In the sparse landscape of contemporary Hindi poetry, Baabusha Kohli occupies a singular space where words often fall silent before the weight they carry. Her poems—particularly "Sangi" (Companion) and "Ubarne me dūbī huī aurat" (The Woman Drowned in Recovering)—achieve what great poetry does: they transform personal anguish into philosophical inquiry without losing the rawness of lived experience. Through what might be called an aesthetic of sacred minimalism, Kohli builds a bridge between medieval Bhakti traditions and modern existential struggle, offering a vision of sorrow not as absence but as presence, not as destruction but as transformation.
At the heart of Kohli's poetic vision lies an extraordinary reimagining: āstik duḥkh—"faithful sorrow." In "Sangi," a poem of just seven lines, this concept unfolds through the silent dialogue between a ghat (riverbank steps) and the river it adjoins. The ghat, rendered in stone, represents inertia—the accumulated weight of centuries of human suffering witnessed, absorbed, held. The river embodies flow, continuity, the capacity to absorb without being consumed. When the poet writes, "The ghat, conversing with the river / Sends its sorrows downstream," she revives a primal conversation between human consciousness and nature that modernity has largely silenced.
This is not sorrow as pathology. The phrase "devotional grief" grants pain a spiritual dignity, transforming it from something to be eliminated into something to be offered. In the solitude of night, when external clamour subsides, the ghat's sorrow finds the "generous water" that will absorb it. The word sīrānā—"to send downstream"—carries the sanctity of immersion (visarjan) in Indian folk culture, the act of releasing unfulfilled desires or broken idols into flowing water. Sorrow, here, becomes an offering rather than a burden.
The poem's final line—"In a poem, a vapour of moisture rises"—completes this alchemical process. Vapour is transformation made visible: pain, when touched by consciousness (the river), becomes poetry, rising as transparent moisture that may moisten the reader's eyes. This is catharsis not as emotional purge but as transubstantiation—the heaviness of stone lifting into the lightness of air.
Bhakti, Modernism, and the Grammar of Silence
Kohli's "faithful sorrow" finds its antecedents in medieval Bhakti poetry, where sorrow was never mere lament but a medium of connection. When Kabir declares himself dukhīvā dāsa—"the sorrowful servant"—his anguish is not depression but awakened consciousness, the fire of biraha (longing) that pulls the soul toward the infinite. Mirabai's tears become pearls; Surdas's Gopis transform separation into spiritual victory. In each case, sorrow gains meaning through its orientation toward something beyond the self.
What distinguishes Kohli is her ability to refract this tradition through the lens of modernist and post-structuralist sensibility. Where modernism—from Kafka to Beckett—often presented sorrow as absurd, solitary, without destination, Kohli restores its dialogic nature. The ghat converses; the woman in "Ubarne me dūbī huī aurat" sits near God, even when her words become curses. Sorrow here is not the scream in the void but the conversation that refuses the void.
The poet's use of silence is particularly significant. In "Sangi," the dialogue between stone and water is wordless; their communication occurs in the spaces between language. This silence is not absence but density—what Indian philosophy calls anahata nāda, "the unstruck sound," that resonates without being struck. The vapour rising at poem's end is the visual expression of this silence, wordless yet bearing witness to the heat of transformation that has occurred within.
Two Forms of Faithful Surrender
The relationship between "Sangi" and "Ubarne me dūbī huī aurat" reveals the dialectical range of Kohli's vision. Both poems centre on faithfulness, but faithfulness takes radically different forms. In "Sangi," sorrow finds release through immersion—the ghat's trust in the river's generosity is complete, horizontal, a merging without resistance. In "Ubarne me dūbī huī aurat," the woman who has "drowned up to her head in love" and now drowns in the very act of recovery expresses her faithfulness through complaint, through cursing, through refusal to accept silence.
The poem catalogues survival's paradoxes with clinical precision: "She recovers less / She appears recovered more"; "She listens less / She talks in a loud voice more"; "She worships less / she curses more." Each binary opposition maps the terrain of trauma—the reconfiguration of self that occurs when love has dismantled everything familiar. The woman who "does not stop sitting near God" but curses rather than worships embodies a faithfulness more radical than conventional piety. Cursing here is not blasphemy but intimacy; it assumes God's authority and holds Him accountable. It is the most honest devotion possible after betrayal.
This dual movement—immersion and resistance, surrender and demand—defines Kohli's theological aesthetic. The river in "Sangi" represents natural, decentralized power that works silently, absorbing pain until it rises as vapour. God in "Ubarne me dūbī huī aurat" represents centralized, personal power before whom the woman stakes her claim. One is the path of vilayan (merging), the other of upalambh (complaint). Both are paths of faithfulness.
Ecological and Feminist Dimensions
Kohli's work speaks urgently to contemporary ecological consciousness. In "Sangi," nature is not resource or backdrop but "generous water" that absorbs human pain, a living entity capable of therapeutic exchange. Eco-psychology suggests that much modern mental distress stems from disconnection from the natural world; Kohli's poem re-establishes that connection as both possible and necessary. The ghat's dialogue with the river models a relationship of mutual healing, where human sorrow finds release and nature, in turn, becomes more than mere geography.
The feminist implications are equally significant. The ghat, silent witness to centuries of human activity, bears the weight of stories—including, one imagines, those of women whose sorrows have been traditionally silenced. In "Ubarne me dūbī huī aurat," the woman's loud voice and her curses reject patriarchal expectations of female suffering—silent, submissive, invisible. When she talks "in a loud voice more" and forgives more while getting angry less, she rewrites the script of recovery. Her firmness is not strength in the heroic sense but the calcification trauma leaves behind—a scar that is hardened, protective, forever altered.
Conclusion
Baabusha Kohli's poetry achieves something rare: it gives sorrow dignity without sentimentalizing it, offers faith without dogma, and finds language for the silence that surrounds profound experience. In "Sangi," sorrow becomes vapour—transformed, lightened, released. In "Ubarne me dūbī huī aurat," sorrow becomes stubborn survival—firm in character, loud in voice, still sitting near God but demanding answers. Together, these poems create a complete theology of modern pain, one that draws from Bhakti's depth and modernism's honesty to articulate a faithfulness for the twenty-first century.
The rising vapour at the end of "Sangi" is perhaps Kohli's most powerful image—not because it resolves, but because it ascends. It suggests that sorrow, when held faithfully, need not remain heavy. It can become moisture that moistens, poetry that connects, vapour that rises toward the infinite. In an age of noise and fragmentation, this is a quiet, necessary revolution.
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*Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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