Compressed provincialism: ‘Susurrus in the Skull’ by Rabindra Swain

Even today, the situation surrounding English-language writing in Orissa is yet to progress beyond the scattered forays that were witnessed in Calcutta and Madras during the 19th century, when English-educated Indians first began to write in the newly acquired tongue. Today, English-language literature in Orissa is still marked by lopsidedness, with significant disproportion between prose and poetry in favour of the latter. There are today simply not many Oriyas writing in English in the first place; among the miniscule group that is, there is virtually no fiction writer worth the name. For one reason or another, the world of Oriya English poetry has fared somewhat better. There is some irony in the fact that while Orissa is home to one of the finest and best-known among contemporary Indian English-language poets, Jayanta Mahapatra, the now-prominent map of Indian English poetry does not have a strong impression of the state.

Indeed, the non-Oriya readership of India has heard of only four Oriya poets – Mahapatra himself, as well as Bibhu Padhi, Rabindra Swain and the late Niranjan Mohanty, who passed away in July. This paucity inevitably forces one to think in terms of isolated individual voices rather than of a defining tradition or coherent world vision. The problem is compounded by the fact that the limelight continues to elude Orissa, thanks to its being only on the margin of socioeconomic development.

On their own admission, Padhi, Swain and Mahapatra are outsiders to the mainstream English poetry tradition. As Subhashini Kaligotla, poet, professor and editor of the New York-based poetry magazine Catamaran, pointed out in a recent overview of English-language poetry from Orissa, the tradition of these three poets is "a poetic consciousness shaped by remoteness, both physical and metaphysical, from the metros – places such as Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta." The poets themselves will readily acknowledge that the only community they are conscious of is, to quote Kaligotla, "a virtual one or a republic of one".

There are significant problems with being thus positioned. But one must not lose sight of the attendant prospects as well – a strong sense of the personal and the subjective, and an intense sensitivity to the local. The construction of the subjective and the local is, of course, different with regard to each of these three poets, being mythic and densely metaphoric for Mahapatra, lyrical for Padhi, and laconic and self-deprecatory for Swain. For the latter, this quality results from the poet's meditation on the small joys and sorrows of small-town existence, the drabness of life and, above all, on the restricted possibilities of life that confronts one in present-day Orissa.

Grinding days
Though based in Bhubaneswar, in his first two volumes (1996 and 1999), Swain wrote about an ambience that disempowers rather than one that boasts of glitter and power. In his third work, Severed Cord, from 2002, he snapped the umbilical cord between man and god, reducing the former to a helpless "embryo without the fetus' navigational skill". His latest volume of poetry, Susurrus in the Skull, maps this middling level of life, locale and letters rather well. If Swain is able to turn this rather unpromising material into poetry, this dross into gold, then it is largely through the power of his terse presentations, his wry sense of humour, and his sharply observed details of the provincial world.

Take this quiet musing on a day's daily morning rituals, from the opening poem, "Over a Cup of Tea", which includes sentiments so artfully conveyed in word that, on the face of it, they seem almost banal. At first there is the effortless build-up of empty moments, which come out of an immersion in a townscape:

Here sleep comes late
and leaves early. Still drowsy
you come out to the balcony
with the morning tea
and with an accumulation of days of doing nothing.

And then, in a dramatic shift
of scene to the avian world, we get
the following:

Breaking the spell
a small grey bird comes hopping
towards you and picks worms
and seeds – the dawn is so quiet that you could hear them cracking
inside its beak.

By the time we arrive at this last line, we feel as though it were the sound of silence, the wordless music that inheres in things we have not made. The poem ends on an even more poignant note, flinging the speaker back into the same automatised world from which he had hoped to flee. This last is ironically symbolised by a death-dealing bird, either the owl or the mechanical bird within the wall clock, calling the speaker to death or the daily grind of work – largely the same thing in this worldview.

Swain's short, telegraphic lines nearly always pack a punch, particularly so when they dismantle meanings through wordplay and reversals. This, coupled with the non-human, natural perspective the poet brings to bear upon inverted human institutions such as electoral politics and bureaucracy ("Who will sleep with whom this time?"), not to mention, marriage ("the tactful vendor of dreams: saying our eighth child will be a son"), lends to Swain's poetry an extra dose of irony. A certain scepticism about gods, mysticism and miracles also runs through Susurrus in the Skull, ensuring that the chief actors here are self and society, in their inevitable relationship to the deglamourised plants, flowers and animals that inhabit the town space.

There being no god for the poet, we have a curious doubling-back in many of these poems. This process turns to explore family ties, as between father and son (as in "Mirror too Close to the Face"), father and daughter ("Daughter's Learning the Alphabet, Father's Dilemma"), man and wife ("Salt and Green Chilli", "My Wedding Night"), as well as the intrigues of sexuality ("What Is Wrong with This Thing of Mine?"). A staggering range of feelings and attitudes covering guilt, incomprehension, expiation, bemused wonder and introspection is uncovered by this pitiless gaze into the self. As always with Swain, it is his clinching closing lines that capture the themes and tensions of these poems.

Inside voices
The poet's way with the societal self is equally uncompromising. Two relatively short poems, "He Has in Him" and "Here the Lilies are Buried", speak for this middle stage in life, in which fantasy is sacrificed at the altar of cold, hard factuality. The first poem, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, is about the death of dreams (symbolised by lilies) in our modern-day jungles of brick and concrete.

He has in him a road, built over
The fields of paddy,
over the river, silted, buried,
over the temples razed,
over a pond of lilies.
He has abridged everything
from sunrise to sunset.
He has avoided mentors,
birds with clipped wings,
orgasms as disasters
and accepted all the perils
in building a road
like having to listen to the sound
of tyres on tar, the wailing
of the lilies, buried, in his sleep.

In a subtle play on 'bridging' and 'abridging', the poet here makes an irony out of the "roadmap talk" that dominates political culture in today's world. The second poem begins where the first one leaves off, by referring to the "lilies, buried, in his sleep", before unfolding for us this process of the burial of our dreams beneath our developmental needs and deeds.

The title poem, "Susurrus in the Skull", is, naturally, quite central (though this is belied by the illustration of copulating frogs that adorns the book's cover, an image that actually comes from another poem, "Returned from the Frogs"). In a significant break with his characteristic self-lacerating and satirical vein, the titular work shows the poet in a rare mood of Hamlet-like philosophising over his own skull. The speaker not only sees the skull beneath the skin, but presents a juxtaposition of perspectives on what it contains.

(A 'susurrus' is a murmur or a whisper.) The challenge here is in auditing that "anthill of small endeavors, noble ones, once wet and palpitating now deserted and hardened to the earths' dry bones." The poet's name for this long-winded expression is "susurrus of desire", which serves both to make its human bearer an object of desire and to individualise its possessor before it returns to the dreadful sameness of a lifeless object. Interestingly, the poem takes this desire away from the wife, obsessing about sex, and hands it to the mother, as the last lines make unambiguously clear:

Instead,
she would resume talking
to herself: but my son's like
a bird who's always
afloat in the wind.

This sort of poise is reached only momentarily, however, after which the volume resumes its habitual mode of now-playful, now-pitiless glances at the provincial milieu and mindset. It is to Swain's credit to have developed, in Sussurus, a verse of compressed understatement to record this stasis. Granted, this rules out any big philosophy, but the accumulation of little, small-town lives and their minutiae create, through their diffuseness, an impact, something of an epiphany. But Swain cannot stop short at this, especially given the lack of forward movement in Oriya English-language writing, as noted previously. He now needs to break through to a vision and verse of self-making that can create the conditions for an alternative heroic mapping of Orissa's past and present, thereby helping in the reshaping of the English-language writing scene in the region.

~ Himansu S Mohapatra is a professor of English at Utkal University in Bhubaneshwar.