Suman K Sharma
Dr ChanchalBhasin’s collection of Dogri poetry, UDANKHATOLA (Highbrow Publications, Bari Brahmana, Jammu, 2022), is a mixed bag, both in its content and style. She writes about selfhood, love in its diverse aspects, inter-personal relations, poverty, women and so on. Her diction has the earthy fragrance of the Duggar – you have to get used to it before you can enjoy it. Some of her poems have the biting sarcasm of one who does not mind calling spade a spade; there are also quite a few that have the mystique of a mystic. Dr Chanchal has a flair for the blank verse, though she is adept alsoatfollowing the discipline of rhymed poetry and yet ensuring that her intent does not get lost in her worry to find a rhyming pair of words.
Contrary to its title, UDANKHATOLA is no work of imagination to take the reader to the magic world of fantasy. Even the poem of that caption (96-97) is but a nostalgic recapitulation of a mother’s clemency towards her difficult child. The poet treads on hard earth and is familiar with the harsh realities of life. In LACHARI (83-84), she brings to life the misery of a starving boy selling flour-pellets by the side of a lake for feeding the fish. BHALEKHA (109-110) is a gentle take on the delusion of the temple-thronging lot who think it is better to offer money to the idols inside than help the beggars standing outside the shrine. MEED (57-59) evokes the horrendous plight of those hand-to-mouth rural young men and women who left their hearths and homes in the fond hope of striking it rich in a city, but had to trudge back to their villages, emasculated and disillusioned because of the Corona epidemics.
Dr Bhasin displays a sharp sense of the irony. SAH – the shortest poem in the collection -describes in just two stanzas how some people monopolised the supply of oxygen cylindersduring the Corona regime, appropriating for themselves God’s dispensation as to which of the patients would take how many more breaths. CHARCHA (104-107) opens in a hotel where a senior bureaucrat briefs the press on the packages the government has sanctioned to ameliorate the lot of the poor. The show is over, high-tea slurped and savoured, when the media-come come out of the hotel to capture the reaction of a woman-labourer carrying an infant on her back. “O, let’s be/Let’s grind our own chakki” she bursts out in anger, smashing to smithereens a couple of stones for emphasis. SUARTH (67-68) is a sarcastic poem – as cutting as it is incisive – on the tendency of the ego-centricelite who put their catchwords into the mouths of the commoners and ensure that such half-understood, even damaging words are repeated ad nauseumby the gullible people to serve their narrow interests.
The collection has at least ten woman-centric poems. Of them, two demand special attention as they depict women in extreme shades. The woman in SUAL (111-112) is a timorous, ultra-sensitive, easily duped and over-exploited creature. She is mere ‘woman’ – an object of lust. The HAUSALA (33-34) woman, on the contrary, is a self-assured, energetic, competent, educated and highly skilled person who not only knows her worth but makes the world recognise it. No more is she the handmaid of any weak-kneed man. Which one of the two women does Ms Bhasin really believe in, one wonders.
UDANKHATOLA is a welcome addition to the Dogriliterature. The compilation not only reasserts the capability of the language to accurately express some of the most intricate emotions, but it also convincingly affirms that more and more authors and poets of the Duggar are eager to adopt their mother-tongue to vent their Muse.
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