Where tears become notes: The feminine melody of Ranjana Mishra

By Ravi Ranjan* 

In the vast, often tumultuous landscape of contemporary Hindi literature, the voice of Ranjana Mishra emerges not with a shout, but with a melody. It is a voice steeped in the ancient grammar of Indian classical music, yet intimately familiar with the quiet rebellions of the modern heart. Her recent poem, “Raga Malkauns,” from her acclaimed collection Patthar Samay Ki Seedhiyan (Stone Steps of Time), is a masterful example of this fusion. It’s a work that transforms a midnight melody into a profound meditation on sorrow, feminine identity, and the very nature of creation.

At its core, “Raga Malkauns” is a poem of catharsis. Mishra uses the raga—traditionally a grave, calm, and contemplative night melody—as a vessel for overwhelming emotion. The poem opens with a powerful image of dissolution:

"Breaking the banks of the eyes

A tear burst in the deep night

Flowed out from within oneself

Another river flowing

Those are the notes of Malkauns

Melted by the weight of dense tenderness

Dim dawn, just before the light" 

Here, sorrow is not a quiet trickle but a flood. The “banks of the eyes” are the levees of social composure, the restraint that patriarchy and convention often demand, particularly of women. When these banks break, what emerges is not just a tear, but “another river flowing”—an inner landscape of emotion given form. This river is the raga itself. The notes of Malkauns, traditionally sung with flat (komal) notes that give it a dense, gravity-laden feel, are not merely heard; they are the physical manifestation of weeping, “melted by the weight of dense tenderness.”

The Grammar of Grief

What makes Mishra’s work so compelling is its precise musicality. Malkauns is a raga of the deep night, a time of solitude and introspection. The poem’s journey from “deep night” to a “dim dawn, just before the light” mirrors the raga’s prescribed performance time and its emotional arc. The poet doesn’t just name-drop the raga; she embeds its structure into the poem’s fabric. The “dense tenderness” reflects the sonic weight of its flat notes, transforming a technical aspect of musicology into a powerful emotional and physical sensation.

This blending of the technical and the personal is where Mishra’s genius lies. She connects the ancient wisdom of sages like Abhinavagupta, the 10th-century philosopher who spoke of music’s power to induce chitta-druti (the melting of the mind) and lead to a state of supreme bliss, with the intimate experience of a woman in solitude. The breaking of the banks becomes Abhinavagupta’s “inner entry” (antahpravesha), a moving beyond the limited ego into a vast, shared consciousness.

A Feminine Poetics of Fluidity

To read “Raga Malkauns” through a feminist lens is to see it as a powerful act of what French feminist Hélène Cixous called écriture féminine—a form of writing rooted in the female body and its sensations. For centuries, women’s tears have been dismissed as a sign of weakness. Mishra reclaims them. In her poem, weeping is not a collapse but a creative force. The fluidity of tears becomes the fluidity of the river, which in turn becomes the fluidity of music.

This stands in stark contrast to the more traditional, masculine conception of musical transcendence. The article contrasts Mishra’s poem with Agyeya’s modernist classic, “Asadhya Veena” (The Unplayable Lute). In Agyeya’s work, the path to artistic perfection lies in the dissolution of the ego into a state of ‘zero-ness’ and silence. The king must surrender his crown and his pride before the music can flow. It is a philosophy of stoicism and quietus.

Mishra offers a different path. Her dissolution is not through becoming ‘zero’, but through becoming ‘melted’ (dravita). It is not silence, but a river in full flow. The ego is not annihilated; it is transformed. The poem’s power lies in its embrace of motion and weeping, qualities traditionally coded as feminine, and elevating them to the level of classical dignity. As the analysis notes, “What patriarchy negated by calling ‘tears,’ the poetess has granted the dignity of ‘Raga Malkauns’.”

This idea is further illuminated by the work of French post-structuralist Julia Kristeva. Her concepts of the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’ provide a perfect framework for understanding the poem’s inner workings. The ‘symbolic’ is the realm of language, grammar, social order—the fixed banks of the river. The ‘semiotic’ is the pre-linguistic, rhythmic, bodily pulse—the chaotic, powerful flow of emotion. 

The “tear burst” in the poem is the eruption of the ‘semiotic’ into the ‘symbolic’. It is the primal cry that shatters the discipline of language. The poet’s craft lies in taking this formless impulse (the semiotic) and shaping it into the structured, beautiful form of the raga (the symbolic). The poem itself becomes the space where these two forces meet and create meaning.

A Global Stage for a Local Lament

While deeply rooted in Indian tradition, Mishra’s poetic vision resonates on a global stage. Her use of music as a philosophical framework invites comparison to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, where music becomes a metaphor for the intersection of time and the timeless. When Eliot writes, “you are the music while the music lasts,” he captures the same sense of transcendent unity that Mishra achieves when tears become notes.

The raw, passionate impulse in her work echoes Federico García Lorca’s concept of the duende—that dark, earthy power born from the struggle with death and creation. Lorca’s “black sounds” find their parallel in Mishra’s “dense tenderness,” a creative force that bursts from the depths of being. And in its transformation of personal grief into a structured, repeating pattern, the poem even recalls Paul Celan’s use of the fugue form to transmute historical trauma into art.

Yet, Mishra’s voice remains uniquely her own. For Eliot, music is often an abstract philosophy; for Lorca, it is passion and death; for Celan, it is a tool to confront horror. For Ranjana Mishra, music is a biological and spiritual process, an internal river that is the very substance of feminine existence. She connects the metaphysical directly to the body, making the experience of raga as natural and inevitable as breathing.

“Raga Malkauns” is ultimately a poem about the sublimation of sorrow. It argues that great art is not about escaping pain, but about giving it a form so powerful that it transcends the personal and touches the universal. The poem ends not with a resolution, but with a threshold—“just before the light.” It is a moment pregnant with possibility, where sorrow has done its work and peace is about to dawn.

In a literary world often fragmented between tradition and modernity, Ranjana Mishra’s “Raga Malkauns” builds a bridge. It demonstrates that the ancient grammar of our classical arts can still provide the most profound language for expressing the most intimate truths of the human heart. It proves that a woman’s tears, when forged into art, are not an end, but a beginning—the source of “another river,” flowing towards the infinite.

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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