By Ananya S Guha
Verrier Elwin, the anthropologist and Indologist who lived in Shillong wrote a collection of 28 poems which were recently unearthed, and the collection has been published by North East Zonal Cultural Centre (NEZCC) Government of India. The untrained anthropologist was also an innate poet. Having majored in English Literature, Elwin perhaps rediscovered poetry in the hills and plains of rural, tribal India. His cosmology was the tribal world which he could translate into lyrical, rhymed poetry. If you are looking for cerebral poetry; you will not get it here, but if you are looking for a de-personalised myth and the world of tribal folk, then Elwin gives us more than an insight into the deeply felt sensitive world of the common man or woman, in deep intimacy with Nature, his / her tramped world and a divine cosmos. There is a narrative structure in the poems, internalized like internal monologues. It is as if the poet is talking to himself in a meditative and confessional manner.
It is poetry of the heart, pristine where there are no cleavages, but where the poet identifies himself with this world and the people around him. It is a world of not only self-identification but in Keatsian terms, Truth and Beauty reflecting inter-changeably an ethos of harmony what; love for people is, can best be understood by these poems of ineffable quality and melodic rhythm.
In consonance with his metamorphosed world of tribal life and the purity therein, these poems like songs are not poems of praise. Just like observations with minutiae of details, the poems dislocate time and place. For example there is no mention of the community or the place. In fact, such dislocation takes to the reader an intuitive apprehension of culture and a way of life. But there are infirmities here as well like old age and sickness (leprosy). It is veritably and incontrovertibly the ‘Tribal’ World of Verrier Elwin’.Yet there are worlds within worlds, spaces of infinite hiatus and anthropomorphic lessons to derive, infinite roads and – a home and a hearth. The multi voiced poet is a passive onlooker to beauty, morality and goodness. How one person from an ‘alien’ land can adopt another country and its peoples with deep-seated love and respect is typified in these poems marked by sheer brevity and lyricism. There is felt experience and sensuousness. There is plumbing of depths and riot if not chiaroscuro of colours.
One is touched by these sensibilities. Wounded, yet richer from having learnt about life’s nuances.
Elwin’s poetry merges with his prose, his life with his times, his sensitivities with the people he worked for, the people for whom he lived his life; whether it be in Bustar or in the hilly terrain of North East India.
Reading these poems was not only an electrifying experience, but identification of self with the spirit.