The Poet as Mouse and Owl: Reflections on a Poem by Jibananada Das

Author(s): Edward C. Dimock, Jr.

Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Aug., 1974), pp. 603-610
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2053127
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VOL. XXXIII, No. 4 JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES AUGUST 1974

The Poet as Mouse anid Owl: Reflections on a

Poem by Jibanananda Da's

EDWARD C. DIMOCK, JR.

Onie day eight years ago2

it was heard that they had taken him
to the dissecting room;
yesterday evening it was, in the darkness of the Phalgun night
when the fifth moon sank
his desire was to die.

His wife lay beside him, his child too;

he had love, and hope-in the moonlight-and then he saw
what spirit? Why did he wake from sleep?
Or perhaps sleep was a long time coming-and now he lies
in sleep, in the dissecting room.
Perhaps he wanted this sleep.
Like a plague rat, face smeared with bloody foam,
neck twisted, in a lightless hole he sleeps now;
he will awake no more.

"He will awake no more

the thick pain of awakening
incessantly-the constant burden
he will bear no more-
they told him this
when the moon sank down-into unprecedented darkness
as if beside his window
a few silences were comne
like a camel's neck.

Still the owl is awake;

a rotting old frog begs a few moments
at the hint of still another dawn-in passion knowable and hot.

1 The poem was read and discussed in a seminar
at thc University of Chicago led by Clinton Seely
anid myself. Mr. Secly's dissertation is on the sub-
ject of Jibaninancla, the first one to my knowle(dge
xvritten in this country on that fascinating man,
annd I hopc he will in no way consider this little
essay an intrusion. Other miiembers of the seminar,
to whom I amii in debt for some of the thoughts
to folloxv and in fact for the title of the essay, are
David Curley, Ephraim Miller, Rotta Pempe, Adi-
tinath Sarkar, Pabitra Sarkar, an(d John Sokolow.
The reflections are on the (leath of a frien(d dear to
my (laugliter.
Edward C. Diinock, Jr. is Professor of South
Asian Languages and Civilizations at the Univer-
sity of Chicago.
2 St bacizar age} ekdin, from Alaha-prthlibi, by
JibanTnanda Ddss. (Calcutta: Signet Press, I376
B.S.)

603

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 604 EDWARD C. DIMOCK, JR.

In the thick aimlessness of gregarious darkness is

the hostility of the mosquito-net all around;
mosquitoes love the stream of life, awakening in delight
of swarming darkness.

Flies rise back into sunlight from blood and filth;

I have seen so often flying insects play in waves of golden sunlight.
It is as if the sky were very near, as if some life diffused
possesses the minds of these;
in the hands of wicked children a sudden startling of moths
fighting with death;
after the moon had sunk, in the primary darkness you went near the peepul tree,
rope in hand, still alone,
knowing this:
that life of moth or sparrow does not coincide with that of man.

Did not the peepul branch

protest? Crowds of fireflies came-did they not mass together in pleasing swarms of
golden flowers?
Did not the old she-owl come and hiss: "The old hag moon has foundered in the flood?
Wonderful!
Now let us catch a mouse or two!"
Did not the she-owl rnake this fierce, profound pronouncement?

This hint of life, the smell of ripening wheat in afternoons of winter-perhaps you could
not bear it.
In the morgue, is your heart now relieved
in the morgue-in the heat
like a flattened rat with blood-smeared lips?

Listen
to the tale of this dead one.
The love of a certain woman was not vain,
the joys of marriage nowhere alloyed.
In time's convulsions there arose a wife
sweet things and the honey of the mind
she had given him to know;
he had never shivered, in this life, in the exhaustion of complete despair, in a winter of
pain.
Still,
in the dissecting room
he lies stiff upon the table.

I know-still I know
a woman's heart-love-child-home-this is not everything;
not wealth, or fame, or power-
another endangering surprise is
playing
in our inmost blood;
it exhausts us
and exhausts us, and exhausts us.

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 THE POET AS MOUSE AND OWL 605

There is no such exhaustion in the dissecting room so

in the dissecting room
he lies stiff upon a table.
Yet every night I watch
the blind old she-owl sitting on the branch of the peepul tree,
rolling her eyes and hissing: "The old hag has foundered in the flood?
Wonderful!
Now let us catch a mouse or two!"
Ah, wise ancestress, is it wonderful still today?
I too, grown old like you, shall drown the old hag moon in floods of darkness,
and together we will empty out the vast storehouse of life.

Jibanalnanda D-as is among the first of the modern Bengali poets, as Rabindranath
is among the last of the classical ones at least insofar as his ties with the mainstream
of Indian philosophical thought are concerned.3 And there is much, in history and
in the writings of the two men themselves, to support this argument. Jibanananda
was a member of the "Kallol group," a school of Bengali writers in the middle
and late Twenties of which some members set themselves up in deliberate opposition
to Tagore. The later reflections of one of the group suggest that their view of the
master was somewhat more ambiguous:
Adolescent rebels, we derided Rabinidranath's peace and swooned in ecstasy over
his lines, reciting them in chorus in hot streets and cheap restaurants and mur-
muring them alone in bed at night . . .4

But indeed there is much in the poem above which is in striking contrast to
"Rabindranath's peace," expressed as it is in the poems that are to follow, in serene,
dignified, and clear images and lines. Jibaniananda's strange, personal imprecision
in his images of the camel's neck, fireflies as swarms of golden flowers, wicked
children tearing wings from flying creatures, the brooding presence of the owl
herself, watching blind and dangerous the poet's progress-these things I think
would not have been wholly congenial to Rabindranath, though he might have been
pleased with their "pictorial quality."l And there is Jibaniananda's treatment of death.
The poet's deep concern here with the paradox of life in death and death in
life reminds one of the curious passage in Taittiriya-upanisad 3: io: 6: "I am food,
I am food, I am food. I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food, I am an eater
of food . . . I who am food eat the eater of food. I have overcome the whole world."
On which R. C. Zachner remarks, rightly I think: "Eating and being eaten repre-
sent life in death and death in life, the abolition of the individuality in the unending
life of the Primeval Man in the PurusasuKita, who, though sacrificed, continues to
live as the All."6 It is very much like Tillich's paradox of the conquering of existence
3 From the point of view of the literary historian, more than to his often iconoclastic means of com-
the statement might be debatable. As one of my munication.
commentators has accurately pointed out, not only 4 Buddhadleva Bose, An Acre of Gr-een Grass
does RabInndransth exhibit "strong affinitics with the (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, I948), p. 7I. I am in-
English Romantic poets," an(l see himiself as a ro- debted to Ruta Pempe for calling my attention to
mantic, but in various ways establish himself the passage.
as in fact "one of the pioneers of mo(lern Bengali i Ibid., p. 7?.
poctry." As will be clcar, however, I intend to (leal o; R. C. Zachner, Hindut and Molslini Mystioiso
with only one aspect of the thought, rather than the (L-on(lon: University of London at the Athlone
literary expression, of this versatile man, and the Press), I960, p. 30.
terml- "classical" is meant to apply to his attitude

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 606 EDWARD C. DIMOCK, JR.

through the conditions of existence. And indeed, it puts Jibanananda in that stream
of Indian thought which has concerned itself with the paradox. It also puts him
in opposition to Tagore, who saw the problem differently.
If one makes an analysis of the Manasa myth,7 one can come out with an inter-
esting result which shows life and death on one side of a binary opposition, and
zero on the other. What this suggests is that in some Indian perception at least, both
life and death are categories of existence, as opposed to total extinction. This is also,
it seems to me, what Jibanananda is telling us. The owl, the poet, death, implacable,
feed on life, the mouse; mosquitoes seeking to drink the blood of life swarm with
life; the dead man, the suicide of the poem, has his immortality in providing food
for death, and is at rest, in a positive state of existence.
A man has killed himself, despite the fact, or because of the fact, that he has
all that life can offer. His body, its neck broken and twisted like that of a rat
sundered by the talons of the owl, lies in wait, perhaps for an autopsy, perhaps
for the scalpels of medical students. What drove him to hang himself? He is prey,
like the old frog waiting in terror for dawn to thwart the owl, as the curtain thwarts
mosquitoes. Flies seek the sunlight, even after drawing sustenance from blood in
darkness. The suicide itself teems with life; the dead man wakes to realize death,
the tree from which the body hangs is live, the fireflies swarm with golden lights,
and even, in the darkness when the moon has set, the old owl, herself death, seeks
sustenance. It was this very life that the suicide, and perhaps the poet too, could
not bear, for in the life phase of existence is individuality and exhaustion. The
moth with torn wings struggles for life; the old frog begs for life, and is exhausted.
So the poet too, like his owl ancestress, will drown the light and be the slayer
and the slain.
It is a tormented poem, written by a tormented man. Yet the imagery is re-
markably consistent. Life is decay which is death which is life. This is not strange,
in the classical Indian view. What is different is that here these are not sequential,
for all are latent all the time. The morgue is death. Yet the poet uses the common
Bengali word for morgue-the loan from English-only in one passage; in all the
rest he uses lds'katt-ghar, "the room for cutting up corpses:" even the corpse will
lead to life. Darkness is death. The owl sees in darkness the prey that sustains life,
and the darkness teems with living things. Darkness has no color. Yet it is darkness
that allows fireflies to be seen. They are transitory, like life, like the watermelon
vine in crystal goblets of the poet's other vision. They are vivid, and they give
meaning to the darkness.
The suicide knew the fullness of life, and so had to die. It is not as it was with
Durga, in Pather pdic,li. She too was full of life, but had no place in the structured
world of civilization: she was nature, perhaps she was Bengal too, and could not
live in a world with its Calcuttas and awesome railway trains and throbbing tele-
graph wires, and so she dies. But this was not Jlbanananda's concern. Banerji's
problem in Pather pdinculi is one of linear time: can the natural life of a Bengali
village exist in the chaos of modern civilization? Jibanananda's problem is in a

7 The analysis is not published, but the outline Snakes, part II," in History of Religions (Winter
of the myth can be found in Edward C. Dimock, I964), pp. 300-322.
Jr. and A. K. Ramanujan, "Manasa, Goddess of

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 THE POET AS MOUSE AND OWL 607

way more traditional and more profoun

very thing that gives us life, death lurks like malaria? Jiban,dnanda is concerned
with time, but in a very different way. It is in fact in the context of time, and a
traditional context at that, that Jibanananda's solution of the seeming paradox
can be seen.
In another, rather less remarkable poem called Rdtri the poet describes a quarter
of Calcutta at night:
I stopped in Bentinck Street, in the Tiriti Bazaar
in wind dry as ground nuts.
The smells and lights are there. Under the last gaslight, three rickshaws stand
motionless. From the windows above
A half-waking Jewish girl sings a song
in a tune infinitely personal;
she smiles, thinking of the land of her fathers .
Foreign sailors saunter along jauntily, and
leaning casually against a post, a Negro smiles;
an old man cleans a briar pipe in his hand.
The city is "like the jungles of Libya," their beasts clothed "subservient to shame."
This quarter of the great city of Bengal is alive. Only Bengalis themselves are
missing. It is as if Calcutta is in fact two cities, one imposed upon the other, each
taking turns becoming manifest. Bengali businessmen by day give way to foreign
sailors and whores by night. No change in the city occurs; it is merely that the city
has two separate lives, latent one in the other.8
If this is extended, the notion appears that there are two sets of gunas, qualities,
exactly superimposed upon one another. One of these sets is material and one
immaterial. Both sets vary in quantity and in balance from individual to individual,
yielding distinguishing form. And the immateral gunas retain this form, even when
one has dropped the material gunas and gained release. This is the iivan-mukta,
who, even though released, can walk around and interact, be recognized, and be
a social being. He is in fact no longer subject to the laws of the flesh, or those
of space, or those of time. So in Jibanananda's poem, the precision and particularity
of the "eight years" of the title line are dissipated as the poem progresses, and we
are made to know that every moment of all of time is pregnant with both life
and death. As Calcutta can be two, or two million, cities, all equally real, so can
the eater and the eaten, the slayer and the slain, be the same. They look different,
but when individualities are abolished, then can peace, or rasa, or the sleep of the
poem, be attained.

S libandnanda daser sestha ktabitd (Calcutta, drama developed only "seeming rasa:" because it
Nabhana Press, I956), p. 94. This is not a new
idea. There is a passage in the seventeenth century
Caitanya-caritdmrta of Krsnadasa Kaviraja (111:5)
which describes a scene in which a drama has been
brought by its author for Caitanya to hear. In
such cases it was policy for a censor, Svaru6pa
Damodara by name, to read the literary offering
first, to see whether or not it would offend Cai-
tanya's ears. FIe judged that this one would, and
for an interesting reason. Svarupa said that the
had a basic theological flaw, neither ornaments nor
images could possibly be good. And the flaw was
that the author of the drama had said that Jagan-
natha was the body of Krsna, while Caitanya was
the spirit. The truth is that Jagannatha, Caitanya,
and Krsna are all identical in both body and spirit.
They seem different in form, it is true, but this is
because God can appear in any form, at any time
and in all time, without in any way affecting his
essence.

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 608 EDWARD C. DIMOCK, JR.

Tagore's view of time or death is not the same. Let us look at one treatment
of the theme, not, I think an atypical one:

Ah, my queen, is this how you listen to my goodbye?

I see the smile tremble in the corner of your eye.
I've taken false leave of you before
so you think to yourself:
This man will never go;
he gets to the door and turns,
he'll come back again.

Then if you ask me

I'll tell you the truth-
the doubt is there with me too;
I shall come back.
The days of spring come back again,
the night of the full moon smiles again,
vakula flowers bloom again on bare branches-
these do not go away.
A thousand times they take their leaves
and return again.

But doubt a little;

do not give immediate answer to the lie.
For a moment of illusion
bring tears to your eyes
when I say, sobbing,
"It's time for me to go."
You can laugh
when I return.9

Tagore wrote this poem when he was about thirty-nine; (Jiban5nanda wrote
"One day eight years ago" when he was also in his thirties); and he sees death
as gentle, ordered, even humorous. He doubts and questions, it is true. But he sees
also a cycle of natural things, and himself as a natural thing, and that he will
return. He does not welcome death exactly, he clings to life a little. But death is
nature, nature is order, and he is prepared for the cycle of rebirth.
Tagore never lost this sense of the order of things, even in his last poems,
though the humor of the confident young may no longer be there. In one of his
last collections, Arogya, he writes like this (No. 30; the poem is dated 1941, the
year he died):

Evening comes gently; one by one the many knots have slipped
in action's net, in the watch of day. The day gives offerings
of dew,
unlocking the lion-gate of the west,
its majesty golden
in the confluence of light and darkness,
bowed in silent obeisance toward distant morning.

9Bidcay-riti, from Ksanikd; in Rabindra-racandvali, vol. 7 (Visvabharati, I96I), p. 264.

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 THE POET AS MOUSE AND OWL 609

Eyes closed like flowers, the time has come

to immerse
beneath deep meditation, external self.
Peaceful field of constellations, where infinite sky
keeps hidden the unformed essence of the day;
there truth, to find itself, embarks
toward the other shore of night.

The key word of the poem is, I think, sdntikFetra, "the field of peace," as opposed
to the field of war of the Mahdbhzirata: the divine hero Bhisma will not die but
by his own wish, and he dies at the twilight of the year.'0 The place where light
and darkness flow together is sdgarasamgama, where the river meets the sea, where
the individual, the particular, merges with the whole, a place where pilgrims go.
And when one reaches the other shore of night, beyond the pull of the current
of life's river, then there is peace.
It does not seem to me that the most important distinction here is Jibanananda's
vision of death as violent and bloody, with creatures feeding upon one another
to sustain a life of questionable worth, and Rabindranath's vision of it as serene.
This is present, to be sure. Nature to Rabindran5th is order; to Jiban5nanda it is
chaos. But it is chaos only insofar as it is full of seeming paradox-that the fullness
of life is death. He is perhaps less certain than Tagore, but he senses that the
resolution of the problem lies in the perception that life is death, as death is life,
and perhaps that both are opposed to extinction or non-existence, and in this he
too finds a degree of order. The distinction is that time, to Tagore, moves in slow
majestic waves, rising up and sinking down again into the sea. Once in a while
passion is crystallized and thus placed beyond time. The first stanza of Tagore's
Shah Jahan goes like this:

This you used to know, 0 lord of India, Shah Jahan:

life and youth, wealth and honor, floating in the current of time.
Only then inward pain
long lived-let it be. Was this the path along which empire led?
Power of a king, harsh thunderbolt
like evening's bloody passion; let it be absorbed at the feet
of lassitude.
Only a deep sigh
eternally swelling; let the sky be merciful.
This was the hope in your heart.
Built of gems, diamonds and pearls
like the magic shimmering of the rainbow in empty horizons
let it be hidden.
Only let this one tear-drop
glisten pure upon the cheek of time,
this Taj Mahal."1

All the rest tremble for their moment on the crest, and then merge once more with
the sea. Nonetheless, for Tagore time is real. For Jibanananda, it seems to have no

10 Anus'asana-parvan: i66. bhdrati, 1368 B.S.), p. 604.

llSdha jahdn from Baldka in Bicitra, (Visva-

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 610 EDWARD C. DIMOCK, JR.

meaning. In all his poems he wan

"For thousands of years I have walked the byways of the world," he writes in
Banalatd Sen."2 The moment, past or future, and eternity are the same; they merely
have different forms and names. Like the mouse and owl, they are of one essence.
It is of course impossible to escape one's cultural heritage, though one might
select, or be selected by, different strands within it. On one level it is true that
Jibanananda is concerned with the moment, with the particularity and the pain of
it, while Rabindranith seeks the more abstract and impersonal levels of rasa. But
if rasa is, among other things, the suspension of ordinary time, the abolition of
particular consciousness, then this is what Jibanananda, on another leved, also seeks.
If life and death are the same, both have the same value, or lack of it. The pain
is too great otherwise.

12 Jibanananda Das, op. cit., p. 9.

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