issue 22: winter 2020
The Dom of Manikarnika: Four Poems from Magadh
Translated from the Hindi by Rahul Soni
The People of Magadh
The people of Magadh
are sorting the bones of the dead
Which ones are Ashoka’s?
And Chandragupta’s?
No, no,
these can’t be Bimbisara’s
they are Ajatashatru’s,
the people of Magadh say shedding tears
It’s natural
those who have seen a man alive
only they
can see him dead
those who haven’t seen him alive
how can they see him dead?
Just yesterday
the people of Magadh
saw Ashoka
going to Kalinga
returning from Kalinga
Chandragupta riding his horse to Takshashila
Bimbisara
in tears Ajatashatru
flexing his muscles
The people of Magadh
had seen
and they
can’t forget
that they had seen
those who
can no longer
be found
(1984)
Justice in Kashi
The council has been dismissed
Councillors, let’s go
What had to happen happened
Why then the long faces?
Why the wavering?
What are we afraid of?
We did not judge –
merely nodding in agreement is not judgement
We didn’t even give it a moment’s thought
The debaters debated what did we do?
What’s our fault?
We don’t call the council
We don’t judge
We come to Kashi
once a year
to say only this –
The council is unnecessary
everyone has already
been judged before they were born
(1984)
Questions from Friends
Friends,
it is meaningless to say
I’m coming back.
The question is: where are you going?
Friends,
it is pointless to say
I’m moving with the times.
The question is: are the times changing you
or are you
changing the times?
Friends,
it is meaningless to say
I’ve reached home.
The question is:
where will you go next?
(1984)
The Dom of Manikarnika
The dom often tells Manikarnika,
Manikarnika
don’t be sad,
sadness does not become you
There are burning ghats
where not one corpse arrives
and even if it does,
it isn’t bathed
in the Ganga
What else
can the dom say,
who else
but a dom can stay
alone
at Manikarnika
Manikarnika, don’t be sad,
sadness is not
for you
It is for
the corpse-bearers
it was for those
they left behind
Yet, they are fortunate
they get to leave
their sadness to you
Manikarnika
Manikarnika
don’t be sad,
sadness does not become us
There are doms
whose eyes turn to stone
waiting for corpses
but no corpse arrives –
what else can the dom say?
(1984)
These translations are excerpted from Magadh (Almost Island Books, 2013).
Shrikant Verma (1931-86) was a central figure in the Nai Kavita movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, he did his Masters in Hindi from Nagpur University in 1956, then moved to New Delhi, where he worked in journalism and politics. Verma served as special correspondent for Dinman, a major Hindi periodical, from 1966 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha on a Congress (I) ticket, and served as an official and spokesman of the party through the late 1970s to the early 80s. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry, of which the most important are Jalasaghar (1973) and Magadh (1984). The latter, a ground-breaking work that remains one of the best-known books in contemporary Hindi poetry. Verma was a visitor at the Iowa International Writing Program twice (1970-71 and 1978), and won the Tulsi Puraskar (1976), the Kumaran Asan Award, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (posthumously, for "Magadh", in 1987).
Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He has edited an anthology of Hindi poetry in English translation, Home from a Distance (2011), and translated Shrikant Verma’s collection of poetry, Magadh (2013), Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (2013), a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry A Name for Every Leaf (2016), and Pankaj Kapur’s novella Dopehri (2019).