The Kundali: A New Form in English Poetry
By Pariksith Singh, MD
The kundali is a six-line poem in Hindi verse characterized by its helical structure. Kundali in Hindi means a snake in its coil. The two main features of a kundali in its classical form are:
1) The last word or phrase of the second line recurs immediately at the beginning of the third, and
2) The first word of the kundali is also its last.
Thus, the head of the snake comes to lie next to its tail. In its more formal structure, each line is comprised of two hemistichs and the second hemistich of the second line become the first hemistich of the third. The form may be represented by the scheme (R)abR’ R’ cdefR, where R is the word that begins the kundali and R’ the word or phrase that ends the second line and begins the third.
The roots of the kundali go back to medieval India. It was used perhaps by court-poets and courtesans for the amusement of kings and nobles and was employed mainly for light-verse and romantic poetry. Giridhar Kavirai, a famous Hindi poet wrote several kundaliyan that were ethnic, rooted to common living and wisdom, sometimes witty, sometimes humorous. In more recent times, the kundali has fallen in disfavor with modern poets since vers libre (mukt chhanda) and experimentalism (prayogvada) has become more prominent. Only one poet, Kaka Hathrasi, has kept the form alive with his light verse. Although it does not seem mandatory, both Giridhar Kavirai and Kaka Hathrasi mention their name in the first hemistich of the fifth line as their trademark.
I have attempted to adapt the kundali to English and as far as I am aware, this is the first time such an attempt has been made. Let me illustrate the form with the first stanza of my poem, ‘The Cat and the Fly’:
A cat tries to catch a fly
And rolls wildly on my doormat.
On my doormat, catching a nap
But a fly on the nose is worse than a wasp.
And she roars, I shall catch you wherever you fly,
Or else, my dear, I am not a cat.
The Difficulties with the Form
To my mind, the biggest difficulty with trans-creating the kundali into English is the effort required to repeat the word or phrase immediately in the third line in a very small poem without sounding too artificial. Forms with repeating lines, e.g., villanelle, pantoum, triolet, etc., are common in English. However, in all these form poems, the repetition occurs after a gap of at least one line (if not more). This gives the poet and the reader a break and the time and space to create a necessity for repetition.
The need for back-to-back repetition may be the reason why the kundali has been used mostly in light verse, although Giridhar Kavirai did attempt some more serious and instructive poems. One way to circumvent this problem may be through the use of puns. Homophones (words that sound alike but have different meanings and spellings) or homonyms (words that sound and spell the same but have different meanings) may be used. The English language is rich in these words and other related sound-effects, such as heteronyms, charades, etc. For a more detailed discussion of these sound effects, I recommend two books by Richard Lederer, Get Thee to a Punnery (Wyrick 1988) and Crazy English (Pocket Books 1990).
The other difficulty which is relatively minor compared to the first one is the need to repeat the first word of the poem at its end. Given the limitation of six lines with the kundali, the first word should perhaps be one of the key words in the poem. It is interesting to note that a similar problem exists with a rondeau where it is often circumvented again with the use of puns.
A Subject to Suit the Form
I refer the reader to the chapter on form poems in the book The Art and Craft of Poetry by Michael Bugeja where he emphasizes the need to pick a theme that goes along with the form. For a kundali, this usually means a subject that deals with cyclical recurring themes. For example, here are the thematic structures of two kundalis I have attempted.
1) ‘Two Skaters in a Ring’ deals with the movement of two dancers as they gyre and pirouette to music in an arena before an audience.
2) ‘Gong’ employs the spiral movement of sound waves as they travel through the gong to the ears with an allusion to Rilke’s poem by the same name (here gong can be used to illustrate both the object and the sound it creates):
Gong! Through the snail of your heart
Slow as the sound uncoils,
Uncoils the serpent from its sleep.
The ear within the depths is born.
The inner veils of mind are torn
With a quiet simmer when water boils. Gong!
Assonances, alliterations, slant rhymes, internal rhymes, consonances, among others, may be used to augment the chiasma-like structure of the kundali. Line length may vary according to the need of the theme, rhythm, and sense, although a tri-meter would perhaps be extremely difficult to execute. Varying lengths may be deployed as per the demands of the theme.
An English Kundali
English is one of the most flexible languages spoken throughout the world today. It has always risen to new challenges and found a way to adopt new verse-structures from other languages. This adaptability has not only enriched the language but also re-defined its limitations and, hence, possibilities. Accentual poetry from French and Italians was adopted into English by Chaucer thereby initiating the beginnings of a remarkable body of literature in the last 600 years. Petrarchan sonnets were translated into English by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Milton latinized the language and created the first English epic in the manner of Homer and Virgil. In more recent times, Tennyson, Swinburne, Ezra Pound and Sri Aurobindo brought classical Greek and Latin meters to English prosody. Sanskrit rhythms from the Vedas and Upanishads were recreated by Sri Aurobindo in his translations and the epic, Savitri. As recently as couple of decades, Agha Shahid Ali naturalized the ghazal form in angrezi almost flawlessly.
It also becomes easier for translators from other languages to carry the structure along with the essence of the original into English once the form has already been established in English. For bi- or tri-lingual poets like me, this is a fascinating challenge.
(Essay first published in ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, 1997 Volume 7, Number One)