Etching on the Edge

Book Review: RAJNI SINGH

Charu Sheel Singh. ETCHING ON THE EDGE. New Delhi: Adhyayan Publishers, 2007,pp.x+68, Price Rs.85/-,ISBN 81-8435-066-X

Man is a victim of temporality and he creates or recreates this temporality consciously/unconsciously assuming it as the permanent. In this process, every moment a history is etched out only to be disfigured any time. Singh in his foreword to the book says, “All of us begin history even while we lose it.”(p.vii) The poems in the present volume reread Indian history in terms of mythical figures, characters and culture “with the interpretive web that might just inaugurate a new beginning.”(p.vii) Out of the thirty-two poems of this volume, five are based on mythical figures; fourteen are on historical characters and the rest dwell on diverse subjects. Through sumptuous narrative, Singh re narrates the mythical figures with contemporaneous idioms and juxtaposes India’s great past with its agonizing present.

In “Bee-hive”, Singh ponders over the degeneration of man. In the poem the human body is compared to a hive, a storehouse of oozing rasas. Singh says:

the purgatorial corridors open

close as we generate bee hives within (p.32)

It is very unfortunate that man’s ‘reasoned galaxy’ has killed honey-bees with intellectual arrows. He does not participate in the game of ‘sucking’ and ‘plucking’ which is a game of blissful trance. The poet questions:

Could our bodily-hives arise

to the call of innocent

life’s floodgates? (p.33)

Singh strongly condemns the modern man’s practice of commodifying even Gods and festivals:

Dewali is

not a marketable festival that

sells it piety on the Dalal streets

of London. Ram crucified Himself even

as we celebrated Dewali. Sita became

the earthen lamp burning tears into

the candles of night. (‘Deepawali’ p.30)

The change in spelling, from ‘Deepawali’ to ‘Dewali’ brings in a change in the pronunciation of the word that suggests the loss of devotion and reflects on the glamorization that is structured around the festivals.

It

Was Sita who burnt Herself

in the Deepawali earthen pots;

She gave away Her tearful

songs to a society that

knew not piety and love (‘Sita’ p.37)

In the poem ‘Holi’, Singh not only ‘states’ the grossness of the present times but also makes an attempt to ‘suggest’:

Prahlad was eternal fire

who consumed temporal ones. The

colours combine to cleanse and

purify the dross that is often

our self’s pitiable cross. (p.31)

Singh Says:

A lineage of demons often

breeds a pious soul into

the folded prisms of the

pages of history. (p. )

and the pious souls that Singh enlists in his volume are Prahlad, Baba Neem Karori and Gandhi. On the pages of history we have characters like Duryodhana-“stripping Draupadi/ naked into the jungle desires”(p.17) and on the other hand there are pious figures like Baba Neem Karori who, “wove blanket songs of love/and selflessness.”(p. ) This juxtaposition between the good / bad, vice / virtue, Godly / demonic runs down through out the volume.

In its first impression the poems appear obscure and ostentatious but on a careful and responsive study of these poems one finds that they manifest not only the nobility of the poet’s thoughts but also his mastery over the poetic genre. Singh with his narrative art lengthens and shortens his verse paragraphs according to the length of thought unit.

On the whole, Etching on the Edge is undeniably a rich and valuable addition to the corpus of Indian English Poetry as it lays out the very roots of Indian mythology. At the very outset Singh makes it clear that “Indian English Poetry is yet to see its full bloom for it is still searching for a Raja Rao or an Aurobindo.” It is quite true in the sense that many of our talented poets could not deviate from the Eliotesque track or shake off the influence of Bombay poets. Still there lacks in an honest experiment with truth, a need to give a creative worldview of India’s great past. Singh’s Etching on the Edge is a stepping-stone in this direction.

Reviewed by:

Rajni Singh

Assistant Professor of English

Dept. of HSS

Indian School of Mines University

Dhanbad, India