Vachanas

by Ankur Betageri (July 2018)

#159, Herb Kornfeld

 

 

Vachana is a 12th century poetic form which originated in the Kannada language. Vachana literally means ‘saying’, ‘thing said’ or ‘promise’. With the birth of Vachana, Kannada poetry was freed of the metrical and courtly conventions of traditional courtly poetry and its free-verse format made poetry the voice of the working man—the fisherman, the ferryman, the cobbler, the weaver etc.,—as well as that of the minister, the mystic and the rebel. Vachana poetry was revolutionary in that it rejected the Vedic religion, its ritualism, social customs and the caste system.

 

This is my attempt to write vachanas as an atheist.

 

1.

 

What’s revealed

by blaring mantras on loudspeakers?

What rebirth is achieved

by wearing the decaying thread?

I’mBrahmanI’mBrahman

I’mBrahmanI’mBrahman

you mutter until you drown

in delusions of grandeur.

R.W. and W.W., W.B. and T.S.,

what’s with the Aryan bombast and thunder

what’s with the consecration of fertility cults?

You gave psilocybin

to these megalomaniacs

now, who will save them from superlatives

from orgasming on the ineffable?

Look, how they sit in a saintly posture

and think evil of everyone else

O Karlnatha!

 

2.

 

You called woman mayé

because woman-as-phantasm

is adsorbed—not absorbed,

she can be squeezed out of you

like water from a sponge.

Be like a sponge! is your dictum

or better, like thermocol in a tank

or like waterdrop on a lotus-leaf.

 

3.

 

Like Krishna, Kudalasangamadeva

is Transcendental Signified.

And Bhakti, the affect of capture.

So the nomad says,

‘I am the cat who walks by himself

and all places are alike to me’

O Karlnatha.

 

4.

 

There was a time

when you longed for her

then there was a time

you longed for her to disappear

the friction between beings

that produces celestial sparks

also turns them into rocks

O Karlnatha. 

 

5.

 

I am not this form of flesh

I am not my memories or name

I am not the congeries of ideas, yours or mine

I am not anything crystallized or framed—

I am the unformed and form
-ing lightning

between the world and the brain

just the thinking and affecting

and the thought and affected

O Gillenatha.
 
6.

 

If the voice of your conscience 

tells you I am a villain

know that your conscience

is internalized social norms.

Priestly talk has parasitized

your brain

disinfect it with dhamma

O Assalaayana.

 

________________________________
Ankur Betageri is a poet, short fiction writer and visual artist based in New Delhi. He is the author of The Bliss and Madness of Being Human (poetry, 2013) and Bhog and Other Stories (short fiction, 2010). He teaches English at Bharati College, University of Delhi. His poetry has appeared in New English Review, Mascara Literary Review and London Review of Books.

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