Aditya Bahl
july 1938
quit the job at badnagar
________
october 1938
arrive at shujalpur mandi
a verdant country
on the railway line
b/w ujjain and bhopal
here, the municipality
runs a small middle-school:
SHARDA SHIKSHA SADAN
spring 1939
quit the job at shujalpur mandi
________
september 1941
quit the job at daulatganj middle school
________
october 1941
return to
SHARDA SHIKSHA SADAN
the headmaster, dr. joshi
scholar of bergson
devoted to gandhi
the assistant lecturer, nemichandra jain
disgruntled w/ gandhi
devoted to marx
and watched by the british spies
earning 45 rupees per month
five rupees more
even than the headmaster
me, the teacher-clerk
earning a pittance
and devoted to poetry
________
november 1941
every evening
we begin running
classes for
women
comrade kusum joshi
comrade rekha jain
comrade shanta muktibodh
& others
passing plates of
roasted peanuts
in a circle
we some
times sing
the profit rate is falling down
falling down
falling down
the profit rate is falling down
falling down
falling down
& OTHER MISCELLANIOUS RHYMES
composed by nemi babu
to please and provoke
but most of all
to expedite
the learning of
the english language
__________
BUT I HAVE NO
RECOLLECTION OF
HAVING EVER CALLED
SHANTA, MY WIFE,
COMRADE
__________
august 1942
the rebellion
70 police stations destroyed
85 government buildings burned
250 railway stations damaged
550 post offices attacked
2500 telegraph lines cut
we are all about
to become revolutionaries
but i quit my job
bankrupt
and 25 rupees in
debt to the school
…
but the pestilent postcolony slept
thru the English dictionary
and woke up
circa 1954
to the sounds of
the hero of
an epic poem
haranguing the gods
in a different language
you forty meters of linen
you one kg of iron ore
you bent under
the gunny sack
on this green slope
you lain under
the chevy dodge
on this factory floor
you planet of slums
you planet of fields
you furnace of twenty-one brahmanda
you furnace of twenty-two brahmanda
why
why is the price of wheat rising?
his vehement passions
expressed in strong
words measured precisely
in just cadence with
proper accents spoken
in a different language
circa 1954
in order to find out why
he goes down to the market
neither to buy nor to sell
but to anonymously write
in a different language
an essay titled
WHY IS THE PRICE OF WHEAT RISING?
for a small magazine
published in a different language
and earn some pittance
to buy some wheat
for his wife
to grind and
knead
back when this was still
possible
back when independence was still
a thing
and poverty was still
a sign of socialism
agrarian again
sundry less than free
countries hunger
more than the body
it is the count that hurts
the world as it is
millions of billions of
mouths—one
peninsular blur—see for
yourself a loss so
complete—there’s
nothing left
to sing—only today’s
newspapers
despair the PL 480
P for
public—and at
the thought of
Law the lyric begins
to worsen
my comrades reason
why
our sovereignty runs
dry
into the sea
is this the cunning
of reason
seeming
in these spasming
waters there’s some
where a border
hidden from form
only, punning on liquid
ity won’t stop
it
from working
comrade
although punning on
the tempest
might
dare i say
***
consider a joke
circa 1962
three PL 480 ships enter
a sea
circling the sub
continent carrying heavily
subsidized chickenfeed
rumored to be rougher
than the roughest roughage
chickens can tolerate
what is dollar
what is dominance
some gruel
optimism for
the natives’ gizzards
the natives’ caeca
***
lying on a bed
i have not left in three
days hiding
from a street lined with
ten creditors
one barber
two grocers
five american
presbyterians
walking around
counting my
nation’s surplus
cattle
beneath the bed
a stray dog in
heat whimpers
by my feet
a frail buffalo
masticates
the wet air
in the aazaan
pauses the kabaadiwallah
calls
dead flies
limn
the sill
the periphery
the periphery of
the sill
only
the ships
the ships
never
anchor
Note: These are excerpts from an ongoing project titled Mukt, which involves writing through a short poem by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh,
a leading Hindi-language poet and Marxist thinker in India. In several letters and diaries, Muktibodh avers that his poems refuse to end, or
that he is unable to write short poems, even suggesting that his shorter poems are actually incomplete drafts of longer projects. Building on
Muktibodh’s decolonial commitments to the Indian epic tradition, I had planned to rewrite one of his shorter poems—“Ek Aroop Shunya Ke
Prati” (“To a Formless Void”), all of 121 lines short—into a long, very long poem in the English language. I had wanted to make this poem even
more incomplete. But what started out as a formal experiment has since become entwined with several other threads. The personal life of
Muktibodh. His writings on global politics and economy. His undiscovered poems. The everyday context in which my own ”translation”
unfolded (where I lived, what I ate, who I met). A Marxist collective which ran a short-lived workers’ newspaper. An upper-caste child who
grew up performing epic poems in a factory town. The Maoist guerrillas who now wage an armed struggle exactly where Muktibodh once
lived and wrote. All this (and more) became part of the epic’s weave. An excerpt from this project will be published as a chapbook by
Organism for Poetic Research in fall 2021.
Aditya Bahl is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including NAME/AMEN (Timglaset, Malmö,
2019) and Mukt (Organism for Poetic Research, NYC, forthcoming). He has written about literature
and politics for New Left Review, Verso, The New Inquiry, Spectre, Himal Southasian, and other
publications. He is a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, and is associate editor for
English Literary History.