“ Why did Muktibodh  became uniquely significant in the summer of 1964? Why did …almost all the weeklies, monthlies and dailies started introducing him to their readers?” Fifty years ago, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, asked this question in the preface to Chand Ka Munh Tedha hai, the first anthology of poems of Muktibodh being compiled.

Muktibodh then, was in a state of coma , being brought to Delhi from  Rajnadgaon,a small town in Chhattisgarh, by his young writer comrades – like Harishankar Parsai, Srikant Verma and Ashok Vajpeyi, in a desperate, last ditch attempt to save their beloved elder poet. It was not be . He breathed his last on 11 September, 1964 at the AIIMS , before completing his 47^th year. And in  the words of Shamsher, the story of heroic struggle of his brief life and tragic, untimely death turned him into an event for the world of Hindi literature.

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh continues to be an event of Hindi literature, the full meaning of which is still being discussed. And yet, he as a poet was not interested in portraying events . He was more interested in the drama of the human soul, rather soul of a human being, ravaged, wrecked and fatally wounded by industrial modernity. Living the life of a lower middle class family man, constantly changing jobs and places in search of  a modestly secure life which would allow him to write the kind of poetry he wanted, he witnessed  the humanness and individuality of the people being crushed under the ruthless wheels of capitalist modernity.

Muktibodh always saw people as possibilities, and it pained him to see them turning away from the challenges these possibilities threw at them, allowing themselves to sink in the abyss of ordinariness, a life which lacked courage, a life in which the body became the prison of the soul.

A poet is a collector of the fragments of these  unrealized possibilities. In a poem, titled Ek Antarkatha ( An inner story) the narrator follows his mother collecting firewood , which she explains is not dead. These are precious sensibilities, she explains, which have become dead as they  were left disused for long. People ( trees) have thrown them away. Ruling civility turns us away from them. A poet has to dig them out them from the garbage dumps of this civilization and  light them to bring warmth to dispel the coldness of modern progress and growth.

Atm (self) and Atma( soul), naturally, occur frequently in his poems leading some Marxist critics to conclude that he was  turning away from social realities.

The problem Muktibodh kept grappling with was akin to what the young Marx had posed in his 1844 manuscripts: why this distance between the social and the self? And whenever this distance is erased , why does the social always consume the self ? Marx was angry with capitalism as it never allowed the working, laboring masses to even feel what solitude is, something that had become the privilege of a few. Solitude is social, he wrote, but people are deprived of it.

Human beings are reduced to the status of laboring, producing bodies. The economic side of the being grows grotesquely disproportionate to the living, feeling side of it. Humanness has been sacrificed at the  altar of the God of Profit. It is merely a fuel for the production of a commodity , which is  again nothing but dead , alienated humanity. In a perverse way, reason has won and sensibility has been turned into its slave. Any liberatory project has to have this as its mission: restoration of the human to human beings.

One is not sure whether Muktibodh ever knew about the 1844 manuscripts of Marx. Not that it was necessary. He understood with the wisdom of  a poet, that the responsibility of perpetuating  a system of dead souls cannot be laid only at the door of outside, objective economic and social forces. One has to accept that it was in fact our decisions, or our refusal to take decisions which led to this disaster. It is we who have invited this crisis.

A deep sense of responsibility, responsibility to take decisions, to participate in LIFE  informs his poems. It creates in a sense of urgency to intervene as he , with his knowledge has the foreboding of an impending accident involving humanity. He has to alert them, and also rescue them. It makes his poems sound desperate, full of anxiety.

A poet, living amidst deformed or destructed souls, wandering in their ruins cannot write well formed poetry. Muktibodh realized that the form he had inherited from his romantic predecessors could not contain him.  His literary sensibilities were constructed by the Marathi, Hindi and Russian novels. Ashok Vajpeyi points out that he wrote poetry with a novelistic imagination. He saw with anxiety his poems grow incessantly, refusing to end. He was always uncertain about the reception of his extraordinarily long poems as the ruling poetic sensibility was formed by small, lyrical poetry. Poems , readers and critics were used to had to be finished whereas his poems had always a tendency to break free, postpone the end, keep moving in unknown directions. His constantly beckoned him and it took him years to complete a poem.

Using a formulation proposed by Bal Chandra Rajan in a different context, one can say that that in the poems of Muktibodh is a  possibility of a ‘Form of the Unfinished’. Rajan says that unfinished should not be confused with the term ‘incomplete’, for incomplete is that which ‘ought ‘ to be completed but was not. He warns that any attempt to bring the unfinished to a close is to ignore the resistance of those forces preventing closure, and hence to destroy the essential identity of the work.

Lyrical poetry  creates and conveys a total experience whereas the long, unfinished poem  questions ‘not simply the possibility , but the desirability of totalization.’ We should also consider the suggestion made by  Kapil Muni Tiwari, another scholar of English literature to use form as verb as in ‘to form something’. In this sense, Muktibodh emerges as a worker of poetry. He makes the labour contained in poetry visible and palpable whereas a successful artwork is considered one which does not bear on its body the signs of labour undergone in constructing it. The labour or work part of the poems gets invisibilsed. Imagination is also an act of labour, and the writer sweats  is what we forget and the poem becomes a pleasurable, commoditified   experience to be consumed by the reader.

Muktibodh is, in true sense of the term, a political poet as he, through his work makes us conscious about the politics of the form. Reading his poetry , one realizes that it is an exhaustingly physical act. It involves your entire nervous system, makes you run and stop, climb  steep heights and descend into deep mines,  get surrounded by marching crowds, get thrown in darkness and suddenly emerge in the sweet light of the morning sun. Even in this serene moment, there is no forgetting. This subjectivity which does not or, rather, cannot forget  is what he aspires for. This is a political self he is looking for, an engaged subjectivity, helplessly bound with the fate of all of humanity and living with the full awareness, that life is a never ending struggle and our duty is be in the thick of things.

( A sightly edited version of this article was carried by the Indian express on 11 September,2014)