Dilip Chitre’s life and his poems are inextricably linked. And the life, when put in perspective, incorporates the four stages, the four ashramas, of a Hindu’s life: brahmachari, grihasti, vanaprastha and sanyas.
“A Christian suffers from guilt, a Hindu from the Ego,” says Chitre in one of his early poems (“In Ethiopia”) and the refrain catches on in others:
A Hindu haunted by objective reality (“The Fifteenth Breakfast: News of the Day”).
The Hindu idea of destiny:
I have not visualized
The season to follow,
For my ancestors were peasants
Who saw not beyond
What the weather gave
And what destiny decreed.
(“Homage to Pataliputra”—Section I)
Hindu fatalism:
Pataliputra is governed by Karma alone
When I asked the subjects why this was so,
They asked me, “ Ka karega?” What can be done?
(“Homage to Pataliputra”—Section IV)
The first two stages coalesce. Chitre’s birth and schooling in Baroda in the 30s and 40s, his college education in Bombay in the 50s, culminating in his romance with and marriage to Viju—with whom he still lives, despite several of the poems hinting at extra- marital involvements—are significant milestones in his early life and career. This phase includes the three years that Dilip and Viju, man and wife, spent in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where Ashay, their only son, was born.
Ashay: sickly from the start, stricken with pneumonia when he was three, affected by the Bhopal gas disaster at 23, dying of accidental asphyxiation in Pune at 42. Perhaps Chitre foretold it all when he wrote at the time of his dear son’s birth:
Then the night of crisis came, of the critical moment
Of the caesarean birth: the doctor, with well-weighed gravity,
Prepared me for two deaths; assured would do his best
To save at least the mother; then the theatre
Closed its stainless lid, and I, forewarned, forsaken,
Paced on the polished floor.
In the deodorized passageway fear liberated me
From the careful premonitions of a change in destiny.
(“In Ethiopia”—Section 6 )
But premonitions notwithstanding, life must go on. Chitre, now a responsible householder, settled down in Bombay, wrote (both in English and Marathi) and worked. Like Nissim Ezekiel, he dabbled in and chucked full-time corporate jobs in order to write. His series entitled The First Twenty Breakfasts, written over a period of 24 years, swelled. In a way, the series is typified by these lines from “The Sixteenth Breakfast: Remembering Kalidasa”:
Bring me a raw steak with my whiskey
For only food and drink humanize us,
And Dear Pimp, get me a buxom lass to lie with me,
For sex turns us into angels.
Gluttonous pleasures of the flesh, after all, facilitate a temporary escape from pain.
One of Chitre’s most moving poems, the queer “Ambulance Ride,” an elegy for his male friend Bhola Shrestha, was written during this phase:
There are times when having a friend
Is worse than having an enemy
What will I do with a dead friend?
I can only go on arguing with you
From this side of life
I can’t write letters to you
I can’t send you a telegram
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s infamous Emergency in 1975 coincided with Chitre’s departure for Iowa that year, where he represented India at the prestigious International Writing Program: in fact, the Emergency, characterized by curbs on freedom of expression, was one of the reasons why Chitre left. Indira Gandhi’s fiercest opponents became his heroes, as the long poem “Homage to Pataliputra: A Poem in Many Voices for Jayaprakash Narayan,” begun in Bombay and completed in Iowa, demonstrates:
Proclamations
These forests are failing
In this black rain;
Rain, rain of whiplashing laws;
Rain, rain in which the good man goes under;
Rain which grows like a cancer,
Inverting thunder,
Curbing lightning;
Rain which fattens on fright;
Rain of terror
Upon bared and broken roots
Of upturned trees.
Rain that rattles spines,
Opens gutters in the guts.
Rain, the rain of silence
Ripping and raping
The already routed.
(Section I)
In another section of the poem, Section II, Chitre says “And all that was green is grey,” succinctly capturing thereby the mood and the sprit of the Emergency.
Chitre’s finest book in English, Travelling in a Cage, was written in exile in Iowa. The poem of this worldly phase, though not in formal meter and rhyme, abundantly displays a feel for cadence and rhythm, and boast of hair-raising imagery. The language is violent and therefore powerful, reaching its high point in a poem like “This is About My Friend”:
Sometimes he said he was god and had the right
To pee in other people’s beds or shit in their kitchens
He screamed obscenities in art galleries and temples
Tried to conduct traffic with an empty bottle his baton
What he hated most to see were children and poets
How could God be different surrounded by his own creation?
In these poems, Chitre reveals himself to be a high modernist like most other Indian English poets of his generation form Ezekiel to Dom Moraes and Adil Jussawalla to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, influenced by the Pound-Eliot revolution of the 1920s. Accordingly, most of his poems are cerebral, and link observation to reflection; a later generation of Indian English poets, influenced by post-modernism, would be content with mere observation, subtly editing out the reflection; a notable case in point being Vikram Seth. It is only occasionally that one gets a poem written in a lighter vein that invokes mirth:
And you there, Fernandes, you Goan sod,
Open your mouth like the Hindu God
And reveal the contents of your inner self
Konkan’s penury, Portugal’s pelf
The Swine Revolution that climaxed in
Pork sorpotel and cashew wine
Show us the weather beaten face of Vasco da Gama
Take us into the shabby taverna owned by Anton’s mama
Evoke the titillating images of Hindu devdasis
Offered to god for nothing, to man for a silver piece
Reveal the ruddy face of St. Francis
That blesses Miss Universe, the Bombay steno
Tell us about your mother’s brother in Toronto
And her sisters in Dar-es-Salam and Singapore
(“And you there, Fernandes”)
In an early poem, Chitre writes: “Tukaram in heaven, Chitre in hell,/“Tuned to the same truth, centuries apart.” This anticipates the third stage, the life of a hermit that Chitre embraces in the ‘90s. Lines such as these represent the transition from householder to hermit:
So the world saw in me
A suicidal drunk
A promiscuous lunatic
An obsessive fool
A wounded lover
Anything but a man blessed by you
Driven by you alone.
(“It was Then That I Realized”)
Or even these:
Do not linger
Near the lingam
It’s self-made
It’s profane
Because it’s the private part
Of everything that exists.
(“Shiva”)
But it is mainly in his translation of the abhangas of the Marathi Saint-poet Tukaram (Says Tuka, 1991), for which Chitre won a Sahitya Akademi Award, and in his long poem The Mountain, begun in the early ‘80s, but completed only in 1998, (which I happened to review) that Chitre’s spiritual concerns become clear. The setting of The Mountain is Kade Pathar on which the old temple of Khandoba, Maharashtra’s oldest folk deity, made famous by Arun Kolatkar in his long poem “Jejuri”, is built. Chitre himself was introduced to Khandoba-worship by Gunther D. Sontheimer whose work with the Dhangar Community is well known. The poems in The Mountain are mellow. The Angry Young Man, the existentialist of Travelling in a Cage, matures into a self-effacing seeker for whom all that he sees around him is part of an over-arching, divine plan:
When the moon comes up
The one recognizable insect sings
From the phantom depths
The one unidentifiable bell rings
What brought me to this edge
Was my man’s destiny
Calling me
Right out of my skin
And what I took
Was just this little step
Into nothing.
(“A Little Step Into Nothing”)
Vanaprastha seasoned Chitre and enabled him to cope with loss with fortitude. Ashay’s impaired lung function in the wake of the Bhopal gas leak, Sontheimer’s sudden death in 1992, and then Ashay’s own death by asphyxiation in 2003 were personal tragedies through which he has lived and survived. True, it resulted in depression and even a nervous breakdown, but he emerged triumphant, conquering pain and suffering with his spiritual wherewithal that, the way I see it, readied him for the final stage, sanyas or total renunciation. A poet’s renunciation, of course, is different from that of a saint’s or a yogi’s. Chitre’s renunciation, it seems to me, is effected in the way grief becomes sublimated in art, and he is able to view his own pain with a sense of detachment.
The chronicle of Ashay’s death is told in some poems in “A Starnberger See Interlude” and in a cycle entitled “After Ashay”.
November is the month to remember
A dark lake at dawn in the shadow of the Alps
And his death before sunrise
At an unmappable distance
Its news arriving as precisely as an icicle.
(“November”)
These poems, reminiscent of “Ambulance Ride” are not free of sentimentalism, but, aesthetically speaking, herein lies the poet’s liberation. For no longer is Chitre governed by the tenets of modernism, of T.S. Eliot’s famous dictum of poetry as escape from emotion, as he was as a young man writing in English. Instead, the allegiance now is to the more indigenous tradition of Bhakti poetry, where the emotions are always given free reign, and the object of one’s devotion can be a god, a beloved, or even a dead son: Dilip Chitre in these poems simply lets himself go.
Then Ashay choked to death in Pune
On November 29, 2003
It was early morning in Feldafing when the phone rang:
“Fire? Smoke? Oh God! No! How’s he?
Where’s he?” I heard Viju and she knew
And I knew we’d lost our son—
Ashay, just 42, another survivor, now gone.
(“Anniversary”—Section 2)
In “Lost Images” Chitre recalls
The first picture I took of you
In the Princess Tsehai Hospital—
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
In the last week of June, 1961.
In “Unfinished Requiem for a Lost Son,” he writes—
Son lost to me forever
Something of you still remains in my autopsy
For which I find no starred cover
And in “Looking at Ashay’s Paintings,” he says with a twinge of regret:
I’ve visited all the galleries and museums I could
And considering the length of my life so far I don’t think I can
Take in many more pictures than I already can recall
I find myself locked in another kind of a museum or a gallery
Filled with those depressing and detailed women you painted, Ashay,
Their unhappy ambience hits me in my solar plexus
I know it is you behind them, my son, addressing your insensitive father.
As is, Where Is, then, is the story of Dilip Chitre’s life, his autobiography in verse. It is a faithful record of his conflicts, dilemmas and crises. It is a lifetime’s work that contains his sweat, blood and tears. The literary world owes much to Hemant Divate, founder of Poetrywala, for bringing out the book. Divate proves that for him, as indeed for so many of us, Dilip Chitre has earned, through dedication to his craft and through suffering, the distinction of being Guru or Master, and our rightful place is at his feet. We must therefore reject his view of his own verse, expressed in “Post Climatic Love Poem-I, Section 5”:
This is no poetry; they’re sure to say,
The ranting and ravings of a near-senile man.
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