Brambles of memory, ruins of time: The poetry of Keshav Tiwari

By Ravi Ranjan* 

In an age when much contemporary poetry chases fashionable idioms and performative outrage, Keshav Tiwari offers something rarer: a voice rooted in the soil of rural India, yet reaching toward universal human truths. His collection Nadi ka marsiya to pani hi gayega (Only the Water Will Sing the River's Elegy) stands as a quiet but profound intervention in Hindi literature—one where personal suffering intertwines with collective memory, and environmental decay merges with human resilience.

The Memory That Binds

The collection opens with "Jog" (Asceticism), a poem that unfolds through a child's eyes. A wandering ascetic comes to the door asking for alms. The little girl tells him to leave because her mother starts crying whenever she hears his sarangi. What the child cannot yet comprehend is the invisible connection between the strings of that instrument and the strings of her mother's heart—an old bond, a buried memory.

Tiwari handles this with extraordinary delicacy. The jogi knows that once the notes awaken, one must remain awake with them for life. This is not a game of winning or losing but an experience lived with complete absorption. The poet then looks toward the future: one day, that girl will hear the sarangi's melancholy ripple through her own dreams. That moment will mark her maturity—when she finally understands the sorrow she once tried to chase away.

This is Tiwari's great theme: memory as both wound and inheritance. The poem transforms personal pain into a broader social discourse, revealing how human sensitivities flow from one generation to the next.

The System and the Self

Tiwari's political vision is never sloganistic. In "Mang" (Demand), he invokes the great Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir, who asked only for two things: to sleep in peace for a while, and a little wine. These are not luxuries but the cries of a weary soul seeking comfort amid daily grind. The poem then expands: some people ask for a little sky (freedom), others for a water vessel (resources), still others for a compass (direction). These are the most basic human needs—dignity, sustenance, clarity.

But the system cannot tolerate even these requests. The courtiers warn the rulers whenever their hearts soften even slightly. "You don't know what they are asking for!"—this line exposes the paranoid logic of power. If ordinary people assert their right to peace, water, and direction, the entire authoritarian edifice might shake.

What makes this political critique poetic rather than polemical is Tiwari's use of intertextuality. Mir's presence fills the poem with classical dignity and human compassion, transforming what could have been a mere statement into a meditation stretching across centuries.

When Rivers Die

The title poem confronts perhaps the most urgent crisis of our time: ecological collapse. "Only the Water Will Sing the River's Elegy" refuses the comfortable distance of nature poetry. Here, the river is not a backdrop but a subaltern—exploited by power and capital, with only the water itself left to mourn its passing.

Tiwari's poems on dying rivers—Bakulahi, Chandraval, Pahuj, Sindh, Dhasan, Urmil, Chelna, Jamnar—form a devastating sequence. These are not merely watercourses but cultural memory and biological identity. Their disappearance means the dehydration of an entire civilisation. Against the noise of development projects, Tiwari insists on something deeper: that a river matters not because of its utility but because it has its own autonomous right to exist.

When the water sings its own elegy, it becomes an act of resistance—a counter-discourse that shatters the silence imposed by those who see nature only as commodity.

The Courage of Small Movements

Yet Tiwari is no doomsayer. In "Halcalen" (Small Movements), he finds hope in the most modest signs: someone going to the city obscured in fog, an animal that has slipped its tether, an elderly person repeating verses from the Ramcharitmanas in bed. The east glows "like the iron in a blacksmith's furnace"—an image that connects the sun's energy to human labour.

Amid the world's big movements—political upheavals, global crises—Tiwari considers the awakening of a single human being with his own courage to be the greatest event. This is deep ecology: the trust that nature reactivates itself despite cold, fog, and darkness. Liberation lies not in escaping this earth but in recognising our bondedness to it.

The Responsible Poet

In "Uski Kavita" (His Poetry), Tiwari reflects on the creator's role. Drawing on Sartre's confession—"Long ago I took my pen for a sword; today I know my powerlessness. Yet I write"—the poem embraces a mature, unheroic commitment. The poet cannot change the world through words alone. But the choice to write while knowing this limitation makes him a truly engaged creator.

This is not bad faith, not the illusion that poetry is a complete political act. It is something more honest: a moral intervention that gives voice to those the system silences. Tiwari's poet does not raise his voice; he listens. He gives space to the woman who wept all her life, to the farmer whose hands touch the earth, to the disappearing rivers that once sustained entire worlds.

Conclusion

Keshav Tiwari's poetry teaches the art not of turning sorrow into celebration, but of bearing it. His lines create a beauty of silence—the mother's silent weeping, the jogi's awakening through music, the water singing its own elegy. This silence lingers like an after-echo, granting poetic dignity to life's deprivations and to renunciation.

Even as rivers dry up, memories turn to thorns, and civilisation crumbles into debris, Tiwari reminds us of poetry's true purpose: to preserve the sound of water in parched riverbeds, the potential for a flower amidst brambles, and the final spark of human dignity within the ruins. His is a voice that speaks softly but carries far—a necessary antidote to our noisy, forgetful age.

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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