Rajani: Songs of the Night

By Dhan Gopal Mukerji and Mint Editions

Rajani: Songs of the Night (1916) is a poetry collection by Dhan Gopal Mukerji. Published while Mukerji was a young student in California, Rajani: Songs of the Night is the debut collection of poems from the first Indian writer to gain a popular audience in the United States. Lyrical and romantic, Mukerji’s poems capture his commitment to beauty while maintaining his sense of isolation and exile as a young man living far from home. In “Bhikshu’s Song,” the collection’s opening poem, the poet greets a Buddhist monk at the door, returning in memory to his native Bengal. Repeating the Bhikshu’s mantra throughout—“Om Moni Padme Om!”—Mukerji allows himself to “drift with the stream / To [his] destination of dream.” An exile, Mukerji can only reach his homeland through memory and song, by infusing English meter with the sights and sounds of Bengal. “A singer that sings of sorrow; / Whose night knows no tomorrow; / [His] song finds its source / In its moonless immensity.” Although he never returned to his native country, Mukerji left an inspiring legacy through his literary achievement and unwavering commitment to Indian independence. This edition of Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s Rajani: Songs of the Night is a classic of Indian American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513223438

Dhan Gopal Mukerji

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration to such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In this little volume a young Hindu scholar has tried to express in English free verse something of the dream-poetry of his native Bengal. The little poems are not translations, nor imitations. They are fancies of the night, Rajani, suggestions and bints of the emotions which the darkness awakens in the mind of a mystical scholar. In the first of the series, Bhikshu (mendicant), the poet, feels himself awakening as a suppliant for reality in the light of Oriental thought. With the dawn, he bails the Lotus, Om Moni Padme Om, as the symbol of the source whence flows the nectar of sustenance, the life-impulse which vivifies all living creatures.

Rajani, the world of baffling dreams, showers down its strange sensations, but with all these goes the bidden sense of lack of reality. Through the morning dew comes the song of the Bhikshu, the lute-player who has lost his scroll and makes his plea for reality.

For the rest, the verses must tell their own story. It remains for me to say, that Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born near Calcutta in 1890, that he was educated in the Universities of Calcutta, Tokyo, California and Stanford, taking his degree at Palo Alto, in 1914, as a student of Comparative Literature.

DAVID STARR JORDAN

Stanford University,

February 18, 1916.

¹BHIKSHU’S SONG

A Bhikshu at the door,

Om Moni Padme Om!

A lute-player without a scroll;

A boatswain without his toll.

My barque is laden with life,

Bound for the shore of light;

Let it drift with the stream

To its destination of dream!

A Bhikshu at the