“The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.” –Robert Graves
A week or so ago, our government sponsored an event that commemorated “World Poetry Day”. But for some reason I didn’t notice any Hindu participation. Did the organisers know that every Hindu text – which is chanted, recited, sung and analysed every day, across the country – is in the form of poetry? Were they invited or does the government go along with the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ divide?
Well we Hindus don’t even call what we practice a ‘religion’: we talk about our ‘way of life’, or ‘tradition’ or our “Sanaatan Dharma” – the eternal path. These thoughts came to my mind, because my family is preparing for a pooja today (Saturday), the last night of Nav Raatri tonight and the birth of Shri Ram tomorrow. And every book we had to look up was written in beautiful poetry.
Hindus hold that our earliest religious texts were apprehensions of a reality that transcended the limitations of a finite mind. So they generally chose poetry to convey their findings – since poetry, very properly, does not describe truth but seek to connote and invoke feelings so that the truth is experienced at the deepest levels of the psyche.
Our philosophy does not concede explanations only to reason. For this reason, all of our ‘religious’ presentations are actually performances that involve, singing, chanting, sounds of bells and conches, the smell of incense and the touch of all sorts of offerings to the deities. All the senses are involved – especially the sight of the Murtus – to supplement the direst apprehension of the truth embodied in the poetry.
Those writers that kept up the Sanaatan Dharma are all called “kavis” – poets. Valmiki is called the Adi Kavi – the first poet and the unit of poetry he wrote his text – the Ramayan has a very wonderful story attached. The shloka as it is called came to his mind spontaneously when he saw the grief of a bird whose mate was killed.
The Ramayan – written in Sanskrit – was retold numerous times in the following two millennia. The retelling that is most popular in Guyana is that of Sri Tulsidas – the Ram Charit Manas, written almost five hundred years ago. He of course set it to poetry but the language was that of the ordinary folks.
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