Poetry in India has never been only about beauty. It has been conscience, witness, and resistance, an art form that breathes life into the anxieties of society while also holding up a mirror to its contradictions. From the ecstatic devotional voices of Kabir and Mirabai to the realism of modern poets who turned their gaze on exploitation and injustice, verse has spoken both for the self and for the collective. In this long lineage, Arun Kamal stands out as a poet who does not merely compose verses but also reflects deeply on the very function of poetry. His poetry and criticism together reveal him as a figure who, in Rajasekhara’s words, is both gold and touchstone—creator and critic in one.
Arun Kamal’s seven collections—Apni Kewal Dhar, Saboot, Naye Ilake Mein, Putli Mein Sansar, Yogfal, Main Wo Shankh Mahashankh, and most recently Rangsaz ki Rasoi—span nearly five decades of Indian life. They chart shifting social realities with a rare intensity. His poetry does not offer easy consolations. Instead, it insists that poetry is strength for the weak, a voice for those with no voice, a testimony to the lives of the most vulnerable. He has said that poetry is “a lullaby and a morning march,” a phrase that captures both its consoling and mobilizing power.
What sets Arun Kamal apart is his refusal to confine aesthetics to beauty alone. He embraces what he calls the “aesthetics of ugliness,” giving voice to those condemned for centuries to the hell of the social order. He refuses to prettify their misery or gloss over their exploitation. In his poem from Saboot, he writes: “Look, the killers are given rule and respect… the grand festival of democracy, a feast of fifty-six dishes… a Magahi paan for the one whose mouth has a morsel of flesh.” Here the obscene does not lie in bloodied lips alone but in the spectacle of rulers feasting while labourers bleed. Against a tradition that celebrated the red stain of paan as aristocratic beauty, Arun Kamal sees only horror in the redness that comes from blood. He is in agreement with Umberto Eco’s observation that the line between beauty and ugliness is blurred in our times; what the powerful see as beautiful may appear grotesque to the socially conscious eye. In this sense his work carries forward Adorno’s aesthetics, which recognized that embracing ugliness was a protest against the exclusions and injustices of capitalist modernity.
This commitment finds some of its most striking expression in Rangsaz ki Rasoi, a collection that reveals the breadth of his themes, his willingness to engage with issues often left outside the domain of poetry. In the much-discussed poem The Tale of a Bulldozer, he dramatizes the state’s use of demolition as a political tool. The bulldozer speaks in first person: it razes homes, madrasas, settlements, uproots entire communities. For long, no one resists, but finally an unarmed woman stands in its way, forcing it to stop. The bulldozer is left a helpless relic, reduced to a playground for children. In these lines, Arun Kamal transforms a contemporary image of state power into a parable of resistance. He echoes Faiz’s dream of oppressive mountains flying like cotton, Aurobindo’s vision of the tiger destroyed by its own might, and even biblical prophecy. What results is not only a document of present-day injustice but also a vision of “possible consciousness,” the hope of eventual justice. The lines “That era is gone, those rulers are dead, crushed under their own weight” convey the inevitability of tyranny collapsing under its own burden.
Elsewhere in the collection, Arun Kamal draws from contemporary events beyond India to explore human fragility. In The Game, inspired by the rise and fall of tennis legend Boris Becker, he sees the irony of glory and downfall. Becker’s triumph at Wimbledon at seventeen, his career of titles, and then his bankruptcy and prison sentence provide the backdrop. Kamal narrates Becker’s realization in prison—that fame is meaningless before daily struggle for survival among killers and addicts. The poem concludes that life is but a game where victory and defeat are illusions; what matters is to live as if each sight of the world were the last, to savor even a drop of honey on the tongue. This recalls the Buddhist Jataka tale of a man suspended between a tiger and a snake, surviving by licking honey. By drawing on such parables, Kamal universalizes the tragedy of human existence: yesterday one may have everything, today nothing, for the ground can collapse at any moment.
Rangsaz ki Rasoi also contains poems that bear witness where statistics and official reports fail. In Clue, he insists that when history, sociology, and science betray us, poetry alone preserves the truth: “the first drop of a tear, the last drop of blood, the final hollow breath.” This aligns with Engels’s praise of Balzac, who revealed more about French society than economists could. Arun Kamal reaffirms that poetry is not secondary to social science; it is its living, breathing counterpart, recording what statistics cannot—human pain, empathy, resistance.
The collection is striking for its engagement with homelessness, one of the gravest but least poeticized issues of our time. In Where Will He Sleep Tonight, the poet describes a man carrying his bedding under his arm, wandering in search of a place to lie down, while behind closed doors families eat, quarrel, and sleep. The simplicity of the scene magnifies its cruelty: the exclusion of millions from the most basic human right to shelter. According to the 2011 census, India has 1.7 million homeless, though activists believe the urban figure alone is at least 3 million. Women and children among them are the most vulnerable, prey to violence, denied health, food, and safety. Arun Kamal gives voice to their silent anguish. His lines echo the poems of global writers like Jacob Folger, who wrote of carrying his only torn bag and wishing the world would see him as a man. Poetry here becomes testimony against an indifference that statistics alone cannot shake.
In another poem, Expulsion, the poet turns inward to the fragility of human relationships. A man is pushed out of a house into the cold night. Suddenly, there is no place for him in the world. His life and death are a game for others, he says, likening himself to a pulled tooth, an unwanted abortion. Unlike homelessness imposed by poverty, this expulsion comes from within a family, exposing the collapse of intimacy in modern life. It reminds us that a dwelling is not always a home, and that belonging can dissolve overnight. The tone recalls Majaz’s wandering ghazals and Kedarnath Singh’s meditation on “to go,” but Kamal sharpens it for our fractured age of broken relationships.
Rangsaz ki Rasoi is also notable for its dialogue with tradition. In a poem addressed to Shiva, Arun Kamal brings flowers, bael leaves, and datura, invoking Ashutosh, the easily pleased god. His lines—“Untie your matted hair, let me drink, let this dry body bathe”—add a contemporary resonance to Kalidasa’s ancient invocation of Parvati and Parameshwara as word and meaning. By imagining the blue of Shiva’s throat spreading across the world, Kamal suggests that every risk taken for the betterment of others is beautiful. He transforms myth into an ethic of sacrifice and solidarity. The humility of his tone recalls Tulsidas’s declaration that he was no poet, only a servant. Arun Kamal compares himself to a child with short arms, unable to draw enough water from the well of poetry. This self-awareness marks the true poet, one who sees himself as apprentice to language rather than master.
The collection also celebrates labour with rare clarity. In one poem, he compares his own work to both the mason laying bricks under the sun and the girl stitching embroidery in silence. For him, there is no hierarchy between intellectual and physical labour. Both demand rhythm, patience, and precision. This recalls the saint-poets like Kabir and Raidas, as well as Kedarnath Agrawal, who sang of labouring hands as creators of beauty. Arun Kamal continues this tradition, insisting that the poet is a worker among workers, a smith of words.
In Eagle, dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg, he warns against inertia. Rosa admired those who could walk long distances, he reminds us, and despised those who stagnated. Kamal exhorts his readers to keep walking even if they do not know where the road leads, for walking itself reveals the chains on one’s feet. He urges them to speak what no one dares to speak, for only in walking and speaking does one resist. Even if the eagle flies low today, it alone can soar the highest. In these lines, Arun Kamal embodies the urgency of Kaifi Azmi’s call to rise, and the spirit of Faiz’s revolutionary hope.
Throughout Rangsaz ki Rasoi, one finds poems that seem to spring from silence as much as from speech. In one prose poem, he searches for Surdas’s hut by the Yamuna but finds only a mansion and a dried well. He writes that the well of poetry never dries; the greater the poet, the deeper its waters, fed by rivers across the world. Yet, he confesses, the rope and bucket fall short, and his arms are weak. Such humility coexists with confidence, creating a unique poetic posture—one that draws on tradition yet refuses blind religiosity, one that acknowledges weakness yet continues to strive.
In the end, what makes Rangsaz ki Rasoi a significant cultural document is its range: from bulldozer justice to Boris Becker, from homelessness to devotion, from labour to myth. It reminds us that poetry is not ornament but witness, not escape but engagement. Arun Kamal has said that he wished his poetry to be “the poetry of the whole of life,” collecting food from every house into his begging bowl. In this latest collection, he fulfills that wish.
Poetry in our time risks being drowned by the noise of social media and the abstraction of data. Yet, as Namvar Singh observed, a poem acquires meaning only in the act of reading, and its life continues long after its writing. Arun Kamal’s poems prove this truth. They comfort the sorrowful, awaken the complacent, and strengthen the struggling. They tell us, again and again, that poetry is the strength of the weak. And in their witness lies the sociology of resistance: the conviction that even in despair, one can keep walking, keep speaking, and keep imagining justice.
---
*Former Visiting Professor, Centre for India Studies, Peking University, Beijing.(2005-2008); Former Visiting Professor, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Warsaw (2015-2018). This is an abridged version of the author's orignal article
Comments