A Different History Commentary

This passage is taken from the book Songs of Ourselves. This poem written by Sujata Bhatt is written post the British colonisation of India and importance of religions and culture in India. It is a poem written about the social and political concern of the lost of cultural identical renunciation of Indian identity. The poem is based on Religion and a bit of Greek Mythology.
All the lines are not of the same length. This shows us that the poem is meant to be read slowly with understanding. The effect that the first stanza creates is telling us about the gods in India and how freely they roam. The second stanza is talking about the change and how the conquers quest and language are loved by the people who were forced to learn it. The poem is written in Blank verse. The poet has used sentence pattern, motifs, symbolisms and imagery mainly in this poem to emphasise the problem of younger generations losing their roots and identities.
The title relates to the poem in a way that it can be said to be about different histories, different cultural backgrounds but also about, the poet Sujata Bhatt’s own past. In another context, it could also said to be about history itself, relating to Greek mythology and Indian religion that is centuries old. As a child, the poet had to move from country to country and may be reminiscing about how life would have been if she had never left India. A history different to the one she had experienced.

In the poem Sujata Bhatt has used a lot of literary devices and imagery, in the poem. The kinds of devices used are metaphors, similes and allusions. In the first line of the poem there is imagery. “DEAD” this word is to imagery. The feelings of death bring great sadness and sorrow. It gives us the effect of no movement like the person can’t move, or the person is in a state of trance. “ROAM FREELY” is movement again they are not area bound but they are free to do what they want and what they don’t want. “DISGUISED AS SNAKES OR MONKEYS” this is the 5th line, this is a simile and Sujata is comparing the gods as animals. This shows that she has less concern about the Indian gods. The words “SLAM and TOSS” are visual imagery and they show what are a few ways to disturb saraswati. “SARASWATI” is another allusion. Saraswati is the Indian goddess of knowledge and in India it is believed that saraswati is present in all the things we use to learn even in a pen. “WHICH LANGUAGE TRULY MEANT TO MURDER SOMEONE” this is a metaphor. This is in the second stanza and it means which language of the conqueror meant to murder some people of a country because of their quest. “A SCYTHE SWOOPING” the scythe is a very sharp object that is moving at a very high speed and the imagery relating to swooping is auditory, visual and kinesthetic. The auditory because you can hear a little noise when anything is moving at a high speed. Because you can see the sharp object, it is visual. It is Kinesthetic because you can see the movement of the sharp object. The effect that the allusions create is that it is a half open window the full picture is not shown to the reader of who the person is or what this event is. This makes the reader find out more about what is in the poem.
The poet, Sujata Bhatt, while writing this poem has given importance to the culture and various religions in India. She has emphasized in her poem by repeating words and questions and thereby making her poem stronger. She writes about Indian traditions, lost identities, importance of language, cultural difference to create different moods and themes. In the first part of the poem, she concentrates on respect for education and learning. She claims that in Indian religion every 
object is sacred. There is God in trees. You should treat your books as the goddess of knowledge. You should be gentle when turning the pages of the book that you read for knowledge of religion.
The theme of this poem is Identity, time, language, religion and culture. The poem is reflecting her past and she is telling us about the differences in the cultures and how people act strangely towards people from different cultures. This poem is a serious poem telling the reader how different the world is. She explores the Indian culture through this poem and tells the reader the depth of this eccentric culture.
The words used by Sujata Bhatt are formal and informal. She doesn’t want this poem to become too serious. Words like dead and emigrated are formal words. These words are put here to increase the emphasis to the poem and to the referred line. In the first line “great Pan is not DEAD”. The word dead plays an important part due to the fact of telling us that the god is not dead. One the other hand words like shove and slam are informal words. These words let the poem get more exiting to the reader to find out what will happen next. The specific words mean with reference to “slam”. This particular word in line 11. “a sin to slam books down” Sujata Bhatt is trying to tell us what is the Indian culture, because in the culture it says that slamming a book hard, kicking a book and throwing a book is a sin, because it offends saraswati the Indian god of learning. All the words have a reference to the line they are placed in and they all have a deep meaning to them.

Sujata Bhatt addresses the preference of English over native languages by addressing the youth in India and the unborn, who are preferring the foreign language at the cost of the extinction of native Indian languages and dialects. The poem is very well written by the poet, Sujata Bhatt. The way she has explained the cultural differences is detailed and having to go through cultural changes three times in your life can be difficult. She is able to explain each line with its difference very well in the poem. Putting the allusions of the Indian gods and great pan changed the full structure of the poem