Dr R L Shant
Justifying the caption he has given to this second collection of poems, poet BK Sanyasi avers in his “Arpan” (Dedication) on the very first page thus:
“To that Super-Conscious, which gives the Conscious, the Sub-Conscious and the Unconscious a feeling of oneness and leads man’s thinking from darkness to light.”
Even if we do not take into consideration, the poet’s statement in the above lines, we are comfortably lead to the conclusion that Sanyasi is a poet of human situation as convertly present in human psyche or as overtly visible in human actions. The poet comes up as a very keen observer of man in confrontation with his own self. The conflcit is visible in most of the nazms (non-ghazal poems) which dominate this anthology both in numbers and space. Even though the book contains only 39 nazms as against 50 ghazals, the nazms are spread over 101 pages as against the ghazals over only 75, that comparison notwithstanding, BK Sanyasi is primarily a poet of deeper commitment to analyzing the intricacies of human response to his milieu in a free idiom. The idiom he has chosen and smoothened over the years is that of the nazm, even as his ghazals are no less tractable for him.
Nazmz captioned ‘I, this Rug and that Moon,’ So said the Swallow,’ ‘Hopping insect, ‘Mendicant’ ‘Calamity, ‘Protest’ and many others present some fine examples of how well the poet uses his language and a free flowing meter to convey his understanding of the human mind in vexed situations. One struggling with mother’s body is in a fix and finds oneself in contrast with a flower’s prank (Go, play and frolic, flower) A strong introspection and honest assertion brings forth the warring ideological inputs already stacked in the psyche of the persons of the poem (Neither hell worries me, nor does heaven tempt) thus:-
A torch I hold in my hand/To cart many rivers on my shoulders/Steps I ascend, I will not slip/To annihilate fear at the top/I am not merry, have no anxiety…./
Whatever the situation, the poet builds on an apt metaphor and opens up a mesmerizing world of his vision of the predicament he and his kind of sensitive beings are faced with. Poems like “Yes, we are to blame,”
Malhar,” “Earthworms’ create an ambience of a dialogue with the self where layers of ideas and expressions are complementary. However, at a few places a more compactness of expression would be desirable, otherwise BK Sanyasi’s precision and pertinence have been the remarkable feature of his poetry all through his over 30 years of creative writing.
As said above, even as the poet stands out as mainly a thought provoking nazm-poet his ghazals are significant for their candid assertion in a direct idiom. Examples like these galore: “I am his tears, I drip laughing down; As a crocodile, he won’t even smile.”
I begged and it trained in torrents, who knows how long? Dare I goad it to stop now?..In the post-90’ scenario BK Sanyasi has created a niche for himself in modern Kashmiri poetry and this fact is acknowledged by critics.
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