In an age where human connections have become increasingly precarious, Hindi poet Kumar Ambuj's poem 'Vyavdhan' (Interruption) emerges as a profound meditation on the transformed nature of love and loneliness. The poem presents a paradoxical emotional landscape where the arrival of a beloved person is no longer a cause for unbridled celebration but is perceived as an obstruction to a carefully cultivated habit of living alone. This reading explores how the poem captures the existential crisis of contemporary humanity, trapped between the desire for connection and the comfort of managed solitude.
The poem opens with the beloved's arrival serving as a reminder that they still exist in the world, but not for the speaker. This seemingly simple observation unravels the complex psychological machinery of modern relationships. The speaker has been gradually forming a habit of living without the beloved, and their presence threatens to undo this painstakingly constructed emotional equilibrium. What makes this poem particularly striking is its reversal of traditional romantic expectations. In classical love poetry, separation is the wound and union the healing, but here union itself becomes the wound that reopens what time had supposedly healed.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the poem documents the mourning process with remarkable precision. Sigmund Freud's theory of mourning suggests that the ego gradually withdraws its libidinal energy from the lost object to protect itself from destruction. The speaker's formation of a habit of living without the beloved represents this very reinvestment of emotional energy. When the beloved returns, this energy must be redirected once more, forcing the speaker to begin the arduous task of detachment anew. The word 'habit' is particularly significant here, indicating that what was once conscious effort has become second nature, a defense mechanism so deeply embedded that its disruption feels like a violation.
The psychosocial dimensions of the poem become evident when viewed through Erik Erikson's framework of identity formation. In modern society, alienation has paradoxically become integral to identity. The speaker has constructed a self around absence, finding security in the predictability of solitude. The beloved's presence threatens not just emotional stability but the very structure of identity that has been built in their absence. This explains why happiness at seeing the beloved is immediately shadowed by anxiety, the pleasure of reunion cannot outweigh the terror of having to reconstruct a self that had learned to exist independently.
Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid love provides the sociological framework for understanding this emotional configuration. In our contemporary world, relationships have become fluid, disposable, and subject to the same consumerist logic that governs markets. The modern individual desires connection but fears the commitment that makes connection meaningful. We want relationships that we can exit as easily as we enter them, bonds that do not constrain our freedom. The speaker in 'Vyavdhan' embodies this contradiction perfectly, they acknowledge the beloved's existence and feel happiness at their presence, but this happiness is contaminated by the awareness that it disrupts the emotional management system they have perfected.
The post-truth era, with its erosion of objective reality and valorization of personal perception, has deeply affected how we experience love. Emotions are no longer understood as enduring truths but as manageable states that should serve our convenience. The speaker's habit of living without the beloved represents the triumph of personal narrative over shared reality. They have constructed a version of life where absence is normal, and presence becomes the anomaly that must be explained away. The beloved's arrival is an interruption not just of routine but of a carefully maintained fiction of self-sufficiency.
Marketism and consumerist culture have commodified even our most intimate emotions. The poem's language of habit, management, and interruption reflects the logic of efficiency and productivity that governs capitalist societies. Love, which traditionally demanded surrender and inconvenience, is now evaluated through cost-benefit analysis. The speaker's frustration at having to begin again the process of living without the beloved is fundamentally the frustration of wasted emotional labor, of investments that yield no lasting return. The beloved becomes an inefficiency in an otherwise smoothly operating system of emotional management.
When placed against the love poetry of earlier progressive poets like Nagarjun, Kedarnath Agarwal, and Trilochan, Ambuj's distinctiveness becomes starkly visible. In Nagarjun, separation produces a longing that connects the human to their roots, memories serve as sustenance. In Kedarnath Agarwal, love is a creative expansion that makes the world beautiful. Trilochan's sonnets grant love a philosophical dignity where distance itself becomes part of intimacy. But in Ambuj, there is no such romantic imagination. Memories are not sustenance but interference, the beloved's presence does not beautify the world but disorders it. This is the poetry of emotional exhaustion, where love has become not revolutionary energy but energy drain, not achievement but repetitive labor.
The existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus illuminates the deeper philosophical stakes of the poem. Sartre's famous declaration that "hell is other people" finds vivid illustration in 'Vyavdhan'. The beloved's gaze turns the speaker into an object, fixing them in a web of expectations and memories from which they had worked hard to escape. The speaker's carefully cultivated nothingness, their existential freedom in solitude, is threatened by the beloved's presence. Similarly, the poem echoes Camus's myth of Sisyphus in its depiction of endless, meaningless repetition. The task of learning to live without the beloved must be undertaken again and again, each time the beloved arrives and departs. This is the absurd condition of modern love, where we are condemned to repeat the same emotional labor without hope of lasting resolution.
The linguistic craft of the poem achieves its power through minimalism and restraint. Words are spent economically, as if the speaker themselves wishes to avoid the obstruction of language. The pauses between lines create spaces where meaning accumulates in silence. The word 'Vyavdhan' itself becomes a powerful image, suggesting a discordant note in harmonious music, a crack in a carefully decorated surface. The final lines, "that you are and / we are alone", achieve their devastating effect through the simple conjunction 'and', which deepens rather than bridges the chasm between presence and togetherness.
Ultimately, 'Vyavdhan' is not merely a poem about personal emotion but a sociological document of our times. It records the moment when loneliness ceased to be a punishment and became a choice, when forgetting transformed from weakness into survival skill, when the presence of another began to feel like an interruption rather than a completion. The poem warns us that we are moving toward a civilization where the human, in attempting to escape the pain of loss, has suppressed the very capacity for deep connection. Love ends here not in hatred or conflict but in a cold, tired acceptance that togetherness and loneliness are no longer opposites but companions. Kumar Ambuj has given us a mirror in which we can see the cracked heart of modernity, a heart that has forgotten how to fill its own emptiness.
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*Professor and Former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original article
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