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Anil Saari Arora - a failure or a flawed genius?
My friend Anil Saari has died. He was a considerable poet, a brilliant journalist with a prose style free of clichés and media jargon, Some of his peers who managed to secure high office in the media world of India were unable to fathom this maverick genius, were uncomfortable with this iconoclast and did not hesitate to call Anil a “failure”. They should sit down in shame and read some of the poems in Nomads & Other Moments and look into its clear depths.
A friend remembers meeting Anil Saari in 1963 for the first time at the offices of the Patriot, the newly launched English language daily which screamed its left wing pro Soviet sympathies unashamedly from its banner headlines. Anil was 19 and still looked very much a fat school boy with close cropped hair; he carried with him a sheaf of his writing on folded foolscap paper. He had himself requested an interview for a position as a features writer for the paper on the strength of a bunch of poems which he duly presented to the News editor. The general consensus prevailing then, perhaps now, was that anyone with a leaning towards creative writing was an unwelcome presence. Faced with the poems, all typed in lower case, Anil's friend was strongly reminded of e.e. cummings.This style of lower case presentation continued to remain the distinctive hallmark of all of Anil's poems, owing nothing further to e.e.cummings.
The following three decades saw Anil develop as a serious journalist, a cine theorist and critic. He believed that celebrity-chasing cine journalism underestimated the intelligence of the average film goer. Anil learnt his craft in the early 70s as a reporter for Screen then edited by the outspoken, charismatic SS Pillai. Anil often chose deliberately to sleep in the doorways of the city of Bombay in preference to his flat, to express his solidarity with the homeless in such a vulgarly affluent city. These decades are worth documenting and I hope someone undertakes this work.
1995 was a great year for Anil, as he launched Blackmuse Books, a publishing venture, along with his long time friends, Hindi poet Girdhar Rathi, painter Rajesh Mehra, and writer Anees Chishti. It may have been an over ambitious project, sadly under capitalised, hardly likely to turn in a profit for several years. However, there were several media interviews when the first book was published, appropriately a collection of Anil's poems spanning a quarter of a century from 1970 to 1994, instinctively titled "NOMADS and Other Moments".
Poonam Saxena wrote at length in a half page spread with a beaming bearded picture of Anil in the centre in Asian Age, exulting "An Idealist of the Sixties: It is not too late to publish and flourish". The interview was far from anodyne and Anil was expectedly combative and critical of current establishment. He felt that what was being published widely was either "derivative or just non-poetry". The publishing venture was well received by the media and written about at length. J.M.Iyer wrote a cautiously welcoming piece in the Pioneer (Saturday July 1). Another review by Kavita A Sharma in the Hindu (Sunday June 4th 1995) says that Anil Saari presents an insider view of the "pettiness of the modern middle class" in his poems. Generally the review is adulatory and quotes extensively from the book. In a Sunday Times of India review dated 28th May 1995, Nihkat Kazmi calls the poems a “Reflection of Urban Angst”, with echoes of Eliot’s Wasteland, a terrain that the urban guerrilla stakes out. Anil made it his own, calling it a “No Nonsense Country”, where “the river has turned black,” where “it does not run anymore, it simply curls under the table”. Asian Age dated 16th July 1995 devotes him considerable space under the Variety/Poetry page header, and prints three of the poems: “Stabbed!” , “The Non Nonsense Country” and “The Rain Is A Symbol”.
Anil’s poems in Nomads are reductive: these poems capture the sensuous in minimalist sharp-edged angular phrasing. It is less like the sonorous elegance and alliterative music of Paul Valery: “La Mer, la Mer toujours recommencée”: “The sea, the sea always reappears” but more the reductive simplicity and staccato rhythm of Rainer Maria Rilke: “lie down again and again among the flowers, face to face with the sky.”
One begins to wonder: where on earth did Anil learn to write such fine poems? Since he lays claim to no literary influence, and in fact spent years iconoclastically denying he ever read the 20th century greats like Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Robert Lowell, John Berryman. Anil’s surrealistic free form poetry is so stunningly original that it is hard indeed to trace it to obvious influences.
As he grew older Anil’s physical appearance became an amalgam two personas: of a Hindu and a Moslem, a UP upper class bohemian scholar and a bon vivant aristocrat. With a greying beard, an attire of kurta pyjamas, you could easily mistake him for an academic from Aligarh Muslim University. He also re-evaluated his fraught relationship with his deceased father and came to appreciate his ideology, his achievements, his passionate advocacy of the industrial workers as a Rajya Sabha M.P. in the first post-independence parliament.
He took back his family name once again, declaring an emotional completeness, a reconciliation and healing of a familial wound. Beneath this scholar aristocrat mask which sent confusing signals to others, Anil’s demons continued to seethe in the depths of his unquiet heart. His marriage had broken up resulting in two decades of separation. Anil however was a romantic lover in classical Urdu love poetry mould, unknowingly moving towards a search for love as the enduring language of poetry.
A year later, after the impact of the fulsome publicity had subsided, Anil was once again a disenchanted outsider and said as much in a letter to a friend in London: “Unfortunately for many of us who stayed back here in India, the modern Indian state – to use VS Naipaul’s phrase – had dedicated itself to mediocrity during the late nineteen-seventies. In our naiveté, or for reasons beyond one’s understanding, guys like me refused to accept this as an inevitable course and went about trying to swim against the mainstream. Therefore I should have no regrets about not having achieved much in terms of position or worldly status. These days I feel happy enough listening to somebody like Godavaribai Munde singing Kabir’s great verses in her robust folk style, and the musical recitations of traditional Sikh raagis. These are what I spend a lot of my time on and this gives me as much satisfaction as a sense of power/money power would give a more successful writer. Particularly because I feel that I’m not a patch on Kabir as a poet.”
Here is part of a poem titled "Confessions", written “in the footsteps of Sant Tukaram :
the simple things bring me to you.
it is your sudden revelations of the breath of life that bring me to
the doorstep -
the simple Good Morning, namaskar
of a neighbour who returns from your shrine with a heart full of prasad
and a face full of smiles.
However the small group of friends and readers whose high estimate of Anil’s genius never wavered were aware that Anil’s poetry was definitively moving away from human love to the divine, the seeking of love finally finding haven in bhakti – via a transference of erotic human love daydreaming of physical union (see “Seminars, Daydreams” – page 19 Nomads) to divine love. Mirza Ghalib whom Anil revered had delivered Anil’s alter ego lover into the hands of Kabir and Tukaram, Meera and Tulsidas.
This was not by any means a quasi religious late life conversion. He kept up a long exchange of e-mails with a few of his chosen friends feeding them with his new poems, uncertain and apprehensive about their reception. For a while Hanuman’s love and devotion to Lord Rama became emblematic of this new found love. His openly left wing political sympathies continued to lace his new “devotional” poetry.
Here is an example:
Hanuman ji
You are the god of the underdog, are you
not?
A monkey god, A leader of the unseen tribals - India's invisible men.
A messiah of the forgotten folk cast beneath the shroud of poverty
like so much dust,
God of the losers - the multitudes of our land,
their faces battered in the jungle of deprivation, looking like a monkey-god!
Hanuman ji,
Like you I want to wrap my tail with fire
and burn down the world that chokes me,
like you I want to have no family of despairs or greed,
like you I want to fly over the sea and breathe life into a new empire
of emotions.
One must point out that Anil had to come out of the closet with two poems about Lord Hanuman because there had been a recent debate and some controversy in literary and media circles about writer Rajendra Yadav's description of Hanuman as the first terrorist, who burnt Ravana's city.
A lifetime of work by such a significant writer should not be allowed to vanish. Wouldn’t it be good if an Indian University bought all the significant papers of Anil Saari Arora, his unpublished manuscripts, and even the considerable amount of writing he did for web based literary magazines like Crimson Feet (www.crimsonfeet.com, also www.zine5.com and www.chowk.com). There may have been several other such online magazines showcasing creative writing. These need to be collected together, and even the letters he wrote to his friends and strangers. This could form a comprehensive archive for painstaking editing and gradual phased publication. Such an archive could also provide rich material for a media studies course or a literature Masters or a doctoral thesis. This would enable a fortunate student to take some of Anil’s demons for an outing.
In July 2001 Anil Saari wrote to his friend in London:
“However, being an Non Resident Indian you cannot understand something about me. Let me try and explain:
You know, there are two intellectual traditions. The first one is the conventional, mainstream tradition which offers its devotees baskets of money, influence and power.
There is another tradition in India, starting from the rishi and the muni of ancient times, as frequently mentioned in the Ramayan and the Mahabharata. These rishi-muni stayed away from the palace and court. Around the 6th century A.D. a wave of devotional poets emerged in Tamil Nadu. Their tradition moved up north, through Maharashtra where we had the devotional poets and wandering reformers like Sant Dnyaneshwar and Sant Tukaram. In the 15th century the Bhakti movement had spread across the subcontinent. In the north the two major poets/reformers were Kabir and Guru Nanak.
Now many of us in contemporary India belong to this tradition. We just happen to belong to this tradition! So we are not in the race at the centres of powers/in the corridors of power. As a result of the influence the Kabir tradition has had on me, I am just not keen on worldly success.
Kabir says in one of his verses:
"Sayi itna kijiye Jay mein kutumbh sambhaal Main bhi bhooka na rahoon Sadhu na bhooka jaaye."
(Be involved in the business of life to the extent that you can look after your family and you don't starve, and you can give something to those who are gyani (the knowledgeable ones/the holy ones.)”
Days before he died he told his wife who had taken him back with her and nursed him till the end: “As a poet, I’m up there with Kabir but people are far too blind to see that”.