Yuyutsu R D Sharma

Kathmandu,

Knowing major Nepali poet Ishwore Ballab can be an engrossing as well as a taxing experience. This 60-year-old poet can easily charm you with his endearing voice and awesome presence. In spite of his formidable big-brotherly image, he can win you over with his intimate talks.

When it comes to poetry, its meaning, craft and art, Ballab can abruptly grow stern and frustrate you ruthlessly, leaving you wondering if he’s the same Ishwore Dai with the simple, amicable smile. You wonder if it’s the mask or the face behind the mask that you have been face to face with all these years.

This complex identity goes back to his origins; his early childhood days when his father, a community pundit, priest and politician Murali Dhar Bhattarai unknowingly performed an artistic feat that was to alter the course of the boy Ballab.

Ishwore’s father, who used to play the harmonium and sing devotional songs to the devotees of Jaisidewal, collected these songs and published them under young Ishwore’s name. This incident was instrumental in changing Iswore’s life. He decided to become a real poet and write a book of his own. From the position of a poet ‘by proxy’ to the real poet and protagonist of his nation, Ballab’s life has certainly not been easy.

As Ballab grew up, he faced another calamity that ravaged his psyche permanently. One day his father brought home a second wife, upsetting the harmony of their lives. Ballab’s own mother, Newar by caste, suffered pangs of loneliness and in desperation committed suicide. “She sliced her throat with a khukuri,” recollects Ballab. The incident resulted in the disintegration of a young childhood. Ballab spent most of his youth after that in

India, in Varanasi and Darjeeling where he taught Nepali and met his life.

Recreating the details of his mother’s loneliness, causes Ballab to grow restless. Silence leaps from his eyes. He realises how his mother’s dominant Newar culture has remained impinged on his psyche. “She came from the family of Udas merchants to a Brahmin’s house. She was a proud woman and suffered alone,” shares Ballab.

It was during his self-exile in Darjeeling that Ballab started writing poetry. His first poem was published in 1956.

In the year 1963, he was associated with ‘Tesro Aayam’, a modernist literary movement called ‘Third Dimension’. “I have been called a prisoner of this movement. People have tried to pigeonhole me into it but I think I have used it to speak out my truths. At the same time I didn’t have to become an Ayameli first to become a poet.”

Though in the contemporary context, the Ayameli movement appears naïve and formulaic, the first of its kind in the history of Nepali literature that heralded intellectual experimentation in poetry in the fashion of Western modernists. “It tried to see man,” claims Ballab “in totality.”

“A poem can’t be for a common man. Its concerns can’t be for the average man but of man. It cannot speak on his behalf, or for him, it can only ask him to come and sit by my side. How can you talk of poetry as a commonplace thing?”

Interestingly, Ballab’s new poetry collection has been titled ‘Dhuwa ko Jungle’ (Forest of Smoke). As one turns over the pages of the book, one realises how dense that jungle of smoke is. Ballab refuses to embrace contemporary reality directly or discreetly and page after page keeps playing with images of rivers, mountains, skies and flowers, the images that have become clichés in Nepali poetry.

He refuses to acknowledge due debt to modern masters. “I want to be known as Ishwore Ballab, not as Devkota. Do I have to learn any thing from Rimal or Bhupi? I don’t see a drop in Devkota. What has an Ayameli to do with these poets?” On metre, he’s very harsh. “Those who use metres are occupied with a set of fixed frames. Each poem needs a separate metre.”

Under the influence of western obscurantists and advocates of pure poetry, Ballab keeps speaking in a vacuum. His works do not suck their energies from real life contexts, since he doesn’t have a specific reader as target, he turns out to be obscure, incomprehensive and repetitive.

He refuses to translate himself to a common reader, meaning turns out to be his creative world’s first casualty. He wanders in halls of foreign forms, sleeps in the lanes of Noah, Jarasandh and Sisyphus dreaming of Eliot, Pound and Proust.

It is only his name bearing the warranty of his lifetime’s commitment to Nepali literature that lures you to go through the book. If one were to remove his name, from the poems, it would become difficult to plod through the rugged terrains of his creative world. — yuyutsurd@yahoo.com