardly, platonic love lorn moorings they were content to write on local legends, sylvan surroundings in the name of nature poetry and if possible weak and wailing notes on foreign rule. But Pattabhi had gone out even from Shantiniketan and found himself in Calcultta in the dingy rooms of lower Chitpoor Road … "the mad commercial activity of the city, the extravagant advertisements, the inhuman exploitation, the dominance of machines… the din, the squlor and the human misery ….. the loathsome brothels of Chitpor Road where innocence was exploited by avarice ….” Thus, it was the city and the gathering war clouds of 1938 in Europe that made him a deviant poet even before Sri Sri and Narayana Babu came with their ‘Maha Prasthanam’and ‘Rudihira Jyothi’ poems.

Location and locution are two important elements in Pattabhi’s poems. The ‘I’ he speaks of everytime like – “I am different in no way less original” “I am a famous poet” “I can never describe well your arms” “I gobbled up her body” shows Pattabhi only as othering himself, the poet being a social agent, showing him as an agent of interpretation without any loss of spatiality or temporality which were absolutely missing in the romantic poets those days. Pattabhi had shown the way of transition from the second person assuming the role of a first person He dramatizes himself like – “I would rather be Ravana /My ten mouths would then Press your tender body and face/ My twenty eyes would, for ever, Bind you like a chain With twenty arms/ I would have you tight And be are with you dear” And “Lil’s nipples dance on my face I pull them with my mouth”No Telugu poet before Pattabhi had defined such deictic (directly showing) moments and movements with such clarity and alacrity. It was Pattabhi who introduced a person like Alfred J. Prufrock to Telugu poetry for the first time.

Being a master of prosody and mathematical theorems he introduced pun and with that fun and frolic, all against mostly himself! It was an act of happy violence against the yet original traditional self, an act of transcending the perverted original self, a cruel act of translating culture deeply rooted.

The techniques he followed for novelty are fractured syntax, alterity of phrases, breaking expectancy in word formation surprising inflections and a re-integrated rhetorical complex of emotions. He used the first person voice – the pronoun ‘I’ to explore whatever could be said by whomever. You will find this device beautifully exploited in his harmonizing of the Fiddle and its Raga  “ ——— the Fiddle – Ragas are lovers of new coinages deeply passionate / a very loving couple, too /Ms Fiddle said : My dear Raga! Your people are all orthodox They may turn their nose up I warned you:/ I am English Don’t make me your spouse Even so, bravely, romantically You married me sweet heart. Raga replied : Thanks to Pattabhi Since he helped me most courageously We got married, darling” Another deictic poetic device can be seen in his poem “Kamakshi’s Saree” wherein the saree itself narrates her song. This should not be taken as a mere trope of personification in poetry – “I was scared I might get crushed in the friction of those two bodies ….”

All said and done, Pattabhi did not write much after his first book, apart from ‘Phanchangam’ (this too in a dozen sections in the names of the months of a year) although he declared “Poetry my deity”, for he was a man of many parts – a political thinker, a sociologist, sea farer (his voyages to California, Mexico etc) a breaker of images, a fighter (not a freedom fighter, though) a non-conformist (his marriage with Snehalata) an idealist ( a follower of Lohia) a victim (during emergency) an art movie maker (Samskara and Chandamaruta) and finally a syncronist who learnt a lot about life and living through the meta-programming of the universe. Probably he internalized the intentionality of the external world!

(Translation segments are from Dr.B.V.L. Narrayanarow’s)