He is a rhetor of a high order. Many people will go long distances merely to hear him speak. His prime ministerial swansong was a command performance. He can appear Olympian one instant, a knife-wielding street fighter the next—he can be arrogant and winsome, classical and popular, moving confidently and flexibly over the cultural range to move his grateful listeners at will. It is this flexibility which is missing in his poetry. It might almost be as if he needs an audience to get him going, to thaw him from the frozen postures prescribed by his preferred shade of cultural nationalism.
To understand how this happens, it is necessary to step back into history. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Brahmins of the Hindi heartland (with a sprinkling of other savarna castes) were seeking to muscle in on the cosy dominance exercised by the 'Avadh elite' which was hybrid, cosmopolitan and feudal-aristocratic. And perhaps the most insidious strategy which they devised for this was the appropriation of the gloriously mixed common tongue of the common people. The end product was what we recognise today as High Hindi: Brahminical, Sanskritic, purified of 'alien' influences. So, there are at least two Hindis: the common one which swept the country in centuries past; and the synthetic one, which was invented in the early 20th century and which so many of us have learned to hate in classroom encounters. Vajpayee the poet is, finally, a prisoner of the second.
Not that the vocabulary is limited. There are many words which would be Urdu if he hadn't excluded those dreaded agents of contamination, the nuktas. But the affiliation cripples him at a deeper level. Writing on Nazism, George Steiner noted how its authoritarian, goose-stepping beat had perverted the dense and thoughtful music of classical German. The savarna elite which pioneered Brahminical Hindi had an analogous need to stamp out the confusion of history, to forget the past even as it sought control of the future. The linguistic consequence is a kind of 'soundproofing': words are used to arrest the wayward and playful rhythms of natural language, and chainganged into parade ground drills. The literary concomitant is a kind of posturing, a histrionic performance against a mythical/historical backdrop, from which the materiality of actual history is carefully filtered out.
Many will have a painful familiarity with this kind of poetry; declamatory verse, patriotic stuff suitable for earnest schoolboys. This is marked by a kind of loud attitudinising, abstracted from context and specificity:
Main Shankar ka vah krodhanal kar sakta jagati kshaar kshaar
Damru ki vah pralay-dhwani hoon jisme nachta bhishan sanhaar
Ranchadi ki atripta pyaas, main Durga ka unmatt haas...
This complex of abstract rage, abstract enemies, abstract fulfilments best expresses the historical urge of the savarna classes which are in flight from history. Nursing their victimhood, they are ill-prepared for the complexities and ambiguities of actual situations. It makes for a peculiar, 'platonic' poetry—a sort of sketch or diagram, minus the substance of experience. As against all this declamation, poetry must happen in a normal voice: ruminant, flexible, ironical.
It is a pity that Poet Vajpayee rarely allows himself to drop his voice to a humane level. But he does sometimes, and the results are pleasing enough, albeit in a minor mode—not enough thought, too many inherited and automatic 'poetic' moves. He appears to have a genuine feel for the music of the common tongue—rubbed down and softened in the run of time. This is very evident in the Emergency poems, but it is missing in the patriotic stuff which he produces when he is not incarcerated:
Ujjwaltar ujjwaltam hoti hai
Mahasangathan ki jwala
Pratipal barhti hi jati hai
Chandi ke mundon ki mala.
There is another interesting cycle of birthday poems: Vajpayee shares December 25 with Another (Christ). I looked for one dated December 25, 1992. I can imagine the sort of loud and bullying thing that the imitative Jammu boy, 'mini-Atalji', would dish out for his BJP audiences. I like to think that the occasionally adult Vajpayee could sound different: it would be some compensation for the alarming glimpses of his RSS face, 'ham Hindu' set against 'Ghori ki santati'. Alas, the birthday poem for 1992 simply wasn't there. Just like the Babri Masjid.
