When Words Can No Longer Be Contained : Neerja

The Moment Expression Becomes a Necessity

Waves surge toward the shore, carrying secrets hidden in the ocean’s heart. Occasionally, they leave a thing or two on the sand and recede, holding the rest within their depths. The roar of aching sorrow and pain resounds ceaselessly in their minds. A similar roar constantly echoes within our own minds. No matter which shore we sit upon, that sound and its attendant unease never leave us. It hums like background music through our daily lives. And from it is born a poem, sometimes a story, sometimes a novel. This disquiet is a permanent resident in our minds, as if it has come to stay for a lifetime. This has been my experience. My mind is perpetually full, like an overladen cloud, waiting for the release of a downpour. If it doesn't rain, the soul suffocates. To prevent that suffocation, I let the words spill. When I first started writing, I couldn't even identify the source of this unease. Reflecting today, I feel that the restlessness that began on that timeline and still surrounds me must have been born from my very nature. Perhaps it was due to my extensive reading, or the companionship of many writers, poets, and thinkers. Most importantly, it may be because I was blessed with a father, the senior critic Dr. M. S. Patil, who understood my creativity, who was perpetually immersed in poetry, and who sought to interpret its meaning. As a result, questions began to stir in me very early on—questions about life and my place within this system. It was never in my nature to simply live the life that was handed to me. I was always trying to understand the life that lay beyond it. Sometimes I would grasp it through reading, and at other times, the answers to many questions would unravel from the life around me. I walked around with a thousand questions in my mind. Questions would arise, and I would seek their answers. If I didn't find them, I would grow irritable. From this, I would raise a flag of rebellion in whatever way I could. At the time, I didn't understand a woman's place in the system. But when my uncle insisted that I must wear bangles and apply to my forehead, I refused. Much later, I wrote: “To trace kumkum because it looks nice, holds little meaning, It is only the charred dryness of the moist wounds he inflicted.” Be it the laws concerning women or the expectations this system had of her, those were the days when everything felt wrong. It would occur to me: why are the heroines in all the stories beautiful, delicate, and graceful, while the heroes are strong, brave, and accomplished? Why is the princess always trapped and in peril? Why is it always the prince who comes to rescue her? Why doesn't the prince ever find himself in danger? Why don't we hear stories of a princess rescuing a prince? Why did Sita have to endure the ordeal by fire? And why did Draupadi, even after being won by Arjuna, have to live as the wife of all five Pandavas? A thousand stories, and the thousand questions they raised, set me on a journey of discovery. Perhaps the reasons for my expression can be found in the very first poem, ‘Pratiksha’ (Waiting), from my collection . In that poem, I wrote: One evening, her heart torn by pages filled with darkness, She stepped out. Since then, her eyes have become fireflies. Reading this excerpt today, written when I was about twenty, I feel that my journey of self-discovery, stepping out with a heart torn by dark pages, must have begun back then. It was a journey of self-awareness. I never even realized when, in searching for myself, I arrived at the collective. The era when I began writing was one of many movements. The fight to end caste, the women's liberation movement, the readers' movement, the Emergency, and political shifts—the repercussions of all these were imprinted on my mind. Although I was personally distant from them and had no direct connection with any movement, they reached me through my reading and shaped me. The social system I lived in was, unbeknownst to me, raising many questions in my mind. I felt a desire to understand not just national but global events, the literature, culture, and movements there. And in such a restless time, I found the Jayakar Library at the University of Pune and its books. I came to Pune to pursue my M.A. in English, and my very way of thinking was transformed. I had already met Dickens, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen, along with Shakespeare. But here, I encountered writers, poets, and playwrights who spoke to the many questions stirring in my mind and gave direction to my thoughts: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Miller, Beckett, Pinter. During those days, their writing seeped deep into my consciousness. I could easily connect Camus's absurdism to my own life. D.H. Lawrence's novels began to raise questions in my mind about the male-female relationship and the sexuality within it. During that time, I wrote a term paper on the theme of 'Sexual Images in Eliot's '. After reading novels like and , I began to feel that this system had completely failed to consider a woman's sexual instincts and her desire to express them. Unconsciously, I began to examine the contexts of our own ancient tales, folk stories, and Western myths, and all of this started to manifest, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, in my poetry. This was a time of being completely possessed by books. It was a time of understanding Marxism while watching plays and films that confronted social issues. Whether it was plays like , , and , or parallel cinema like , , , , , and —all of them initiated a unique churning in my mind. I began trying to interpret the characters from our epics who had become myths. And then, slowly, I started to express Draupadi's anguish, saying, "How can I find dharma in this darkness? / All boons were given to adharma, / From then until today, / How many disrobings! How many disrobings!" At other times, I would unconsciously lash out at society's hypocrisy, saying, "Right here, some Draupadi was disrobed / and with her own clothes as banners / a procession to Pandharpur departed." An aggressiveness began to enter my words. The secondary status given to women in a patriarchal system, her exploitation, became visible everywhere, and my pen, without my knowledge, grew sharper. After marriage, the secondary position this system had assigned me became intensely palpable. The people in my new home were bound by traditional frameworks, and I was expected to live within those confines. As I tried to live silently within the roles of a woman, and especially a daughter-in-law, my spirit began to suffocate. The freedom and uninhibited flight of my parents' home were absent here. My parents had not raised me as a 'girl'; in fact, my father had taken knitting needles from my hands and placed a sharp word in them instead. He had showered me with books so I could lose myself in their world. This world, however, was completely traditional, a home that accepted a woman's secondary status within the system's framework. Consequently, I felt the pain of trying to root myself in a new home. "A woman has to go through this, she has to prove herself while navigating the roles of daughter-in-law, wife, sister-in-law, mother. What’s so special about that?" I began to hear this question from all sides. I started to understand that if you want to settle properly in a new home, you have to prune the branches of your existence that others find undesirable. The women around me did it without complaint. They had inscribed on the slates of their minds since primordial times that this was a part of the system. They didn't even realize that on a slate so crowded with such tales, there is no space left to sketch the joyfully dancing peacock of one's own heart. Gradually, I realized that women who live their lives performing this balancing act, who have endured this suffocation for years, were also in my new home. But they had decided to carry that suffocation on their shoulders like a phantom and expected others to do the same. I, however, refused. My poetry and stories began to speak of the woman who was exploited by this system, as well as the one who had gained self-awareness. The woman I have been writing about for many years is, on one hand, the woman exploited by the system, revolving around the center that is man. But on the other hand, she is also a woman who has found herself, who is on a journey of self-discovery, who questions the system, who considers her own essence, who possesses the ability to make her own decisions, who examines herself, and who speaks openly about her sexuality. That is perhaps why I was able to write a poem like: “As she surrenders her entire being, The woman watches with fondness the man, limp and spent in the hollow of her womb... She knows that after every union The man is lost from himself, The woman understands the aching pain of his insubstantial existence And continues to grow herself, assimilating new currents within her.” And this is the kind of woman who began to feature prominently in my stories. Feminine experiences are more prevalent in my writing, and that is only natural, but they do not appear with any specific agenda in mind. The reason might be that I never particularly connected with love poetry or lyrical poetry. I enjoy reading Balkavi. I get sentimental reading many tender lyrical poems, but what truly strikes me is the poetry of Mardhekar, Sadanand Rege, Narayan Surve, Namdeo Dhasal, and Vasant Abaji Dahake. I like Eliot. When I read the poems of Pablo Neruda or Octavio Paz, I connect with them instantly. My disposition aligns with those who write with irony. Perhaps that's why my poetry has always had a satirical edge. It is visible in many poems in . In the wee hours of the morning, in a deep slumber, when I saw Duhshasana disrobing Draupadi, then I remembered the boy coming to see me that evening. And then the radio wailed – ‘The wounds in this heart have opened once more’. (Contextless - Niranvay) In a poem from the collection , I wrote: “I am suffocated by this stench. / Hey, someone bring perfumes / and spray them / on this skeleton of culture…” Or perhaps that is how I came to write a poem like, The hypocrisy of the system continued to be expressed through the path of irony. The woman is at the centre of my writing, but my existence as a human being is also important to me. As a person, my struggle is with tradition and its rituals, as well as with human behavior based on caste, religion, and gender; with the entire society and its power dynamics. The mentality of people who use the systems of caste, religion, or gender to their advantage disquiets me. Then, any rape, from Khairlanji to Kopardi, feels like a rape of my own womanhood. “What is a woman’s caste, and what is her religion? Does the level of pain change if the caste changes? What kind of satisfaction is on the faces that tear at the body – The satisfaction of violating a woman, or of violating a caste?” Such questions continue to haunt me. Today, the growing atmosphere of violence around me, the politics based on religion, caste, and language, and the resulting cultural degradation, all leave me restless. And then, words surface in my mind: "I don't even know which era I have arrived in." At such times, these words emerge: “So that not a single word may escape my throat, They tighten the noose and hang me from the tree of suicide. In this directionless decade, they pour down my throat the gripe water of nationalism. They stuff my brain with the chaff of hatred. The people who have entered the arena, inflating the frogs of development, They are cutting off my writing fingers and on any footpath, they sketch My picture is lying in a pool of blood.” All this unease descends through words, becomes a poem, a story, or sometimes a personal essay. And now, I have written a novel. The society I live in is not made up of like-minded people, and it would be wrong to expect it to be. Often, one's life is spent just trying to understand such a society, but a writer must do it. Today, it has become difficult even for a writer to understand other writers of their own time. While living in such an era, one has to understand the fear in people's hearts, along with their ambitions and political greed. I have been making this effort and continue to do so. That is why the poetry in my collections (Birds of the Meaningless) and (Before Ascending the Altar of Destruction), as well as the characters in my novel (Remains of a Frozen Time), speak of these political, religious, and social contexts. I have continued to try to capture the tensions of today's society, its power dynamics, its contradictions, the mentality of its people, and its cultural references, and to engage with human existence from various perspectives. And in doing so, I feel I am making a certain statement today. I am on a journey from self-awareness to the universal. I never felt that a poet should deliberately become the mouthpiece of an ideology and confine poetry to such a framework. I still don't. Just as a poet's illusions, unease, fragmentation, suffocation, joys, and anguishes are expressed through their poetry, so too does the surrounding social and political reality flow through it. It must happen, but not deliberately; it should flow as a natural part of your existence. Your writing unravels the life of the writer within you and of the collective, and in doing so, it automatically makes a statement of its own. I have my own stances. The class-based equality of Marxism, the equality of men and women at all levels in feminism, Mahatma Phule's , Ambedkar's fight against casteism, his burning of the Manusmriti and his acceptance of the Buddha's compassion, and the guiding light of the Constitution he placed in our hands—these are all parts of my life. I learned Sane Guruji's lesson of offering love to the world along with my morning prayers, yet I have not confined myself to the rigid framework of any single 'ism'. Often, one's soul suffocates within these frameworks, and we become mere spokespersons, repeating the same things. A certain monotony creeps into our life and conduct. Over time, while the questions may not have changed, their nature does. In such times, we forget that there is a need to rewrite and reconstruct these ideologies. The people who want to create a monolithic and religion-based social structure today do not know that the culture we take pride in is fluid and assimilates new ideologies. The people who cling to traditions and find satisfaction in proclaiming "this is our culture" never wanted change. The growing presence of people who label various movements that dream of a scientific, rational, and exploitation-free society as "Urban Naxals" is unsettling. For the past few years, another thing has been making me uneasy. The era has begun where the sensitivities and emotions of the newly rich, who have gone global by taking advantage of globalisation, are freezing. The middle-class people who once cherished sensitivity are now supporting hatred. They have become extremely narrow-minded. This country has changed in ways it never did before. It has started dictating what one should eat, what one should wear, what one should read, and what one should write. It has started using the language of crushing the movements that strive for equality based on religion, caste, and gender, as enshrined in the Constitution. It has started labelling them as anti-nationals and now, Urban Naxals. In such times, not just a writer like me, but any sensitive person is bound to be disturbed. Perhaps my novel, , written during the COVID-19 pandemic, was born out of this. The condition of all sensitive people today is reflected in this novel, and many feel that it expresses the turmoil in their own minds. Overall, I write so that the suffocation in my mind, which is packed with the events happening around me, does not explode. I feel that the words spilling onto paper free me from this suffocation, even if only for a few moments. As I wrote in a poem from my collection : A heap of words must be spilt every day And flocks of letters must be released into the sky Perhaps the bitterness will lessen From life And the mind too will become Clear and serene.

- Neeraja

(This article is the translated version of the original article आम्ही का लिहितो?  : शब्द सांडणं अपरिहार्य बनतं तेव्हा...

 written by

Neeraja

published in the Sahitya Chaprak Diwali Ank 2025 ) https://youtu.be/JU2zMe8vSy4