Lifting the Veil
At a redeeming moment in life
when they, each in his or her own way,
longed to journey to Sarada Ma’s land
and went and sat at her feet,
anxious to be initiated beyond the veil---
Crowning the pilgrim devotee’s progress
the Mother would light a lamp
in their eyes
in her poor small candle-lit room
that silently lit up
in a serene endless flame
Her immense land of
primal boundless self-born joy.
Sindhubala Ghosh
The ordinary and lighthouse facts of her life
are easily stated.
Born perhaps in the late eighteen nineties,
Sindhubala grew up in rural Bengal
In British India. When the ripples
of the Swadeshi movement and armed struggle
struck her region, gendered roles suddenly went awry.
Young women took the plunge, as if
In lock step with men.
Out of this mould Sindhubala-s grew,
then broke it too.
Non-violent struggle, boycott, picketing framed
the Gandhian orthopraxy. But delinquent Bengal
also bred and adored her foot soldiers
who believed that they were at war with the Raj
and died fighting the spasmodic war.
Sindhubala threaded both kinds with gallant ease
as means to unchaining and spent
a couple of years in jail.
She was already married and a mother, too.
When marriage and children come in
at the door, it is said, revolution
flies out of the window.
Sindhubala was a raptor and
Shattered the mould again.
A deadly swift-footed adept at
dodging the police and smuggling arms,
she was ambushed by the police
in her last exploit and
jumped into the Darakeswar river
to escape capture.
A disciple of Ma Saradamani,
she staged her own revolution in
nineteen twenty-eight before
revolution promulgated ‘Agni Jug’
in Bengal in the nineteen thirties.
How piety and patriotism transformed
her and others always
acquires a mystery.
She isn’t one of the putative great.
Lesser known, missing in the photo gallery,
She gleams in lonely lustre
from a penumbra of unsung stars
unknown to history.
Subhransu Maitra
An established translator who has published English translations of Tagore, Saratchandra Chatterjee, Jibanananda Das, Sankha Ghosh and Mahasweta Devi, Subhransu Maitra is also a poet with two published books of verse, namely, When My Mother Sang and Dark Harvest.