Radha Chakravarty is a widely published writer, critic and translator. She has published over 20 books including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi, Kazi Nazrul Islam and contemporary women writers. She co-edited ‘The essential Tagore’ (Harvard and Visva-Bharati) named ‘Book of the Year’, 2011 by Martha Nussbaum. She has published anthologies of South Asian writing on fiction and on the subjects of feminism and freedom. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including in ‘Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem’ (Muse Pie Press, USA) nominated for the Pushcart Prize, 2020. ‘Subliminal’ is her debut collection of poems written over several years.

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A major focus in ‘Subliminal’ is self-exploration which also yields self-knowledge. This exploration involves the hidden depths of the psyche, discovering the unexpected yet connecting this to general human experience that cuts across borders and divisions. There is a personal charge to this exploration driven by emotions, memory, relationships, social issues and specific events, both private and public, that broaden the canvas of expression. There are poems on women that are drawn from myth and legend, from ancestry and from questions of voice, desire and freedom. There is an excitement about unitedness; the interconnection between us and nature and dismay over its degradation; there is recognition of the ominous, of indifference and hate and of a time lost forever; there is joy in seeing beauty in art, in stillness, in questing and in the unexpected. There is pathos in seeing less privileged lives, in feelings of betrayal and uprootedness and in suffering as a spur to inner growth.

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It takes courage to face the inner world and even more courage to express it with honesty. In the poem, Alien, dark are the shadows of the self, seen in mirrors of the night: ‘New-grown fangs, and forked tongue, /Twisted talons,/serpents writhing/In tangled hair, black hollows for eyes’… ‘my own dark twin, trapped/Here, in this lonely planet, this body?’ The self-knowledge: ‘Knowing the way in is the only way out.’ Through the uncanny use of a Bosphorus ferry connecting Asia with Europe by sea, the poem Continental Drift explores the metaphor of a journey at two levels: on the surface there are trade routes, wars, uprooted lives and the efflorescence of art. Below the surface‘what future islands, shores, continents,/maps, borders, stories, take shape/beneath the wake’s turmoil, waiting/to rear their heads one day’? What unexpected surprises will our journeys – inner and outer – yield? A possibility: universes coalesce in Starlight to obliterate our egos, our ‘dream of immortal fame’. The distant stars look down upon our petty lives, our vainglorious ways with a cold indifference that ‘shrivels our hubris, humbles our pride’.

 

There is passion involved in this self-exploration. In Elemental love, the poet deliberately lets down her guard to let in ‘lightning, storm and rain’. For, metaphorically, it is the elements of nature that will ‘Tear down my walls, /My pride, my will. /Destroy my defences.’ In Not alone there is solace in that she is ‘not alone, not finite, not single, not whole’ for there are cosmic forces at work uniting her with other lives, other selves - her own turbulent stream merging ‘with the vast ocean of life, eternal,/infinite, ever in motion.’ Yet, anomalously, in Uncrossed Sea, there are seas, paths, forests and selves still unexplored, yet explored through words: ‘With my many selves I co-exist/in the parallel world of verse.’

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We see Chakravarty’s attention to sound and rhythm in her poetic craft in consonance with her explorations. In one of the clearest expressions of a self that has yet to attain its centre, Aftershocks uses the word ‘temblor’ instead of ‘earthquake’ to emphasise the consonant ‘t’ in the ensuing words. The temblor signals a roiling at the core: ‘the terror of knowing/that we are not in control/of subterranean emotions/we thought we had subdued.’ In the sonnet The Key, there is both rhythm and an unexpected turn of phrase that is a hallmark of Chakravarty’s poems:

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But when faces are masked, truth can shed its disguise

When the clamor falls silent, a voice speaks within,

When the world sinks in darkness, we see with new eyes,

When habit is broken, let new journeys begin

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In In search of Shantiniketan there is both cadence and invitation to smell the mango blossom in the breeze, to hear the birdsong, to run with the wind, to dance in the rain. For to recall Tagore’s eternal words, it is a reminder of a place ‘Where the mind is without fear,/And knowledge is free.’

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Chakravarty’s most powerful poems relate to women. The parallel to women’s history and lives is the river. In River/Woman it is the river/woman who bears the pain of generations of history. In the woman’s cry, the river’s roar, a million voices merge: ‘The torrent courses through my veins. /My blood dances to an unfamiliar beat.’ There is a wonderful fusion between the woman and the river, as if eons of sorrow must now fructify and be born anew. The great riverine flow continues in the very next poem, The severed tongue. This features Khona, a legendary Bengali woman astrologer and poet, who learnt astrology from her father-in-law, Varahamihir, one of the nine jewels in the court of Emperor Chandragupta II. Outshining him as a star gazer with her dazzling auguries, she was unfortunate to have aroused masculine ire and jealous for which her tongue was cut off. Using powerful riverine language, Chakravarty writes of how the severed tongue bled, sweeping others into the flood, ‘the torrent of voices swelled, becoming/a rising tide of women, speaking, speaking, speaking out, /in many tongues.’

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A natural outcome of a woman’s silent agony borne through aeons of suppressed rage is that pent-up pain can destroy the past ‘depositing new, rich layers of/the lava of a fertile future, greening our dreams‘, transforming our mindscapes forever (The violence of a volcano). But does this really? In Ahalya’s Awakening, Ahalya’s agony, frozen into stone for aeons, is palpable. But when brought to life by a god’s sacred foot, hers is a painful discovery: ‘even in this new, fast-advancing world,/not much has really changed.’ Similarly, in Walking through the flames, Sita’s heart, scorched with burning shame raises the question: ‘After such bitterness, surely the world felt some shame?/ Surely things could never be the same/again, afterwards?/And yet…. ‘

 

Nature is another significant thread that weaves through Chakravarty’s poems. She is acutely aware of the slow poisons destroying our rivers, uprooted tree roots clawing at the air, ancient water bodies vaporously evanescent. In Wheeze she notes this with dismay for our lives are interwoven with nature. If leaves shrivel on branches, so do our lungs: ‘Our lungs, and the lungs of the city/fill with the black dust/of death.’

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Chakravarty also observes a depth of beauty in Nature. In the poem Still, Mount Everest seen from Nagarkot is not just the stillness of sculptured stone or a silhouette of silence. It is a quiet born of tumult at its core. When continents collide and there are tectonic shifts in power, the mountain is ‘Pushed to the pinnacle/Of a planet’s despair’. It is from this vantage point that it dreams ‘Of a green earth,/A world with water,/World without war.’

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Subliminal’s poems compress emotions so they are expressed through images and metaphors that carry resonances and associations, touching the reader through their layers. Fear can get linked to the moon and the sea – dragging by the hair ‘a turbid tide of death/to our fearful shore’. (Lockdown, 2020). Betrayal is communicated through six minimalist lines: Leaf in the wind/twists and turns/in free fall/shudders in disbelief/at the branch’s breach/of trust (Betrayal). Bliss is the devotee savoring on her tongue the juice of a coconut broken at a temple in ‘the tangible bliss of being/blessed’, the coconut having gone through the process of ripeness, selection, sacrifice and consecration. (Coconut)

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Though the poems reveal empathy through an understanding of lives less privileged, perhaps Chakravarty’s finest poems lie in her memories of her family – of her father, her mother and her grandmother. Her mother’s death has powerful metaphors in the red hibiscus: ‘Bleeding in gardens full of blooms’, the depth of loss and yearning is seen even in the alliteration used: ‘No breath, birdsong, blooms/No breath, no voice, no touch’. (Late Hibiscus). Her father was not just a father but ‘the central axis of my world, /the centre of its gravity’ (You walk with me).

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One of the most lilting poems about family is The casket of stories. This poem has many layers: it uses Bengali words liberally: supuri, lavanga, elaach, dokta (tobacco) – condiments used in the betel leaf; it reveals a poignant nostalgia for a childhood full of love and restraint; it gives us a view of inner lives, veiled and secluded behind barred windows and closed courtyards, of life in dark corners filled with ‘desire, heartbreak, longing, loss’ but leaving for posterity ‘the aroma of lost stories’.

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And finally, in Legacy, wearing her grandmother’s sari is a palpable experience of love and loss, of a lifetime of stories escaping through the worn patches, reminding the poet that wrapped in her grandmother’s sari, ‘I am slowly, but surely, /turning into my grandmother.’