Kashinath Roy, a wieldy poet-teacher, passed away

 

Kashinath Roy Sir was a great poet, a great teacher and a great human being and often those attributes are not divisible. The time I was his student, pursuing my MA in English at the University of Dhaka, in the year 1980 extended my understanding of life and humans past the study of world literature.
Some of the glimpses to his life expressed in the classroom interaction with students brought in the contextual time and space.

Some of the phrases he uttered remained with me through life. I can relate him to the bright young literary personalities of the 1960s and the 1970s, Kashinath Roy Sir was the product of a profound literary world of East Bengal with its imposed unnatural nationalism – a distinctly Bengali world of resistance and refined literary culture. His teaching model is what is now described as project based learning. I don’t think many teachers have practised that model at the University of Dhaka in the nineteen seventies and eighties.

He taught George Barnard Shaw's plays through his natural mode of teaching which was uniquely his own. Coming out of the culture of lectures and note making, the Professor showed how literary texts can be related to real life and used to discuss the issues that concerned us. Kashinath Roy Sir’s poetry reflects challenges and calls for long-overdue societal change.

At the same time his poetry speaks beyond the present moment and shows that language can be inspiring, serving us with resisting energy to be resilient against odds and connect with other humans in a meaningful way.

In the late nineteen-seventies and the beginning of nineteen eighties, Kashinath Roy Sir taught us Shavian laughter, the laughter which emanates from politics, evolution and even economy.  He showed us Shaw's belief that achieving a race of superhuman through the process of creative evolution with the human will. 

His poem “Noah’s Ark” starts with a rousing note on the ‘terror stricken homeland’.

  
I lay watching: churning the three realms  the deluge rises foaming and frothing, and my terror-stricken homeland— my Bangladesh— cowering beneath  the raised paw of complete ruin.

[Translation: Kaisar Hamidul Haq]

It continues for a few lines emphasizing the possibilities of saving the beloved land. In ‘the postmodern ark’ the persona picks two of each species for the sake of sustainability of the new land.   Hence when the poet writes:

I picked up from Creation’s motley throng one by one, in couples, whatever thrives  in our homeland’s discommoded soil: peasants, workers, students, intellectuals tycoons, merchants, grocers, ministers, sentries, bureaucrats, officials, newspapers and newsmen, policies and policy-makers, poets, artists, lovers;     

[Translation: Kaisar Hamidul Haq]

It is not just a wish list or surreal dream of a fairy world.  This list helps the poet to achieve the positiveness of reality.  This list is not his own but it emanates from the collective wish and desire of the society.  But, the journey towards the new land is halted by the overwhelming dirt and filth of the ‘terror stricken homeland’.  Hence the following lines could not be truer:

malnourished peasant, unionized worker, short-sighted students and intellectuals, bogus industrialists, merchants, grocers, thuggish minister, sentry, bureaucrat, official, newspaper crushed under bad news,                              newsman troubled by commercialism,                          unprincipled policy-maker . . .

 [Translation: Kaisar Hamidul Haq]

The ‘poem’ attempts to satirize the degrading and self-destructive cycle that the society at large has plunged into and suggests that the recovery though far away but achievable if the spiritual and physical purification of selves is initiated:

Raising limp hands in prayer to Khuda almighty.   

I begged forgiveness and plunged into the turbulent waves . . .

[Translation: Kaisar Hamidul Haq]

At the end, the persona in Kashinath Roy Sir’s poetry accepts the collective guilt for destroying and bringing havoc to the creations of the Great Creator.  The human interventions that bring anarchy and destruction to the natural world do not falter or stop the persona to appreciate those living beings who subverted the unholy schemes. This modest act may be insignificant yet they serve as the tool to bargain forgiveness from the Great Creator. The concluding lines are just a reminder to keep the natural world safe in order to survive as humans.

Standing on the ground of final judgement I will press my chest and say: Allah, these two eyes You gave, I have used my eyes to watch Branches that grow in the stony rubbish The Desperate Jasmin, the Stupid Rose Grow breaking the curse of the afflicted air Weathering the boiling heat every day In the middle of carelessness I have seen them all through my life.

 [My translation]


The writer is a poet, literary critic and academic based in Australia.