Kolkata Classics: A Book of Verse

Poet’s Note

Why poetry? Why Kolkata? And, why poetry on Kolkata?

Before I even attempt to explain the above, I must give you a glimpse of my tryst with poetry. It isn’t any spectacular journey where one is born to a long lineage of coveted poets or writers. Rather, it is a journey of discovery; the discovery of the beauty of poetry, of its possibilities, of its many scents and hues, of its promise, of the many emotions it can evoke, of the many thoughts it can distil and of the many, many questions and ideas it can stir.

My earliest fragrances of poetry go back to ‘Madhushala’ by none other than Dr. Harivansh Rai Bachchan. Did I even know what Madhushala meant? Of course, not! But I (and many others) can’t forget the relish with which my father could recite verse after verse of it. Of the way it would light up his being when he read it over and over again.

Then there were dohas of Kabir, Rahim, Khusro, Tulsi, Nanak, Meera bai and Raskhan, amongst others. These opened up two avenues: One—since they were shorter, they were easier to commit to memory and recite. And two—though they had words that came close to Hindi, they sounded a tad different; almost folkish. That’s because a lot of their writing had a touch of Braj, Maithili and Urdu. So, one learnt to listen to and even understand different dialects, different bolis. If the home front introduced me to poetry and literature in ‘vernacular’, the school syllabus fed us with poetry by Walter de la Mare, Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and many more. Dinkar, Jaishankar Prasad, Mahadevi Verma, Nirala, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan and many others brought us closer to our cultural ethos.

Of course, there was the school prayer and song, the weekly recital of Vande Mataram and the national anthem. And how can I not mention Rabindra Sangeet! As I look back, I understand how these were some of my first group renditions of poetry and music coming together, evocatively.

Music! If there are two expressions that have been going hand-in-hand in every culture, era after era, they have to be words and music. Fortunately, we grew up in an atmosphere that had music playing all the time, much of it predominated by Hindi film songs. And many of these Hindi songs were also fabulous pieces of poetry.