Ontology of love and violence in Savita Singh’s 'Dreams and Butterflies'

By Ravi Ranjan* 

Savita Singh has emerged as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Hindi poetry. Her work fuses women’s existence, the philosophy of time, and psychophysical sensations into a subtle yet powerful poetic language. In her verse, the woman is not merely a subject but the very foundation of creation, consciousness, and action. Collections such as “Āpne Jaisā Jīvan” (“A Life Like One’s Own”), “Nīnd Thī aur Rāt Thī” (“There Was Sleep and There Was Night”), “Svapna Samaya” (“Dream Time”), “Prem Bhī Ek Yātanā Hai” (“Love Too Is a Torment”), “Khoī Huī Chīzom kā Soka” (“The Mourning of Lost Things”), and “Vāsanā Ek Nadī kā Nāma Hai” (“Desire Is the Name of a River”) have transformed the contours of modern female consciousness. Singh’s contribution extends beyond literature into education and intellectual discourse, bridging academic theory with lived social realities.

Her poem “Dreams and Butterflies” (“Sapane Aura Titaliyām”) exemplifies this synthesis. It is a cinematic montage where memory, dream, and historical reality dissolve into one another. Love, memory, fear, death, and historical violence intertwine so deeply that the poem resists confinement to a single meaning. It is not merely a narrative of love but an exploration of the dark, mysterious realm within love—where memories become dreams, the dead return, and past time intrudes upon present consciousness. The poem’s structure resembles an unconscious region governed not by visible reality but by memory, desire, trauma, and fear. A psychoanalytical reading becomes both challenging and rewarding.

Epic Framework, Lyrical Core

Externally, “Dreams and Butterflies” resembles a long narrative poem, spanning centuries of war, hunt, and rebirth. Internally, it is lyrical, built from individual pain, subtle waves of love, and the throb of memory. Life, death, and destiny appear in epic scope, but resolution lies not in heroism but in grief transformed into poetry. The poem begins with a dream and expands into a grand narrative where “the surging river of blood” and “the mystery of butterflies” coexist, lending epic dignity.

Soft images shift into doubles of harsh reality. Patriarchal oppression and individual pain return in uncanny form, echoing Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”. Singh uncovers the enchantment of love alongside the river of blood flowing within it. Butterflies and kisses are not romantic symbols but witnesses to the politics of the body and historical pain, where eroticism becomes a crisis of existence. Preserving memory and mourning lost things becomes the condition for vitality.

The poem’s dreamlike layout resists linear storytelling. Memories return suddenly, time shatters, and scenes melt into each other. Repetitions like “Remember / Remember” deepen the psychological landscape. Freud’s “Dream Interpretation” and Jung’s “Collective Unconscious” illuminate the poem: dreams as symbolic expressions of repression, archetypes beyond personal experience. Love here is not liberation but a field where blood flows, death intrudes, and memory torments. Butterflies become kisses, then signals of death. Love encompasses violence, ownership, lack, and fear of loss—ironies central to modern existence.

The reference to Borges’s “The Magic Book” adds another dimension. Memory becomes irretrievable, each page lost once read. The poem searches for what cannot be recovered, transforming memory into dream and dream into art. In this sense, “Dreams and Butterflies” is not only about love and memory but about humanity’s need to preserve lost experiences in language.

Anti-War Poetics

Beyond psychoanalysis, Singh’s poem is anti-war poetry. It challenges patriarchal idioms of victory and defeat. Violence recorded in history and women’s internal pain converge in resistance through poetry. Plath’s “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” share this terrain, where the female unconscious regains power through dream-film aesthetics. Svetlana Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War” resonates here, highlighting women’s long wait and burden of memory during war—different from men’s experience. Love and memory become fronts where existence itself is at stake, and the monstrous (blood, mutilated bodies, corpses) transforms into symbolic language through magical realism.

Singh and Plath both deploy upheaval of memory and mythical symbols—rivers of blood, dying butterflies—to create private worlds of women’s history against patriarchal destruction.

The poem begins: “This is a small part of a long dream.” The “long dream” becomes metaphor for human history, female experience, and the torment of love. The protagonist woman is in a forest, “Assured like the trees and leaves themselves / Fearless among the creatures of the jungle.” Nature is intimate, not violent. Sitting on an “old stone” by the river connects her to archaeological memory. The stone is a witness of history. This recalls Kalidasa’s “Shakuntala”, where woman and nature are inseparable. Acharya Mallinatha’s commentary describes Shakuntala’s sibling-like affection for trees. Singh’s modern woman echoes this intimacy, finding ease in nature against civilisation’s insecurity.

The Horseman and Patriarchal Violence

At this point, the man on horseback enters. He claims to have searched for her across births, that she holds his “fruits and rivers.” These symbols represent creativity, fertility, emotional wealth. His hunger and thirst reveal tension between love and ownership. To the woman, he is a stranger; to him, she is his past. His face bears smallpox marks, signs of historical violence. His harsh vow to possess her reflects patriarchy’s authority even in love. Her solitude is threatened—love becomes a crisis of self-erasure.

The metaphor of the “hunt” sharpens this. She recalls being killed before on this riverbank, her children snatched away. This is collective memory of women’s history—wars, patriarchal violence, violation of rights. Her creative power merges into infinity. Yet this time she resists, running with the momentum of winds, walking on water, reaching treetops. This is free imagination of female consciousness. But the man sows “seeds of doubt,” echoing Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, where Satan whispers doubt into Eve’s mind. Patriarchal control operates not only through force but through psychological traps of guilt and memory.

Milton’s Satan convinces Eve that God’s prohibition is conspiracy, sowing doubt that transforms curiosity into guilt. Singh’s horseman similarly destabilises the woman’s resistance. He insists they are parts of each other, separated centuries ago, recalling rivers of blood and butterflies that became kisses. Patriarchal gaslighting attempts to stop liberation through doubt and guilt. Singh exposes this global cunning of male-dominated psychological control.

Memory, Death, and Enchantment

The poem blurs dream and memory: “What has been saved in memory and what is in the dream / Are one and the same.” The beloved and the hunter merge. Butterflies, once kisses, now signal death. The horse carries both beloved and corpse. The woman’s world oscillates between sorrow and enchantment. Borges’s “The Magic Book” reappears, symbolising irretrievable memory. Butterflies are no longer kisses but torment. Love itself becomes dangerous to existence.

Ultimately, “Dreams and Butterflies” presents a multi-layered ontology of existence. It merges dream, past, history, body-memory, and present experience. It critiques civilisation, highlights patriarchal violence, and reclaims female consciousness through magical realism. Singh’s imagery—forest, stone, river, horse, blood, butterflies—creates a symbolic language of unconscious memory and existential crisis. Plath’s confessional intensity parallels this, both poets transforming grief into resistance.

The poem insists that human consciousness does not live only in the present but wanders in memories, fears, desires, and unfulfilled aspirations. Love is not merely beauty and intimacy but also violence, ownership, and fear. Through magical realism, Singh and Plath articulate the female unconscious as a site of resistance against war, patriarchy, and time.

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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