Ras Ki Laathi

Ashtabhuja Shukla, a poet from outside the penthouse of current Hindi poetry, is one whose poetrys cold and dusty atmosphere is determined by the day and night within the country, not by devices designed to counter that day and night. His forthcoming collection, Ras Ki Lathi, like his four previous collections, is a statement of small things that may not even tickle the soles of America but are capable of making all of India cry. In this lathi of Ras, the blow and the sweetness show no mercy to each other, he says. But even within this unkind present, there exists a tunnel whose mouth opens toward a period marked by the fusion of past and future nouns, in which spring is absent, and the vowel pa will be free to sing auspicious songs. The pasts solid faith in the poetic creation of this period rests on the nourishment of mustard and wheat, which, despite all their mechanical nature, still need soil, water, and spring as much as they always have. And the fluid assurance of the future is as eloquent as the bell of a bicycle on a schoolgirl or the laughter of a child sleeping in her lap in their dreams. These poems are eyewitness accounts of eyes whose dripping blood hasnt so dimmed them that they cant recognize the suns glow. But even if poetry has the tenacity to preserve enough energy to not put down its brush even to paint the image of bad times, the flexibility of the fingers must display some extra warmth to withstand the chill of dystopia. It will not remain hidden from Ashtabhujas readers that the figures of speech in his poetry, once glimpsed from afar, are now glowing within his veins as a ritual, and his grace is the grace of that unserved body of his poetic creation, whose formation also includes the maturity of the next generation reaching its youth. The idiom of Ashtabhujas poetry has, over time, accumulated the strength and solidity to bear the increasing burden under which most of todays Hindi poetry structures crumble before they can even rise. Even those who encounter his poetry for the first time through this collection will sense its beauty, which constantly reinvents itself, and because of which, to its detractors, each encounter seems like an invention. -Vagish Shukla.