An Explorative Self in the Poetry of Manohar Shetty

An Explorative Self in the Poetry of Manohar Shetty

A poet, it is often believed, is an explorer in the world of vision, truth and linguistic expression. He looks deep within life and the world around and explores multi-layered and multi-dimensional meaning and the truths of life which emerge out of everyday living. And to read poetry is to be on a sojourn into the world of mystery, romance and differently significant truth which the act of living reveals to a discerning eye and a loving soul. A careful perusal of Manohar Shetty’s poetry confirms this observation of ours to an adequate extent. His is a poetic voice, serious and sensitive which demands a ‘contrapuntal reading’, a post-colonial term, borrowed from Edward Said for a comprehensive opening to the world of the readers’ imagination. In the realm of the post Ezekiel-Mahapatra cannon of modern Indian poetry in English, Shetty is one of the important voices, including Agha Shahid Ali (1949 ), Meena Alexander (1951), Bibhu Padhi (1951) ,Vikram Seth (1952 and Intiaz Dharkar(1952). Manohar Shetty’s poetry should be considered an important contribution to the contemporary Indian poetry in English in terms of innovative language, original imagery and a fresh attitude of looking at numerous issues of life in the fast changing world around us.

Born in Bombay in 1953 and educated at the University of Bombay Shetty, a journalist in profession is now based in Goa and edits` Goa Today`, a cultural magazine. He has published four books of poetry so far including` Domestic Creatures: Poems` (Oxford University Press, Delhi 1994). He has contributed poems to numerous prestigious magazines and journals such as London Magazine (UK), Wasafiri (UK) Fulcrum (U.S.A) and Helix (Australia). His poetry has been translated into different languages as Italian, Finnish, German and Slovenian. He has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a senior Sahitya Academy Fellow. Multidimensionality is an appropriate term to describe Manohar Shetty, the man and the poet always breaking away from the world of familiarity and boundary. Reading Manohar Shetty is a great rewarding experience because his poetry is not that of a man, cocooned within the literary ambience and so called literary coterie. His poetry always is an attempt to cross the periphery of anything defined and captured within the limits of a certain genre of literature. His poetry takes us on a journey to the world of wonder and discovery and to that of experience, often cleaned of dirt of modern life by the sparkling innocence, temporarily achieved through recollection of our dreams of childhood days. In Shetty the world of innocence and that of experience often meet at a point and the journey of life comes lively in the course of his linguistic voyage.

Shetty’s approach is one without rhetorical flourishes but his deceptive simplicity soon changes into a complexity of feelings and realization for a sensitive reader. Reading of the following poem attests to these observations:

There’s a nursery outside

With flowers drooling,

And shaking their heads

Over the tall hedge.

I’ve tried to identify

Them by name; some,

I see, have turned

Very red; most are all too,

Common; a few, I suspect,

Speak to themselves

At night. I met

The gardener

This morning. He spread his

Palms out towards me.

I noticed that all his

Fingers were green. (p31)1

In the poem Shetty has presented a simple everyday experience of meeting a gardener. But the experience achieved a metaphysical dimension ultimately. In other ways the meeting with the gardener becomes a surreal experience because the gardener with green fingers seen to be an extraordinary identity  or beyond-nature phenomenon which one can meet in his deepest unconsciousness. In Shetty the surreal comes easily to the plane of the real without necessitating specific language and formal design of presenting anything beyond the natural and the realistic.

Manohar Shetty looks at things differently way and a new perspective of life and reality emerges out of simple things. His curious eyes are as if those of a sensitive child looking into the inner moving world of a bioscope. And so, the everyday world appears in new apparel in Shetty’s poetry. A woodpecker as Shetty discovers it to be a  bird with ‘scintillating scissors’ and ‘luminous eyes’ Shetty writes in ‘Four Comic Strips’ :

The woodpecker’s eyes are

Dripping aureoles, her beak

Scintillating scissors.

She clings to a bole

Of bored holes; the garden

Rake of her eyelashes close:

She dreams she’s tunnelled

Through the earth;

Her luminous dyes stares

From the end of the world. (p46)2

The surprise at the end gets the readers overwhelmed with a joy of exploration and the image of the woodpecker now grows to be a sign which signifies and suggests many things ranging from the spirit of perennial search to the stuffed storehouse of human psyche.

Reflections on childhood constitute the subject of many of Shetty’s poems. And it is not always found that Shetty necessarily idealizes the childhood. Rather Shetty often discovers the world of experience in childhood. He writes in the poem ‘Fireflies’:

I had felt nothing then.

Only a small pang for the loss

Of a schoolboy’s ornament. But now,

Travelling my daily groove

In the hunt for food and habitat

I remember their trapped lights.

(P-11)³

Memories play a pivotal role in shaping the poetic consciousness of Shetty. They occupy a very important space in Shetty’s poetry. Bruce King, an eminent scholar in his book ‘Modern Indian Poetry in English’ writes:

Memories of past experience are brought into the present to become the subject for reflection. The child’s cruelty towards the firefly is innocent as the child is only aware of a desired attractiveness by contrast the adult, knowing what it is like to be caged into a routine made necessary by the economics of survival, no longer is innocent and sees himself in the trapped applied insects. (P-141)⁴

Recollection of childhood here speaks of a tragic sense. The child who used to get the insects trapped has now got himself trapped in the web of life’s complexities and falsities. Trapping is found to be a recurrent metaphor in the poetic oeuvre of Manohar Shetty. In this world of neo-colonialism, open market and globalization, each human individual finds himself or herself trapped in an overwhelming trap, working cinematically everywhere in the world. Shetty’s ‘firefly’ in that sense has become a metaphor of globalised man trapped in the web of information explosion.

Shetty has written a number of beautiful love poems. Love, in Shetty’s poetry blooms to the fullest through a sexual journey. References to ‘boats’, ‘bridges’, ‘beach’, and ‘oysters’ in his love poems heighten the spirit of engaging natural forces in the act of physical union. Physical cognation does not end here in sexual pleasure but uplifts the souls to some liberating feeling. Shetty here with adequate craftsmanship depicts the marriage of two souls in the poem ‘The Boats’:

They lie tied to swirling beds.

Toss in the restless darkness.

Cupped brows chiselled

For movement. They

Lurch closer, bodies chafe

And whisper, wince at each

Touch of the wind.

Rooted to stillness,

Salt festers in their ribs.

The grey waters wrinkle.

Their bones twitch.

Thrash as the moon-chained

Tide deepens to darken

Eel-scaled waves. (P-18)⁵

Intensity of feeling and physical vitality makes the poem tense and vibrant. Sensual images and those natural are amalgamated with such skill that human body has become a symbol of Nature itself. Shetty’s love poems are wonderful literary pieces which carefully combine deep insights and descriptive vividness. Life is a wonder which is to be discovered and lived. Shetty’s poetry helps us explore our everyday life in a different light. Life is a vibrant experience which Shetty’s poetry attests to. This vibrancy is to be found in another poem titled ‘Gifts’:

You unfold, like starfish,

On a beach, your touch

Strills the rumpled sea,

Hair plastered sea-weed.

I come from the labyrinths:

Traffic lights park in my eyes

Before I cross, highways fork

And stream like veins in my hand.

You hunger for a blade of grass

In the welter of concrete,

I step on softening sand

Suspiciously. Together

We trace a bridge: you pick

A shell translucent as neon,

And I a tribal earring

Reflected in plate glass. (P-24)⁶

‘Jackfruit’ is another brilliant poem in which one can experience intensity of Shetty’s poetic imagination which can easily lifts the commonplace to the level of sensitive evocation. Shetty’s imagination easily converts the simple act of breaking-up-a-ripe jackfruit into two halves an emotional search. He writes:

My hands grope in the wholesome

innards, the golden slippery ligaments,

the litter of flesh-coloured seeds,

the plucked flesh heaped in a bowl,

the pimpled carapace

like something disembowelled. (P-58)⁷

Manohar Shetty’s world is a world of the mundane reality around us but here boredom has the potentiality for blooming into wonders and meaningfulness. Shetty can take us by surprise by using startling images and exploring new perspectives into life we know and live every day. The poem ‘Dialogue with a Child’ speaks highly of Shetty’s different ways of looking at things:

And inside the glass

Paperweight the flowers

Are frozen.

No, they’re not rings

In the tree stump

But my footprints. (P-70)⁸

Here Shetty has attempted to depict the world of childhood innocence. But this innocence is somewhat tinged with sadness and a sense of great emotional loss. Ripeness is achieved at the cost of childhood innocence and suffering.

In the space of post Ezekiel-Mahapatra-Ramanujan’s Indian Poetry in English Manohar Shetty occupies an important space because of his introduction of a variety of new subjects to the realm of modern English poetry and his minute observation of the life and the world around. Not only that. Shetty has expanded the tradition of minimalism, an art practiced and exacted to a large extent by A.K.Ramanujan. But Ramanujan’s appeal is often on our intellect, Shetty’s on our intellect and emotion combined.

To read Shetty is to take a journey to the world of unexpected revelations. In his world a jackfruit is a ‘maternal fruit’, ‘rings in the tree stamp are footprints’, spider a ‘jiggling asterisk’. All meaning ambiguity and rhetorical grandeur are conspicuously absent in his poetry. Exactness is the motto of Shetty’s poetic art. But Shetty always succeeds to lift the simple world to the level of into multicoloured suggestiveness. Shetty’s images do not get the readers tied to a single perspective but encourages them to proceed further and explore a new territory of meaning and aesthetic enjoyment. His is a poetic world, a journey which amply records the movements of a sensitive self.

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Bibliography

1.       Domestic Creatures : Poems Manohar Shetty

Oxford University Press, 1994, P-31

2.       Ibid 46

3.       Ibid 11

4.       Modern Indian Poetry in English – Bruce King

Oxford University Press

Revised Edition Paperback,

Second impression, 2006, (p 141)

5.       Domestic Creatures : Poems, Manohar Shetty

Oxford University Press, 1994, P-18

6.       Ibid 24

7.       Ibid 58

8.       Ibid 70.