Pristine Femininity – Mamta Agarwal’s Poetry

Abstract

Poetry read in eyes
Heard in sighs
Felt in touch
Recited in smiles
Sipped in quiet
Mamta Agarwal published her first collection of poems Rhythms of Life (Tekson Book Shop, New
Delhi) in 2008. It made a mark soon and in 2010 she published her second collection Voices of
autumn and other short poems, Sampark, Calcutta, 1989. Mamta Agarwal is quite well known
today even abroad in countries like the U.S., New Zealand and Romania. The third is An Untold
Story of a Pebble, Global Fraternity of Poets, Gurgaon, 2013. Now she has carved a distinctive
niche for herself in the recent and new Indian English poets.
Mamta’s very first collection has been very promising with a thought provoking poem A Tribute
to Motherhood. It marks the beginning of a poet who can be justly acclaimed a motherly new
feminist devoted as much to our native sensitivity with her love of nature, birds, flowers, rivers
besides affectionate relationships, with parents, children, little infants and the grand daughter.
She has a compassionate heart and values aardrata. The best of the litterateurs have always
moved readers to tears and compassion. Oriental aestheticians believed compassion to be the
most ennobling rasa. The Sanskrit poet of yore Bhavabhuti said ‘eko rasah karuna Eva’. Karuna
rasa is the fountain head of aardrata, a term which defies translation. But ‘wetness’ of the heart
describes it. A rough and ready rendering of the word ‘aardrata’ would be this ‘wetness’
referring to the surging of a feeling in the ‘manas’, heart-mind-desire.
From the time
of conception
a mother
nurtures like a gardener
who plants a seed
and tenderly
watches it growing from a sapling to a tree
Her heart has the width of the sky.
(A Tribute to Motherhood pp-18-19)
Love of the mother is love at its sublimity. She is the Sun and like a tree and humble like a river
on the banks of which man has begun to build the earliest civilizations. The poet concludes that a
mother encompasses the whole cosmos. Love of nature, flowers, butterflie