A Swish of Violet:Verse of Colours and Concepts.
Sarada Muraleedharan.
Calicut: Olive Publications, 2000.
pp. 99, Rs. 70/-

Poetry has always defied definitions and limitations. Crossing boundaries of language, life styles, faith and beliefs, it transcends thought and words to nest in sensitive minds. Poetry can be said to find its own space amid the clamour of racial and rational clashes. The newly emerging genre of Indian English writing also witnesses the blossoming of Indian poets writing in this alien language with perfect ease.

In Kerala, the number of poets expressing themselves in English seem to be surpassing those writing in their mother tongue. One of the reasons for this surprising phenomenon might be the system of basic education provided. While English has to be learned compulsorily, a choice is offered in the case of the second language. So children learn to handle English better than Malayalam and this trait grows with each step of the education process.

Sarada Mulaleedharan, an upcoming poet writing in English, has an added advantage to a postgraduate degree in English Literature -- her early childhood in Canada. So it might bethat English is as much her own language as the native tongue.

Muraleedharan’s first published work is the collection of poems entitled “A Swish of Violet”. The poems included here are said “to span over fifteen years and are occupied by interiors and brooding spaces that occasionally spill over to accommodate other worlds”. Muraleedharan herself occupies different worlds -- professionally she is highly successful as a member of the prestigious I.A.S cadre, she has been the collector of Thiruvananthapuram District; at home she is wife and mother and last but not least there is the imaginative world of her own creation.

At first glance what impresses one most is the compact, concise completeness of these poems. Not a word is used unnecessarily or out of place. It is as if she selects each word for its maximum effect and places it just right.
The perfect examples is “Images”

Saw pictures today
That would not go away
The sea at night
A nun in shroud
A face in a wineglass
Wind on the flowers
Flowers in the grass
Flowers in the hair

The images evoked by these simple words remain within the reader without going away easily. The poet transmits the images she has so precisely that the same re-emerge in the reader’s sensibility. A silent communication takes place wherein the words become the images themselves and looking upon them one sees the ‘face in the wineglass’ and ‘the flowers in the hair’. Both the nun and the face are formless distorted images as in water and one strains again and again to capture them completely. The sea at night is also shadowed, unclear. The wind on the flowers is felt, not seen. Flowers in the hair again is an incomplete image for we know not whose hair it is. Thus we are provided with surface images that leave us disturbed and “without going away” they haunt us to probe into the meanings of words -- into the poet’s creativity itself.

“A View of Mountains” is another poem which turns words to images as if at the wave of a magic wand. “The Intimidation of Stupendous Landscapes” that turns us awestruck and speechless can be felt fully. “An Enigma on its Haunches over Unbridged Silences” draws thepicture of “Pondicherry Wharf” just as “A Cynical Sodden Thought by the Throb of Heavy Engines” describes the station aptly.

“The heavy slide down
A cumbersome cheek
Bitter revelation
Of a wet sleeve
Private embarrassment
Spilling over
In a cringing apology
For inadequacy”.

This is a poem entitled “Sweat.” Here again a word picture is created seemingly effortlessly. “Shadowed”, “Patterns” and “Voices in the Curtain” elaborate this same technique of chiselling away”, as Dr.Ayyappa Panicker mentions in the introduction of this work, to create perfect forms. As is usual with poets, Muraleedharan’s poems deal with a variety of ideas -- love, nostalgia, social concerns, Nature, and the self.

The title poem “A Swish of Violet” is vibrant with the colours of nature. “Bloom of Violet in the Night when all Noise is Stilled” is a special visual experience. In the poem, “The Sacred Spring”, a thought of sunshine on the verge of a forest and “The Sea on a Thought Beautiful” illustrate how Muraleedharan coins descriptions joining words denoting the abstract with the concrete scenes from nature itself. The contrived and the natural are interspersed to create a novel perspective of man’s place in thescheme of things.

Muraleedharan’s poems dealing with the time honoured discrepancies in man-woman relationships are very much of the present. “Beloved”, “The Wait”, “Measure for Measure”, “Absence,” “Eagles Flying Southward” and “Letter” are redolent of disappointments in love on one level or other. “I sit and count the silences. They sit and stare back at me, “The Letter.” I listen to the thud of your ball game -- the thud of my unsettled wait, “The Wait,” indicate the communication gap that is growing between the male and female in the fast paced modern way of life. The poem “Intimations” sums up this feeling of loss completely. Starting with “When Dreams Grow too Difficult to Live with, Pass them on,” it ends on the note of pain existing always, many ways, little and great. This is the pain of lack of love, understanding, empathy, dedication -- call it what you will -- an ever increasing, all encompassing feeling of alienation. In the last piece in the book, “Surfing”, which is all poetic prose, Muraleedharan tries to analyse this pain more specifically. Endeavouring for a “slow unraveling of the elemental self”, an “experimenting with growth” and “facing of reality”, this eavesdropping on a “conversation between the established poet and the unhinged poetic” explores the space between the sexes. The need to seek the self often pushes out close ties -- “Transparence cannot survive company--It gets clouded”--and loneliness might become a by-product of self-realisation.

But Muraleedharan seems to think that what is lost in human ties might be made up for by touches of another world. In such poems as “I Thought I Heard”, “Rainbow”, “Pinnacle” an optimistic note can be heard -- as if what was sought was finally found like “love singing in the mountains”. The trace of nostalgia underlying many of the poems is highlighted in “Hiawatha in the Drift” -- the only poem in the collection that indicates the poet’s early childhood in an alien country. Multiple identity, another problem countered by the new generation, poses a different set of emotional chaos. Here the poet seems to have turned Canadian -- all the images here are foreign -- “dreams silver like the underbelly of the oak”, “the coyote in the darkness”, “the soft encompassing snow”, “salmon spawned eyes” of Hiawatha -- himself part of Canadian folklore.

Being a woman and part of the Administrative Services too, Sarada Muraleedharan naturally comes across many a social issue concerning woman’s welfare. Poems reflecting her personal sorrow of the current state of women here are couched in intense terms. “Heartless”, a short, succinct piece of just fifteen words, hits the reader with all the force of a tornado. “The Hounded Women”, “Hostile Witness” and the prosaic “This Side of the Window:” are similarly disturbing. “The Women of Anjengo” is of a quite different style in that Sarada’s often-pedantic usage of English gives way to an Anjengo Cockney slang that emphasise the moral indignation of the downtrodden women.

Writing is also a woman’s way to salvation, especially in thesetroubled times when we are helpless in the face of injustices and inhuman practices. “When the self is fragmented” as mother, social developer -- “Fragments”-- and poet, “an identity crisis within a complacent dream” -- “Morning”-- is always possible. But Muraleedharan strings together all the threads of her character to the stable sensibility of the poet supreme.

SULOCHANA RAM MOHAN

Contributor
SULOCHANA RAM MOHAN. Promising short story writer, poet and translator. Has published critical studies of the stories of Chandramathi and Ashitha.