Ananya S Guha reviews a collection of S Chandramohan’s powerful social poetry
S CHANDRAMOHAN is an English poet based in India. His poems reflect thesocio-political struggles of the marginalized, the working class and thenomadic outcasts of the World who are victimized and then forgotten asnations clash and wage relentless war. His work has been profiled in various publications around the globe.
Chandramohan’s poems are a powerful commentary of a crises-riddensociety. They are protestations of a caste conscious society, of anubiquitous poverty, of a degenerate wealthy class of people who
understand only the glitzy riches of the corporate world. There are ‘leftist’ overtones in the poems- allusions to the middle class andthe bourgeoisie. The poems are broad statements on the condition of a
weakened and exploited humanity. Who will mourn the death of a tribal?Who will protest the rape of an innocent tribal girl?
Throughout the poems there is lamentation, not seething anger. Angeris controlled and the irony or satire has compassion in them. This isthe inherent markedness of the poems.Seething compassion. Thatcompassion is an universal force is evident in his pithy poetry.Chandramohan draws also on history and mythology to rework ‘new’sensibilities in his poetry.
And what is this ‘newness’? It isthis damned protest against caste hegemony, social and economic
exploitation and western hegemony.
Protest poetry is a genre, loosely speaking. It hits out against anyform of intolerance or hegemony. It is satirical in mode, butcompassionate in voice. That is its inner logic. The poetry of theArgentinian poet, Nicholas Gullen for example uses a directness inachieving this.
Chandramohan uses direct statements, in the manner ofspeaking to someone but hard hitting. The poems are eye openers: whyfor example are the Northeast people of the country called ‘Chinkies’? What is the ‘historical’ India? Where is ‘Tribal’ India?
These poems are constant interrogations, because throughinterrogations we can achieve ‘power’, through questioning, we candismantle edifices! Chandramohan’s poems are very powerfulextrapolations of such ‘truths’- the India of today, shaped by Indiaof yesterdays, where power is corrupt, where politicians and peopleare lacqueys of power mongers and plutocrats. And some of our ‘leaders’ are replicates of the western powers.
Now, something about the language of poetry. Is it not man speaking toman as Wordsworth once said? Chandramohan addresses his fellow humanbeings in a conversational tone, earmarking all the need for protest,hitting out at ‘conscience keepers’. Who are they, me, you? Thelanguage of poetry has been deftly reworked into a zealous weapon tofight casteism, tribal exploitation, or at least the insouciancetowards them.There is no anger mind you, only a deep down lament.
Taken together as a body the poems are an elegy on the ‘death’ ofsocieties, even of a nation!
This is riveting, hard hitting poetry. It invokes history, becauseonly the past can make the present- this crises ridden society,symbolized by Pokhran, in one of his poems. We know about Dalitpoetry. Read Chandramohan’s poems to understand the revolutionaryprocesses in poetry- both content and style!
WARSCAPE VERSES, Authorspress, New Delhi, Rs195