Friendship as meaning: A transtextual reading of Arun Kamal’s 'Dosta'

Ravi Ranjan, Arun Kamal

By Ravi Ranjan* 

Arun Kamal occupies a central place in contemporary Hindi literature, both as poet and critic. His collections—“Apnī Keval Dhār,” “Sabūt,” “Naye Ilāke Mem,” “Maim Vo Sankh Mahāsankh,” “Yogaphal,” and “Putlī Mem Samsār”—and his prose works “Kavitā Aur Samay” and “Golmez” mark him as a voice bridging classical sensibilities with modern anxieties. Winner of the Bharat Bhushan Agarwal Award and later the Sahitya Akademi Award (1996), he also shaped critical discourse as editor of “Ālocanā” with Namwar Singh. His poem “Dosta” (“Friend”) emerges from this legacy as a meditation on friendship in an increasingly fragmented, “friendless time.”

The poem opens with the refusal to measure life: “Neither rotis while eating, nor years while living, are meant for counting.” Here Kamal resists quantification, insisting that meaning lies in lived intensity. Natural images—the sky, mountain, river, tamarind tree—anchor permanence, and the friend is placed alongside them as “the turning point of my life, my secured savings, my dam of water.” Friendship becomes existential stability, not mere sentiment.

The friend is saviour and witness: “There is somewhere my hero who will save me at the final moment… who will lift me like a flower from the noose of the gallows.” Yet this unconditional trust is balanced by moral vigilance: “There is someone before whose face I would not tell a lie… to fall from whose gaze would mean falling from the twenty‑fourth floor.” The gaze of the friend is both refuge and discipline, echoing existentialist debates from Sartre’s “Hell is other people” to the possibility of authenticity through the other’s presence. Kamal’s lines transform this tension into warmth: the friend’s gaze is not oppressive but morally awakening.

The poem’s metaphors—“relationship of honey and dew,” “gum of the acacia,” “threads of a rope”—capture friendship’s delicacy and adhesive strength. The most poignant image is social: two poor boys polishing shoes, one sharing cream with the other, then eating litti together. This ordinary act embodies friendship as sharing amid deprivation. Kamal asks, “What is there in this small thing that is making me restless today?” That restlessness is the moral centre of the poem, where friendship becomes a social value affirming equality and cooperation.

The final comparison—“water on the moon” versus “water in the flask of friends”—underscores that scientific achievement pales before the sweetness of human closeness. “The water of my well is brackish and the water at my friend’s house is sweet.” Taste here is existential: belonging makes the friend’s water sweeter.

Critically, “Dosta” engages transtextually with traditions from the “Mahabharata,” “Nītisatakam,” “Rāmcaritamānasa,” “Sudāmā Carita,” and Shamsher Bahadur Singh’s “Aman ka Rāg.” Friendship is reorganised across historical and ideological planes, resonating with Genette’s “transtextuality” and Kristeva’s “intertextuality.” Kamal’s poem is not closed but open, dialogic, balancing tradition and modernity.

The language is strikingly simple, echoing Wordsworth’s call in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” for poetry in “the real language of men.” Kamal’s diction—“There is someone before whose face I would not tell a lie”—touches moral truth without ornament. His imagery functions as Eliot’s “objective correlative”: concrete acts (shoe‑shining boys, honey, dew, gum) embody abstract feelings. Bakhtin’s “dialogism” is evident in the questioning tone—“What is it that draws one man towards another man?”—which invites readers into meaning‑making rather than imposing conclusions.

Structurally, the poem builds meaning through oppositions: counting/not counting, sin/redemption, lie/truth, deprivation/sharing. The friend is signifier whose meaning shifts across contexts—protector, witness, mirror, moral standard. Post‑structuralist readings deepen this instability: Derrida’s “différance” shows meaning deferred, Barthes’s “death of the author” opens the text to readerly participation. Thus “Dosta” is not a fixed hymn to friendship but a dynamic field where meaning is continually remade.

The moral‑emotional tension is crucial. On one side, unconditional acceptance—“no matter how much sin I may commit”—presents the friend as refuge. On the other, the fear of falling from his gaze makes friendship a moral touchstone. This duality transforms friendship into a living process of accountability, where compassion and criticism coexist. True friendship, Kamal suggests, is not blind support but vigilant closeness.

Socially, the poem affirms dignity amid marginalisation. The shoe‑shining boys embody cooperation beyond class division. Kamal avoids didacticism; instead, a small incident unsettles the reader, urging reflection on society’s structure. Friendship here becomes a broad social value, imagining a community where identity rests not on class but on human sensitivity.

Existentially, “Dosta” resists measurement, affirming that meaning arises in lived experience. The friend is the “other” through whom the “I” gains awareness. Unlike Sartre’s oppressive gaze, Kamal’s friend enables authenticity. Meaning is not solitary but relational, constructed through trust and moral closeness. Friendship “creates meanings in life”—meanings born not from external imposition but shared experience.

In sum, Arun Kamal’s “Dosta” is a layered text where friendship is emotional support, moral mirror, existential anchor, and social value. Its simplicity of language conceals profound philosophical depth, weaving together Indian traditions and Western theories from Wordsworth to Eliot, Bakhtin, Sartre, Derrida, and Barthes. The poem unsettles by showing that in a fragmented, competitive age, friendship remains the force that rescues life from meaninglessness. As Kamal writes: “Friends—from whom meanings are born in life.”

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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