Eminent poet Navakanta Barua’s latest offering reverberates Joseph
Brodsky’s famous line: If the poet has any obligation towards the
society, it is to write well.
What happens to a milestone when it does not get itself rooted to the soil? It will
end up mak ing a bridge out of itself connecting the banks of the gorge where it falls.
With this thought-provoking rendition Navakanta Barua opens his latest anthology of
poems The Tent on the Bridge (Dolongot Tamighora). The poems Milestone and the Bridge and The Bridge
at Crossroads unfolds to us the vistas of new insights about a bridge. It is to him that
a sensible person never gets panicked to face the ultimate truth of life -- the death,
rather he visualizes the death as a purposeful one -- like a bridge that connects the
present and the future generation.
Milestone has fallen down
Down there in the ravine, deep
It has become a bridge
The ultimate theme of the poem are embodied in the following lines:
It is better to lie down
Than to remain upright and dare challenge;
For only while lying down
Arise no problem of falling dow
In the Alidumujar Sako (The Bridge at the Crossroads) he describes a pedestrian’s
effort to make himself a bridge in an attempt to connect
The past with the present and
The present with that day
The day that has not yet come
The pedestrian in the poem presents his deep sense of social awareness; it is
through this pedestrian the poet communicates his realization that simplicity is all
that is required to serve the social cause; a man of simplicity communicates to the
world through his heart. But it is the pride of knowledge that makes things
complicated. This is a cardinal truth as propounded in Buddhism and it is explicit in
this poem man gains his own soul by sacrifice only.
The other poems of the collection reflect different facets of his experiences in true
focus and in his own style of communication. As usual there are diversion in metre,
imagery and vocabulary too (e.g. Few unequal Stanzas for Mother and Now in the
Winter) from his known set-up. It is his experimental impulse that leads to such
deviations. But these poems deserve separate evaluation for each one of them is
singular and profound. For example Prayer for the Living is a picturization of living
scenario. Two Years in Inferno presents a vivid description of hell after Dante. It is a
long poem and not all parts of it are lyrics. As such, we will confine ourselves here to
tracing the poets’ feat in adopting bridge as the primary theme in his different verses.
A sensitive and a serious poet, Navakanta Barua’s creativity is prominent in his
poems. His diction, his psycho-social consciousness and social commitment has
given his poems a unique character among the creations of his time. It is for this
reason that his poems attracts the heart of the younger generations despite being the
fact that romanticism is not the only aspect in his poems. The remarkable thing about
the poet is that he simply cannot write badly for the reason of this awareness. As
Joseph Brodsky feels, "If a poet has any obligation toward society it is to write well."
The characteristic recurrence of bridge either as a symbol or as allusion can be
observed in many of his poems. This suggests his intense love for bridge as symbol
of life. The Tent on the Bridge from the thematic point of view retains the affinity with
few of his finest earlier poems wherein the bridge as a subject does frequently and
spontaneously acquire an eminent position. It contains 38 new poems of which two
as quoted above are specifically written with their central theme as the bridge.
Personification of bridge although is common in many of his poems yet, what is
remarkable in this context is that they are more real than simple imagination. In this
famous poem In Continuity, the poet observes how the life despite being ephemeral
carries on
Across the
Innumerable bridges of death
Life crawls along
And of the many facets of life, change is the one and the only important -- it is the
change that comes to life over the passage of time. We are to admit these changes,
for:
We are said to have been coming
Through the ages in different forms
Across the bridge of change
And when the bridge symbolizes life’s dynamism he writes:
Close for one evening
This bridge, the symbol of life
With the Kalindi night made overflowed
by the flood of light
The poems today will encroach upon
The dynamism of the bridge.
For poetry is infinite life living in only
for a evening.
The poet than acts as a bridge carrying the insignificant songs and dead legends of
the past to the distant far as presented in his poem Bridgehead:
Many lost notes from some forgotten music
Block my way to say;
"Please take us with you, will you?"
In perplexed eagerness I wish to take
in one or two
Who knows, they might find friends
in the distant far --
(Courtesy - D. N. Bezboruah’s translation)
The poet becomes melancholic when he recalls the fellow travellers all of whom had
come together aiming to build houses on the bridge -- the bridge that symbolizes the
intervening period between the life and the death.
Recognized a lot of them. They are
fellow traveller
Through my thousands of birth
We had come together with futile
passions to
Erect houses on the bridges of life.
The degeneration of human values in recent times has disturbed the poet and his
despair know no bounds. He made an honest assessment of the situation in his
poem With a Transparent Mask where he drew the picture of a bridge that fails to fulfil
its commitment. He sees the future of our generation on this aimless bridge and thus
raised the alarm.
We have been journeying across a bridge
The bridge that does not connect one
bank to the other.
And then he wrote the episode that narrates the pain of continuing life when one
loses his means of livelihood it is the story of a boatman’s life (Now the Bridge Has
Been Built) who found himself out of job after the bridge is built:
Now the bridge is built
..................
The last boatman has also departed
Selling his boat to the western trader
..................
The aimless path only goes forth
Nowhere is there the news of quittance
Dynamism is the name of this pain.
Bridge is thy name.
It is his inner voice. Not all of man’s encroachment on nature creates such
imbalances; yet he admits this as not unnatural -- whether the adoption of alternative
modes of livelihood brings about transformation in life? His effort to understand such
critical issues as this one is inherent in his nature and in his poetics. This is the
reason why his poetry is so close to us and is within us.
