In 1974 I was sixteen and the poems of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar were the furniture of my mind. We learned them by rote for the board exam. We recited them in school assemblies. I can still, without effort, say the first forty lines of Kurukshetra.
For decades afterwards I did not read Dinkar at all. One does not, as a rule, return to the texts of one’s forced youth. I read Muktibodh; I read Agyeya; I read Shamsher. Dinkar stayed on the shelf — a handsome, silent spine.
This winter, for reasons I cannot now reconstruct, I took down the Rashmirathi and read it aloud, in an empty room, at the speed of a man of sixty-two. It was not the poem I remembered. The martial music was still there, but under it there was something else I had been unable to hear at sixteen — a long, measured grief.
The Karna of Rashmirathi is not the Karna of the school recitation. He is not primarily a warrior; he is a man who has spent his entire life being asked to be less than what he is, and who has agreed. His anger is not the anger of battle. It is the older, quieter anger of a man who has been unrecognised.
The curriculum committees of the 1970s, in their wisdom, assigned us the most thunderous passages. A sixteen-year-old boy wants to be thunderous. A sixty-two-year-old man wants, mostly, to have been recognised. The poem I once recited in a school assembly is not the poem I now read at sixty-two. The words have not changed. I have.
Dinkar’s reputation has suffered from his uses. He was too useful to too many states. But the poems, read slowly, in an empty room, turn out to have survived their uses. There is a literary critic’s argument here, about the separability of the text from the politics of its circulation. I will write it elsewhere. Here I only want to say that I was wrong to leave him on the shelf.
The poem I once recited in a school assembly is not the poem I now read at sixty-two. The words have not changed. I have.