An Emerging power

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Uddipana Goswami

Assessing Uddipana Goswami, an emerging voice among Indian English Poets, the younger ones, as a poet needs a special acumen since she is multifaceted; trying in earnest to face many challenges from many quarters of academic and media segments. A very rich variety of exposures she had faced indeed

If we keenly scrutinize the driving motive behind all these activities, we get the truer basics of herself. Being born in the hilly north-east end amidst a rich cultural background and lore embedded ,with ancient as well as significant ethnic identity, which grew suddenly alarmed of infiltrators and their eroding values; her heart pulsates with the love for her Assam and her Guwahati .

The Assam Andolan had a deep impact within her, when she was in school studying eighth standard she fancied herself a revolutionary writing insurgent poetry on the sly and a small coterie of friends read and admired them, and she dreamed of overturning the establishment. But Revolution abandoned her when school authorities warned her of reporting to her parents.

The insurgency as usually was faced with the counter- insurgency; which resulted in the middle class of urban area to shed off their emotive responses to the movement. Returning to Delhi, she found everybody from Assam was branded as a terrorist.

The love for her hilly Assam, the bonds she has with Guwahati keep on ringing in almost all of her poems. Bonds are bound to become loose. And especially in an urban middle class mind with much exposures to Western values and culture, abandoning bonds with the birth-place , its culture and concern is not unusual, in our times of hunting for the survival.

What we find in Uddipana Goswami is some thing different and staunch, the love which runs with the same warmth in her poetic blood from her childhood.

When Nilikesh Gogoi was shot dead by Indian Central Industrial Security Force Personnel in Geleky, a town on the Assam-Nagaland border she writes…

‘A man lived and a man died

And I can still hear his song:

Melakpanite dubiba senate dikhiba..

His voice must be floating now

On the Melakpani river

Stopping at every bend

To tell a tale’

In her ‘Would I be a poet still?’ we come across more powerful imageries and emotive firings

‘Would I be a poet still

If wrote instead the cacophony

Of irsurgent cross-fires

And false encounters, secret killings?’

When writing about politicians and intelligentsia, her poetic whip takes a form of bitterness addressing them as….

‘And political touts and merchant of ideology?

They were dreamer who thought poetry

Was about nation, revolution , freedom.

They were dreaming in their sleep

Their dreams died as they slept.’

And then on poetification on poetry itself , she continues …

‘Will you consider poetry

If it were splashed with mud from military boots

Mixed with the blood of revolutionaries and mercenaries…..’

And she ends the poem with a deeply stamping sorrow

‘Poetry became a casualty of armed skirmishes.’

Our attempts to estimate Uddipana should not cease here; just branding her revolutionary mind. We are accustomed to them; the comings and goings of revolutions and the revolutionary spirits. Her base is different depicting her love for her ethnic identity, i.e Assam. And more than all ; surpassing them stands the poet. Her or his contributory traits to the time and its hand shake of Time in return. Might it be the pathos, deep agonies a poet has her staunch stamp.

‘On the other shore,

I am shorn of my identity.

I stand half naked;

They ask me:

‘You eat human flesh, don’t you?’

Nowadays I do not protest

Quietly, I pay the price of being

What they are not……

Does she have a hope for tomorrow? Let her express her doubts.

‘As I swim back across

Fighting monsters, gasping for breath

I miss life;

I search for an anodyne,

Find oblivion.

But even as I do, I remember,

Tomorrow is yet another lifetime

In purgatory.’

When she writes about a lover recollecting and addressing the other her love for the river reverberates with exceptional idioms

‘When we met

On the afternoon sands

The Dibdong was on fire

And I, my Kaneng

Was on fire too,

When you let fall

Your ribi gacjemg

At my feet,

I was scalded.

I reached out

For coolness in the shadow

Of your breasts

And I was scorched

You did nothing to help.’

For another sample of power expressed behind words expounded with the help of words to empower the readers minds……

‘You have seen naked trees

But you want to believe

You need not cry.

Instead you dream

and your dreams

hold up mirrors of sand

for you

So what do you do

but make love

under a street lamp

while a lunatic moon

on the loose

peeks in through

the frosted panes

of your car window?

And cry

for unwilling dreams

for a jack –in-the-box love

that jumps to life

or fades away

while you join

a voyeuristic street lamp

in watching yourself make love?

For no doubt you know

there’s nowhere to go

after this sky

On the whole Uddipana has written only eleven poems; not even published a book; but we sense a major poet under making, perhaps as a volcano waiting for a time to express its major upsurge. At times I used to doubt whether she dissipates her energy and time for other pursuits; but later I had a better vision. Everything is in the making.. It might help in the making of a major poet.

What makes a major poet actually? Not mere mastery over the language, knowing the technical ways of playing on minds; grandiose of vocabulary, unforeseen inventions in imagery, thought tricks... etc ..etc..These can be mastered by practice. But the sincere source of power born in from the birth, kept remained as an unrelenting fire, that makes the major poet. We sense it in Uddipana.

Uddipana means inspiration/ enthusiasm in Assamese. For us Uddipana means an emerging power, waiting for proper exposure.

[The poems mentioned in this post are under copyright. In no form they should be used without the permission of the Author: Uddipana Goswami. ]