Deeply Touched Contemplation – Enduring Indic Predilection in Literary Endeavour A Study of the Diaspora Indian, Rajender Krishan’s Solitude and other poems

Abstract

I don’t write. I do not sit down to write or force myself to write.
It just happens perhaps when something touches me deeply.
(Rajender Krishan to a critic’s query about poetry and poetic art)
Rajender Krishan’s poetry as of now is not voluminous. A Diaspora Indian, he published his first
collection of sixty poems only this year but he has the makings of one who would soon make a niche for
himself in the temple of our literature of contemplation, cerebration and the concern for higher values
in the context of alarming decadence and degeneration in the contemporary conditions in our country
and in man in general. A poet with deep understanding of our native ethos, customs, beliefs and candid
righteousness, his poems have the fundamental love of mother land. Looking in and looking around with
an understanding of what is higher and skyward are literary pursuits. The seriousness of the poet’s
pursuit is evidenced in the illustrations by a like-minded artist who obviously thought deep while giving
the poems a thought provoking and meaningfully text-related line delineations.
Solitude is ekaanta, a condition with not just the feeling of a loner. This is something that touches
one deeply. Solitude is about the singleness of a cerebral feeling, the feeling of being in an island where
the mind places or finds itself. Thoughts move and oscillate with a special kind of intensity moving in all
directions. The movement is not that of a pendulum and for that reason it is felt in a myriad ways. This
is the feeling of the speaker in ‘Solitude’. Describing solitude is not easy, its nature is elusive.
Untiring is the phenomenon
yet unruffled remains the witness
to this incredible marvel
of pristine amusement.(p4
The feeling of amusement or even joy is singularity. But then there is a mysterious, mystical kind of
freedom experienced.