A Compassionate Dissent: The poetry of Madhu Raghavendra
Madhu Raghavendra sitting in front of Michel Duchamp's 1913 kinetic sculpture “Bicycle Wheel” in New York City. Photo credit: Madhu Raghavendra
Madhu Raghavendra’s poetry confronts issues of contemporary Indian politics and culture, verses that hold a mirror to our faces to witness our responses to our reflections.
What is the purpose of poetry at a time like ours, when the world is flooded by other distracting elements? What can poetry possibly do to its readers? Does it hold the value of life? What kind of aesthetics can we witness in the various genres of poetry? Do the layers of semantics not (in)directly correlate or permeate into aesthetics?
These are some of the questions that keep the poet Madhu Raghavendra in the literary news. His three major collections, namely Stick No Bills (2019), Being Non Essential (2021), and Going Home (2022) are all intriguing insights into the art of poetry, and the ongoing seasons of socio-political rhetoric. As he writes in “Countless”:
How do I respond to
‘How many poems have you written?’
Maybe not even one
if you haven’t read any, yet.
Perhaps innumerable
if you read even one of them
many, many times over
and never kept count.
Raghavendra's poetry stresses on the genre’s gentility and, sometimes, his style gives us a peek to his desire to blur the divisions of genre altogether. Much of his poetry articulates his informed and politically-active positions, especially those against the mainstream media (re)presentations of the northeastern states. His conscious voice works to stage platforms to look at the central government's lack of proper management of facilities for basic rights and amenities in these regions.
Born and brought up in Kolkata, Raghavendra lives with his family with Guwahati, Assam. He has been associated with several poetry outfits and has been planning to extend his visions to exciting art and literature related platforms around the world.
Prior to turning pages in his chapbooks, I was under the impression that Raghavendra’s voice was crucial to look at aesthetics in resistance that was left unexplored, in rhetorical or in any other analytical form in the immediate political presentation of the East. No denying that a lot is available on the subject of ‘the aesthetics in resistance’, but it always triggers us to look beyond the established enquiries. Raghavendra's poetry can be treated as a case of meticulous eloquence on the tensions of daily life, inflicted by the rigid turmoil placed through policy-making and grand political statements that affect our immediate knowledge of life. His pen derives strength of the common people, conscious of their right to speak or to be seen.
In “How to kill an activist,” he gives a glimpse of the citizenry’s strength:
The media covers the story
in the way one would hide
blood vomit stains with an innocent poster.
A bunch of managers crop up
around them, or maybe not.
Some international NGOs
join in too, or maybe not.
There are those who tell them
what to do, where to go, who to meet, etc.
Get them some big awards,
maybe Nobel, or maybe not.
Artists, writers, and friends become his source for inspirations, where Raghavendra exchanges their views with his own, almost responding to an invisible dialogue in their practices, while raising his voice and awareness for indigenous or displaced lives and history. Many of his poems are dedicated to the moments he spends with them as an explanation to the title of his poems. In “Temporary”, a piece about performance artist Inder Salim, Raguvendra writes:
Two birds in the bush are worth more
than the one exiled in your hand
and I can see you are about to kill
the two birds with the stone
in your hand.
Raghavendra’s poetry poses the collective voice, willing to reason and question the extent of our immediate knowledge and experience. In the meantime, his words caress and nurture our burning resistance against the tyranny of plight and class, while drawing the mundane as a point of reference. For example, “Too much Democracy” is a reflection on the farmers’ protests that took place between 2020-2021 in Delhi, where he clearly starts with unnerving news reports and turns to mundane rationales presented in daily life.
Over 40,000 farmers and daily wagers
committed suicide as per NCRB 2019.
Hate crime is rising rapidly,
so is the wealth of Indian billionaires.
Jailed poets and activists are unable
to get straws and spectacles.
There is too much measuring
by the same yardstick,
too much religionisation of things
in this land of delightful diversity…
I agree, there is too much democracy.
Savouring Raghavendra’s lyricality and the prosodic qualities of his voice at a staged reading, one may come across perfect impulse to attend to the urgency in the immediate moment. The dissent his voice poses is an active engagement with the ongoing dialogue on resistance, where his reasons are particularly involved in directing our attention to our outraged selves. In other words, a mirror is held in front of our faces to witness our responses to our reflections.
Elsewhere in his collections, Raghavendra condemns rigidity and uses fluidity in his portrayals, where his voice urges us to recollect, return, and reinstate our Indianness, but not as a mark of resistance, but as a means of solidarity. That way, this becomes a means of forming the collective, where one is drawn into the rhizomes of another and they grow haphazardly into space for negotiations. Raghavendra’s dissent is not without compassion, and his revolt is not without finding ways to resolve the crisis of entertainment or politics.
He voices the mundane of inflicted lives, a mundanity that needs to be witnessed without an extended presentation of protest. In turn, Raghavendra stages the protest marking events of everyday living. Here, the minutest events or exchanges form grounds of image and reflections.
Essentially lyrical and upbeat, Raghuvendra’s poems meander through the interior locales and communities of India. He devices language to interact with the familiarities of sounds and visuals, while promptly resuscitating the cultural demographics that remain restrained in the features of mainstream media.
During the post-COVID Lockdown, the poem “Artist” went viral from his Facebook wall that brought his poetry to the tongue of those who were constantly battling between daily news on media and life.
I don’t mind
being the non-essential
knowing you will come looking
when things are broken
and nothing else works.
The poem was a response to an article on the Singapore-based newspaper The Strait Times, which featured a survey that ranked Artists as the least-essential profession to keep Singapore’s economy afloat. Through these verses, Raghavendra reminds his readers and artists across the world to look at their value as incomparable in a world of essentialism. In the simplest terms, the poem suggests that the arts are non-essential only because they are mostly taken for granted. It is like asking for a glass of water during a well laid-out grand meal at the most exotic of locations.
Raghavendra’s balming sense of mirth has staged many interesting dialogues, where people refer to his poem and then move beyond the reference to engage with the circumstances centred around it. Perhaps it can be inferred that the poem became a tool for looking deep within and exposing ourselves to the inflicted wounds of abnegation. Here, his voice presents a treatise against the radical stigma of essentialism.
Raghavendra’s work also de-canonizes poetry from its predecessors. Written in pentameters, these poems do not adhere to the formal form and, in the process, they offer a hint of disconnect from the establishment. Given Raghavendra's training in planning and development, his poetic inclination is largely influenced by the limericks and regional ditties often heard on the lips of the farming communities or in certain subcultural sections of society. Most of his rhymes and rhythms are evocative of the easiness of sound and music that language produces when it is used to address the regularities or authorities by way of life.
The cadence of India’s Northeastern belt, Bengal, and Odisha have flavoured Raghavendra’s work. Readers will find a sprinkling of words from these regions’ languages, as a way of reaching out of their boundaries to locate the trans-bordered imagination of nation-states. In “Giving Love a Bad Name”, he writes:
Take two bowls of conversations,
one bowlful of Donyi, one bowlful of Polo,
sprinkle some takar, weed the domey,
ensure the dogum dor,
Wrap it in an okko leaf warmed in fire,
stuff it in a uddu, fill to the brim with poka,
put it in a lichik on high flames, let it shimmer
and fill the room with a Galo dream.
Essentially lyrical and upbeat, Raghavendra’s poems meander through the interior locales and communities of India. He devices language to interact with the familiarities of sounds and visuals, while promptly resuscitating the cultural demographics that remain restrained in the features of mainstream media. These sights that he revisits in his poems are a mere means to look beyond the popularized narratives which he does invoke often as a reminder to the fact that despite the world’s disconnect with Northeast, the people of these region still find themselves connecting with the world through popular culture. “Giving Love a Bad Name” is specifically a wink at the music of rock musician Jon Bon Jovi, an important popular cultural reference for the northeastern musicians covering rock ballads while performing in festivals and other social events.
The Stick No Bills collection features a glimpse into the popular practices of graffiti art, music, shows, cuisine, and lifestyles in the Eastern belt. Raghavendra portrays the state of these states as he witnesses them against the backdrop of the immediate moment, where he does not shy away from initiating the imageries of subcultural consciousness in negotiations with the capitalized spaces or regions. As readers, we witness his sense of the ‘lesser-good’ in achieving a balance between territories, ideologies, and social praxis.
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Satarupa Bhattacharya is an independent cultural practitioner, associated with academic journals on visual and cultural studies. She is currently working on academic publications and a novella. You can find her on Instagram: @sattybatty.
