Sanjukta Dasgupta’s ‘Oh, Freedom’ – A Review
Navamalati Neog Chakraborty reviews Sanjukta Dasgupta‘s powerful collection, “Oh, Freedom.” This poetry censures the mockery of freedom for the needy, exploring themes of nihilism and global oppression.
Sanjukta Dasgupta has in her latest collection, Oh, Freedom, not sung paeans for the cause of freedom. Freedom as a word that spells unbiased justice for one and all living in the land, lauding the sacrifices of the freedom fighters, is what the sacred word ought to mean. But such thoughts are foregone conclusions. The poet who writes on Freedom is as bold and enterprising, in the words her pen writes. The Psalm 137 of the New Testament states how by the rivers of Babylon they sat and wept when they remembered Zion. Happy are the sons and daughters who can sing for the glory of the land, if freedom is followed by glory of one’s true feel!
The poet has the post-Civil War African American freedom song of the 1960’s in mind, when she chose the title for her collection. I know not about Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, ‘de-transcendentalize’ for a term may be twisted and looped as a motivating trigger by others, but Dasgupta in this tenth volume of her poems squarely censures all the plaudits the word ‘freedom’ means and snatches away from the poor, the low-born and the needy. The doctrine of nihilism that was developed in Tsarist Russia, is what she held on to, in her poems here. Where margins sweep in and separate people on the basis of their tongue, their class, their purse, their religion; then freedom turns niggardly. Where it ought to have been a lofty thought, it turns aside to niggle. It stymies the glow of that largeness of heart and instead of being a verbatim truth, grow cock-eyed to concentrate on the subalterns. Let life be now without a cooped-up song, which people sing just for the heck of it. The obsessive compulsive disorder of our time, to hole in long after our Azadi make freedom a mockery of sorts! Sanjukta steals words away from Robert Frost to say, now there are not many miles to sleep. That is what she boldly means as a pointer of man’s foolhardy resolve. Then where is our hope on Republic Day? The poet herself tells us…
Yet the flag flutters with joy
As young arms raise it high! (page 4)
Again, in the poem From Jannat to Jahannam, she expresses her bitterness in that Pahalgam terrorist attack on holiday goers, Pandemonium permeated Every pore of Paradise. The poet has her own innate style of repeating to affirm her say….
Freedom was in a solitary cell
The jail was worse than hell
Freedom could not shout
Freedom could not speak
Freedom could not sing
The favourite freedom song
One night someone slashed
Freedom’s talkative tongue. (page 115)
The poet finds the earth enduring such oppression that instead of human gods the Earth now has greedy salivating Godzillas grinding their nuclear teeth with glee.
The poet finds freedom affected deep and sullen, everywhere. Memories turn to treasure troves. In the poem Remembering, the poet has a torn letter, a sepia envelope/ Silent witnesses through days and decades. The eighty poems in this collection have nihilism in its grip, from varied angles. This collection honours her granddaughter Ivaana, who is just an eight-year-old, asking her not to relent amidst the cacophony of silence. Each poem written in the style that the poet has, holds the uncanny ability to capitalise on despair and not holler. She herself longs to float like a bird/ In the blue ocean overhead/ As I sing my love song/For those loved and lost/ For those I lost forever/ In the teeming crowd. (Terrace)
Sanjukta’s freedom goes further back to her grandfather in Chittagong, who found himself there, always with time and history in Bangladesh, turn to a minority. To whom can the poet demand for freedom to find the ancestral soil turning them to minorities? Was that a page of justice done? Or is it for the only daughter of her parents who grew up in a warm home that is near the Airport, where her childhood shaped up to reach womanhood with a lot of happy memories, and a thing to gloat about, find strangers living in that familiar abode she had once called, home! Such freedom, is also a freedom snatched away cruelly by time and circumstances. Beyond that, she speaks about how Everyone is up for sale to the highest bidder. Cricketers are auctioned, and so is real estate; and what else is then left clueless in importance? The mother in a home, who has no freedom as such to speak of, but who dishes out such freedom at mealtimes, has only tears that can repay.
Unpaid labour is all about
Mother’s mesmerizing culinary skills
The world sidesteps genuine beauty of impulse in human relationship. In Of, Freedom, Sanjukta sadly turns to speak of the bombs, jets, guns, arms, drones and genocide and in the same breath speak about the mockery of international amity. Gaza has become a word, a name for…
Do the bells toll to awaken
The inhuman humans
As blood-spattered bodies
Ripped and battered, lie dead
Limbs scattered like torn flowers (page 19)
The way Roots is a beautifully deep-seated poem about her ancestral soil, the poet through each poem proves how man form a connect and seek the freedom of love, trust and security. The smell of rotting villainy, is to her nauseating and obnoxious. Like serpents they hiss with vehemence. She asks God seated in his wireless world…Am I audible/Am I visible. And the poet can be as bitter to realise God’s frustration too in finding his human experiment a disaster. She makes a suggestion, to sadly lightly pensively press the command button that is labelled, ELIMINATE EARTH.
That’s the best suggestion in a poem indeed, that show how far the English poetry world has moved from the time of the Romantic poets, far away, all distanced. It is indeed the light of the late evening sun, chaffing and grappling with reason being the prevalence of raw hatred in the world that impede all relationship. A collection that has the honour of being dedicated to her granddaughter, holding all the raw truth of the world itself is a pointer to Sanjukta Dasgupta’s grip of reality and change. One need not walk forward blindly but have each step, as a knowing step.
What will it be like when I leave
Will you still be there looking for me
Trying every day to call me on my phone
My number is now beyond call or recall
My anxious ashes float in desperate search
Hoping to join yours someday. (Eyes, page 68)
Book Details:
- Title: Oh, Freedom
- Author: Sanjukta Dasgupta
- Publisher: SAHITYA AKADEMI
- Release Date: 30 April 2025
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 126 pages
- Where to buy: www.amazon.in/Oh-Freedom-Collection-Sanjukta-Publication
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