CS RAJESH AND THE POETIC IMAGINARY OF A COMMON MAN

While travelling
Have you seen
The trees running backwards?
Enquires the teacher in the class.

Have not seen it yet
When we do look
We only see Malls, flats,
Mobile towers,
Huge jewellery shops,
Saree shops
And all that
Running backward-
Comes the kid's reply.
(Speed, C.S.Rajesh) 

CS Rajesh, the poet presently stays in Kochi,Kerala, and is a prominent emerging voice on the Malayalam poetry scene.. His poetry started with rhythmic structures of a reciteable variety, often with certain dominating and simple patterns, done as a part of a roaming young poets activist fervour, (Endosulphan poems) brought out as cds. Soon, as a poet who roamed around in the villages in the area ranging from Kochi to Trivandrum  reciting his poetry, he moved on to structurally and politically more exciting forms and patterns, often in blank verse, talking in the language of unconscious deep structures, political subversions, quirky linguistic play and turnabouts. Poems like "The dog who bites' subtly turns around the majoritarian imaginary of KG Sankarapillai's 'Bengal' ,in which the dog is entrusted with obedient domestic tasks like barking at thieves, etc., mainly done at the behest of its so called 'masters'. It tries to see the master himself as a dog who bites 'tress'passers and is loyal to his clan background, slowly on the way to turn themselves back to snarling hounds, but obviously without tooth (pandan naayude pallinu souryam pande pole bhalikkunnilla..), or maybe even as a burden to the family of wild dogs which enjoy their lives and rejects the chain and slavery altogether. This complex status of the animal return of man, of the snarl of feudal authority towards the people, marks the plights of a killer age, as in Binu Pallippad's poetry, where the light of a cigarette butt suggests subtle threats and tensions of a troubled life ,that a person like the 'Invisible man' (Ralph Ellison)easily recognizes.
Many of his characters and situations parody the complex interplay of caste and class, often in overtly secular situations like processions of party workers, where the enthusiasm to voice a slogan against caste is suddenly slackened by the activist's  realization that a love affair is fledgling between a family member of his own and another lower caste party workers grandson(Slogan). Another similar twist is related to the large scale mechanization of various works in the paddy fields, responding to which the poet adds: If there were to be machines for doing the postering and flagstaff erecting, the old man in the colony will also have been able to reach his home early(Machine).
Against these large and inhuman structures of humiliation and canonisation, he ventures on a journey of love, picking his words and situations from everyday experiences, reflecting on them with a subtle pride and defiance, telling the world as to how he loves it and expecting it to respond, though at times desperate about its nonchalance. Sometimes it is a painful and distant memory, at others an intimate glance or expectation.
"On the palmtree
 Full of nests
 Where is hers?

Of the one who had
With a single song
Made the darkness
Blossom into morn.

She who wouldn't lower
Herself to my shoe flower plant
Though I had tried hard
To call her with my different tone.

Who by not singing
May turn my tomorrow
Into a harsh mid-summer noon.

On this palmtree
Full of nests
One is hers.
(Voices)
In another instance (Journey) the words resonate something of the charm of  Chinese "clody ' poetry
" You
In a little while look at me,
In a little while look at the cloud
I feel that
When you look at me, you are very far;
When you look at the cloud, you are very near. "
-(Far and near, Gei Cheng)

"After having
Seen her off on the train
He returns
On an autorikshaw.

That is:
He is now
On that train
And she
Travelling in the auto.
-(C.S.Rajesh, Journey)

One of the poems that Rajesh playfully calls 'Umbris' (tiny poems) which in a few lines capture the concentrated energies of a perceptive soul, frolicking with the language to articulate a shift in positions, in the gazes, the continuation of wayward thoughts. At another instance it is a Latin American poem that critiques the use of the figure of the dove as an emblem of peace that is called to mind, but this time also with an original recouping of peace as fundamentally built upon the labour of ordinary folks/ crows sometimes pointing towards their exclusion from the pedestals of our 'peace prizes' and 'prized peace'.

" We don't really know
What those doves
Do for assuring peace to you.

We crows
Those who
At least do eat up the waste
That you throw at each other
In the night
Before you meet each other in the morning
And start fighting.

On earth
There is no country that wouldn't
Face rioting
If we were to decide that
From tomorrow on-wards
We will not clean up any waste.

Yet as to why it is that you
Always hold only them doves
As the symbols of peace-
And why do you repeatedly
Release them into the skies
That I could never make any sense of!
 -(Rajesh, The bird of peace.)

In another poem, Rajesh subtly points to the lack or under representation of subordinated people or castes in political leadership- a political procession to him appears like a large serpant with a white hood (leaders) and dark hind parts. Another decisive twist in  his poetry is where he looks at the sparse audience and largely upper caste/elite crowd on the stage, taking a polemical aim at the political game of all the  three fronts. Th Olympic logo, then rolls aside a bit to reveal an aporia of our sporting and gaming, of under representation of lower castes, minorities, or women in various fields.. The death of Buddha at the hands of Ram and Manu, children of Yashodhara, is referred to us the tragic event that had ended egalitarianism in the brahminic world- (What is the reason for only the fatherless kids being  left outside in the rain?)..He scoffs at the  'One who laughs when somebody asks his  name , adding his surname(caste) innocently, as if they had asked( Out of Syllabus).

Blossoming a bit away and later from the modernist episteme and epoch, these encounters of language are moderated by a levelling and egalitarian courage, speaking truth in a parrhesiastic manner, directly to power, to political hierarchies and envisioning an evolvement of the imaginary beyond hegemonic understanding.