Megan doesn’t scream, neither yells. His poetry stems out from the intense coalescing of his radical spirit with his personal- his emotions, and it creates a unique blend which reeks of a voice against injustice and a desire to raise his voice against all odds; it also speaks about a transcendental desire to realize life through the act of writing poetry.
There can be three strains noted in his poetry, unlike most Naxalite and revolutionary poems which are simmering with a raging desire to burst out and destroy everything on its way. Megan is different from these poets and their work.
Melodies and Guns edited by
Mamoni Raisom Goswami and translated by Pradip Acharya and Manjeet Baruah can be categorized into three different extremely fluid compartments, difficult to retain its structure. They range from an exploration of his radical desires against an ambiguous establishment, personal poems and thirdly, another assemblage that blurs this personal and public realm.
A scene from Rabijita Gogoi's play, Memsahab Prithivi, performed in NSD, 7-10 December 2006. The title is borrowed from Megan Kachari's poem.
It reminds one of Bertold Brecht’s famous song, “Song of the Defenselessness of the Goods and the Gods” (from The Good Person of Szechwan)—a song where it is asked why don’t the Gods lodge an invasion and take away all the good people from earth, if at all the human beings have to remain good since its almost impossible to remain good in a bad world, as a minority. But Megan supercedes Brecht’s desire here. For him, digging up a grave for the Gods is not a difficult task at all. And why wont he? The Gods who are careless and nonchalant enough to fall asleep soon as night descends, actually doesn’t deserve the right to live. As if he tells us—‘Don’t you know God is dead?’ Here go the lines of that adrenaline secreting poem-
“Soon as night descends, all Gods fall asleep
Don’t you murder silence yelling for them
Instead, let’s join hands and dig a grave
For all Gods. Lets again declare war
Like people raging mad with the dark nights
(‘Soon As Night Descends’)
His animosity or disappointment whatever someone terms, is a recurring theme in his poems, each time re-defining the meaning of his radicalism. Due to its subtlety, it’s much more threatening than the poems of Naxalite poets like Bipul Chakravorty, for instance, who cries out in torture:
“Whip me again and again
So that
When you are finished with your whipping
I rise up
Looking like
A stripped tiger!”
(As quoted in The Thema Book of Naxalite Poetry, edited by Sumanta Banerjee)
Gods lurk in as unannounced even in personal poems like ‘You and I’ and ‘The Way you Wish’ and disrupts his personal sphere. This is where one can see the way how the two realms of the personal and the public—charged with radical desire—is merged. But why God again and again? Is it because of the helplessness? The paralysis of dreams? ‘Gods’ can be Gods. ‘Gods’ can be the establishment or rather the establishment who pretends like a crow in peacock’s feather to be ‘Gods’. Questions are not answered, except that there is a spiritual realization about the futility of existence. The man, who was caught in a military operation in Bhutan, just because he kept arguing to himself whether he should awaken the peacefully sleeping green doves, that he kept as pets but at the same time held arms and wrote poetry, is perhaps the most significant aspect that is to be looked in consonance to the publication of this book. An alternative perspective to a militant, -- that is exactly what this book intends to focus consciously.
Indira Goswami’s ‘Introduction’ speaks about many more such alternatives. He is not only a militant, or a ‘blood sucker’, a ‘murderer’ for her unlike thousands of other people but a poet. She recalls:
“I met Megan Kachari for the first time in Guwahati jail… A fair, handsome young man, he reminded me of the young actors from some British play. The moment I saw him, it suddenly struck me that he was the same person famous as a poet.!”
That was the sole reason behind the conscious documentation of the incident which led to his capture, the dhanesh bird and the rare green doves that he kept as pets and off course, the publication of Melodies and Guns.
If these alternatives aren’t surprising enough, Megan’s love poems perhaps serve the purpose. But the smell of fresh blood is splattered in many places in the poems! They percolate, they seep in and then they invade—‘The Throb of Life’ starts with:
“Let us go, where lies the end / Of the end of the universe”
But goes on to:
“If still on earth there is dry
Of the smell of love and care
Clean and pure
We shall come back
Come back
Again
To this smell of fresh blood.”
What about the next poem? ‘The Beastly Darkness—Light’? Blood lies clotting there also, in the petals of hibiscus flowers—
“Someone poured the red paint
The colour of the Hibiscus
Or the thick fresh blood?
Can you smell it?”
There are twenty four poems in the collection. The first four of them are translated by Pradip Acharya and the rest nineteen by Manjeet Barua. A comparison with the original Assamese poems was not possible due to their inaccessibility but the poems don’t read like translations. It’s a unique publication. Not only because
Mamoni Raisom has lent her name into it but also because these poems are written by a banned militant and yet they are not only about blood and burnt flesh, about destruction and killings. Some of the poems do suggest symbols of transcendental meanings, which is very significant because the premier premise of approaching poetry written by militants and revolutionaries is that they should not be attempted to be judge by conventional aesthetic norms but from the point of view of what purpose they are serving. It makes Megan’s poems very different and stand apart. Perhaps, Assam and the team of
Melodies and Guns is leading the way in this genre of poetry by militants that even satisfy subtle artistic norms, in the whole world. Released in the World Book Fair, Frankfurt, Germany 2006, it evoked a lot of curious responses and excitement to posses a book of poems written by a man who was caught due to two green doves and a beautiful pet hornbill.
A poem in the collection, ‘The Earth a Memsahib’, concludes this way: “And yet, my feet feel heavy/ Too heavy/ To dance, with you/ To be with you/ To be like you/ To be like others.” True, Megan is not ‘like others’. He is different. Very very different.
Image Courtesy:
Sadin, Rabijita Gogoi
“Soon as night descends, all Gods fall asleep
Gods lurk in as unannounced even in personal poems like ‘You and I’ and ‘The Way you Wish’ and disrupts his personal sphere. This is where one can see the way how the two realms of the personal and the public—charged with radical desire—is merged. But why God again and again? Is it because of the helplessness? The paralysis of dreams? ‘Gods’ can be Gods. ‘Gods’ can be the establishment or rather the establishment who pretends like a crow in peacock’s feather to be ‘Gods’. Questions are not answered, except that there is a spiritual realization about the futility of existence. The man, who was caught in a military operation in Bhutan, just because he kept arguing to himself whether he should awaken the peacefully sleeping green doves, that he kept as pets but at the same time held arms and wrote poetry, is perhaps the most significant aspect that is to be looked in consonance to the publication of this book. An alternative perspective to a militant, -- that is exactly what this book intends to focus consciously.
