The Ethics of Repetition and Gajānan Mādhav Muktibodh’s Ek Sāhityik Kī Dāyarī

In the latter half of the deeply turbulent and agonising decade of the 1950’s, Gajānan Mādhav Muktibodh contributed a set of pieces to the Hindī literary journal Vasudhā under the title ‘Ek Sāhityik Kī Dāyarī’ (loosely translated as; A Litterateur’s Diary). These diaries, as they were called, were commissioned by the editor of the journal, the well-known satirist and Hindī author, Harishankar Parsāi, and Muktibodh was given a free rein to write on topics of interest to him, on literary and non-literary questions which played on his nerves. It is to be noted that Muktibodh also contributed an identically titled column in the weekly Nayā Khūn, under his own editorship, before continuing doing the same in Vasudhā. A selection of these pieces was later published in the form of a book bearing the same title, Ek Sāhityik Kī Dāyarī. The selection was made by Muktibodh himself and was handed over to the poet Shrikānt Vermā in March 1964 to oversee its publication. Muktibodh was able to see it in a published form, although, it is worth pointing out to the readers that till then no poetry collection of his was published, and neither was this to change until his death. The second edition of the book was published in 1964 itself, but two months after Muktibodh passed away (11 September 1964), by the Jnānpīth Prakāshan. Later these diaries, those published in the previous editions and several others including the ones which featured in Nayā Khūn, were collected in the Muktibodh Rachnāvalī (Vols 1-6), compiled and edited by the poet, theorist of theatre and Muktibodh’s dear friend, Nemichandra Jain, and first published in the year 1980 by the Rājkamal Prakāshan. 

The Dāyarī is unique because instead of the usual date-wise entries to do with everyday affairs, it consists of attempts to reflect on, in fact to ‘theorise’ aesthetic experience and the process of making poetry. Most of the pieces contained in the Dāyarī are structured as passionate dialogues with friends over questions of aesthetics and literature. Also interspersed in between are extended reflections on their personalities and their equation with the author. The form and content of the text make it an event in the history of Hindī literature, and Indian literature more broadly, often bringing to mind a similarly structured text from another context and culture; A Writer’s Diary by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this short piece my purpose is to decode the text for reader’s interested in Muktibodh as well as to throw light on the unique aesthetic vision elaborated in it, which as will be shown, was premised on the ethical and pedagogical value of repetition. Before I take a dive into the text by Muktibodh let me first say something on the motivation which went behind writing the Dāyarī as well its connection with the ethical and pedagogical value of repetition; a connection which may not seem obvious to the readers who do not have an intimate familiarity with Muktibodh’s writings. 

Background to the Dāyarī

Muktibodh was noticed as a force to contend with, with the publication of Tār Saptak (A Heptad of Strings) in 1943 under the editorship of Sacchidānand Hīrānand Vātsyāyan Agyeya. The publication of this volume also heralded the Nayī Kavitā movement in Hindi, which was distinguished by its focus on individual experience as the axis around which poetry making should take place, thus implying an offbeat and experimental departure from the Chhāyāvādī (Shadow-ism) era and other minor poetic tendencies which were observed in its immediate aftermath. On the question of form too the movement came to stand for a certain experimental attitude towards motifs and language. Thus both at the levels of content and form, the movement came to represent avant-gardist tendencies in Hindi literature, often emphasising the autonomy of poetic creation and its non-subservience to any external demand or agenda. Even though Muktibodh’s evolution as a poet was most promising and pronounced amongst the nayī kavitā poets he eventually became disillusioned with the movement because as per his diagnoses nayī kavitā didn’t continue being nayī (new) over the period of time, and instead became thoroughly conventionalised. The most distressing sign of this for Muktibodh was the manner in which poets used to intervene on behalf of the poetic discourse, manipulating it or pruning it so that the end product turns out to be acceptable and in accordance with the reigning literary standards. In the process nayī kavitā for Muktibodh became a variant of naqlī kavitā (fake). 

On the other hand, even though Muktibodh grew distanced from nayī kavitā his relationship to the ‘rival’ camp of pragativād (progressivism) was equally complicated, if not more. With his life-long and creative fascination with what was considered as a ‘bourgeois’ theme of individual self-expression and the very complexity of his poems, with no easily translatable and graspable social message to them, meant that his status as a progressive poet too remained uncertain. And this was despite Muktibodh’s often clear acknowledgement of Marxism as the most ‘scientific’ and vital of the world-views which can infuse the methods and morals of poetry making with vigour and purposefulness. 

Living and growing as a solitary and unique poetic voice, given the above literary climate (broadly), Muktibodh formulated for himself a most complex question and proceeded to answer it in the most original way possible. The question was how one can maintain the true autonomy of poetic process, thus keeping the initial motivation of nayī kavitā intact, and at the same enlarge, deepen and incorporate the commitment that progressivist literature stood for, but obviously not by diluting the question of form and compromising on the demands of the craft. Muktibodh’s glorious attempt to answer this question consisted in his recognition that the above two problems of autonomy and commitment are not separate at all! In fact the poetic process would be as autonomous and spontaneous, and would not require the poet to intervene on behalf of discourse every now and then, as the commitment a poet develops by expanding her world-view and constant-unending work on self would be relentless and uncompromising. So the ‘process’ would be as independent, as the ‘preparation’ would be sound. On the one hand the poet will constantly work on herself; question, edit and modify her thought processes and assess her mode of belonging to the world, and on the other hand when it comes to the actual writing of poetry, it (the process of writing) will follow its own logic (I discuss this logic in the next section).

As I will argue in this essay, this is the question and the answering of it that frames the Dāyarī and is a key to understanding the text. It goes without saying that this is a rather simplistic presentation of numerous themes which jostle with each other in Muktibodh’s richly textured Dāyarī, but I propose that if understood well this provides a crucial entry point not just into this text, but into Muktibodh’s oeuvre as a whole. Now where does ethics of repetition and the pedagogical value of the same figure in all this. For Muktibodh the crucial factor which eventually goes backstage to the process of making poetry is anvarat sanshodhan (unending reform) of one’s self. Almost repeated like riyaz (practice), where one’s innermost convictions, notions, assumptions, inhibitions, are subjected to constant criticism and examination, and, crucially, not in the form of inner soliloquy, but in the presence and companionship of friends, who are as much critics as intimate confidantes. Without a constantly expanding and vital worldview and engagement with the world around, and the incessant repetition of editing-modifying of the contours one’s self that this involves, the poetic process will not have sufficient energy and dynamism to sustain itself. 

Repetition is also involved in the fact that given this process one is bound to repeat images, themes, symbols and other tropes in poetry because it is not poetry as so many end products, but a process which is essentially repeated in the same way over and over again. If in Muktibodh’s poetry one often feels that each poem echoes several others that he wrote, this is not surprising because in him ethics of repetition is fundamentally and intimately connected with the aesthetics of creation. And Muktibodh’s project in the Dāyarī is to make this process explicit and thus for everyone to see. By turning the hidden labour of poetry inside-out and displaying it for others to see and learn from, was Muktibodh thinking of his text(s) as having a pedagogical value too? I would argue that the primer like quality of the Dāyarī, where questions are raised and conclusions are reached, does give it a form where a series of discourses put it out there, how to be a Muktibodh-ian poet, and thus in process acquire a distinctly pedagogical value. This apart from and additionally to the fact that in the text Muktibodh makes connections, numerous times, between learning and repeating, and learning to repeat well, in order to prepare a robust and generative background for poetry. 

As hinted before, the decade of 1950s for Muktibodh was marked by a deepening despair and alienation, as is also evinced by the steady increase of darker and grimmer themes and imagery in his poems. On the economic front he was struggling to make ends meet with a big family and this was putting considerable strain on his role as a householder. Added to this he lived under constant stress and anxiety as his literary style, most glaringly represented by his propensity to write long poems, had very few takers in the ideologically rife world of Hindī literature, which was marked all across by very different aesthetic sensibilities than his. It is remarkable then that he wrote profusely in this decade, and most importantly, managed to take his poems to completion, particularly in the latter half of the decade, thus managing to tackle a problem which had otherwise been plaguing him in his career since then, i.e. how to bring his poems to a finish. This was particularly true about the time when he had shifted to Rājnāndgāon from Nāgpur. However, whether eventually completed or not, much of his landmark work was initiated in Nāgpur and the city played a major role in shaping his later career. The Nāgpur of those times breathes in Muktibodh’s writings of the period and the poet’s struggle with and in the city and its sheer presence in his oeuvre comes alive as one goes through it. Not going into his poems for this piece, even though they provide a more diverse and variegated site for exploring repetition in Muktibodh, I want to suggest that the Dāyarī provides the most unique and persistent effort to ‘theorise’ it (repetition) in connection with aesthetics and the process of making poetry. 

‘Repetition’ and the ‘Dāyarī’

Repetition in Muktibodh functions to suture his life taken in a broader sense and his practice as a poet. Let us see how, as this is also the key to understanding his efforts in the Dāyarī. 

Responding to Muktibodh’s contention that one must not take literature too seriously, the great prosaist Nirmal Vermā had once said that who other than Muktibodh one can think of when it comes to taking literature seriously and vigorously. Let us try to disentangle this seeming contradiction as in it lies the key to understand repetition in Muktibodh. At the very outset it can be said that Muktibodh responded to questions of aesthetics as if they were indistinguishable from questions of ethics. In fact, to put it more accurately, what made him a unique poetic voice of his times and an exemplary, albeit spectral presence for the future generations were his tireless efforts to demonstrate and to actually live out the continuum between ethics and aesthetics. I intend to highlight in this essay that repetition provided Muktibodh, the framework to establish or invent this continuum. 

Throughout his life Muktibodh remained an advocate of the autonomy of the poetic process, but as the influential critic Nāmvar Singh had pointed out this was to be better understood as relative autonomy. Muktibodh tells us in the Dāyarī that there are so many and so different experiences a person goes through in a single day, and yet choses to give expression to only some of them, in fact, to very few of them. Given Muktibodh’s class-situation and the hardships he had to endure not in the least due to that, one can imagine that the experiences he was talking about were indeed layered and very intense. Muktibodh suggests that this happens because of aesthetic ‘conditioning’, due to which one starts putting censors on what deserves expression and what does not, and even more primarily, on what one even feels!

To talk about concrete human experiences, not to say experiences of the ‘self’, was the point of departure for Nayī Kavitā compared to Chhāyāvād (shadow-ism) and poetic tendencies which developed in its immediate aftermath. But as the traits and sensibilities characteristic of nayī Kavitā became settled, it lapsed into a beaten and overwrought attitudinising. Muktibodh disparagingly called such poetry ‘fake’ and merely a nayē design kī kavitā (a poetry which feigns a new design or is only superficially new); a form of poem which has compromised on the ‘newness’ it exuded when it first appeared on the scene and now remains ‘new’ only in an opportunistic way.

Contemporary poets according to Muktibodh are so deeply domesticated by/in the reigning conventions of (Hindī) literature that they forget that the task of a poet-writer is to constantly outgrow the field identified as ‘literature’, which is so identified due to a monotonous and inattentive production of ‘sameness’. For Muktibodh the exigent was to constantly respond to and renew the newness that nayī kavitā brought on the scene, instead of feigning adherence to the label for the sake of it. Practicing newness by repeating or revisiting the premises of one’s poetry was for Muktibodh the marker of personal integrity of an artist. It is in this sense that Muktibodh advised writers not to take literature seriously, because only catering to and crafting according to the prevailing literary system blunts the possibilities that a writer may tap into and unleash in turn. Moreover, what it does is that writers are then frequently given over to interfere with the autonomy of poetic process and to chisel it by means of tricks they pick up while practising the trade, to make their output more acceptable and palatable for the readers-consumers. 

Now let us come back to Nirmal Vermā’s contention that who apart from Muktibodh one can think of when taking literature in full earnest is at stake, and recognising the true ring of the same, attempt to understand this contention. As I mentioned before, for Muktibodh the relationship between life and literature was marked by a continuum. A writer must take leave from literature to deepen her involvement and understanding of life so that she may come back to it with increased vigour. In fact, he explicitly pointed out that writing poetry is a culmination of constant thinking and churning which goes on in the background. However, as and when a writer sets down to write she should abstain from letting herself be swayed by the desire to achieve an acceptable design and to thereby edit and modify his writing keeping in mind standards of suitability and acceptability. In this way he was putting his finger on a duality which resides in our minds and hearts as creators and otherwise. 

We respond to experiences in one way, but as we take to writing we edit and modify our mental responses to make them less edgy and more recognisable. Muktibodh said it in no uncertain terms that this leads to ‘fraud’ being committed in the name of poetry. Ideally it should happen that while the writing of poetry happens in an autonomous way, the processes taking place in its background require that the poet constantly expands his awareness; of her own self, its connectedness to the surface (satah) around it, and the world, to develop a vital and poignant world-view. This enlarges and frees her mental responses, making them more receptive, turning them into forms of deeply intellective-affections. The dialectical interplay between intellective-affections and affective-intellections paves the way for a more receptive and self-reflexive consciousness. Muktibodh regards this as even more important than the actual writing of poetry. When Nirmal Vermā feels that very few have taken literature as much to heart as Muktibodh did, it is because for him life and literature strike a continuum, and not a disjointed and a-forever-drifting-apart relationship. 

For him the utmost duty of a writer is to constantly expand her cognitive base so that her mental responses become more and more nuanced and reflective, as under such conditions they are engendered by life-dreams (jīvan-swapna), where the latter are given to rise by constantly deepening and intensifying knowledge. Here knowledge has to be conceived in the broadest sense possible, not just as an accumulation of information or awareness of scientific facts. For Muktibodh feelings wander in the field created by cognitive awareness and are as rich and well-formed as the latter is expansive and oriented to forming ever new connections. Thus, for him constant work on the inner-self, modifying and editing the same according to the above described process was of greater importance than the mere ‘integrity of expression’. In fact, he often noted that ‘fraud’ is frequently committed in the field of poetry in the name of the latter. 

It may look paradoxical to stress upon the ‘migration-instinct’ of a writer and the constant need to enlarge and intensify one’s world-view as a prerequisite for the ‘process of writing’ on the one hand, and the need to preserve the autonomousity of the same on the other. But that precisely was Muktibodh’s struggle throughout his life which it will be no overstatement to state had become one with poetry. In fact, it wouldn’t be out of place to say that for him poetry was not limited to artistic or aesthetic creation, but had become one with his life; a form of life. Curious readers may ask where repetition figures in all this. To a reader of Muktibodh it becomes evident that repetition; signified by constant-unending work on self; sutures the self of a poet and her creative work. It ensures that the process of preparation or kāvya- sādhanā is so intense and is repeated with such commitment that poetic experiences themselves become rich and ripe, giving rise to poetic fantasies, which when projected onto the plane of language unravel by means of it, at the same time as they shape it in turn. It is this repetition which enables Muktibodh to offer a template of how life as a poet has to be lived on the one hand and to sketch-out the logic of actual poetic process on the other. Repetition ensures that the two processes are maintained in relative autonomy, even as they feed into each other. Repetition allowed Muktibodh to develop this into actual practice, not reducible to a mere abstract-theoretical gesture. 

In his powerful and most well-known piece from the Dāyarī, titled, ‘Tīsrā Kshan’ (The Third Moment), Muktibodh reflects on the dynamics of poetry construction and says that there are three integral moments which frame and structure this process thereby making it a truly transformative experience. The first movement is that of brute, intense and raging life-experiences which occasions or forms the underlying impulse for art or poetry. As a further nuance, he points out that these experiences are not like any other experience which simply happens to us, but are already reflective and partly conscious. So, the first moment in itself manifests a certain unity of perception and cognition, sensation and intellect, and experience and observation, although in an inchoate and as yet rudimentary form. Experience and reflection are inseparable in this first and originary moment making it different from other incidences and forbearances of life which simply happen to us. The second moment is where these experiences get separated off their unnerving and troubling sources and transform into a veritable and living fantasy. This fantasy manifests a synthesis of a higher order because it reflects the action of ‘context-specific experience’ and ‘context-free observation’ on each other resulting in an increasing context-specificity of observation and enhanced context-independence of experiences. Because of this sublime integration that a fantasy embodies it becomes a seat of ‘affective-intellection’ (samvēdanātmak gyān) and ‘intellective-affection’ (gyānātmak samvēdan), thus abolishing or precluding the supposed and arbitrary division of gyān (intellect) and samvēdna (affect). Because of this process of mutual pollution or purification, experience acquires a measure of distance from the context and hence truly and genuinely becomes representative. 

The fantasy that presents itself in the second moment, because of its structure and constitution, creates a necessity within the author to express it in words. This marks the beginning of the third moment for Muktibodh. Here the condensed core of fantasy gradually evolves into a perspective. Projecting the fantasy onto the plane of language creates multiple associations with consanguine words and images, thereby transforming the initial essence of fantasy to include newer cognitive elements. In the third moment fantasy begins to dissolve, as it were on its own accord, including in its sway sounds, images, and intellectual-emotional responses to other life-experiences. But it does not mean that the fantasy completely loses its structure but rather manifests a much more dispersed and disseminated congruity. Depending upon the energy and force contained in the core of fantasy, it will keep on generating images and newer elements but once it cools off it will have exhausted its purpose and the poem should end there. If it doesn’t end there it means that the author’s grasp on fantasy’s animating core is not complete or she has been led astray because of the onslaught of images and ideas. The responsibility here is squarely placed on the author for she has to continuously measure her heartfelt ideas with various linguistic resources available. If this process is truly lived out and out, it transforms or adds new dimensions to the author’s personality for she keeps meeting new and newer affectual-truths. As with her whole being, she is oriented towards the raw kernel of the fantasy and her personality is riveting over it, acquiring a measure of coherence in process, it also gains new dimensions and therefore does not remain the same as it was. To be sure language also changes in the process and the poet who is able to introduce new sensibilities into language, in fact, is able to invent a language of her own, is truly a great poet. 

As one can see in his discussion of these three moments Muktibodh is trying to suggest that poetry writing is all about developing and elaborating upon infinite ends which, to use Deleuzean terminology, have ‘being’ only as ‘becoming’. It is useless to think of these efforts in terms of is, because that which is, “the same or the identical, strictly speaking, is not” (Deleuze 2006: x). Why Infinite ends? Because as Deleuze says “writing does have its end in itself” (Deleuze 2006: 4) and “the only aim of writing is life, through the combinations which it draws” (ibid). Muktibodh in this sense becomes a desert; an “experimentation on oneself” (ibid: 9). To be sure it is a painful and a drawn-out process, without an end in sight. Perhaps this also explains why Muktibodh never finished many of his writings, and became a practitioner of mostly long and often nightmarish poems!

Now coming back to the theme of this essay, only repetition ensures that such a practice becomes the principle of a poet’s behaviour, her driving force. Repetition in the sense of Kāvya Sādhanā becomes even more important than poetry seen as an end product. Muktibodh’s true interest here is in the background or preparation of poetry; in the making and remaking of self; taking it out and expanding it from the restricted and restricting middle-class ethos. In order for poetry to become a natural and not a forced component of a poet’s personality this Sādhanā has to be intense and to be kept on priority. The aim here is to strive for a non-residual ethics on the poet’s part which will, ironically and as explained before, make the writing of poetry as autonomous as possible. And, repetition is at the same time a precondition, a promise and the price of this process. To use a Kantian formulation repetition ensures that the above process turns into ‘disposition’, into the transcendent foundation of the will for a poet. What some critics have noted as the force of Muktibodh’s poetry only testifies to the earnestness with which he strove to expand his world-view, and not just that, but, to soak it with sensitivity and understanding on the one hand, and on the other hand, achieve that state where poetry writing becomes no less than second nature to his ‘self’. The former was necessary to enlarge the possibility of having more and more meaningful experiences, or to develop the ability to register the significance of experiences that simply eventuate and are forgotten immediately or with time, and the latter served to ensure the autonomy of poetic creation, which as I must stress again, results because of the former and not despite of it. 

Muktibodh lived in an age where turbulent politics and history were matched by affective moderation practised in discourse. The resulting ‘fraud’ in words was as much a characteristic of political language as of literature, and Muktibodh detested the form of writing where a writer intervenes on behalf of the discourse to give it a pacifist and non-committal neutrality. Carefully uninvolved and pruned writing was for Muktibodh as greater a fall from the aim of writing as for Mahātamā Gāndhī non-partisan pacifism was from the form non-violence visualised by him. Surely, there was no guarantee for either (Muktibodh or Gāndhī) in the paths they followed, except to repeat and repeat incessantly with passion. If the connection with Gandhi seems forced here, I would like the readers to know that one of the frequent refrains of Muktibodh as people visited his home in Nāgpur was to ask them to take a detour on their way back to Wardhā and see the Gāndhi Āshram there. Further, Gāndhi also figures critically in his magnificent-long poem Andhērē Mēin (In the Dark), as a figure of hope and guidance. Perhaps he identified with the autonomous grammar of non-violence that Gāndhi strove to achieve and lay out for everyone to practice, in his travails for achieving a similar autonomy for poetic-process with the help of a background and never-ending Kāvya Sādhanā. Who knows! Only further research can shed light on this very interesting-possible connection. 

To end this section, I would like to note a point which is very critical to understanding the Dāyarī, but demands a more extensive treatment than is possible here. This is to do with the centrality of argumentative-dialogue (behas) as a rhetorical device and the presence of a friend as ‘conceptual-persona’ in several diaries. One, not only repeats, but repeats with a friend, whether real or imagined, who in the midst of an intense dialogue provides the signifier which marks a shift in the ‘real’ and lets one see differently. This shift sets one free; making them full of love and empathy. It is not accidental that several of Muktibodh’s diaries end with a tender and warm feeling developing between friends who have been in debate, often hotly so, in the preceding pages. This aspect of the Dāyarī deserves a careful treatment and its connection with what has been said previously must be made clear, but having pointed it out for the interested readers of Muktibodh, I would like to bring this section to a close, noting for now that the ‘real’ as well as ‘conceptual’ (is there a difference!) support of friendship finely underlined (and under-cushioned) the ethics and aesthetics of repetition for the poet, so much so that his younger brother Sharchchandra Muktibodh (himself a major figure in Marāthī literature) used to half-chidingly refer to him as a mitrjīvī, the one who almost parasitically lives off his friends. One doubts whether Muktibodh would have been much bothered by this characterisation. In fact, he may even have accepted it with an impish glee! Let me now bring this essay to a close by offering a few remarks on the ‘pedagogical value’ that the ‘ethics of repetition’, sketched-out in this section, seemed to have possessed for Muktibodh. 

Concluding Comments

As remarked before Muktibodh’s attempt was to make the labour of poetry explicit and display to others, particularly to young and emerging poets, the value of this labour-process, which he considered to be even more than the value of a finished piece of poetry. Moreover, he also wanted to show to others how he had arrived at his formulations regarding poetry. Ek Sāhityik Kī Dāyarī in Muktibodh’s oeuvre serves precisely this purpose, and thus acquires a deep pedagogical value. The repetition that he charts out in these diaries is presented and laid out for what seems like its ‘instructional’ importance. As Apoorvānand (2022) has noted in a remarkable new take on Muktibodh, to be instructional and pedagogical is not considered a mark of good poetry, but Muktibodh never shied away from casting his poems in an ‘educational’ mode, often also engaging in sermonising! As Apoorvānand notes this is because Muktibodh gave little importance to the fact whether his poems would even be considered poetry in the traditionally accepted mode, and thus continued to live the continuum between life and literature, underlining for both the pedagogical value of creative repetition. Even if that at times amounted to a form of didacticism and irked many a critic for what they thought led to a loss in poetic quality. I have tried to argue in this essay that the Dāyarī too, even more explicitly than his poems, represents a constant search on Muktibodh’s part to give his poetry and poetic-process a certain meta-language or meta-articulation; so that it can be shared with others, so that people can, hopefully, learn from it. That is why I remarked earlier that the Dāyarī carries a certain primer like quality. But I now want to stress that rather than being just a simple educational-text for emerging poets, it is a deeply moving account of how one poet arrived at his understanding of poetry and the labour it demands. Muktibodh shared his thoughts with us and bared his process for all to see, even in its not so certain moments, hoping that we will learn from not only what he has to ‘teach’, but also from his mistakes.