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 BIO-DATA
Name Rati Saxena
permanent Address K.P. XI/624 Vaijayant
Chettikunnu, Medical College P.O.
Thiruvananthapuram 685011, INDIA
Education M.A. (Sanskrit, Hindi) B.Ed. (Sanskrit)
P.hD.(Atharvavediya padarth yojana- 1979)
Languages known Hindi, English, Malayalam, Sanskrit
Publications
A literary criticism in the field of indology-
“ THE SEEDS OF THE MIND”-A fresh approach to study of the Atharvaveda a research work under Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts- ( under publication )
Collections of poetry in 1-Maya Maha Thagini,
Hindi 2-Ajanmi Kavita ki Kokh se janmi Kavita
( Rajasthan academy publication)
3-Sapane Dekhata Samudra ( magadha prakashan)
Anumber of poems published in different journals.
Criticism 1-Balamoni Amma ki kavya Kala our Darshan
( Sahitya akademi publication)
Collection in other languages- 1- Kundli churalum stri Deha- Malayalam
currents books publications
2- The serpent coiling woman body-English
Vargo books publications
A number of Poems are translated in Panjabi, Konkani, Tamil, Bengali etc and published in leading journals
Internet journals- A number of poems and articles are published on net, (Indian and western as well. Feather writer for the journal- abhivyakti
Translated books from Malayalam
1. Ayyappa Panikker ke Kavitaen – Sahitya Acedemi. publication
2 Naivedyam -Balamani Amma’s Poems- Birala Foundation
3.Rassi-Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Kayar's abridgment form , NBTpublication
4.Selected Stories by Karoor Neelakanta Pillai Sahitya Acedemi
5-Apoornam-Selected Poems by K. Satchidanandan,
6-Neermatalam pootha kalam by Kamala Das- under publication
7-Meri Divar par –Ayyappa –Gyanpeeth- Jyanapeeth pub.
8- Tanav- Poems of Ayyappa panikkar
a number of translations are published in different journals
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MY ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
- 1. Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation 2000
- 2. felloship of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the arts-2003-2004
- 3 . State Bank of Travancore Award for poetry 2001
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MY RESIDENCE INFO:
City: Thiruvananthpuram
State/Country: Kerala, India
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BOOKS PUBLISHED:
The seeds of the mind-
This study is the result of an attempt on my part to examine the hymns in Atharvaveda as folk poetry. Many scholars from the East and the West have commented on the religious or philosophical elements in this Veda. But very few efforts have so far been made to look at the Vedas, especially Atharvaveda, from the literary point of view or read as works of folk imagination. The hymns referring to rituals and deities in Atharvaveda appear to be deeply grounded in the society of the times, which produced this wonderful collection of folk poems. Hitherto the emphasis has been on the medical and magical aspects these hymns. The emphasis here is on their poetic and aesthetic value.
Ever since I started research on Atharvaveda for my Ph. D. thesis at the University of Rajasthanss, the imaginative beauties of Atharvaveda have fascinated me. The offer of a fellowship from the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts has enabled me to complete this project. I have the satisfaction that through this project I have been able to bring to the notice of learned readers the aesthetic qualities of the Atharvavedic hymns. The greater charm of these hymns lies in their not being looked at as mere magical charms but as genuine poems of primordial inspiration, reflecting the cohesive social life of the Atharvavedic people and their life of imagination. I am happy to hope that this work will attract the attention of Indian and foreign scholars, especially Vedic scholars to this rather neglected aspect of Atharvavedic literature.
The eight chapters of this book are so designed as to highlight eight aspects of the study of Atharvaveda. Translations of selected hymns have been provided to establish the poetic as well as folk aspects of this veda. Chapter One is introductory and sets up the framework of the innovative approach projected in this study. In Chapter Two an attempt is made to demystify the hymns of Atharvaveda and read them as folk poems. Atharvaveda may be read as a work of the imagination and the aesthetic beauties of the hymns are highlighted in Chapter Three. Chapters Four and Five are concerned respectively with the folk deities and folk rituals, which give a special character to Atharveveda among the four samhitas. There is a lot of excellent love poetry in Atharvaveda, which establishes its concern with worldly life, and Chapter Six explains and illustrates this aspect. Death is a central theme in several of the hymns in Atharvaveda and a detailed commentary on the hymns dealing with death is given in Chapter Seven. That Atharvaveda treats of the various emotions, which affect the common man is brought out in Chapter Eight. Some important hymns like the Prithvi Sukta and Varun Sukta are briefly discussed in the Appendix.
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Reading Dr. Rati Saxena’s poems in Hindi translated into English is a rewarding and enriching experience for more than one reason. She was born in 1954 in Udaipur, Rajasthan, and grew up in Madhyapradesh, Uttarpradesh and Delhi. She had her higher studies in the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, from where she secured the Ph.D degree in Sanskrit, with specialization in the study of Atharva Veda. She is married to a VSSC scientist from Kanpur and has been living in Trivandrum, Kerala, for the past twenty-seven years. During this period she has also travelled to many parts of India, east, west and south, and has had the benefit of a wider exposure to the regional cultures of India more than many other poets in Hindi. She took to writing poetry quite earnestly only in the nineties, although she had privately nurtured a deep interest in poetry from her early days. Her studies in folk culture have enabled her to look into the Vedas from a fresh angle, while her pan-Indian outlook has given a sharpness and a universality to her perception and description of experience. While her literary locus is well entrenched in the aesthetics and ethos of Hindi tradition, her imagination provides her poetry a focus on the regional orientation. This is perhaps something rare among the poets of the Hindi belt, since few of them ever get a chance to stay outside and have deep and long interaction with regional writing and writers as well as with life on the margins. She seems to have instinctively become aware of the role of the marginalized in the so-called mainstream or central tradition in Indian literature. But the power of her poetry comes from her control over the images she employs to project her awareness of the diverse cultures of India, in so far as it can find adequate expression in Hindi. When the poems are translated into English, naturally a part of their strength and immediacy is lost. But this is true of all translations, especially of poetry. Rati Saxena is herself a good translator, and as a recognition of the merits of her translation from Malayalam into Hindi, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, bestowed on her last year’s award for translation.
The Serpent Coiling Woman Body is the first collection of Rati Saxena’s poems in English translation and contains a fair selection of her best poems, which are more or less amenable to translation. With a powerful spray of words she manages to erect an image of woman, of woman body (the way the American black woman poet Nikki Giovanni calls one of her poems just “Woman Poem,”), which she feels is a serpent coiling. There is enough freshness in her perceptions of the woman’s role in society, where the body is the cause that sets up ever so many taboos against woman, throttling her freedom and wholesome development. The words and images in this title piece are sharp hard-hitting arrows against the social discrimination against woman, hardly noticed by men and even by the women, who are acquiesced to the status quo. The right to protest is often underplayed; the stifled cry of anguish is seldom heard by the powers that be. Hence the bold, though bitter, declaration of self-identity:
“Take not my self away from me.
Give me only one life, just for me.
My body and I are one principle;
my body is my identity.
The storms that swell in it,
the pains that swim in it,
all are mine! . . .”
More than a manifesto or credo about woman’s self-awareness in today’s historic moment, it is an epic fragment on the condition of woman, dramatizing the crucial importance of her woman body as the basis of her sufferings from the beginnings of history. In a series of poems about women and girls, the poet highlights the tragedy looming large on every girl child from her days in her mother’s womb. “The girl fighting with the bloody points” is a scathing attack on the value system that tolerates the destruction of the girl child in the womb before she is born into the world. The threat of the forceps she faces is brought out here in all its surrealistic horror: the poem combines protest with deep pathos, but she doesn’t give up easily. The words addressed to the child, realizing the danger that the mother’s womb is no protection for the girl child, urge the child to be born, resisting all potential threats from sinister forces:
Don’t die defeated, my child
blossom in the womb again and again
fighting against the bloody points
and enter the earth
Her anger and compassion turn into bitter satire and irony at times, as when she writes about “The girls from good families,” torpedoing the notion of “good” families, or when she draws a gratuitous contrast between girls and goats (“They are goats, not girls”) or when she slyly insinuates that “Girls do not lie on the rails without any cause.” The suicide of a woman comes up again for a very compassionate study of social tragedy in “Comrade Sunila, why did you commit suicide?” No social scientist seems to have felt the slightest prick of conscience when such horrible things have happened, for there is no anticipated explanation for it in Das Kapital. “Kanyakumari,” one of the poems in this volume demystifying mythical assumptions, speaks about the benign goddess, destined to wait patiently for her lord for eternity, exploding into a veritable Durga or Kali, questioning the ethos underlying the myth: she emerges into a Bhairavi, and unfolds a nightmarish vision, but in very controlled vocabulary and stifled rhythms.
To turn to the softer moods of Rati Saxena’s poetry, poems like “The sea that dreams,” and “Ignorant rock,” provide an insight into the irony and paradox inherent in Nature, but in them too one finds an allegorical statement of the human condition. There are seemingly lighter moments in “On returning,” “Washing clothes,” and “Tell me the name of a flower.” But even there a serious concern for human destiny is interiorized, which only slow and meditative reading will bring to the reader’s cognition. A rare touch of tenderness may be felt behind the sarcasm in “Father of sick daughter.” “The eyes of the old” comments on the persistence of tradition, while “The aesthetics of the spider” and “Their language” reveal to us the need to learn to look at things from the non-conventional point of view, so often forgotten by man in his struggle for self-aggrandizement. “On returning” unfolds a moment of lyrical reflection, putting under a shade the loud cynicism of some of the other poems.
The set of eleven short poems brought together under the title, “Amidst the earth-coloured trees,” written during a short trip to Chattisgarh, are a celebration of folk/tribal culture, that flourishes under the salutary influence of nature—trees, hills, rivers, birds, animals and human beings still capable of breathing in tune with the spirit of the environment. A fresh breath of air blows through these relaxed songs of natural beauty, of natural living, which awakens in the poet a new understanding of the nature and function of poetry itself. Poem no. 10 invokes a new concept of the role of poetry too.
Poetry is not iron,
but cuts the iron.
In iron there is no poetry,
but the sharpness of poetry.
The heart if connected
with the iron city,
weaving the nest with poetry
Here the trees,
the birds also,
with the chirping,
with fluttering.
Here there are clouds,
mango groves, neighbours
and their secret talks.
Sometimes the birds
build their nest on the electric post,
by saying “no” to the inviting branches
and scolding the coolness of shadows,
they challenge the burning sun
There is poetry in iron,
maybe, something special.
The sum total of the effect of reading poetry like this, the same way as it affected the writer herself, is to arrive at a new understanding of poetry, a new definition of poetry itself, which can cut the iron rusting in our otherwise routine existence. Rati Saxena’s poetry, judging from the poems in this volume, has cut the iron, by offering a new perspective of relating nature and the humans through the mediation of poetry. Atharva veda, the area of her specialization for Ph.D., is the veda of the earth, the repository of folk wisdom. Something of the charm and spell of the suktas of the fourth veda may be heard or overheard in these poems too, especially those about the earth-coloured trees, which constitute the upward thrust of an otherwise flat earth.
Ayyappa Paniker
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