Each Day is a Song Somehere

Title of the collection of poems: Faithfully, I Await (2017)

        -By Jaydeep Sarangi

--Reviewed by Daya Dissanayake, Srilanka

Jaydeep Sarangi is a poet I have admired for many years, ever since I came across his writings but I met him in person much later, and realized he fits the image I had of the poet I had met in cyberspace. I admire him for his writings and translations of the plight of the suppressed and oppressed classes, and taking Indian writings to Australia, building a bridge between the two countries. His poetry has been acclaimed in many countries across the world. As a poet who has unlocked his own heart, through cleverly constructed word patterns he subtly unlocks the hearts of those of us who reads his poems.

To Sarangi,  “poetry is a holy and beautiful dream”,  a dream he shares with all of us ever so skillfully. In his latest collection of poetry, aptly titled 'Faithfully, I Wait' which are poems on rain, thunder and lightening at Jhargram and beyond. In the poem titled Love and Longing in Jhargram, he takes us all to Jhargram many decades ago, where; Beautiful sunsets need cloudy sky,

history walks through the corridor

of uncertainties, after the October rain.

The images he created came alive to me even while I read it at my home in Sri Lanka. Even before I read the line that explained what Jhargram means I sensed that it simply has to be, “where everything ends with love”.

Sarangi identifies himself with the rickshaw puller, the sweeper, the angry Dalit, the thief and even the writer by the name of Bengal “all are me”. 

What wall awaits us, Giddy?

Slaves drifting, dalits piercing,

rhyming with the wind and chance (Leaders Trading)

I’m a squatter in a group of poets in Kolkata, Bangla poets.

Evening gatherings run deep in my blood

Joy makes no joy. Teesta floods blood. I write elegies.  (A Caretaker)

This empathy we find in all his writings, as only a true poet could make the reader too become the rickshaw puller and all the other victims of a society suffering from empathy deficit.

He is in search of a literary consort,  as well. ““Write on” moves my heart to Write for a literary consort somewhere, words move towards words”. When words mingle with words, the readers too mingle with the other readers, through the poet.

“Where there is food, there is violence”, he writes, and sums up in that one short line the entire violent history of mankind, as it is food that made man greedy and envious, explained by the Buddha in the Agganna Sutta in the Digha Nikaya. But a poet would never be hungry.

“A poet has no home, Only a quest— Waiting, faithfully”, because his home is the whole wide universe, the sky is his roof. And here too we find how hopeful Sarangi is. The greatness is to express that in so few words.

“One tree is one new arrival, of fresh living, on the fields of the dead. A tree is green hope, for dying rivers and drying minds” Sarangi takes us to his old Jhargram and the little river and reminds all of us  through his poems, that “Green ways saves life, saves rivers, oceans and dreams”.

Though he says, “I need a key. It opens gates of borders. Between minds, hearts,” Sarangi has already found the key to cross all borders, physical, racial and political. He continues in another poem, “My poems are doors, You are my guest, from the country of hope”. In most of his poems we see this hope, the hope for a better and wonderful world.

After so many years my boat is free.

It takes to its own course

Under the alien sky, gardens unseen.

I believe that we should translate Sarangi's poems to other languages so that 'each day is a song somwhere' to all of us on planet earth.

The book is available via online stores: https://www.amazon.in/Faithfully-I-Wait-Jaydeep-Sarangi/dp/9386653176

Stories of Social Awakening: Reflections of Dalit Refugee Lives of Bengal

Paperback – 2017, Authorspress, New Delhi

    --by Jatin Bala (Author), Jaydeep Sarangi (Editor)

Jatin Bala (1949- ) is an award winning Bengali Dalit author. He had faced the gory violence of Bengal partition. Crossing the borders with his family, he has spent years shuttling between refugee camps in West Bengal. He has taken active part in many refugee movements demanding fundamental human rights. At present, Bala is the author of fourteen books and an autobiography. Dalita Sahitya Aandalan (Dalit Literary Movement), a collection of research articles, is of paramount importance in the field of dalit studies.

About the Editor

Jaydeep Sarangi is a senior faculty, Department of English, Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri College (University of Calcutta).Kolkata, India. He can be reached at: jaydeepsarangi@gmail.com

About the Book

Jatin Bala's stories hold truth. These stories capture life's black holes at different points, life of a refugee struggling for survival. Some stories explore pangs and angst of a dalit surviving in a non dalit milieu. They are part of human literature. Some stories conceive the position of the liminal people placed on the thin edge between visibility and invisibility, between survival and death, between nothing and something. Stories in this collection go beyond any particular tag. They are universal in appeal. Translators and the editor) have tried to keep the flavour and sentiments intact.

>Endorsement by Arjun Dangle, the editor of Poisoned Bread.

 Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.in/Stories-Social-Awakening-Reflections-Refugee/dp/9352075439/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494751743&sr=1-1

 A DOOR SOMEWHERE?

                                         POEMS BY JAYDEEP SARANGI

CYBERWIT.NET, 2014,ISBN 978-81-8253-490-2

Reviewed by

Edyta WIĘCŁAWSKA

University of Rzeszów,Poland

            The volume of poems under review is a collection of thoughts that present a new look at the aspects of life that have always been reflected upon. Although the poet puts himself in a modest position choosing for his motto the words by A.D. Hope emphasising – by analogy to the power of nature – the helplessness of a man to describe the reality, the poems prove to be a very thought-provoking and pleasant material for highly intellectual readers.

The topics touched upon are said – by the poet himself – to have been triggered by past memories and experiences. The theme of the past recurs in a number of poems. For example, in the poem Small Things in Life the poet uses phrases like ‘old castles live with memories’ and ‘ancient ghosts are chanting’. In the same poem we read that the past comes to us through the open door or windows. There is also a reference to ‘unlocking the past’.

The motive of a door seems to be recurring throughout the volume. The image of door is a way to present life as a continuum. We wait in front of the door, cross the threshold and face new challenges. The poet says ‘I do not know his tomorrow behind the door’ in Mysteries of the Door. In the same poem the readers get the image of the door that is open or locked. Entering new sphere of possibilities is perceived as embarking on a journey. We read about people who wait and then leave the station (Small Things in Life).

            The reflections seem to be even more authentic for those who can trace some autobiographical elements in the poems by Jaydeep Sarangi. In My Old Chariot roads […] carry me and my daughter’. Likewise, in Small Things in Life the author provides us with the picture of sitting and talking with his daughter (‘I sat with my daughter who kept talking’). Finally, A Mirror includes the picture of his daughter tracing white lines on his head. The authenticity of the poetry is enhanced by the promise the poet makes in Small Things in Life: Now I don’t look for a by-pass everywhere. It’s straight from my heart’.

            The poems are to be appreciated for their rhetorics. The author uses a variety of linguistic devices to convey his reflections. For example, whispering time in My Old Chariot, the river that greets the poet in A Door  and the day growing older in Day Breaking stand for cases of personifications. In general, the metaphorics of the poems under review is very rich and the images sketched by the poet may be said to be triggered by a variety of conceptual links. Hence, to illustrate, the overwhelming silence is referred to as ‘blanket of silence’ in My Old Chariot. Notably, the rain-based metaphorics is particularly favoured by the poet. Hence we have ‘rain of images’ in A Door, ‘rain-lashed trees’ in A Letter to God, ‘words don’t rain surprise’ in A Mirror and ‘wet trees looked at me in amazement’ in Each Time.

There are also instances of taste metaphor. Here belong, for instance, sweet face mentioned in My Old Chariot, thoughts that are swallowed, as written in For a Postman, hungry eyes in Mystery of the Land and honey dreams referred to in Sleep.

In synthesis it needs to be emphasised that the poetry by Jaydeep Sarangi has much of a clam-down effect. It puts the reader in a state of harmony, belief and trust for the good things to come. Things which are important to all of us are said to come to us in a natural way, just as the sun comes after a spell of bad weather. The message communicated in the poems is delivered with unique freshness. Reading about serious philosophical issues the reader feels relaxed and positive. This may be said to be the result of the sincerity of thought and the richness of green and rainy imagery, as delivered by the poet, which – by the way – brings to us the taste of India.

Silent Days: Review

Silent Days : Poems by Jaydeep Sarangi . Cyberwit.net , Allahabad . (2013 ) P.b.68pp.ISBN : 978-81-8253-396-7. Rs.200/-

 

 By Dr Pradip Kr Patra, Professor of English

Bodoland University, Kokrajhar-783370 , Assam           

Silent Days is all about memorable days, sweet moment or otherwise the author’s yearning for the best moment of life. It is quite clear that for the poet the present moment is not as good as the past. But he doesn’t moan over. He gives the impression that the past is as concrete as anything. It is as real as the present. In one of the poems, ‘Flight’, the poet compares the state of being in ‘flight’ with the ‘rock’. It is that status of soaring high which is important, not the lifelessness the rock. For the poet, greater is the pleasure of going above ‘stagnant knowledge’. The poet’s covert yearning for knowledge in democratic spirit is discernible. As a sequel to the said poem, ‘The Guest’ is  one of the important poems in this anthology. In a casual manner Sarangi tells the story of time. Through the poem, he tells the story of the individuals who are usually scared of the time moving very fast. Implicitly, the poet expresses the fear of his thoughts having taking him altogether in a different direction because of the acceleration of time . Time may be a big factor responsible for change. But, it is not that time castrates everything. Sarangi has certain moments of life which time cannot erase. ‘The Red Soil Allure’ is one such poem that brings a turning point in the life of the poet. For him, ‘the red soil’ is drenched in emotion. It is the emotion of a son towards the mother that trickles down. The poet has a conflict within himself: of nature and spontaneity in one hand and the process of being civilized on the other. The nature and culture conflict is very prominently portrayed in ‘Missed Calls’. Sarangi compares and contrasts busy and hectic life in one hand with that of the innocence of his child who like the grown-ups doesn’t hanker after anything other than colour pencils. The poet also points out the desire both of  grown-ups and children. The desires of children are so simple, whereas that of gown-ups so complex. By choosing the title, ‘Missed Calls’ ( of the poet’s child ) the author rather hints at his own yearning for innocence.

            In ‘I’m on your Side’, the poet elaborately depicts what he has portrayed rather implicitly in ‘The Red Soil Allure’. Here is the celebration of tribal village life. The poet’s sophisticated self goes spontaneously back to ‘red soil’, ‘of herbs numberless’, ‘earthen cottage’, ‘cool shade’, ‘small river’, ‘windy past’ and ‘rains’ etc. With heart and soul, he remains in such natural ambience.

            As he proceeds, the poet appears to have matured in course of time. In ‘Growing Old with Time’ he acquires greater experiences of life. He has realized what actually time is. He has also had the realization that time is a great leveller: years of isolation and stagnation may end surprisingly. Hence, he justifies the title of the poem, ‘Growing Old with Time’.

            It is not just the experiences and realization of life , the poet rather moves towards freedom, not just physical, but also spiritual, the yearning of which even on the part of a prisoner can contribute to the making of history as it is reflected in the poem, ‘Small Rivers of the Mind’.

            The title poem, ‘Silent Days’, in a way, is all about the convictions of life. Days keep passing in a sequential manner. It is not possible to cut the sequence of life. Life is holistic. Bypassing a small portion means disrupting the whole. What we consider to be old has its repercussion upon the new.  Hence, it is not just the poem, ‘Silent Days’, but also the collection of poems entitled, Silent Days reflects not only the poet’s way of looking at the world, colouring it with wisdom, but also gradual development of his own self. It makes a good reading which will have a positive impact up on the readers and energize their thought process.

When Silent days Communicate

SILENT DAYS REVIEW
by Prof. Dr. Sunil Sharma

 

Silent Days. Jaydeep Sarangi. Allahabad: Cyberwit.Net. 2013.
ISBN: 978-81-8253-396-7. Pp68. Price: Rs. 200/-. Print.

There are times when days fall silent and they speak through a vibrating silence − like a cell-phone kept on silent mode but vibrating at the incoming calls. It is up to the receiver to accept the call/s or reject them, depending on the context and the caller ID. In case of a poet − especially versatile Jaydeep sarangi with increasing global visibility and credibility as a thinker-poet and critic − the temptation to let go by such silent alerts is difficult and despite being busy with a thousand of mundane jobs that we all are condemned to execute Sisyphus-like in our post-modern, one-dimensional, everyday existence on a degrading planet, we latch on to such fleeting moments and snatches of conversations.

Jaydeep Sarangi  − JS to close friends − does that precisely. Working multiple roles as an essayist, critic, editor, traveler, writer, poet, reviewer, interviewer, teacher, mentor and friend, the man from Dublong to Beas does another literary feat at a high-altitude and conducts us to a rarefied field − perhaps at 50,000-feet above earth-level where sound-barriers are breached by a soaring mind of a poet in a trance and entering a different realm visited by the early Greeks and Shakespeare, among a notable number of astral visitors from the terra firma − of communing with life! His slim collection called teasingly Silent days captures the days falling silent and interacting with a hungry poetic soul in a gentle absence − the verbal lack. The clarifying non-verbal spaces were/ are glimpsed by the meditating monks. He plumbs and probes those inner depths of everyday realities, the angst of our middle-class urban existence, the value of non-verbal communication, delight of pursuing arts and the overall meaning of being alive in a stressful moment of history searching for ideals, and brings up pearls from such expeditions to those dim regions.

His messianic role of a reader/poet is summed up in these elegant lines:

My Dream
It is my dream,
My hungry heart can swallow
The whole world
Of poems and rhymes.
I can arrange the dreams
Of Indian youth
In indigenous ink,
A narrative that lay bare to readers,
I do not know how what you feel
And what makes you weep.
I only reconstruct your stories
And flimsy history. (P. 18)

Here you can hear a post-colonial critic of repute translating the dynamics of that complex of ideas into a flow simple, yet powerful, like the waves of the Beas. The role of a poet is also carefully undermined by claiming the inability/unwillingness to know the reasons for the alienation of Indian youth and a claim to represent their pain/angst/anger causing tears from a cultivated distance through re-constructions of flimsy history. The coinage of the term indigenous ink is striking − IWE (Indian Writing in English) − is doing that only: Crafting, re-creating, re-imagining/re-presenting Indian experience in an alien medium, a colonial language lovingly preserved and promoted in a big way in a free country, as a heirloom. This kind of subtle de-construction and critique can come from a powerful mind engaged with theory at the highest plane only and you get reminded of Eliot as a poet-critic.

Look at these lines:

I Am
It is the old attire, I touch with a pen.
Sweet song enthralls
My flesh.
And the seed speaks through the iron gates. (P. 19)

Here, the native/alien binary is hinted and re-formulated expertly in a new combination, recalling the famous Barthesian assertion that all writing ultimately becomes a rich tissue of quotations, a thing that refers back to others in a kind of intertextuality, in an age of intersecting intellectual grids and borderless conversations and exchange of trans-national ideas. Writing in another language is an eclectic act in itself and very delicate one. Native experiences and heritage get expressed in anther idiom and JS, an expert craftsman, does that act with the élan of a connoisseur.

This poignant line from Silent Days again mirrors the mood of the poet in a poise of mental alertness, trying to catch the weightless atoms/impressions falling on his lyrical Richter scale and the writer faithfully recording them for posterity: 

‘You are passing through a phase; silent days.’ (P. 26)

While reading these poems, I felt like travelling back to a country road that I often take to my office in suburban Mumbai. It is a long winding road nestling among trees and cutting through a small river gurgling its way to sea. It lies stretched between two national highways and is a short-cut. While travelling through this green zone I understand the meaning of inner/outer solitude for a fevered urban mind. For the ‘natives’ living there in the little villages in the shadows of hills, it is a natural state of being. For an ‘alien/outsider’, it is a transient state of rare silence that soothes so much − like the aanchal of an old mother.  JS is successful in re-creating that elusive mood, that mysterious moment, that strange tranquility you feel while going on a country road or watching a sun-up or a Gauguin, up close. He catches the strains that can be heard only when days suddenly become quiet and one goes inside one’s personality to fathom the inner riches stored for us all. His poems inaugurate a New Movement in IWE.

A major poet is born!

Silent Days vociferously proclaim the arrival of a genius!
 

When Silent days Communicate
by Prof. Dr. Sunil Sharma   Silent Days. Jaydeep Sarangi. Allahabad: Cyberwit.Net. 2013.
ISBN: 978-81-8253-396-7. Pp68. Price: Rs. 200/-. Print.
There are times when days fall silent and they speak through a vibrating silence − like a cell-phone kept on silent mode but vibrating at the incoming calls. It is up to the receiver to accept the call/s or reject them, depending on the context and the caller ID. In case of a poet − especially versatile Jaydeep sarangi with increasing global visibility and credibility as a thinker-poet and critic − the temptation to let go by such silent alerts is difficult and despite being busy with a thousand of mundane jobs that we all are condemned to execute Sisyphus-like in our post-modern, one-dimensional, everyday existence on a degrading planet, we latch on to such fleeting moments and snatches of conversations.

Jaydeep Sarangi  − JS to close friends − does that precisely. Working multiple roles as an essayist, critic, editor, traveler, writer, poet, reviewer, interviewer, teacher, mentor and friend, the man from Dublong to Beas does another literary feat at a high-altitude and conducts us to a rarefied field − perhaps at 50,000-feet above earth-level where sound-barriers are breached by a soaring mind of a poet in a trance and entering a different realm visited by the early Greeks and Shakespeare, among a notable number of astral visitors from the terra firma − of communing with life! His slim collection called teasingly Silent days captures the days falling silent and interacting with a hungry poetic soul in a gentle absence − the verbal lack. The clarifying non-verbal spaces were/ are glimpsed by the meditating monks. He plumbs and probes those inner depths of everyday realities, the angst of our middle-class urban existence, the value of non-verbal communication, delight of pursuing arts and the overall meaning of being alive in a stressful moment of history searching for ideals, and brings up pearls from such expeditions to those dim regions.
His messianic role of a reader/poet is summed up in these elegant lines:

My Dream
It is my dream,
My hungry heart can swallow
The whole world
Of poems and rhymes.
I can arrange the dreams
Of Indian youth
In indigenous ink,
A narrative that lay bare to readers,
I do not know how what you feel
And what makes you weep.
I only reconstruct your stories
And flimsy history. (P. 18)

Here you can hear a post-colonial critic of repute translating the dynamics of that complex of ideas into a flow simple, yet powerful, like the waves of the Beas. The role of a poet is also carefully undermined by claiming the inability/unwillingness to know the reasons for the alienation of Indian youth and a claim to represent their pain/angst/anger causing tears from a cultivated distance through re-constructions of flimsy history. The coinage of the term indigenous ink is striking − IWE (Indian Writing in English) − is doing that only: Crafting, re-creating, re-imagining/re-presenting Indian experience in an alien medium, a colonial language lovingly preserved and promoted in a big way in a free country, as a heirloom. This kind of subtle de-construction and critique can come from a powerful mind engaged with theory at the highest plane only and you get reminded of Eliot as a poet-critic.
Look at these lines:

I Am
It is the old attire, I touch with a pen.
Sweet song enthralls
My flesh.
And the seed speaks through the iron gates. (P. 19)

Here, the native/alien binary is hinted and re-formulated expertly in a new combination, recalling the famous Barthesian assertion that all writing ultimately becomes a rich tissue of quotations, a thing that refers back to others in a kind of intertextuality, in an age of intersecting intellectual grids and borderless conversations and exchange of trans-national ideas. Writing in another language is an eclectic act in itself and very delicate one. Native experiences and heritage get expressed in anther idiom and JS, an expert craftsman, does that act with the élan of a connoisseur.
This poignant line from Silent Days again mirrors the mood of the poet in a poise of mental alertness, trying to catch the weightless atoms/impressions falling on his lyrical Richter scale and the writer faithfully recording them for posterity: 

‘You are passing through a phase; silent days.’ (P. 26)

While reading these poems, I felt like travelling back to a country road that I often take to my office in suburban Mumbai. It is a long winding road nestling among trees and cutting through a small river gurgling its way to sea. It lies stretched between two national highways and is a short-cut. While travelling through this green zone I understand the meaning of inner/outer solitude for a fevered urban mind. For the ‘natives’ living there in the little villages in the shadows of hills, it is a natural state of being. For an ‘alien/outsider’, it is a transient state of rare silence that soothes so much − like the aanchal of an old mother.  JS is successful in re-creating that elusive mood, that mysterious moment, that strange tranquility you feel while going on a country road or watching a sun-up or a Gauguin, up close. He catches the strains that can be heard only when days suddenly become quiet and one goes inside one’s personality to fathom the inner riches stored for us all. His poems inaugurate a New Movement in IWE.
A major poet is born!
Silent Days vociferously proclaim the arrival of a genius!
 
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