The Poetry of Meena Kumari


                                        

Meena Kumari - Indian cinema’s legendary actress - was a poet of exceptional sensibility. It’s a tragedy, the way her life was, that her poems are not readily available. Today’s generation, especially those interested in poetry, do not know what they are missing, for her poetry by any stretch of imagination and by all standards is remarkable, in fact astoundingly remarkable.

One of her poems start

aaghaz toh hota hai anjaam nahin hota

jab meri kahani mein vo naam nahin hota

& ends

din duube hai ya duubi barat liye kashti

sahil pe magar koi kohram nahin hota

The verses are so full of emotions, so full of sorrow, and the use of imagery is immaculate. She was able to translate her personal experiences into poetry so effortlessly as is evident in another poem of hers:

udaasiyon ne meri aatma ko ghera hai

ru-pahli chandni hai aur ghup andhera hai

kahin kahin koi taara kahin kahin koi jugnu

 jo meri raat thi vo aap ka savera hai

Noorul Hasan has translated her poems in a collection called Meena Kumari the Poet: A Life Beyond Cinema and in it he says ‘Meena Kumari’s unadorned, screaming verse reminds me of snatches of Donne, Firaq, Wordsworth, and Ghalib’ – that’s high praise, too much exaggerated, I thought, but he further says, ‘yet the poetry is slight, casual, a kind of intermittent adventure or holiday she allowed herself from her self- consuming stardom.’

Well, Meena-ji certainly was no Donne, Firaq, Wordsworth or Ghalib, but she had her individual style and in almost all her poems, her inner turmoil, her agony is evident. She’s a good poet because she could transfer her feelings into words but because she was unable to transcend her emotions, go beyond them, she falls short of being a great poet.

Broken marriage, unfulfilled relationships and alcoholism shattered her and it’s in her poetry that we find her picking the fragments of her life. She was lonelier than lonely and her loneliness is so poignantly described by her  

khud hi ko tez nakhunon se haye nochte hain ab

hamen allah khud se kaisi ulfat hoti jaati hai

No cheer, no joy in any of her poems, only melancholy and pathos. The tragedy queen of acting was also the tragedy queen of poetry.

-          NZ

5.7.2019

Comments

  1. Unknown5 July 2019 at 07:33

    Meena kumari as a poet, was not known to many. Beautiful poems

    ReplyDelete

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