નિશીથ

નિશીથ is Sanskrit for the dead of night, and Umashankar Joshi's ode — dated Bombay, September 1938 — refuses to let midnight be an absence. The opening line installs him instead as નર્તક રુદ્રરમ્ય, a dancer terrible and beautiful at once, and the whole first movement builds a Nataraja out of astronomy: the Milky Way (સ્વર્ગંગ, the Ganga of heaven) garlands his throat, the gale is the damaru rattling in his hand, comets wheel as the plumes on his head, and nebulae stream off him like a flying shawl. He takes his dance-steps on the hemispheres, plants a foot on the spinning earth's back, claps time with the distant stars — and when his foot does come down, it lands, with a dancer's courtesy, on the soft stage of the earth, where the ocean's deep mridang keeps the beat. It is among the most sustained feats of cosmic image-making in Gujarati, a Shiva myth rebuilt from a clear night sky.

The middle movements keep changing the god's costume, because midnight will not hold one shape. He is a playboy of the constellations — stooping into Agastya's hut, flying the Saptarshi as a kite tethered to the Pole Star, rowing the little boat of Punarvasu, swinging in Devayani; in winter he takes up the sickle of Magha and harvests the ripened stars like grain, and in the monsoon he simply pulls a blanket of cloud over himself and lies down. Then he is a તપસ્વી, folding his vast tandava into a cross-legged stillness firm as the Himalaya, brooding on the universe's secrets in the pitch of the new moon — while we humans, lighting a lamp to get a look at him, glimpse the yawning enormity of his face and hastily ring our little house-lamp with our bodies, trying to forget what we saw. Then a wandering સંન્યાસી, forehead anointed with darkness, body rubbed with the white ash of moonlight, the crescent for a water-pot, going door to door scattering the pollen of consciousness into hearts lying awake.

And then the ode remembers what year it is. મારા દેશે શાશ્વતી શર્વરી કશી! — what an unending night in my country! The people's eyes are heavy with sleep, their innocent hearts swoon-shadowed, and in the poet's own bloodstream sits દાસ્યદુર્ભેદ્ય તંદ્રા — a stupor sealed by slavery that nothing has pierced. The closing lines beg the great dancer to do for a subject nation what he does for the sky: let the fall of his foot break this sorrow, let new music spring up in the blood, beat by beat; sow strange seeds of dreams in the clay of human minds. The last line hands midnight his true title and the poem its politics in a single vocative — વૈતાલિક હે ઉષાના, o herald-bard of the dawn. A decade later the dawn came; three decades later the collection this poem crowns brought Gujarati its first Jnanpith, and the citation begins here, with midnight dancing.