Among the most common clichés deployed against Narendra Modi is that he is a “polarising figure.” This phrase is by now so well-worn that we have, to our great credit, learnt to leave it to foreign correspondents.
But even this characterisation requires a founding assumption: that Modi experiences his own nature as a unity, and is only “polarising” with respect to that vast audience across Gujarat, India and the diaspora who either revere the very ground he walks on, or loathe him so much that they won’t allow even a paisa’s worth of praise for him to pass from the lips of their peers.
Anyone reading Modi’s new book of poems, though, and trying to square the figure and nature of the lyric speaker of A Journey with that of the political animal, might come to a different conclusion, one that’s simultaneously more alarming and more affecting than the old consensus.
It may be that Modi is polarising even unto himself, a man with an internal partition designed to separate ideals from tarnished reality, so that neither universe might vitiate the other. How else can we explain the fact that the speaker of the poems is a genuinely sympathetic figure, seen yearning—and often through beautiful images, metaphors, and cadences—for the brotherhood of man, the comity of faiths, communion with a personal god or an absent other. He is all the while conscious, like the poet Kabir, of life’s paradoxes. (“And though the soul is immortal,/ We seek immortality in this body,” he says in ‘Today.’)
This voice shares with that of the public figure the resolve always to be seen as single-minded, unyielding, indifferent to praise and opprobrium alike. But there is one crucial difference. Though the man in the poems, like Modi the politician, never admits to having any flaws or weaknesses, he does speak—repeatedly—of being profoundly lonely. In ‘At Midnight,’ he writes,
Only we know the anguish within,
Is there a companion to share
These emotions that build behind the padlocked door.
There isn’t such a companion, apparently, and as a consequence, it’s as if that “padlocked door” of the self shuts the speaker out even from himself, a paradox that is illuminated elsewhere in this collection, in the lines, “My love for my fellow men is matchless and true/ Yet, only through others’ eyes can I know myself” (‘Blessed Are These Eyes’).
Where are those others? Nowhere, for this is a social, and moral, arena where even those most like the speaker cannot be allowed to become his intimates, as revealed in ‘Renunciation’:
Take no notice of fellow wanderers
Be they there or not.
Leave this striving, leave this struggle,
Cover yourself softly with the path of the lone.
One of the book’s most repeated tropes is that of what we might call the “superior man’s loneliness,” which stems from his own sense of a higher calling, or from the world’s inability to empathise with his dilemma, or—we see a fascinating dialectical tension beginning to operate here—from his own inherent lack of trust in the world because of its perceived fickleness.
Whatever the case, this makes for a lyric self moored in a most independent isolation and a most yearning detachment. It may strike other readers, as it did me, that there are only two kinds of release for such a psychological state: the detached and often partisan communion of politics, and the eloquent and often poignant privacy of poetry.
These two modes may emerge from the same predicament, but even so they cannot speak to each other. Though there are poems in A Journey about Hinduism, nationalism, Gujarat, poetry, festivals and fairs, there are no poems about rallies, governance, or politics in its quotidian form. (Who will be the first politician, one wonders, to produce a successful poem called ‘SEZ’?) And though Modi has recently made some conciliatory remarks about Muslims, I’d hazard a guess that he’s unlikely at any future swearing-in ceremony to recite lines like these from ‘Proud, as a Hindu’:
My faith is not at the expense of another’s
It adds to the comfort of my fellow man.
Only that man’s companionship I like
Who is filled with the warmth of devotion
(It’s tempting to read these last two lines as a description not of a general class of person, but of Amit Shah.)
Elsewhere, Modi seems to point to the demonisation of him as a cold-blooded murderer, and indeed all other kinds of characterisation and interpretation, as an “image,” at one remove from the truth, as pictures are from what they represent. Here is a part of the poem ‘Beyond The Picture’:
The image you see is me, yet not
In that poster I am there, and not
This is not a paradox.
A picture is not like a soul
It gets wet with water
It burns with fire,
When it gets wet or burns
The image goes, but the man remains.
Make no effort to search for me
In the picture, an exercise in futility
I am sitting, legs crossed
Confident—in speech, behaviour, deed.
You know me by my work only
Work that is life’s poem
...
Not in this image but in the fragrance
Of my labour’s sweat you find me.
I rest in the cloak of a heap of plans
These are very fine lines. But in trying to interpret them and reconcile them with reality, we once again clash with one another, and thereby relieve the speaker of the terrible burden of his internal division, or share it.