Magadh: Poems That Celebrate an ‘Enchanted’ Past

Shrikant Verma (1931–86) first published the complete cycle of poems that form Magadh, in 1984. The poems invoke a string of ancient cities, from Magadh to Pataliputra, Takshashila, Kosambi, Ujjaini, Kashi, and others, names in which there lingers, like a spirit, a lost Buddhist past. However, Verma’s purposes in these poems were as elusive and subtle as the faded traces of Buddhism, for he set out not to reclaim or restore the past but, as Prof Apoorvanand writes in the Foreword, to ‘conjure an enchanted world’, mythic and literary, whilst being at the same time a meditation on the dissolution and futility of worldly power, its glory.

Verma’s professed disillusionment with power struck his first readers as odd and unconvincing, for when Magadh appeared, he was the general secretary of the Congress party and a member of the Rajya Sabha: one of the notable and dedicated power brokers of his time. Again, as the translator Rahul Soni points out, Verma’s diction is severely stripped down; its seeming plainness may be another reason these poems took time to grow on readers. May 25 marks the anniversary of Shrikant Verma’s death, a day when it is worth noting that Magadh has become a well-loved classic of Hindi. This reissue of Soni’s acclaimed translation appears exactly ten years after its first launch, time in which, as Soni observes, Verma’s voice has come to sound more prescient than ever.

The following excerpt is drawn from the translator’s Introduction:

FROM THE TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The ‘pastness’ of Magadh, then, at least in my reading of it, is not a pastness that is rooted in the specifics of history, in the details of place or time, but more in the idea of history being cyclical, of the essential nature of things (i.e., people, kingdoms, power) remaining the same, the fact that there are discernible patterns which will repeat themselves, and the weariness, the sense of resignation and futility that such a realisation engenders. (And, indeed, the realisation of the futility of art in the face of this inexorable turning: ‘What I wrote, useless / What I did not, / meaningless’.)

If there is a movement within this cyclical pattern of history, perhaps we see it in how the collection itself moves from mourning, to resisting and searching, to some sort of understanding and acceptance. But in the end, we die, what was lost stays lost, and we start all over again having learnt nothing really, forever doomed to repeat ourselves.

The only consolation, if there’s any consolation to be had, is that, perhaps, in the larger scheme of things, whatever that may be, none of this matters at all. It is only fitting, then, that the last word in the collection goes to Time…

Time, it must be noted, comes up in the very first poem too, in the voice of a vetal – a malevolent spirit that possesses and reanimates corpses. The most famous vetal of all is, of course, the one from the Vikram–Vetal tales – the riddling ghoul hanging off the back of the great king of legend, Vikramaditya, tossing out conundrum after conundrum, and the king who is doomed to repeat the same trek through the cremation grounds over and over.

This is a very potent symbol, and a great voice – inviting yet dangerous, obsequious yet poisonous, sweet yet curdled – to lure the reader into the book and into the ideas of recurrence and futility it circles around. And to me, the form and the language of the poems mirror and are the perfect vehicle for this idea or vision of history.

In my translations, therefore, my attempt has been to retain the rhythms and repetitions of the original without losing its spoken, dialogic quality. To come up with an English that can carry these notes naturally, without sounding antiquated or too contemporary. To mirror its simple, crystalline vocabulary. To find other devices to replace or replicate the effects of the extensive rhyming in the original. To preserve its ambiguities and circularities.

[…]

THE PEOPLE OF MAGADH

The people of Magadh
are sorting the bones of the dead

Which ones are Ashoka’s?
And Chandragupta’s?
No, no,
these can’t be Bimbisara’s
they are Ajatashatru’s,

the people of Magadh say
and shed
tears

It’s natural

those who’ve seen a man alive
only they
will see him dead
those who haven’t seen the living
how can they see the dead?

Just yesterday
the people of Magadh
saw Ashoka
going to Kalinga
returning from Kalinga
Chandragupta riding his horse to Takshashila
Bimbisara
in tears

Ajatashatru
flexing his muscles

The people of Magadh
had seen
and they
can’t forget
that they
had seen

those who
can no longer
be found

(1984)

[…]

CORPSES IN KASHI

Have you seen Kashi?
Where
corpses come and
corpses go
by the same road.

And what of corpses?
Corpses will come,
corpses will go –

ask then, Whose corpse is this?
Rohitashva’s?
No, no,
all corpses can’t be Rohitashva

His corpse
you’ll recognise from a distance
and if not from a distance, then
from up close –
and if not from up close,
then it
can’t be Rohitashva

and even if it is
will it make a difference?

Friends,
you have seen Kashi,

where
corpses come and
corpses go
by the same road.

And this is all you did –
made way
and asked –
Whose corpse is this?

Whoever it was,
whoever it wasn’t,
did it make a difference?

(1984)

[…]

THE CUSTOMS OF HASTINAPUR

I say again
without dharma, there can be nothing –
but no one
listens to me.
It isn’t the custom to listen in Hastinapur –

those who hear
are either deaf
or have been appointed
to turn a deaf ear

I say again
without dharma, there can be nothing –
but no one
listens to me

Listen or not then
people of Hastinapur! Beware!
In Hastinapur
your enemy is being raised: Thought –
and remember
these days it spreads like the plague:
Thought.

(1984)

This is an excerpt from Shrikant Verma's Magadh(2023), translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni and published by Westland Books, 2023. Republished here with permission from the publisher.

Shrikant Verma (1931–86) was a central figure in the Nayi Kavita movement in Hindi literature. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry, including Jalsaghar and Magadh. He won numerous awards for his writing, including the Sahitya Akademi Award for Magadh in 1987.
Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. His translations include a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry, A Name for Every Leaf, Pankaj Kapur’s novella, Dopehri, and International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree’s acclaimed novel, The Roof Beneath Their Feet.