Firecrackers, not Poems!

 

Came back from one of those small little academically oriented ‘Book release’ things, that took place in an upper room with an audience of less than four dozen people.

 A room packed with Jha-jis and bhabis, also friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and of course the culprit who invited me, the native Maithili Professor of English who fashioned this slender collection of 38 angrezi poems.

Prabhat Jha has the audacity to plunk his poems, like so many stones, into the dead sea of mainstream silence, inhabited by non-literate screen-hypnotized cyborgs, and wait for a hint of a ripple!

So here we were, in plebian Patna, this B-level city struggling in her new clothes and shiny shoes, one that has become our home. Jha says it effortlessly:

Your city is like a part of your body,

Nothing new or exciting about it,

You don’t glorify

Or feel special to see it,

But in the end, it’s a part of you…

 

In this debut collection of poems, Prabhat Jha adds a fresh dimension to English literature from Bihar, in the matter of style, subject, syntax, and an earthy syncopation with the soil of Mithila. “My love,” he writes, “can only be felt in Maithili.”

Maybe he speaks for the Bihari college student with ‘You are not the dark lady, and I am no Shakespeare’ and about a love that ‘will be temporary, mundane, fluctuating’!

There are many moods within these 72 odd pages, and why not?

Who said there are only 7 colours in the rainbow?

What about the colours in between?

Colours which are invisible?

 

Now, a thought creeps in when one reads these lines. Which colours that are invisible? My rainbow hues as a Queer person? The special colour of my mixed European and North-east Indian identity? Sneaky, isn’t it? The way this sly fox plays on everyday words. He uses them to tickle you, or fashions them into barbs, prods, tweezers, and tiny little razor-sharp piranha teeth.

Jha isn’t one of those soppy romantics that lulls you off to sleepy, picture postcard, locales. His style appears to be all over the place, random, starkly dictated by whim, and perhaps that is one of the things that is so endearing about this book. Every poem sits up and demands a second, or even a third reading.

And oh yes, it is political, definitely political, and there’s no soft-pedalling, when the muse hits, she comes in with all guns blazing. Jha blithely shoots the crap out of Patriarchy, Icons, Myths, Blind faith, and the state of Nations, with the sly simplicity, and earthiness, of a true-blue Maithili Brahmin. These poems, written over a span of 14 years, speak of desperation, disillusionment, panic, and hope.

Collision is an everyday affair

Ban Dook Dom [Bandook-dom?] is a fire-cracker of a book, with the potential to  jolt you out of your lethargy.My recommendation:  Read  Ban Dook Dom before you suffer Ban Book Dom!

Cheers!

Ban Dook Dum, poems by Prabhat Jha, Authors Press 2024, 72 pages, Rs 295.