Route Map 25

St John Perse wrote Anabas: an expedition into the interior, a journey geographical and spiritual. He got the Nobel Prize half a century ago. Subodh Sarkar wrote Route map 25: an expedetion across India, a journey inside his head, a journey with and without maps, an Odsse geographical, cultural, physical. But Subodh Sarkar won't get the Noble Prize – if only because he is so wildly, aggressively, shatteringly anti- establishment. He won't get the Nobel Prize but he is very much like what Alfred Noble made/ invented: Dynamite. Subodh Sarkar's poems splutter, startle and sparkle like a long or short fuse under our feet. Each poem is a bomb exploding, TNT that burns, blooms and bursts. He showers us with poetic shrapnel that cuts and attacks.

Subodh Sarkar speaks compellingly with many voices. He can be both surreal and sardonic: as in “Those Three in Khalashitola” where Buddha, Christ and Karl Marx sip ‘Bangla spirit' in a shanty-bar and accidentally meet up with Gandhi who says –‘you did a good thing to come here, they won't allow you to enter the Parliament, they are not letting me enter now.' This queer quartet all observe Lakshmi's son, whose ‘hunger spans the whole of India, his eyes hold in dream of the whole world\ when he grows up he will become Amartya Sen.

Subodh Sarkar is always marching beside the ‘multinationals of the poor'. Like his Chomsky who ‘within America' could create ‘another America'. Subodh Sarkar too wants to create his own India, another India within the politician's and Mafia's India. Subodh Sarkar screans with anger, rage or the whiplash of satire and we are made to feel inexorably that even when he is silent that will ‘beget/ A terror full to brim'.

Subodh Sarkar's poems (translated by Caroline Brown, Sanjukta Dasgulta, Fakrul Alam, Sharmila Roy et al) gnash their teeth at us, challenge us even as they shower compassion on himself, us and a Nation/ World gone awry. He does not forget – nor forgive. His is the voice of fire – fire that burns and scalds yet purifies and inspires.

Subodh Sarkar, poet, rehearses Christ passion at Calvary. He is our poet Agonistes.