Ranjana Mishra’s poetry emerges from a rare confluence of Hindustani classical music and literary imagination. A disciple of Pandit Jasraj, she carries forward the Mewati gharana’s legacy, weaving its discipline and resonance into her verse. Her poem "Rāga Alhaiyā Bilāvala" exemplifies this synthesis, transforming the grammar of a morning raga into a meditation on existence, fragility, and resilience.
The poem begins with dawn imagery—“The morning star has only just returned / a faint something, like a hint of the east”—which situates it within the raga’s prescribed time. The playful movement of notes, caught and released, mirrors Bilawal’s vakra chalan and pakad. Yet Mishra overlays this musical discipline with existential imagery: a dewdrop resting on a yellowed leaf, fragile yet luminous, symbolizing impermanence. This recalls Buddhist philosophy, Kabir’s metaphor of the bubble, and Chhayavaadi motifs of tears, while resonating with Mahadevi Verma’s evocations of transience.
The “note breaking and flowing onward” becomes a metaphor for continuity beyond temporal bounds, carrying resonance into darkness. “Tam” here is both literal night and symbolic of suffering or patriarchal obstruction. The feminine gaze is tender yet resolute: instead of rebellion through confrontation, it asserts creation through persistence. The dewdrop on the yellow leaf embodies woman’s will to live and create despite limited resources, transforming fragility into strength. Silence, too, is reinterpreted—not as weakness but as the ground upon which the note ascends, breaking suppression with giggling assertion.
Mishra’s linguistic craft balances tatsama words like bhor, tārā, and pūrva with tadbhava words like kilakate and bhagate. This interplay mirrors the raga’s duality of classical discipline and folk spontaneity. The choice of playful, phonetic words enacts Derrida’s idea of language as free play, where meaning is not fixed but constantly deferred. Barthes’ “death of the author” is invoked when Mishra writes “that note of yours”—the pronoun tumhārā destabilizes authorship, leaving interpretation open to the reader’s experience. Julia Kristeva’s semiotic theory is also applied: the giggling notes erupt as primal, rebellious energy breaking patriarchal language’s rigidity, turning fragility into sublimated strength.
Placed alongside Mahadevi Verma and Kishori Amonkar, Mishra’s work resonates with their philosophies. Verma’s mud-lamp burning even as it extinguishes parallels Mishra’s dewdrop-note flowing into darkness. Kishori Amonkar’s view of raga as transcendental silence finds echo in Mishra’s depiction of notes that delight yet provoke deep thought. In all three, the undercurrent is the autonomy of woman’s voice, resisting darkness through artistic creation.
Post-structuralist frameworks deepen the analysis. Derrida’s différance is evident in the notes’ perpetual deferral between catching and releasing, where meaning lies in intervals rather than fixed presence. The binary of dawn/light versus tam/darkness is inverted: darkness becomes the ground of expansion, complementing rather than opposing light. Foucault’s discourse on power and resistance is applied to the raga’s grammar, which disciplines the note through rules of time and purity. Yet the note’s giggling and running create cracks in this structure, forming heterotopian spaces where art resists surveillance and discipline. The dewdrop on the yellow leaf becomes “subjugated knowledge,” fragile yet challenging entrenched power. Darkness, where surveillance slackens, becomes a space of liberation where the note flows freely.
Ultimately, Mishra’s poem is an open text, refusing closure and embodying post-structuralist fluidity. Meaning is not stable but flows with time, raga, and reader consciousness. Truth is not certainty but appearance, shadow, and instability. The poem’s journey from dawn to darkness symbolizes art’s transcendence of temporal limits, affirming that even fragile existence can illuminate the eternal. Mishra’s fusion of classical discipline, feminine resilience, and philosophical depth transforms "Rāga Alhaiyā Bilāvala" into more than a musical homage—it becomes a metaphor for life itself, where catching and releasing, fragility and strength, silence and sound coexist in endless play.
In this way, Mishra’s poem stands as a declaration of existence, resistance, and liberation. The fragile drop becomes eternal swara, proving that art, like life, is transient yet immortal in its resonance.
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*Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, School of Humaniteis, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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