For the last one decade I was thrown into the closest contact with that fiery idealist Ambikagiri Roychowdhury, when I built a house of my own with its idyllic surroundings near his residence. He used to visit my cottage off-and-on, especially when after reading the morning papers or some private communication, he felt highly perturbed – and this happened very frequently indeed – at the thought of Assam and the Assamese being in danger.
Sometimes he came to my house on moonlit evenings just to enjoy the sight of the thousand broken images of the moon on the surface of my fish pond or of the Sarania hillock raising its small head against the whitened azure of the sky, for he said, this sight made him feel very high and noble within. His visits thus invariably revealed the patriot and the poet in him to me. He took immense pleasure in teaching my youngest daughter recite his latest lyrics Kar kar kar, dhar dhar kam (Do, do thou work; to work, to work) or Sah-talbal nurbhaya-chitta, he mor desor jiyori-po (O ye sons and daughters of my country, invigorated with courage and having no fear at heart). He would sometimes send me some homeopathic pills for my family on merely hearing that someone in the locality had caught small pox or other disease.
His visits becomes sparer as he crossed his eighties and became extremely weak. But his extreme concern for the country would not give him the least rest, and on occasions as described above, he would make someone accompany him to our house and pour forth his heartrending pain in bitter and inconsolable words. Sometimes his disturbance would be caused by some wrong interpretation of his poetry or philosophy. On one occasion, he found one of our leading literary critics enclosing his name in the fold of Assamese imitators of Rabindranath Tagore. This revolted him thoroughly. He came to me and roared: “Well Maheswar, did you not say in an essay written some years back on me that I was the most original and elemental genius in Assamese poetry? Is it only a lie that you propagated?” “No”, I quietly but firmly said – “Never that. I hold my conviction very firmly and dearly, and consider you to be one of those who learn in suffering what they teach in song.” But he could not rest till some one published a rejoinder to the statement by the leading critic.
Sometimes Roychowdhury could not come to me for very long and would be angry that I did not care to be by his side. I was one day taken by great surprise on approaching him in the verandah of his house to be scolded in these words: “Why? Why do you come to see me? I cannot give you any favour or benefit.” I could scarcely understand these unkind words. Later on, however, I was told by his eldest daughter Sakuntala, that he had been extremely dejected for some time past and was repeatedly telling his family of his approaching end. “Do not allow anybody outside my family to touch my dead body,” he had said. “Carry it as best as you can to the cremation ground by yourselves.” This was righteous indignation at the blindness and deafness of his countrymen, who maintained a placid calm in spite of the peril to themselves, which Roychowdhury discerned and diagnosed and others did not. He had this feeling of lonely suffering, particularly towards the last days of his life and said as much in the last verses published in the collection, Vedanar Ulka, which in many places spitted out venom and bitterness. But in spite of this feeling of loneliness, the funeral procession on the third of January drew unusually large crowds.
Dr Banikanta Kakati left behind him a critical assessment of Roychowdhury’s genius; but it caused the poet and the patriot much pain to know that an English paper was in no mood to entertain or countenance the appreciation. I did not understand this reluctance on anybody’s part to give the deserving his due share of praise or blame and included the brilliant piece of writing in the Journal of the University of Gauhati for 1961, but I have doubts if it has reached down to the average reader. A great part of Roychowdhury’s genius thus remained apart from his countrymen.
Ambikagiri caught the imagination of the country’s youth with his perennial youth. We, as undergraduates at Cotton College in the thirties, felt the spell of his declamations. We would go to him and challenge some of his views so boldly marshalled in his speeches and writings. He had his views on everything around him and gave them out in the stiffest language. But we found that he was not so very stiff and could soften and melt when the understanding heart was near him. This attracted us the more to his side. In our evening strolls, he would sometimes give us his energizing company along with his proverbially famous walking-stick. Spreading out some point of view in course of the walks, he would stop very abruptly as his thought current reached a check at seeing someone riding a bicycle after dusk without a lamp or an Assamese belle putting on a sari in place of a mekhela and a cheleng (for the latter were considered to be a criterion of Assamesehood). He attended sittings of the Gauhati ASL Club (now liquidated by wiser people) very regularly, for that gave him the opportunity to measure the mind of the country’s youth : and would make a strong protest when a bargeet was executed poorly or in a wrong measure. Youthful as we were, we would challenge him on this just to make him agree to take up the gauntlet and give us a full-length talk on musical aspects of bargeets.
I do not think he was much of a politician, although he was a patriot through and through. He was a poet and idealist, and the deepest vein of his poetry was its underlying mysticism. This I pointed out in an essay on modern Assamese poetry published serially in the monthly Awahan more than two decades back. He was delighted that I tried to understand him in the proper perspective and insisted on my making a full study of him for whatever he was worth, either in an independent essay or in an independent book. At that moment I did not feel equal to the challenge, particularly when a master critic like Dr Kakati wrote on Roychowdhury and was living, but when immediately after this I met the old poet in the house of our universal grandpa, Nilamani Phookan, at Jorhat, I asked the poet what meaning he himself found in his own poetry (I refer only to his Vina and Tumi). He talked on incessantly, grew more and more dreamy in the course of his talk, got almost lost in some bygone vision, and ended by leaving me completely mystified. I saw only a visionary before my eyes, whose words became bright but as inadequate to express his vision as a conch-shell to measure the deep. This was an experience which I still remember with an amount of awe. I wrote a small paper on him and have published it, but am still to take him up for a more serious study. He is one of our rarest poets who commands both depth and height, both concentration and width.
Good and great as a poet, he was not so as a politician. This was as I see it because he carried much of his poetry and mysticism to things essentially political and requiring a political handling. Every inch a patriot, he hung up political schemes, which in the words of Dr Kakati “had all the glamour of poetry, but not all the four legs of reasons.” But politics is not poetry; it is always a realistic affair. That is why Roychowdhury attracted people to his side like a mirage, but left them on the hot sands of desolation. That is why one of our brilliant politicians of the day sought to term him a ‘national mourner’ always wailing as he was at the manifold branches on the sides of his beloved Mother Assam’s chest. All the same his mourning had a purpose and voiced the conscience of Mother Assam in circles which were too much of all India and where the limb of Mother India called Assam was lost in too much haze. That is why another patriot, Gopinath Bardoloi advised me to help Roychowdhury to frame his ideas in proper words for consumption in New Delhi.
We know how Roychowdhury worked out poetical solutions to political problems. World War-II engaged him very seriously about the fate of Man. We saw there was no scope from war as the small earth would never be able to contain the fast growing human race and the equally expanding national motives. So the way out is the way to the other members of the solar race, the Mars and the Moon. This solution, very easy as a poetical proposition, he gave out very boldly indeed in the form of an essay Jagatar Ses Adarsa Aru Visyavyapi Mahasanti-Sthapanar Upay in 1916 and a poem Manav Jivanbar Rup, in 1929. Looking back on this and also looking at the Soviet and American travellers of space today, one would find in Roychowdhury a seer imbued with a prophetic vision not ready to be dismayed by the impossible.
Roychowdhury held his views with all the boldness and even bravado of an idealist, and was intolerant when others could not appreciate his point. No matter if his critics called him unschooled or an old fossil. In spite of him and all of us, the world always masquerades as modern and leaves old ways and thoughts, however excellent, behind. It was in 1938 when Roychowdhury felt scandalized at the performance of the ‘family theatre’ at the residence of John Sahib, meaning the late Guruprasad Barua, while everybody who saw it felt greatly happy. The Baruas had staged Jyotiprasad Agarwalla’s Karengar Ligiri in which Satyaprasad Barua played the role of the hero, Sundar Kowar and his sister that of Kanchan Kuwari, I was connected with the show, calling myself as an art director in hyperbolic language and thought that Roychowdhury would be all appreciation for the Barua family. But the oversensitive moralist in the leader broke the enthusiasm completely with a piece of tense criticism in his Deka Asom. It had the caption Artar garbhasrava (The abortion of art), and one can easily imagine what its contents were. In a poem He bhagavan, he bhagavan, written in 1963, he makes quite an urgent appeal to God to put an end to the brave new world of artists for he finds in them only immorality and averseness to work.
Roychowdhury was known to the outside world – particularly to the Calcutta papers (sic:) – as an arch enemy of Bengal and the Bengalis. But his first and pure love, Indumati, who was as Shelley’s Emilia Viviani to his brilliant poetry, belonged to that race of people whom he is supposed to hate and only hate. When in 1960 the Bengalis of Guwahati were scared for their lives, he provided very warm asylum to his Bengali neighbours, who never sustained the slightest scratch on their skins.
With an apparent rough outside, Ambikagiri wore a heart of softness, warmth and affection for all. Now that his rough outside is no more, his softness, warmth and affection will surely live with us forever.
