Critical analysis Fakeer of Jungheera

M.K.Bhavnagar University

Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai

 Roll no: 30

Class: Semester -1

Subject: paper-4 (Indian Writing in English)

Topic: Critical Analysis –Fakeer of Jungheera.

Work: Assignment

Guidance: Heenaba Zala.

Critical analysis Fakeer of Jungheera:

             Introduction:

             The protagonist of the Fakeer poem is a robber or a mendicant, who belongs to some unidentified Muslim sect, comes from an upper caste Bengali Hindu family. Derozio’s uses Christian imagery, such a heaven and angels flitting about and juxtaposes it against the Hindu tradition of Sati, Muslim prayers and Tantric tale of Raja Vikramajit and Baital to create a quaint Romantic atmosphere. Though the tantric tale seem to he a lengthy digression within a tragic tale of a blighted Hindu-Muslim love affair it nonetheless places the tragedy in an impure tradition after having rejected all the other dominant religious  forms.

              The Fakeer poem is in two cantos of twenty eight and twenty -four  stanzas respectively written in the iarnbic, anapestic, trochaic and dactylic  meters to suit the different rhymes ranging; from the normal spoken voice and slow description to the racy  bottles and the chant of priest and woman. By introducing commercia transactions of the East India company in India.

          Derozio develops the metaphor of commerce comparing it to the relationship of people in love, he concludes that “Affection are not made for merchandize" The poem highlights the fact that utilitarian ideas of the East India Company  had a far stronger impact on Bengal than the prose- lytizing  work of Christian missionaries.

          Irnitating the English Romantics, Derozio  opens the first cunto with  the wind wandering greatly like “young spirit” but the  wind also sight occasionally reminding us of the transience  of love and fixing the tragic tone of the poem. The beginning however heralds the bountiful embrace of mother earth.

            “The sun-jit-stream in dimples breaks,

              As when a child from slumer, wakes.

             Sweet smiling on its mother there,

              Like heavenly hope o’er mortal care!”

            The  sun continues to shower its blessing on mother earth  sitting under a banyan tree and watching  the ‘Faithless’ honeybee sipping the nector from flower to flower can inspire  anyone, but the bucolic world of blissful fecundity is tinged with the sadness of impermance . In the second stanza Derozio established the tragic theme of sati in the poem. Morning arrives lighting up a “mournful scene” followed by a “maddening wail of misery” a scene where a ‘devoted woman’ need ‘must die’ By the ‘Sacred’ river Ganga  the granite rocks of jungheera stand steep and formidable where during  fishermen guide their Swift shallops  at  high tide to catch fish. In this inaccessible and barren crag, on huge granite boulder stands a natural hat, the abode of “a hole man” with a heart full of “purity” The man,

   “His life unruffled, like a stream

    Flows brightly in a devotion’s beam”

           There are however conflicting opinions about his character. There are some who say that he is saintly wise and holy while others talk of his middles cruelty, treachery and devilry. In stanza four the poet comments that there are cases when evil men may take to religion to hide their criminal intent:

   “Alast in fairest seeming souls

    The tide of guilt all blackly rolls.

     And then they steal religion’s ray

    Upon its surface but to play…”

         The wonderful play of light and shade bring out a deceptive human nature and the evil that lies buried in the human soul.

        In stanza five a group of people protected with soldiers slowly move over the plains beathing “drums and gong” carrying “spears of gold” In the group are upper castes Hindu men,”priests with triple thread”.  Eager woman who follow the procession silently watch these saintly men. Amidst them a woman in white, like a “child of light” stands out this woman has come for the final rites. The notion of saintliness and purity are clearly identified with both the   tragedy when it comes has a deeper moral ring.

          The chorus of woman in stanza six celebrates the deification of the Hindu widow about to become a Sati, woman scatter flowers on the sacrificial alter as the helpless victim is convinced that she will inherit the “gay” gardens blooding with amaranth, filled with soft music and eternally burning lamps. The chorus sings that the Sati will become trice happy in heaven, where she will once again be united with her departed husband, and what better encouragement for her to climb the sacrificial alter.

“On to the alter and scatter the flower,

 Sweeten the path as ye wander along;

 On to the alter! Another blest hour

   Brings to the spirit the kinnura’s song”

     The kinnura’s song could refer to the Hebrew kinnor, an ancient stringed instrument or more especially to the sitar, which can be made to produce mournful sounds. As the procession moves to the grassy bank their song acquire a mysterious, foreboding quality.

  “And loud and deep its numbers roll,

   Like song mysterious o’er the soul.”

        Without much ado, in stanza eight, the “chorus of Brahmans” begins their ritual. As a prelude to the sacrifice they shower petals and sprinkle orient spice and clang the cymbals to complete the rite before sunset. Then the “chief of Brahman” prays for the woman’s immorality and exhorts the sun to be her guardian. The group moves slowly like a passing cloud. The g poet laments at the scene and wonders how the sophists could  have believed that human beings possessed sympathy.

          Derozio pulls out humanistic notions of social love and civil society from his vast reading of the Greek’s but fails to understand the bizarre ritual of Sati. The impending tragedy brings out elegiac lines such as the following:

  “ye who in fancy’ vision view the fires

    Where the calm widow gloriously expire,

  And, charmed, behold her ere she

                    Mounts the pile,

 Her lips ilhimined by a radiant smile"

.

    The widow bought to the sacrificial fire is young and pure in her “Spotless loveliness” but she is a “purchased flower” and a victim of human caprice and guile contrary to the sophists’ human nature seems degenerate.

   “A heaven beyond the limits of her thought,

    Bliss her spirit never yet had sought,

    Ah-! Haply then might pity mourn above

    Degraded nature, not exalied love."

           Pale faced and speechless, she now watches the dead body of her husband covered with sandalwood. The use of sandalwood would obviously signity. The poet paints the heroine as a “perfect” Bengali beauty with large  black eyes, black long hair tresses, a pale lily complercion and a majestic walk.

        As she arrives at this strange “death’s festival”, she seems to be in full control of her emotion, though her eyes speak more than her tongue could. In stanza 13 the world that tries to buy love and impression the heart, but may the Heart was ‘created’ free and there fore cannot be imprinted.

    “Ye mean, ye cruel! In whose be some cold

      The thought springs idly that love may be sold…….”

           In it only stanza 14 that we come to know the name of this beautiful widow, She is called Nuleeni. Though her situation is rather hopeless, she does not reflect upon death but upon love, especially the “blissful hours” she spent in those scented “bright bowers” with her lover she never loved her dead husband as her true feelings were for someone else. Now she husband but the pain of separation from her beloved, she rises like a phoenioc burning in the fire of her “Hopes, affection, happiness,”

          In stanza 15 Derozio introduced Persian imagery of shama- parvane or the lamp and moth representing the heat of love and the tragic death of the loves.

   “On giddy wing it widely wheels,

      Th’ enlivening glow is spirit feels;

     And then it fondly fancies this

     Until into the fire it flies

     And then, too late lamenting dies!"

       Latent in the imagery of shama- pruvna. Pravna is the tragic consequence of unapproved, unconventional love. In the next stanza, stanza 16 Derazio shifts to the image of the sun brightening the Ganga River, Which will soon set leaving the landscape in darkness, Derazio’s dexterous use of the Hindu and Islamic imagery of transience juxtaposed against the Christian image of an external soul highlight the syncretistic aspect of the poet’s imagination, to which the nineteenth century social reality might not have conformed.

          In the rather long stanza 17 the poet foresee the tragic future of the two lovers and once again weaves images of angels, immortal boundless love and flowers from India’s bowers into an epigram of Christian immorality.

   “And these good angels weave for me,

    The wreath of immorality!”

       In stanza 18 Nuleeni stands still like a statue, as a divine being only to be worshipped:

    “With upward gaze, and white clasped hands,

      She like a heaven- wrought statue, stands_.!”

         She is now taken to the funeral pyre for immolation by a Brahmin. Her secret plan to elope with her lover gains acceptance in the light of the stereotypical crafty Bramins priest referred to in the colonial on widow Immolation,

1821-1830 As “hungry Bramins” and “necessitous Bramins”. As the mounts the funeral pyre and takes “seven circuits” of the “pile”. The Hymn to the sun promises her a paradise in the hereinafter. But Nuleeni’s mind is on rescue and escape by her crafty lover, a Muslim Fakeer who does not disappoint her. He comes like a “tempest”, in the evening, kills and wounds a few and takes  her away to Jungheera’s inaccessible crags “bleak and bare”- redeeming   her as an “unoffered sacrifice”.

      Naleeni has always dreamt of him and is now satisfied in his embrace:

      “I dreamt, and now before my view,

        My dream, my golden dream is true”_.

         Derazio sees love between a Hindu and a Muslim as transcending religion though this  could be Derazio’s own atheistic vision of religious categories based on his rationalistic temper. There was a hardening of identity of Bengali Muslim in the subcontinent as Island provide

 “a sense of belonging to the Muslim community.

       In the absence of a powerful modern Muslim leadership in nineteenth century Bengal the ulema emerged   as the leaders of the Muslim community”.

       The British during the latter half of the nineteenth century created a legal and political discourse concerning Sati but kept the categories of Hindus and Muslim quite separate. Though they allowed it to happen with permission till it was completely abolished in 1829. The hardening of religious categories in colonial Bengal lays the ground for the inevitable conflict that ensure in canto second.

        The song that follows is just to provide a maudlin sentiment mixed with Muslim imagery of houris, the sound of lute and love’s passion. Stanza 4 gives us a glimpse of the tragic end, by comparing his heart as a :taper in a tomb” that will soon be extinguished stanzas 5 and 6 introduce the Legend of the Shushan in which the tragedy is contained, stanza 7 reveals the affronted father of Nuleeni who wants to avenge the insult:

     “He stood the statue, warmed with life,

       Demanding vengeance, not relief,

       Honor alive or death in strife.”

      The story at this paint become somewhat sketchy but the robber Fakeer decides to make a last stand and fight. The poet- writer thus,

   “A during conquest must my band achieve:

      And tis my promise, ere another chief

     Shall be selected for thy love’s relief,

     Once more to lead them to their prey alone,

      Then quit for ever, and be all thine own_

     Quench not the light of that life- giving eye

     Swift on the wings of love to thee I’ll fly-

     But bone short hour- and I demand no more-

     For ever thine4, when that short hour is o’er."

       Nuleeni becomes a free agent to choose her destiny; she prefers to die together with someone she loves than with her husband whom she dose not. The Sanskrit word Sati implied a “good and virtuous woman” who was truly devoted to her husband. And according to the Hindu tradition these virtues found expression in the ultimate act of self immolation woman who sacrificed themselves continued to be called Sati long after they were dead and gone. The British however restricted the usage of the term.

     “to the sacrifice alone the act as well as the agent.”

Conclusion:

The hardening of religious identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the deepening  schism between various religious categories, especially Hindus and Muslims, rejected the entire syncretistic tradition that once flowed unhampered not only in Bengal but the entire British India exemplified in the cut of satya pir with also rejection of the syncretistic tradition all literature associated with it was also rejected. The secular and universal ideas that Derazio espouses in his poetry do not go well with the separatist and divisionary politics of modern India. These are some of the revisionist consequences of modernity.

  However, the “modes of social life” that emerged in the early nineteenth century in response to modernity in India now take us “beyond Modernity into the information age. If India must shine it must do so within its own traditions and Derazio occupies a central place in it.