જનની

Damodar Botadkar spent his life as a poorly paid schoolmaster in Botad, teaching himself Sanskrit at night and writing verse about the one subject he owned completely: the Gujarati household. Where his contemporaries reached for nationalism or philosophy, he wrote the mother, the sister, the new bride, the daughter leaving home — and set them to folk tunes so the household itself could sing them back. This geet, published in રાસતરંગિણી in 1923 to the ઢાળ of a well-known folk song, is the summit of that project: a praise-poem to the mother built as a ladder of comparisons, each rung kicked away as soon as it is climbed. Honey is sweet; the monsoon is sweet; એથી મીઠી તે મોરી માત — sweeter than these, my mother. And then the refrain that Gujarati has never put down since: જનનીની જોડ સખિ! નહિ જડે રે લોલ — her equal, friend, will not be found.

The comparisons are chosen with a craftsman's cunning, because every candidate is itself a superlative. She is a doll moulded of God's own love, a species apart from the world; her eyes are filled with અમી — nectar — and her words with tenderness; her hands are woven of silk-thread, her heart a cool spell of early winter. The gods find milk દોહ્યલાં — hard to come by — that she gives freely; the moon itself has watered the sheltering fold of her lap. One finger of hers holds up a child's entire world. Even the great constants fail the audition: Mother Earth, the poem suspects, must tremble sometimes — અચળા અચૂક એક માય — only mother is unmoving without fail; the Ganga's waters rise and fall, her love flows at one level; a sky-cloud rains for a moment, માડીનો મેઘ બારે માસ — mother's cloud rains all twelve months. The closing image seals it in silver: the shifting moon's light will set; એનો નહિ આથમે ઉજાસ — her radiance has no setting.

What happened to the poem afterward is Botadkar's truest monument: it dissolved into the tradition it imitated. Sung at cradles, in school assemblies, at garba, quoted in eulogies and stitched onto wall-hangings, the geet became so completely a folk possession that its authorship dropped away, the same fate that met Narsinh's રૂડી ને રંગીલી — in Gujarat, the highest honor a lyric can earn is to be mistaken for something the language always knew. The schoolmaster of Botad, who died a year after રાસતરંગિણી appeared, wrote the sentence with which his mother tongue now praises all its mothers.