This collection of poems attempts to unlock the wisdom of our ancient seers for the benefit of the layfolk, often eulogised for their resilience in the face of depredations of time, but with no one to turn to—not even the gods—for succour, mercy, and redemption, and far removed from expensive and time-consuming modern psychiatric intervention. It has nothing to do with religion or rituals; nothing to do with an exclusive or an exclusivist lifestyle. Rather, these poems seek to help us cope with the circumstances that confront us on our eventful walk through life.
In Shadows of the Fragmented Moon, each poem has a hidden and unexplored facet of human trait that needs confronting to clear the path of ill-informed illusions. For, as the seers have claimed down the ages, the mind is only an aggregate of desires and nothing else. We humans are a conglomerate of our emotions and reason . . . without purpose, without a second chance. Understanding this one truth alone sets us free.
India’s ancient literary and poetic heritage, whether based on spiritual templates or philosophical musings, is simply too vast to be contained in any category. From the Vedas to the Upanishads, from the Ramayana to the Mahabharata, from the stories of the Puranas to the treatises of an Adi Shankara or a Ramanujacharya, and from the historical and literary outpourings of a Kalhana or Kalidasa to the more modern-day insights of a Swami Vivekananda or Sri Aurobindo, they represent free thinking of the kind rarely seen anywhere in the ancient or modern worlds.
Each one of these works represents an ocean in itself, leaving a treasure-trove of delights for today’s authors to sink their teeth into with relish. One such author is Shubhrangshu Roy, a US-based writer and a former Indian journalist, who has written a short book of 108 poems titled Shadows of The Fragmented Moon: A Time Travel Into The Depths of Mind.
Roy has tapped into the enormous wisdom contained in two lesser-known ancient texts, the Yoga Vasistha and Ashtavakra Gita, texts which are difficult to date, but are linked to the Ramayana. Prof Debashish Banerji, professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures at the California Institute of Integral Studies, who has written the foreword to Roy’s book of 108 poems, calls the Yoga Vasistha and the Ashtavakra Gita as Advaitic in character, but unrelated to the ultimate exponent of the idea, Adi Shankara, who was born several centuries later.
While the inspiration for Roy was the Yoga Vasistha and Ashtavakra Gita, his poems are not limited by their vision or tenor, as they are a “transcreation”, which means they are freed from the need to try and be faithful to the ideas contained in the original texts. In doing so, Roy is doing what million of Indians have done with each text they have been handed down from the ages – use the inspiration, but tell the story in your own way. This is why we have 300 Ramayanas, hundreds of retellings of the Mahabharata, multiple interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita, et al. Today, we also have authors who have reimagined each character portrayed in the original texts to suit our time.
Roy’s poems have a simplicity and directness that are captivating, for they invite you to meditate and contemplate the meanings around the words, which is what our ancient seers and unknown authors of our epics and itihasas would have wanted.
The 108 poems, or explorations of the mind, consciousness and understandings, are grouped under 12 chapters with headings that tell their own story, starting with “Time”, going on to “The Mind” and culminating in “The End of Time” and “Freedom”. Roy mixes his eastern understanding of texts with western idiom, with some poems titled “RIP” and “Que Sera, Sera”.
For those who love contemplative poetry, Roy’s book is a feast. A simple poem that I liked runs like this:
BE!
I long to be free
When united in bondage
Where there is no liberation
In thinking aloud, alone
It’s time then, to free the mind
Of the delusion of you
Let what will be
Just Be! Just Be!
Roy’s readers will fall into two categories. Those who see this as a bit depressing, or those who see this as liberating. Which one are you?
Editorial Director, Swarajya
A poet weaves words into a tapestry of poignancy and beauty. A seer plumbs depths, speaking truth, and pointing to the path that leads away from sorrow to freedom. Rarely do we encounter a writer, in this case a poet, who combines the beautiful with the profound, serving as both poet (kavi) and philosopher (rishi). Shubhrangshu Roy, like Borges and William Blake, transports the reader of his poetry into different realms, different layers of reality. He begins with Self, the essential question: Who am I? Who are you? This question requires bravery, a willingness to dive through the surface into dark waters.
In clusters of poems that evoke time, the eye, the mind, the senses, the shadows, the forest, and the ocean, Shubhrangshu invites the reader to linger, to take a second look, to cultivate the skill and craft of regard.
Arising from meditative moments, the mind stumbles forward in fragments as described by Shubhrangshu. Yet it finds a guide, a teacher, a sage who takes interest and extends a welcoming word: things do have a purpose! Death, rather than being a place of darkness and chaos, has a womb-like quality.
With great elegance, Shubhrangshu Roy starts and ends with awareness of self. The poems explore in exquisite language the many expressions of self. This work celebrates the erasure of a discrete, grasping self as it attains an unspeakable freedom.
Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
Poetry and storytelling as against didactic instruction (shastra) or enumeration (sankhya) achieve their end of conveying wisdom through the occupation of the mind field by complex positionalities of perception and emotion and the resultant dramatisation of thought. Each of these dynamic internal performances leaves a ‘posture’ (asana) in the mind, not dissimilar from a bend of the eight-twisted yogi Ashtavakra, whose mental acrobatics the author draws attention to in his introduction as the meaning of his crooked form. Holding this posture (dharana) tends towards the crystallisation of an orientation of consciousness (dhyana) while the repetition of variations and contraries prepares the intuition for the contact of the unspeakable (samadhi). In their discrete intensities of related forces, Roy’s book of poems is designed for such a process and opens up a new praxis of reading, which also draws on the premodern world. This is a praxis that guides the traversal of consciousness through time, gathering and organising space as a function of movement, a form referred to as chronotope by the literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. We can think of this performatively in examples such as the ritual mystery of the stations of the cross in ancient and medieval Christianity or in visual experience, in the East Asian practice of unfolding horizontal scrolls a section at a time from season to season through the year. In fact, the name ‘Shadows of the (Fragmented) Moon’ carries an echo of Japanese Ukiyo-e series such as Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, each capturing the moon from a very different event-vantage, thus relating episodic fragments to the whole through the sequential flow of a natural time-cycle.
Roy’s poems are tied to a similar temporality.
Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Asian Art,
California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)
San Francisco, CA
I read your book.
I am struck by your exquisite use of language to examine questions that are at the core of the human experience.
Succinctly and precisely, your poetry takes the reader on a dazzling journey of personal introspection, as well as an inquiry into the farthest reaches of the physical cosmos, and in so doing addresses the human condition.
Being humbly ignorant of the underlying historical texts of the poetry, I do not have an informed opinion based on study. I reach my conclusions through inspiration - an inspiration rooted in the magic of the poetic images you so carefully crafted.
Informed opinion vs inspiration can be a vexing question. The cosmos appears to have no limits - astrologically as well as sub- atomically.
Is consciousness rooted in physical matter? Alternatively, Is consciousness eternal and all pervasive, Can we free our minds from the prison cell of experience to live in the moment - the dot? Can we free the mind of physical limitations to connect to the infinite?
I see a fundamental dilemma - we have the capacity to inquire as to the nature of the infinite, but our capacity to understand the infinite is limited.
Perhaps inspiration via poetry is a viable route to free the mind to approach "enlightenment".
Gallery Book Arts
Book binder to the President of The United States of America
Washington DC
Shubhrangshu Roy is what ought to be a contradiction in terms: A philosopher who is also a poet. In this collection of 108 poems the former journalist takes the abstractions of two ancient Indian texts and turns them into the lucid lyricism of poetry.
Roy explores, and explicates, the subtlety of philosophic thought – What is Mind? What is Reality? – and creates vivid verbal images which give evanescent form to the formless.
Roy’s poetry, in the true bardic tradition of oral recitation, is perhaps savoured best by being read out aloud.
Read, speak, and savour.
Many commentaries have been written on the two wisdom works, one by Sage Vasisht containing the essence of his interaction with Prince Ram, and the other, by Sage Ashtavakra, answering questions posed to him by King Janak, the father of Sita. Both works are to be found in the Ramayan, and these contain valuable nuggets of deep insights that help one to come to grips with what is real and what is unreal.
Since much is lost in translation, there are those authors who try to ‘transcreate’ verse, in effect, taking a bit of poetic license to interpret and present what the verse or text is trying to convey. And the newest among such contemporary attempts to “time travel into the depths of mind” is that by Shubhrangshu Roy, in his ‘Shadows Of The Fragmented Moon’ where he presents thoughts found in Yog Vasisht and Ashtavakra Gita in 108 poems.
“You enter a dream for the heck of it / And know not the way to exit route / From the world you brought alive / In sleep, awake to desires manifest / In the raging flame that consumes / Your being stranded amidst embers / Aglow, each spark ignites your mind / Where the forest green will grow anew / Once upon a time in the future past / Luring the hunter once more / In pursuit of the game you love.” Titled ‘The Dreamer’, this is one among the many lyrical presentations that takes one down the transcendental path, throwing open the way to realms beyond, offering tantalizing glimpses of treasures yet to be discovered.
The Yog Vasisht, many feel, is quite dark in the opening chapters as it elaborates on the depressed state of mind experienced by the young Prince Rama who is uncertain of his present and of his future as king. Sage Vasisht, in an attempt to gently lead the way out of the gloom felt by the prince, successfully engages him in a series of questions and answers that serve to lighten the king-designate’s burden, somewhat, and show him the light.
In the process, we, too, get glimpses of wonderfully expressed elaborations on subjects we dread most, like death. Writes Roy, “In hopelessness is hidden / The hope of life in death / Of the wandering mind / Running amok here to there…”.
A common thread running through the works of both Vasisht and Ashtavakra is that of the need to maintain loving detachment. This is well articulated by Janak when he says, “Infinite is, indeed, my wealth of which nothing is mine. If Mithila is burnt, nothing that is mine is burnt.” That is to say, the true Self is infinite, boundless, all-pervasive, formless, subtle, and free. According to Ashtavakra, whether you are a king or a beggar, you shine only when you are unattached.
A king, an administrator, a head of state, is expected to carry out his duties while remaining unattached, free of greed, free of boundedness. This is what makes a true leader. Service to all is another given, which is why MK Gandhi would often remark, “President means chief servant.” This not only means selfless service, it also means equanimity and humility that give no space for the ego.
That ancient Indian texts possess precious wisdom still waiting to be uncovered is a fact known to many. When an author attempts to translate those texts or pens his learnings from these treasure troves of wisdom, the text becomes invaluable. With 108 meditative poems on the experience of reality based on two Indian texts—Yoga Vasistha and Ashtavakra Gita–Shadows of the Fragmented Moon by Shubhrangshu Roy is a collection of poems that appeal to the reader on a subconscious level.
According to the book, poetry rejuvenates the tired mind to think, and eventually talk straight. The author uncovers the several layers of the being that a human is, verse by verse, delving deep into the complexities of the mind and the sense of existence.
“Layer upon layer, This mind of yours
Creates choices, Rich of imagination
Deep asleep when, Awake wide open
Experiencing whatever It builds, Thought by thought
Knowing this, Do as you will, Knowing well, It’s all in the mind” writes Roy, putting into words the calisthenics of the mind—how thought becomes imagination and keeps expanding, even though only and entirely in the mind. The author brings forth the illusion of the mind that creates reality when awake and fantasies when dreaming. He talks about the whirlpools of time emerging and dissolving in the imagination and how the mind is a small fragment of the universe —still largely undiscovered and eclipsed from the human eye.
Through his poem titled Brahman, he conveys the fact that age, worth, arrogance, religious identities—all are the workings of the beautiful mind. “Brahman Am I, Mussalman too Am I, Hanuman Am I, Superman too Am I,” he writes to define the way identities are attached to beings as they become a part of the mortal world. The author explores the idea of God as in the mind, the idea of life and death as perceived by the mind—the pain that comes with it. He subtly suggests the readers to let go of the worldly delusions and “just be” and to exist in freedom. After all, as Roy puts it towards the end of the book, “Rituals are for demons, The gods are truly free.”
Great literature and universal truths have much in common in that they both are manifestations of the agreed-upon knowledge found in the hearts of all humanity. Reading Shubhrangshu Roy's work is like studying some commentary about an ancient scripture written in a long gone age, when philosophers and sages enlightened their world with teachings of wisdom and revealed personal discoveries.
Indian wisdom is ancient indeed, a civilization that has produced a massive amount of books and texts that deal with the questions we all have been asking for millennia. Even before the time when humanity settled down in the first cities, when we humans migrated rather aimlessly hunting and gathering in the plains, deserts and mountains to eke out a means of survival, we have been asking "what, how and where to?"
Civilization produced painting, sculpture and literature, as well as government and religion, whereby explaining and seeking an answer to the many questions that arose with these civilizations became an art form as well as a science. The great scriptures and epics of ancient India are a connection to a glorious civilization that, unlike most others, is still a continuous and ongoing mode of thought and a cultural mindset that has carried itself into the 21st century from the most distant times despite the demands and oppression imposed by numerous invasions, occupations, foreign imperialism, colonialism and modern technology. Yet patiently India has endured and remains as it was, as historian Michael Wood called her, the 'empire of the spirit'.
That she has survived intact is a testament to the ancient teachings that are India's hallmark.
In reading Shadows of the Fragmented Moon, one immediately becomes aware of the depth and universality of the teachings in such ancient Indian texts as the Upanishads, its beautiful verses dealing with every aspect of life in this dimension and in all the possible others. Shubhrangshu Roy, like an enlightened rishi of old, shares his inspiration, views and thoughts about various elements of the great book, bringing to us existing day to day in this modern, high tech world some powerful and timeless wisdom from an age long gone that is selflessly still giving and sharing, breathing and feeling, this knowledge itself like a living being that invites us all to imagine a near state of enlightenment in our busy and sometimes mundane modern lives.
India has always enlightened the world with wisdom, and Shubhrangshu reincarnates this beautiful tradition of enlightened thought through the medium of the written word, in amazingly beautiful language that echoes the works of the sages of old.
Musician, entertainer, purveyor of celestial world sounds, teller of ancient epic and spiritual tales, New York
It’s rare to come across a book of poetry wherein all the poems question notions of physical, emotional, and spiritual reality of life and beings. Shubhrangshu Roy’s book is a unique amalgam of Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, Shakespeare, and Socrates. Each poem in this 212-page book is a testament to the identity crisis most individuals go through. The book is divided into twelve sections which are aptly titled by words that describe the configurations that humans put themselves through almost every single day. Roy has them listed as: Time, The Eye, The Mind, The Senses, The Shadows, The Forest, The Ocean, Fragments of the Mind, The Teacher, Death, The End of Time and Freedom.
Dedicated to “the veiled one,”the coquettish, yet bold, our very own moon, the book represents the poet’s comprehension of two texts from Hindu mythology, the Yoga Vaistha and the Ashtavakra Gita. There is an inherent mystery in the poems as if the poet intends it to be on purpose like a philosopher or spiritual guru. The poems have innumerable questions, some of which are Socratic in nature and encourage the reader to ponder, deliberate, and further question. Some are like a devil’s advocate, enticing us to scratch areas of our consciousnesses we might not often do or perhaps have forgotten because of the unfaithful nature of age, or illness. Like in the poem, “T.I.M.E” in the section Time, Roy’s articulates or vents, much like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To be or not to be?”, saying at the end, “Can memory exist on its own/ Who knows?!”The poet seems to be grazing the ambiguities of a declining mind that slips into Dementia or Alzheimer’s. While the statement could be viewed as a teaser, the question mark that accompanies the exclamation mark adds to the alluring brew the poet seems to be stirring. Further, for example, in the poem, “Brahman!” in the section, The Teacher, the poet emphatically pronounces at the end, “God alone knows Who Am I/Mindsport Am I! Mindsport Am I!”In effect, therefore, beckoning and enticing the reader to follow him on the circuitous non consummating dribbles of the Pied Piper’s rats.
The poet, like in The Alchemist, is on a journey of the mind, the most it seems, less so of the heart or the soul. And while Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “Where the mind is without fear,” is a bellowing to the new glory that could come from independence, Roy’s explorations into the pleasures, anxieties, and optimisms of the mind are too about freedom of a different kind-salvation (moksha) perhaps from the arduous path of a human from birth to death. However, as Roy epitomizes in his poetry the emotional and the spiritual cannot be distinctly or clearly demarcated from the psychological without traces of cross relevance and influence. The subtext of Roy’s book is, A Time Travel into the Depths of Mind. Only a very wise person, an extremely thoughtful and empathetic person with tremendous grasp of the scriptures and universal philosophies could write such sweeping soliloquies with poignant depth about issues of time, space, and matter. Soliloquies that might seem to be intended for the personal inquiry yet have a universal outreach as these compel readers to delve inherently into the crux of the poetic questions and exclamations. In turn into the core of their very own existence and its basic, raw meaning.Many lines in Roy’s poems leave the same delible mark on the reader, which is organic, authentic, yet visceral like the chilling lines in Rumi’s poem, “Don’t go back to sleep”, ‘The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.”
Leaning on the two texts from Hindu mythology, Roy presents his poetry in human cyclical motion of existence, endings, existence, endings. Quite often he appears to be walking in the thick of self-created tensions and conflict or imposed by the other and outsider or someone within the self or from his/her most intimate spaces. Traces of the four phases of a Hindu’s life (traditionally), Brahmacharya (period of celibacy, education and self-growth), Grihastha (the householder stage of marriage and family life), Vanaprastha (search for the meanings to one’s identity, life and sheer existence) and Sannyasa (renunciation of all mortal/physical needs; a stage that very few are able to actualise), are clearly and meticulously outlined in the various sections, especially as the reader proceeds towards the last three sections, Death, The End Of Time and Freedom. Roy like a sage is attempting to motivate people towards deliberating upon all the stages of one’s life, Hindu or otherwise. Truth, honesty, hope, loneliness, emptiness as well as the human relationship with nature and the planet are all woven into the enigmatic poems. Perhaps the first and last poems in the book outline the poet’s intrinsic philosophy. And perhaps ours too, for isn’t that what the poet is attempting to rouse — our thoughts, our analysis, and our actions? In the first poem, “The Storyteller”Roy says, “Memory and experience/In a neverending(sic) spat/Between this and that/Where that’s your memory/And this, your experience/The smarter of the two/Lives to tell the tale.” And in the last poem in the book, “Que Sera, Sera!” Roy says, “What will be, will be/What will be done/Will be done/By the wise/Here and now/Egoless, unselfish/Unviolated.”The fact that the titles of both are well known euphemisms tell us a lot about the intentional design that Roy crafts in his poetry. These are heightened, judicious, clevermessages that those who can decipher will do, or at least attempt, and in the process possibly benefit from these self-explorations in the long run.
This is a must-read poetry book and I commend Shubharngshu Roy for his grasp of mythological texts and of the metaphysical conundrum of our universe and humanity’s conception and potential culmination. Roy leaves us roaming in the realms of realism and surrealism while driving us to seek transcendentalism. No direct solutions are provided, quite much like historian E.H. Carr in his timeless book, What Is History (1961). And we are left quite unsatiated in that regard yet hungry for more, and eager for contemplating, even meditating into Roy’s cleverly, sagaciously, perceptively worded hidden missives in his inexplicable, cautionary, at times daunting yet exulting and inspirational poems.
Poet and Professor,
University of District of Columbia,
Washington DC
I can see why Shubhrangshu Roy’s book of poems, Shadows of The Fragmented Moon, has been described as pre-modern. For his poetic voice, in this collection, is pitched in the timeless, away from the angst, the fever and the fret of the personal self, although incantatory or mantric might be a better description than the amorphous term ‘pre-modern.’
Anchored in the traditional allegories of ancient Indian philosophy, this cycle of poems, is a succession of meditations, part chant, part prayer, addressed to the higher self by itself in states of spiritual illumination. Avowedly based on two ancient texts, the Yoga-Vashishtha and the Ashtavakra Geeta, these units of soul truth, are reminiscent of many Vedic and Upanisadic verse-cycles dwelling on the universal theme of Indian philosophy: the undivided nature of ultimate being.
The moon in the title, singular and transcendent, is nevertheless caught up in its own reflection in multiple vessels, each one offering a different version of the one-ness of reality in accordance with the nature of its reflecting capacity, so that the One appears as the many, and the Undivided as the multifarious. In Advaite Vedanta texts this idea is called ‘Pratibimbavada’. To smash the vessels is to dismiss the maya or the delusion of separateness. And to end the anguish and anxiety of existence in the sublime recognition of illusoriness. If this is the eternal truth of Indian philosophy, Roy’s poems make a noble effort towards conjuring the mood and melody of ancient chants.
The poems themselves, organized in clusters according to the informing insight under heads like Time, The Eye, The Mind, The Senses, The Shadows, Fragments Of The Mind, Death, The End Of Time and Freedom, function quite like ragas in Indian classical music. The words are like notes configured singly or conjointly in a particular evocation of soulscape. Each line is like a deep breath as the poem inhales and exhales to a yogic rhythm, setting up a pattern of mindfulness. The result of the inner or outer recitation is one of surpassing serenity. As the author recommends, these poems are to be read in small doses so that the receptivity of the reader can internalize and amplify the thought and its vibrations in the mind to best effect. To stabilize the fretful mind, to clarify its own station in the order of the universe, to simplify its individual purpose in the context of one’s ordinary humanity, and to settle the consciousness in a state of unalloyed calm – these are the ends pursued ever so gently by these mantric poems.
Author of Requiem in Raga Janaki and other novels
Former Professor of English Literature, Allahabad University
