Q: To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?
J.P: I was born into a family that spoke many languages but which communicated in English. This meant that my dreaming and my desiring, my philosophising and my fantasizing, my worrying and my wondering, are all conducted in English. This pours into my poetry and my poetry comes to me in English.
Q: In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?
J.P: Without doubt. We are palimpsests of all the poetry we read. And we were truly the lucky generation. There was Nissim Ezekiel at the PEN All-India Centre, always ready to listen to a new poem. There was Adil Jussawalla who brought us poetry readings every week for years. Gieve Patel was much more distant but he was willing to mentor kids at some school in South India. Eunice de Souza was teaching English and holding a festival called Ithaca at St Xavier’s College. The college I went to had Vasant A Dahake teaching Marathi. Prabodh Parikh brought us Gujarati poetry, Kauns Ma (Between Parenthesis). And because of this best of raucous song birds, we had birds of passage. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra came through and A K Ramanujan. Each brought a distinct voice, another sound. They wrote in Englishes as varied and wonderful as the country from which they drew sustenance.
Q: What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic
process?
J.P: India lives in simultaneous worlds of book saturation and book hunger. The audience is not my concern. The reader is a myth wrapped in a mystery. Both myth and mystery are important to me but not this one. I don’t think I know much about the reader but I will say this as an inveterate buyer of secondhand books. Indian poetry in English rarely ends up on the streets. These books stay home.
Q: Do you read, write, or translate poetry in a language other than English? If yes, how does it influence your poetry in English?
J.P: I have translated poetry from Marathi and Urdu and Hindi into English. There is nothing I do that does not go into my poetry. This encounter with language has been rewarding in so many ways, I am sometimes of the opinion that it should be a requirement for poets. And then I acknowledge that only a maniac or a demagogue would want to make rules for poets and I let the idea fade.
Q: Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?
J.P: I am guilty of conducting poetry workshops. I do not think poetry can be taught but it can be experienced at workshops in different and useful ways. For instance, reading one’s own poems aloud for the first time is a powerful and transformative experience. You are changed by it forever. Your inside is now outside you. Your voice has left you taking with it a soul secret. You have made your first steps into a frightening and exhilarating world. Reading a poem aloud also breaks it open for you. It sounds so different inside your head, it looks so different on the page and in the charged air between you and the person listening it becomes another thing altogether. Then it is workshopped and its flaws and failures pointed out. These may even be its strengths and you must learn to deflect theory’s slings and arrows from the defenceless word artefact on the page. What can be learned will vary from poet to poet. What can be taught will vary from facilitator to facilitator. But the greatest workshop of all is the reading of poetry and more poetry and yet more poetry and how often we forget that. Poetry is the workshop and the product.
Q: What are your views on the poetry that appears today on such popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram?
J.P: I don’t read much of it so I can’t say.
