Critical Appreciation of the Poem:
Boat - Ride along the Ganga is one of Daruwalla's finest poems. Its scene is laid in Varanasi, the ancient and holy city which has been the repository of Hindu culture and religion since times immemorial.
It contains a vivid and picturesque description of the Ganga with all its squalor, dirt and pollution. Ganga, the holy river of India, is the central metaphor in this poem: Commenting on this metaphor Vrinda Nabar writes that it appears with all its primal, religious and emotive connotations. The river's rhythm is that of life and death, of birth and rebirth of passion and rejection - In and around it are all signs of stagnancy, the tonsured heads, the fossilised anchorites, the tattooed harlots, and the dead who are brought to it shrouded in the anonymity of white. The opening lines of this poem move forward with rhythmic face and simple syntax offering great delight to the reader and exposing the worn out Hindu customs, rituals and their bigoted custodian.
The Boat - Ride along the Ganga opens with the poet's rowing across the Ganga in the evening. It represents and ugly sight of death, disease, staleness, emptiness and lifelessness. The ghats in Varanasi have nothing sacred about them. Varanasi also presents an ugly fight of a dying city. It does not have calm, soothing, cozy and sublime atmosphere: It vividly presents riverscape and cityscape with all its ugliness:
“Slowly the ghat amphitheatre unfolds
like a diseased nocturnal flower in a dream
that opens its petals only at dusk.”
The image used in the lines quoted above suggests the atmosphere of sickness, staleness, death and disease on the ghats of Varanasi due to the all-enveloping pollution, both in air and on water. The “apoplectic gloom “blurs the contours of the landscape.
The pandas jointing out Dasasavamedh ghat begin to narrate the legend which the poets attentively listens to. But he suddenly sees “the server mouth trained like a cannon on the river's flank.” Here the poet sarcastically points out how pollution and religiosity commingle the holy ghats of Varanasi. It suggests growing water pollution due to urbanization. Ganga, the holiest of rivers in the world, has become the unholiest due to excessive water pollution. The Panda who is the spokesman of religion and legends conceals unholy thoughts of guild and exploitation in the garb of religiousness. He stands for the pollution of human thought. Marx the subtle suggestion of sarcasm in the following lines :
“It is as I feared
hygiene is a part of my conscience and I curse it
and curse my upbringing which makes me queazy here.”
To Panda monetary consideration is uppermost, even while he performs the last rites: Pyres are seen burning at each specific ghat. Here man bows down his head before “the finality of fate.” He ruminates on the evanescence of human life:
“You face reality on a different plane
as where death vibrates behind a veil of fire.”
Here people reconcile with death and cultivate a stoic attitude towards it. They realise that death is the ultimate reality and weeping, mourning and beating of breast is useless. Once dead is dead forever:
There is no lament. No one journeys here
to end up beating his breasts. This much the mourners learn
from the river, as they form a ring of shadows
within whose ambit flesh and substance burn.
In this poem the riverscape, the ghatscape and the pyrescape all merge into are landscape, pointed with verocity in highly suggestive colour - words:
and once more the pyres; against a mahogany sky
the flames look like a hedge of spear blades
heated red for a ritual that bodes no good
The mourners are a cave - painting, primitive, grotesque
done with charred wood.
Death is great leveller. All are equal to Death but in life there are distinctions between the rich and the poor, the high and the low. The doms and mallahs are still treated as underdogs in Indian society and have to suffer a lot:
When we disembark, the waterfront ahead
is smothered by night, redpeppered with fires
as ‘doms’ and ‘mallahs’ cook their unleavened food.
The presence of contraries bewilders the poet. He is in a fix since he does not know how to address Varanasi - a Paradise due to its religiosity and legendary character or Purgatory due to its all-pervading pollution and other evils. The poet is disgusted at the stinking, nonseating and polluted atmosphere and he is confused whether, he should address Ganga as ‘Goddess’, ‘mother’ or ‘daughter’:
The concept of goddess baffles you
Ganga as mother, daughter, bride.
What plane of destiny have I arrived at
where corpse - fires and cooking fires
burn side by side?
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