‘Birthing his pain into a poem’: A poetic journey through five decades of Karnataka’s history

In the 18th century, the neighbourhood of Mavalli had been the stamping ground of the brilliant military strategist and one-time ruler of Mysore, Hyder Ali. It was here, in 1760, that he set up a 40-acre rose and cypress garden, which, by KS Nisar Ahmed’s time, had grown into the 240-acre botanical garden of Lalbagh. Nisar was born in Devanahalli, which is also the birthplace of Hyder’s famous son, Tipu Sultan. But it was Mavalli – and Lalbagh, in particular – that had the biggest and most enduring impact on Nisar’s life and work.

“Like everyone else interested in Kannada literature, I read Kuvempu as a boy,” he recalls, referring to KV Puttappa, considered to be the greatest Kannada writer of the 20th century. “Reading his epic novel Kanooru Subbamma Heggadathi (translated into English by Ramachandra Sharma as The House of Kanooru in 1999), I was transported to the verdant hills and dales of Kuvempu’s home region, Malenadu, and wished I had that kind of inspiration for my writing, instead of the tedium of the city. But not for long, because I had Lalbagh. Every evening, after my Quran class at the local masjid, I headed straight for my own Malenadu and spent many happy hours among the trees there, thinking, reading, writing.”

If Lalbagh, and later Shivamogga – where he taught geology at the Sahyadri College – inspired his nature poetry, Bangalore itself, and particularly the bustling neighbourhood of Gandhi Bazaar, where Nisar lived for many years, would become his muse, lovingly cast as either setting or protagonist in many of his poems. At a time when Kannada writers either romanticised the countryside or saw the city as an impersonal, harsh and lonely space, Nisar celebrated its chaos and its imperfections, surveying it all with an amused, affectionate dispassion.

The Poet, He Wrote

The poet, he wrote
Raking his heart with his pen
Pouring onto paper
His long-hoarded cache of pain.

The poet, he wrote
Of loves that had once burnt bright and true
In life’s furnace, before falling through
The cracks, and turning into ashes;
Of joys that, under the unrelenting jackboots
Of caste and class, had fissured to their roots
And disintegrated in patches;
Of the hundreds of youthful dreams that, even as they leapt skywards
Lost their way; and sighing, slunk backwards
Into the ground, cautious;

Having carried the lonely burden of his anguish
For months on end and languished
In the throes of agony, night and day,
The poet, he wrote
Birthing his pain into a poem.

Trusting that his work was not inferior
Mining his ache though it made him wearier
Believing that poetry was art’s purest form –
The poet took apart his creation, layer by layer
Panned it for gold like an expert assayer
And made us a gift of his emotions warm.

The poet, he wrote
From his experiences,
Laying down His defences.

The Orthodox Man

Feeding a pitful of festering tradition
With the rotting hay of dogma
And the rank fungus of class differentiation
Is like maintaining a herd of sterile buffalo.
The chewing of the cud
Of the rancid fodder
Of centuries-old ritual and rite
Is a blight
That traps the mind in the status quo.
Limping along, the quagmire of long-obsolete bonds
Clinging heavy to your feet,
You only connect with the fresh air of the present
When you emerge from your pit to breathe.

Only when – if! – your intellect is roused
From its snoring slumber,
And, cracking open an eye, is doused
In divine sunlight unencumbered
Is there hope of redemption;
If not, you will not live, but only exist,
After a fashion.

Working ceaselessly
The loom of rule and routine
Twisting blind, outdated belief
Into every thread, seen and unseen
The orthodox man weaves his sanctimonious cloth,
Retailing it by the bundle, day after day,
To a putrid past he pledges his troth.

Double the Trouble

The trap is constructed with a cloth of three colours;
Writhing and thrashing inside
Are pyjamas, lungis, beards –
And shaven heads besides;

No sooner than the first malicious whisper
Touches ears, than it begins to fester;
And suspicious eyes seek out and linger
On every muslin dress and henna-dyed finger
And the rumour is broadcast as if tested and true
Via mouths that are radios, without further ado.

Then comes the rigorous investigation
Before the unsolicited certification.
“Is that his real face or is he wearing a mask?”
“Are they sheep or – this is important to ask – Wolves in sheep’s clothing?”
Ripping the veils off our lives with loathing,
They review our actions, to test their mettle,
“Are they truly gold, or an inferior metal?”
And set their ferocious pet hounds
On the trail of our words, their noses to the ground.

Should I march out of step with the country’s grand drill
And proclaim this truth?
“Traitor!” they will yell.
“To the gallows, forsooth!”
Should I band with the wolves, then, and roundly decry
Their crimes against the helpless?
“Fanatic!” they will cry;
It’s really quite hopeless.

Gandhi Bazaar Mornings

Gandhi Bazaar mornings
Have not even a passing familiarity
With common morning traditions –
Neither cock-crow
Nor muezzin call, nor temple carillon;
They are not the dominion
Of the merry jingle of oxen bells
Or their light morning step, which tells
Of beasts still free of the plough’s burden.
Here, no fresh-faced girl unburdens
The jasmine creeper of its silver blossom;
You hear no snatch of song, no hum
Of women milling the morning grain,
Or the creak of the old woman’s brazier lid
In the hut down the lane.

Instead
The rumble of the first-shift factory bus
The grumble of auto and grinning Esso truck, plus
The bray of wood scraping against floor, and more –
Din of push-pulled restaurant chairs, clamorous
Residue of morning birdcall, unglamorous
Clatter of bleary-eyed policeman’s lathi and boot,
The sweeper in his tattered shirt, en route
To somewhere.

These, and more such urban delights, pass
For morning alarms in Gandhi Bazaar, alas.

Excerpted with permission from Every Day a Celebration: Poems, KS Nisar Ahmed, translated from the Kannada by Roopa Pai, Seagull Books.