The intellectual revolution of structuralism in the mid-twentieth century fundamentally altered the scholarly approach to literature, language, and culture. At its core lay the conviction that all human expressions are organized by deep, underlying structures reflecting universal patterns of the human mind. Literary texts, in this view, are complex sign systems where meaning emerges from relationships, differences, and oppositions rather than fixed essences.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model was pivotal, arguing that the link between signifier and signified is arbitrary and determined by convention. This opened the door to understanding symbols as culturally constructed. Claude Lévi-Strauss expanded these principles into myth, demonstrating how narrative functions to mediate binary oppositions like nature versus culture. Roland Barthes further radicalized this by announcing the "death of the author," insisting that meaning is produced in the act of reading, while Roman Jakobson identified the poetic function as a density of language produced through repetition and parallelism.
Against this theoretical backdrop, the flute emerges as an extraordinarily layered sign in modern Hindi poetry. Across the works of Janakivallabh Shastri, Mangalesh Dabral, and Swapnil Shrivastava, the instrument is never merely musical; it is a site where dialectics of loneliness and connection, presence and absence, and repression and expression are interrogated. The flute’s physical structure—hollow bamboo pierced by holes—requires absence to produce presence. This paradox makes it an ideal vehicle for both structuralist mapping and post-structuralist exposure of instability.
Janakivallabh Shastri’s song "Kisne Bāṁsurī Bajāī" stands in a traditional devotional lineage yet shares this symbolic density. The refrain’s persistent question—who played the flute?—creates a raga-like structure of longing. The melody is recognized across lifetimes, suggesting transcendental memory while nature responds with ecstatic vitality.
The flute here mediates opposites—tenderness and difficulty, joy and suffering—within a devotional framework that ultimately affirms divine play. However, a deconstructive reading of the flute tradition, such as that seen in the Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāṇa, reveals that even divine harmony depends on the "filling" of holes that must remain empty for sound to flow. Full presence depends on absence, and the divine center disperses into a chain of ornamental signs.
Mangalesh Dabral’s untitled poem offers a masterpiece of compression, establishing a binary between the "outer flute" that is heard and the "inner flute" that plays inaudibly within the self. This opposition carries profound psychological weight: the outer flute represents sanctioned public expression, while the inner flute stands for private, repressed experience. The poem’s rhythmic structure relies on Jakobsonian equivalence, where audibility becomes the criterion of existence.
The progression from inner playing to silence and then to lament marks a dramatic inversion. Silence, long the marker of absence, becomes the condition for a cry that breaks through, yet it brings no catharsis. The poem ends with ash falling from the holes—the residue of destruction. Here, the flute ends as a relic of irreversible loss, suggesting that prolonged repression leads not to harmony but to tragic erosion.
Swapnil Shrivastava’s poem Flute takes a radically different approach by granting the instrument an autobiographical voice. The poem opens with an act of violence: innocent bamboo is subjected to "torture" to become a flute. This twists the nature/culture opposition, revealing culture as an imposition that wounds nature. The flute is played for the "pleasure" of another while filling with the player’s breath—an intimacy that evokes both fusion and violation.
The moment of the flute "forgetting" its own holes mirrors survival strategies where wounds are repressed to maintain functionality. The climax, where the flute asserts it plays "habitually" even when not held, creates a post-structuralist aporia: is this habitual playing a form of liberation or the deepest form of internalized control?
A feminist reading recasts the flute as a metaphor for the female body under patriarchal domination. In Shrivastava’s work, the violent fashioning of the instrument reenacts Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that one "becomes" a woman through social processes of constraint. The male "you" functions as patriarchal authority, and the "pleasure" derived from the instrument’s pain exposes the gendered asymmetry of labor.
The holes become symbols of patriarchal wounding. The "habitual" playing resonates with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity; gender is not an essence but a repeated performance. The flute’s unprompted continuation suggests a limited agency born of repetition, echoing Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine—a writing of the body that escapes phallogocentric control.
Dabral’s poem complements this by mapping the outer/inner binary onto the feminist critique of public and private spheres. The unheard inner flute embodies the suppressed female voice. The ash falling from the holes evokes a history repeatedly burned by oppression. While both poets are men, their work exposes the urgent need for a resistant voice—whether through Shrivastava’s cautious persistence or Dabral’s explosive lament. Post-structuralism, particularly Jacques Derrida’s différance, further destabilizes these meanings. In these poems, the hierarchy of audible/inaudible reverses, and the "supplement" of the holes both enables music and destroys the instrument.
From the divine rasa of ancient texts and the exiled lament of Rumi’s reed to the modern Hindi poet’s historical pain, the flute’s journey maps the trajectory of meaning-production. Meaning is never stable; it is continually produced through cutting, hollowing, breath, and silence. The flute, with its indispensable holes—wounds that enable resonance—stands as an enduring symbol of how absence births presence and how the performed self persists through the traces of its own making.
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*Professor, Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad
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