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Aug 07

Imtiaz Dharker | Shalini Srinivasan

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Srinivasan, Shalini. “’She must be from another country’: A Critical Biography of Imtiaz Dharker.” Indian Writing In English Online, 7 August 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/imtiaz-dharker-shalini-srinivasan/ .

Chicago:
Srinivasan, Shalini. “’She must be from another country’: A Critical Biography of Imtiaz Dharker.” Indian Writing In English Online. August 7, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/imtiaz-dharker-shalini-srinivasan/ .

“She must be from another country”: A Critical Biography of Imtiaz Dharker

In 2016, while being presented with an honorary doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Imtiaz Dharker shared one of her poems, “The elephants have come out of the room and onto the Picadilly line,” a delightful and absurd image of odd visitors that plays out over the course of the poem. It was a fitting poem to read out. Outsiders of various colours and shapes – visitors, immigrants, travellers, oddities, dissenters, and the purely cussed – have populated Dharker’s work over the decades. These outsiders offer experiences and ethnographies, sorrow and joy, enrichment and impoverishment, and the many nameless shades of feeling awkward, out-of-place, and somehow, removed. The elephants wandering into a London subway – alien by species, size, and geography were, in one sense, not entirely unexpected.

Alien at Home

Born in Pakistan, brought up in Glasgow, and having lived in India and Britain, Imtiaz Dharker is a film-maker, poet, and artist. Purdah, her first volume of poetry, was published in India in 1989, but without the accompanying art that would become an integral part of her books. The art appears some years later in the British edition (Bloodaxe, 1997) that combines the poems from Purdah with Dharker’s second volume, Postcards From god (first published in India in 1994). Her poetry has been well received in India and abroad – it has been widely anthologised, including in These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (2012) and Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe, 2012). Dharker’s honours include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, an honorary doctorate and the Cholmondely Award from SOAS in 2016. She is currently the Chancellor of Newcastle University. Dharker’s art has been exhibited across the world, in India, Britain, the US, and Hong Kong, and she has also worked as a filmmaker in India and Britain.

Similar themes – feminist concerns, the nature of belonging and exclusion, love and longing, the lives of the city – criss-cross across these media (Brown). “By extrapolation, this implies that Dharker herself belongs to a number of different communities in a global sense: Indian, Pakistani, British (including but nevertheless distinct from Scottish and Welsh), and even – as some of her poems portraying transnational feminism make clear – American” (Dix 55). In an interview – one of a series with different Indian poets – Eunice de Souza identifies Dharker’s work as of “social concern” (118), noting its evolving explorations of contemporary concerns, including “sexual and communal politics” (116). Her later poems travel across countries, lingering especially on the experiences of those at the borders and the edges, negotiating belonging and not-belonging: familial, social, national. This range of solidarities lends to Dharker’s poetry a large cast of characters, personas and experiences, each inhabited by empathy.

While migration and diasporic experiences are a significant theme in Dharker’s work, her concern with the peripheries is not restricted to the technologies of identity and inclusion/exclusion that are engendered in those systems. Exclusionary systems, in her work, are also to be found at home.

In Dharker’s first published volume, Purdah and Other Poems, the titular poem is in two parts. It weaves experiences of growing up with a heavy sense of sorrow:

Whatever we did,

the trail was the same:

the tear-stained mother, the gossip aunts

looking for shoots to smother

inside all our cracks. (“Purdah II” Postcards from god, 1997, 2)

There is a sense of shame and helplessness in the face of the larger social structures of which the purdah itself is only a symptom. In Nishat Haider’s reading, the purdah is a symbol, used to stand “more broadly as the elaborate codes of seclusion and feminine modesty used to protect and control women’s lives across the religious divide” (252). Lopamudra Basu argues that in earlier works such as Purdah, Dharker is critical in her “relationship to her religion of Islam,” recognising the role played by religio-social structures that “limit women’s access to the public sphere and deny full recognition of their humanity” (394). In other words, it is the societal structures themselves that engender alienation in the individual. The use of “shoots” for the helplessly overgrowing young women pits their inevitable burgeoning as natural, against a relentless social violence that seeks to confine and destroy it.

Much of Postcards from god (1997) deals with contemporary violence – precipitated by the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the devastating Bombay riots of 1993. Jerry Pinto notes that, “The events at Ayodhya changed many things for Indian Muslims,” and describes the change in Dharker’s poetic voice thus: “Rage had turned some of the poems into posters, the images into slogans.”

Speeches are read.

A few points made.

Somewhere else in the city

A blade finds flesh.

(“Seats of Power”, 139)

Short, bitten-off lines such as these are abundant in this book, accompanied by a sense of anger and anguish, and – as the postcards suggest – a constant striving to understand. “Question 1” and “Question 2” and poems like “Scaffolding,” serve both to ask existential questions and to invite connection. “Scaffolding” closes with the tentative< “Would you be tempted/ to come in” (96). The titular poem too ends on a note of opening, “Keep the channels open. / I will keep trying to get through.” (76) The volume ends with “Minority,” a poem that brings these strands of insider/outsider and speech/silence together:

I was born a foreigner.

I carried on from there

to become a foreigner everywhere …. (157)

Having set this conundrum of belonging, the poem meanders through ideas of language and translation, before bringing the estrangement home in the act of writing:

And who knows, these lines

may scratch their way

into your head –

through all the chatter of community,

family, clattering spoons,

children being fed –

immigrate into your bed,

squat in your home,

and in a corner, eat your bread …. (159)

Despite the possessive and repeated “your”, the community, the bed, and the home have been rendered into signs of isolation. These are now spaces to be occupied by deliberation, even force, rather than by invitation or habit. The poem ends, inevitably, on a final estrangement from the self:

until, one day, you meet

the stranger sidling down your street,

realise you know the face

simplified to bone,

look into its outcast eyes

and recognise it as your own. (159)

The doubling of the poet as both perpetrator and victim, as the minority who is cast out, and the caster-out of minorities, lends the poem both a certain bleakness and empathy. De Souza’s final evaluation returns to this: “Dharker’s predominant tone is elegiac and compassionate. There is deep sadness in ‘Postcards from god’ in which God wonders how people can use his name while perpetrating horrors of every kind” (120).

There are moments of grace, too, as in “Living Space,” where Dharker describes a home in Dharavi, the structure unsteady: “The whole structure leans dangerously/ towards the miraculous.” The poem then takes a turn:

Into this rough frame,
someone has squeezed
a living space

and even dared to place
these eggs in a wire basket,
fragile curves of white
hung out over the dark edge
of a slanted universe,
gathering the light
into themselves,
as if they were
the bright, thin walls of faith. (109)

The eggs balanced precariously over the lurking “dark edge of the slanted universe” are out of place with their curves and their sense of life, but they are all the same, daring and bright.

In Postcards, as in its immediate descendant, I Speak for the Devil (2001), the narrative voice is by necessity at a remove from the human condition. A poem in the latter, in fact begins, “The other bastard’s had his say/now it’s my turn … .” (“The Devil’s Day”, 69) making explicit the posturing of the speaker. This remove allows Dharker a certain vantage point in her observation: possessive ‘you’s and intimate ‘I’s are, nevertheless, at a remove from the humans who populate her poetry. She tells Pinto, “God is who you can be; so is the devil. Both, poetically speaking, were ways in which I was trying to create an interface with the outside world” (Pinto). In I Speak for the Devil the alien – and the structures of alienation – become international.

International Aliens

Dharker’s poetry is often discussed as part of the late twentieth century diaspora literature (Basu), which is to say, it deals with the wide range of cultural and emotional alienation that arises from the experience of migration. Her poetry is set in Bombay and London, in Scotland and Lahore, and the hushed and depersonalised spaces in between where papers, passports, and documentation reign supreme.

Lopamudra Basu’s study traces the evolution of Dharker’s work over the decades and identifies a shift in her stance after 9/11. In The Terrorist at my Table (2006), Basu notes that the focus of Dharker’s critique has gone international, shifting from the home and the community to the larger, Anglo-American public and the public views of Muslims in that context (395). The feeling of not-fitting and alienness has widened, though Dharker’s social concerns that lie at the “intersections of gender, nationalism, and violence,” remain (Basu 398).

The international alien must also contend with the horrors of paperwork and bureaucracy. “ID” for instance, in Leaving Fingerprints, is uncompromising in its stance, “All it is, you see, / is a hook to hang a person on” (104). Fingerprints is stolid in its unravelling of all tools that may be employed to trace and pin down human beings: seals, contracts, fingerprints, photos, CCTVs, palm readings. Echoing the themes of Purdah, it is peopled with those who evade attempts at being counted, instead blending and settling into trains, countries, mud, rivers. Each attempt at exact definition is repeatedly shown to be futile. “I am sorry to say,” a poem on fingerprints is titled, flowing on from there to, “there are limits to what it will tell you. / This print ….” (102). It concludes on a note of physical assertion:

All it can say

with any certainty is

that you were here

and touched this thing. (102)

Filippo Menozzi positions Dharker’s Leaving Fingerprints (2009) solidly “in the context of current debates on migration in Europe and the technologies of recognition adopted to track the movements of migrants and refugees across the European Union” (151). He terms it “peripheral poetry” (152): poetry that defies instrumental systems of identification, that confers upon migrant subjects a carefully graded inclusion. Dharker’s work, in his reading, demonstrates the “insufficiency of the fingerprint as a technology of recognition (164). Dharker’s art carries the lines and whorls of fingerprints, marking a tension between their materiality (which is adapted, for instance into a landscape) while also noting their role in identification.

If the sense of alienation, of being an outsider is characteristic of Dharker’s poetry, it is accompanied often by a sense of possibility, of something burgeoning in the gaps and splits. I Speak for the Devil (2001), for instance, begins with “Honour Killing” and the cut direct: “At last I’m taking off this coat / this black coat of a country…” (5). The sharp social critique from Purdah remains, and migration becomes imbued with potential, a possible way out. Later in the volume, another poem begins, “There is safety in a ticket…” (12).

“They’ll say, ‘She must be from another country”” is astringent about the socio-cultural and the bureaucratic codes that grant belonging:

But from where we are

it doesn’t look like a country,

it’s more like the cracks

that grow between borders

behind their backs.

That’s where I live.

(I Speak for the Devil, 31)

The gesture is not towards mere acceptance, but celebration of the alien, the person who lives outside the rules, spoken and unspoken, “behind their backs.” Dharker’s “them” are reminiscent of Edward Lear’s; and they too stand for the crushing force of societal restrictions upon the individual.

Consider the trajectory of “Hung”, which begins with the removal of the protagonists: “We are suspended above the street/ twelve floors up, nine clouds down/ north of the river, south of peace. (The Terrorist at my Table, 37) The poem winds through the imagery of apartness: ‘floating’, ‘torn’, ‘pieces’, ‘tumble’, ‘shreds’, ‘other’, ‘parts of jigsawed parks’. It is the last of these phrases upon which the poem pivots, and the words begin to be put together: ‘posted’, ‘received’, ‘patched’. The image of the jigsaw puts together the acute disparateness of the poet and the city and turns them into potential, both creative and emotional, into “people we expect to meet” (37).

This narrative arc – outsideness carrying slivers and sparks and opportunity, alienation resolving slowly into possibility – is characteristic of The Terrorist at my Table, and indeed of much of Dharker’s other work. In her conversation with Eunice de Souza, Dharker notes of her writing that, “I love being an outsider. I’d say ‘alienation’, being an outsider is a positive. Not alienated really, but outside. Being an outsider is my country. I value that. That’s the country all writers belong to – standing outside the body too, outside the image” (114).

Dharker’s lines in The Terrorist at my Table often falter and break, with frequent imagery of sounds, words, mouths, breaths, each imperfect and only available in part.

Give me railway stations.

Voices on loudspeakers,

people with their surfaces pulled away

by travelling. Movement gives me words,

carried in the carriages of trains.

Give me a tea-stall on a busy street,

halves of conversations,

stories walking by.

(“Inspiration”, 106)

“Inspiration,” creates a dichotomy between “the poet” (male) and the speaker. While the poet wants hills, solitude, the paraphernalia of the Romantic, the narrator’s eavesdropping on crowds and bustle is enriching. Dharker seems to suggest that the fragments of outside voices make the poem, and widen and deepen the speaker’s work. The poem ends with a repudiation: “I will not go with my friend / the poet to the mountains” (Ibid). The dichotomy between the Romantic poet and the modernist is rendered starkly – they are friends, but the speaker’s poetry is enmeshed with the urban, the everyday, inextricably part of a larger social world. The speaker may be alien, in transit and outside the conversations, but the flashes of intimacy with strangers and the awareness of concerns and connections outside their ambit are deemed essential to their work. Arundhati Subramaniam says of Dharker’s later work: “Displacement here no longer spells exile; it means an exhilarating sense of life at the interstices.” It is in these interstices, “Inspiration” seems to suggest, that poetry grows.

Alien Forms: Art and Poetry

Dharker’s poetry is published with her art. With its stark pen-and-ink style, images deeply shadowed black and bright white, the visuality works inseparably from the text. Dharker’s visual work features a prominent use of line and texture, not unlike her poetry. K Narayana Chandran, for instance, describes her being “alone among her peers in having a highly sophisticated sense of the line—in both poems and in sketches” (872). Dharker’s work, art and poetry, is riven: veils and double-dealings, words and pen strokes slashing across the page, the cutting open of people and things and time too:

Here are the facts, fine

as onion rings.

The same ones can come chopped

or sliced.

(“The Terrorist at my Table,” 22)

In the segment titled “These are the Times we live in,” Dharker employs collage to particular effect, as newsprint occupies faults and breaks within the image.

The newsprint here accompanies lines from “These are the Times we Live in I,” which describes a woman being interrogated on suspicion of terrorism. Her person and her paperwork are weighed and judged by a suspicious officer. The poem ends with the woman found wanting:

The pieces are there

but they missed out your heart.

Half your face splits away,

drifts onto the page of a newspaper

that’s dated today.

It rustles as it lands. (46)

The violence of the imagery is softened by the rustling, by the shift from flesh to paper. Basu notes that the “lines of the lyric and the drawing work simultaneously to evoke the randomness and banality of terrorism being reduced to newspaper headlines and the tragedy of not understanding or resolving the underlying human problems that lead to these acts” (401).

Like the newsprint in the image, like the face of the woman being interrogated, the verse is splintered; each sentence is a stanza, radiating out of the margins to cumulative effect. The image reinforces the tension between the paperwork and the person in the poem. It, however, brings in the element of the public narrative – the newspaper. The inclusion of newsprint lends multiple effects to the image. The first of these is what Scarlett Higgins identifies as integral to the use of collage, “juxtaposition, disruption, and a fundamental sense of anti-narrativity” (1). Thomas Brockelman identifies one on the major effects of collage, to “represent the intersection of multiple discourses” (2), an act in keeping with Modernist and avant-garde uses of collage. Here, the public discourses of terrorism and the image of the Muslim woman are put into an unstable relationship. Is the woman speaking or is she being obscured? Is there something finger-like in the newsprint the acts across her mouth? And who does the broken word “In terror” refer to? The image is not anti-narrative, I argue, so much as limited in its movement: the use of newsprint creates a sense of nowness in the image, anchoring it to coordinates of time and space. In a study of Picasso’s collage, Magda Dragu terms the newspaper “quantifiable,” describing it as a “discrete entity with predetermined spatial and functional coordinates.” (45) In other words, the newspaper functions as an entrance, allowing ingress to the world outside the work of art.

In Dharker’s work here, the inclusion of the newspaper also addresses the same collector’s impulse seen in “Inspiration,” where splinters of the “real” world – fixed, immutable – are embedded into the fluid poetic line to lend it a certain grist. It is to be noted that the newsprint too – often used in collage as the symbol of the modern world of mass production and the collapsibility of form and hierarchy, to critique the text it has been cut from^[1] – has been altered and obscured in its inclusion; it has been cut up, spliced, and appropriated. In this collision of mass-produced newsprint, art, and the personal poem, of media, form, and discourse, the question arises: which is the alien here?

Dharker’s exhibit, “My Breath” at the Manchester International Festival in 2021, is in some ways the culmination of her work with the line across form and medium. This work was part of the multimedia Poet Slash Artist exhibit curated by Lemn Sissay and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Dharker’s work achieves its hybridity by tying together image, text, and the body of the artist. The long lines that cut across the writer’s body, reminiscent of mummification and of jail, unravel slowly into words – a concrete convergence of lines, visual and poetic. The poem itself reworks a poem and an image from The Terrorist at my Table, “My Breath” and an illustration from a little later in the volume. This figure, a woman, hollow-eyed, her mouth and body obscured by the draped cloth is, in the book, paired with the “The Right word”. This too is a poem, albeit more fraught, about finding voice. The speaker of “The Right Word” finds her voice at the end of the poem and calls to the titular terrorist, ending on a note of hope: “I open the door. / Come in I say. /Come in and eat with us” (25).

In the exhibit, “My Breath” is a triptych, the lines of the woman’s drape extending into the middle segment act to connect the woman and the words of the poem. As in the case of the visual lines, each poetic line is repeated over and over – “Walls are paper walls are paper walls are paper” – thickening and elongating the billowing drape, their significance partly as words, partly as visual texture.

Though the joints are visible, the continuities of line (very different from the collages) demonstrate perhaps a continuity of voice and experience – the aliens have found community.

Conclusions

Imtiaz Dharker’s poetry and art insert the figure of the alien as an exploratory incision – an instigation, a way in, and a device with which to peel back layers of places and persons. Through this incision the reader is afforded glimpses of belonging and conformism, of violence, systemic and individual, of love, grief, and the role of the poet in the contemporary world.

Dharker’s recent volumes, Over the Moon (2014), and Luck is the Hook (2018) share many of the themes and preoccupations of the works discussed here, but feature too a number of love poems, and more personal lyrics. Over the Moon, in particular, is characterised by a gentle melancholy, sometimes veering into the elegiac – many of its poems are written in memory of her late husband Simon Powell. “Hiraeth, Old Bombay,” begins with nostalgia for the city of the past, and takes a turn into personal grief and loss:

I would have taken you to Bombay

if its name had not slid into the sea.

I would have taken you to the place called Bombay

if it were still there and if you were still here,

I would have taken you to the Naz café. (E-book, Ch. 6)

The poet’s realisation is that she has been detached physically from both city and lover – the exile is complete.

Dharker’s oeuvre, in short, negotiates questions of human identity and belonging, fraught and beset as they continually are by spaces, social expectations, and memories. While devices perceived as shortcuts or simplifications (fingerprinting, ID cards) are given short shrift, the real depths of identity are often invested in images that are more fluid – rivers, seeds, trees, memories, objects and spaces that are reused and repeopled. Cities, in particular, with their ebb and flow of people and their stories, are both sites of longing and poetic inspiration. Just as the spaces in “Hiraeth, Old Bombay” become one person’s repositories of love and memory, these meanings accrue and spill over.

The city has been taken and given,

named, renamed, possessed, passed on,

passed through many hands,

my hand me down. (“Hand-me-down”, Leaving Fingerprints, 73)

These slow, organic processes of growth and sedimentation are seen as seen as repositories of the self, both individual and social. Even the alien leaves hand-me-downs for others to possess.

Major Works by Imtiaz Dharker

Postcards from god. Bloodaxe, 1997.

(This edition combines her first volume Purdah and other Poems that was originally published in India in 1989 by OUP with her second book, Postcards from god. It also adds illustrations by Dharker that are not present in the OUP edition.)

I Speak for the Devil. Bloodaxe, 2001.

The Terrorist at my Table. Bloodaxe, 2006.

Leaving Fingerprints. Bloodaxe, 2009.

Over the Moon. Bloodaxe, 2014.

Luck is the Hook. Bloodaxe, 2018.

Works Cited

Banash, David. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013.

Basu, Lopamudra. “The Languages of Diaspora: Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker,” A History of Indian Poetry in English, ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri. Cambridge UP, 2016.

Brockelman, Thomas P. The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern. Northwestern UP, 2001.

Brown, Mark. “Imtiaz Dharker Awarded Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry,” The Guardian, 17 Dec 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/imtiaz-dharker-queens-gold-medal-poetry?CMP=share_btn_fb. Accessed 12 Jul 2022.

Chandran, K Narayana. ‘Review of Postcards from God.’ World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Focus on Luisa Valenzuela (Autumn, 1995), pp. 872-873. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151815. Accessed 22 Oct 2022.

De Souza, Eunice. Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. Oxford UP, 1999.

Dharker, Imtiaz. Postcards from god. Bloodaxe, 1997.

—. I Speak for the Devil. Bloodaxe, 2001.

—. The Terrorist at my Table. Bloodaxe, 2006.

—. Leaving Fingerprints. Bloodaxe, 2009.

—. Over the Moon. Bloodaxe, 2014. E-book.

—. Luck is the Hook. Bloodaxe, 2018. E-book.

—. “My Breath Artwork/Poem at Manchester International Festival.” Youtube, 7 July 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6c8uOk1NNc. Accessed 15 Aug 2022.

Dix, Hywel. “Transnational Imagery in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker.” Anglistik, Vol 26, No. 1, 2015. pp. 55–67.

Dragu, Magda. Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage. Routledge, 2020.

Haider, Nishat. “Voices from Behind the Veil: A Study of Imtiaz Dharker’s Purdah and Other Poems,” South Asian Review, Vol 30, No. 1, pp. 246-268, DOI:10.1080/02759527.2009.11932668. Accessed 15 Aug 2022.

Higgins, Scarlett. Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision. Routledge, 2019.

Menozzi, Filippo. “Fingerprinting: Imtiaz Dharker and the Antinomies of Migrant Subjectivity.” College Literature, Volume 46, Number 1, Winter 2019, pp. 151-178. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2019.0005. Accessed 2 Sept 2022.

Pinto, Jerry. “Imtiaz Unbound.” Poetry International, 2 Aug 2004. https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/article/104-2686_Imtiaz-Unbound/. Accessed 15 Aug 2022.

Subramaniam, Arundhati. “Poet: Imtiaz Dharker.” Poetry International. https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-2720_Dharker. Accessed 23 Oct 2022.

“The Elephants have come out of the Room and on to the Piccadilly Line – SOAS Centenary Timeline.” Blogs from around SOAS University of London – Blogs from around SOAS University of London, https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/centenarytimeline/2016/07/29/the-elephants-have-come-out-of-the-room-an d-on-to-the-piccadi lly-line/. Accessed 22 Oct 2022.

Note:

[1] See David Banash’s Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption for a comprehensive discussion of the use of newsprint in Modernist and contemporary collage.

Shalini Srinivasan

Read Imtiaz Dharker on IWE Online

The Terrorist at my Table They'll Say, "She Must Be From Another Country"

Copyedited by Atul V. Nair.

Jul 31

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Suniti Namjoshi | Anandi Rao

By IWE Online Critical Biography No Comments

Introduction

Suniti Namjoshi (1941–) is one of the foremost queer diasporic Indian writers in English. As Anannya Dasgupta puts it, “Namjoshi’s experience of the diaspora as an Indian lesbian puts her through a threefold marginalization so that she develops what she calls the ‘Asian perspective,’ the ‘alien perspective,’ and, later, the ‘lesbian perspective’ (22)” (Dasgupta 100). Namjoshi was born into a “highly influential Chitpavan Brahmin family of Pune” (Vijayasree 23). As a young adult she qualified for the Indian Administrative Services because it seemed to her that it was her “only chance of being somebody in my own right and gaining some independence from the family” (Namjoshi, Because of India 7). In 1969, she left her job and moved to Canada to pursue a PhD in English literature. She subsequently lived and worked in Canada for several years before moving to the UK, where she currently lives. There are two people she met in the UK whose significance is worth pointing out.

In 1978–79 during her sabbatical in the UK, Namjoshi met Christine Donald who began to “politicize” her. Namjoshi writes of this meeting in one of the autobiographical vignettes in Because of India (78), ruminating, “what isn’t clear to me is why I wasn’t influenced by Feminism earlier” (78). She goes on to say that “I hadn’t properly understood the structures of Western society, or even of my own” (78). This statement suggests that the fact that Namjoshi came to “feminism” late was due to her privileged upbringing, but also due to the fact that feminism in the West, at that time, often meant “white feminism”. The second significant person is Gillian Hanscombe, whom Namjoshi met at the International Feminist Book Fair in London in June 1984. They wrote poems to each other between 1984 and 1986, and these were eventually published in the collection Flesh and Paper (1986). Namjoshi describes this book as “a dialogue” where “two lesbians are trying to understand what kind of sense the world makes to a lesbian consciousness, and in the very process of writing are trying to deal with the fact that language creates worlds” (Because of India 113). Namjoshi and Hanscombe live together in the UK.

Namjoshi’s point about language creating “worlds” is an important one in thinking about the “worlds” she creates. These worlds are, after all, rendered in English. In an interview with Olga Kenyon, published in 1992, Namjoshi is asked about why she did not write in her “mother tongue.” Her answer is illuminating: “It may not be my mother tongue, but I was brought up speaking English, and sent to an English-medium school. I couldn’t write in my mother tongue, even if I’d wanted to, because I’ve only used it for simple conversations” (Kenyon 112). This presents an interesting paradox, an experience that is common for several Indian writers in English: English is the language one is most comfortable in, and yet it is not considered to be one’s mother tongue, despite being the language one thinks and writes in. As Namjoshi puts it in an interview with C. Vijayasree, “The Indian cultural context is extraordinarily dense, but the language one thinks in also carries with it the weight of a strong cultural tradition (and in this case a different tradition)” (Vijayasree 176). This also reflects a divide between the realm of the written and the oral. Serena Guarracino analyses this divide in relation to Namjoshi’s work in the Indian Administrative Service. Guarracino notes that

her inability to read and write in her mother tongue marks the chasm between herself and the people she deals with as Assistant Collector, forcing her to admit the schism between her oral mother-tongue, Marathi, and the languages in which she had been taught to read and write, English and Hindi. As a consequence, in Namjoshi’s early writing the unnamed mother tongue is an impalpable entity, strangled between the two master tongues of English and Hindi . . . . Quite uncommonly for the Indo-English context, here Hindi is the language of authority and exploitation (the language used with servants), while English is the language of socialization and learning: both English and Hindi are experienced as master languages, marking the privileged position not of the British colonizer, but of the Indian government official. (Guarracino 135)

I cite Guarracino at length because of the three important points she makes. First, Hindi and English are acknowledged as “master” tongues. Second, the fact that knowing how to read and write only in the master tongues marks both a position of privilege—caste, class, linguistic—but it also entails a loss, an absence. Third, this absence is an “unnamed” and “impalpable entity,” whose presence lingers in the background. It is worth bearing in mind that the position of privilege shifts as Namjoshi moves into a diasporic space where she is othered—as an Indian and as a lesbian. From this perspective she has created a vast oeuvre of poetry, prose, and other writings. In the rest of this essay, I focus on two main areas of Namjoshi’s oeuvre: her engagement with the western canon through her re-writings of The Tempest, and her engagement with Hindu mythology and the symbol of the cow.

Re-interpreting The Tempest in Snapshots of Caliban and Sycorax

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was first performed in 1611. Since the 1960s the “colonial implications of the play” have become more and more apparent for viewers and readers (Singh 24). This has led to several postcolonial reimaginings of the play, many of which center the figure of Caliban. Most notable amongst these are Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (A Tempest, 1969) and E.P. Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Caliban” from his collection Islands (1969), which focus on Caliban as the male colonized subject vis-à-vis Prospero, the European colonizer. In “Snapshots of Caliban,” published in the collection From the Bedside Book of Nightmares (1984), Namjoshi complicates this configuration by “recasting Shakespeare’s character as a Third World lesbian subject. Concomitantly, she reimagines Miranda as a desirous and murderous homoerotic figure and Prospero as the excluded and, finally, defeated patriarch” (Mann 100).

Namjoshi returns to The Tempest in her poem “Sycorax” published in a volume titled, Sycorax: New Fables and Poems (2006). In the “Letter to the Reader” that opens this volume, she describes the poem as follows: “In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sycorax is already dead when Prospero and Miranda arrive on the island. The Sycorax in my poem is still alive and has returned to the island after Prospero and the others have left. She is still defiant, still fierce but she knows that death is no longer so far away that it need not be thought of” (Namjoshi xi). While “Snapshots of Caliban” focuses on Caliban, Miranda, and Prospero, “Sycorax” centers around Sycorax and Ariel, and only occasionally references Prospero and Caliban (Shakespeare’s characters, not Namjoshi’s). The “Prologue” of the poem “Sycorax” is a powerful feminist critique of The Tempest:
Old women do not die easily, nor
are their deaths timely. They make a habit
of outliving men, so that, as I’m still here,
I’m able to say clearly that when Prospero
said he took over an uninhabited island
save for Caliban and the enslaved
Ariel, he lied.
I LIVED ON THAT ISLAND
It was my property (at least as much
as it was anybody else’s). He
drove me away, made himself king, set up
his props and bided his time.
Now that they’ve gone
I may return, and ask myself, not who
they were, but who I was and what I mourn.
There’s greenery left, a clear stream or two,
and Ariel, perhaps, checking his reflection
in yet another pool. Caliban’s gone,
went with the gods who were only men. It’s
what he deserves. He wanted so much
to be just like them.
What is my task?
Because they’ve gone, must I go too? Take leave
of my senses one by one, or two by two?

The good witch Sycorax has bright blue eyes
and now she’s on her own she may fantasize. (Sycorax 1-2)

The first thing that is striking about this section is the line in all capital letters declaring that Prospero lied when he said that the island was “uninhabited.” In the next line Sycorax claims ownership of the island, following the logic of private property. Yet the text in the parenthesis undermines this and shows Sycorax’s understanding of the limitations of the (masculinist, colonialist) discourse of private property. In the subsequent lines, the speaker critiques both Ariel and Caliban. Ariel is depicted as a narcissist (“checking his reflection” in a “pool”), and Caliban as a “mimic man,” to borrow an expression coined by the scholar Homi Bhabha, or indeed as a failed nationalist, if one were to use Frantz Fanon’s analysis.

The contrast between this Caliban who “went with the gods who were only men” and Namjoshi’s Caliban in ‘Snapshots of Caliban’ is worth highlighting. Each section of “Snapshots of Caliban” is told from the perspective of Caliban, Miranda, or Prospero. Namjoshi’s Caliban in Section V of “Snapshots of Caliban” says “Some of the ‘gods’ want to take me with them. But I no longer believe they are gods. I don’t trust them” (Because of India 90). This is critique enough, but Namjoshi’s poem goes a step further with the last couplet in italics, which is not from Sycorax’s perspective. The question that we are left with as readers is which of Sycorax’s critiques and musings are fantastical? Whose voice is the italicised text? No single meaning is evident. As Vijayasree puts it, “when Namjoshi narrates her tale she does not serve the meaning on a platter to her readers; in fact she does not even believe there is a single authoritarian meaning that a writer can dictate. Instead, she leaves it to her readers to draw their own inferences and arrive at their own decoding of the texts. Namjoshi texts reveal themselves in slow degrees, gradually and gratifyingly. A reader does not work on them; they work on the reader” (Vijayasree 14 -15).

A Lesbian Feminist Vision of the Cow

The cow, as Ruth Vanita points out, “is one of the best-known symbols of India in the West” (Vanita 290). In contemporary India it is a symbol of Hindu India. Remarking on how growing up in a Hindu household impacted her, Namjoshi notes in Because of India, “[o]ne of the unexpected effects of being in Gill’s [Gillian Hanscombe’s] company was that I became aware of just how much I had been influenced by the Hinduism around me while I was growing up, and of the rather subtle ways in which a Hindu background rather than a Christian one shapes one’s thinking” (Because of India 112). This reflection highlights both the impact of Hinduism on Namjoshi, and also that often one understands oneself better in conversation with an “other”—or someone from a different background. In another interview, Namjoshi mentions that in “Christianity you make a difference between animals and human beings – and gods. In Hinduism you don’t have to animate animals, they already have an anima. That changes one’s attitude subtly. I find I’m sometimes talking about cats as if they were people” (Kenyon 110).

The Conversations of Cow (1985) brings together Namjoshi’s attitude towards animals through her use of the most sacred of animals in the Hindu pantheon, the cow. Vijayasree points out that “The Conversations of Cow does not belong to any known genre; it is a novella, a feminist utopian tale, a piece of speculative fiction, a lesbian bildungsroman, all in one. This erasure of boundaries between literary genres is important in the feminist enterprise of negotiating in-between spaces and creating new spaces” (Vijayasree 102). The use of the cow Bhadravati as a central figure, and as the human narrator Suniti’s partner in her journey, allows for the “new spaces” to be created and negotiated. Bhadravati is no ordinary cow—she is a “Brahmini cow,” “an immigrant cow,” and indeed a lesbian cow (The Conversations of Cow 13-14). While it is easy, based on name alone, to take the character of Suniti as a stand-in for the author, Bhadravati could also be seen as a stand-in.

Here it is worth turning to Ruth Vanita’s analysis of the cow as a gendered symbol. At first glance, she points out, the cow seems “to be definitely gendered, pointing towards woman as Goddess on the one hand and woman as exploited subordinate on the other, as well as to the image of Mother India as an undernourished, overmilked breeder” (Vanita 291). She goes on to suggest that:

However, in ancient as well as in modern texts, the cow is as often a site for ungendering as it is for gendering. In Sanskrit, the noun go means both ‘bull’ and ‘cow’; in its generic form, the word, like the English ‘cattle’, is not gendered. In the Vedas, powerful natural forces, like rivers, are figured as cows as well as Goddesses. They are not merely nurturing but also potentially dangerous, and must be propitiated. (Vanita 291)

Namjoshi’s work engages with this more complicated understanding of the figure of the cow. In fact, Bhadravati is in many ways a “stray cow” who has a “liminal status” in modern India “as simultaneously sacred and a nuisance, symbolic of motherhood yet a non-reproductive consumer,” and this, for Vanita, “enables it to cross boundaries, literally and metaphorically” (Vanita 304). This liminality is hinted at in one of the early conversations between Bhadravati and Suniti:

‘What do you live on?’ I blurt it out.

‘Welfare,’ she replies. ‘Not as good as the pickings in India. There one is supposed to be worshipped as a god, not that one is – but the climate is warmer. (The Conversations of Cow 14 -17)

The phrasing “supposed to be worshipped as a god” points to the fact that there may be a disjuncture between the ideal and the reality when it comes to life as a stray cow—one dependent on “Welfare.”

Vanita points out that “Namjoshi’s Cow is a symbol for crossing boundaries of gender, race, nationality and sexuality, because the beast trope already functions in similar ways in both Western and Indian literary traditions” (Vanita 306). Bhadravati is Baddy, B, Bud as the novel progresses, shifting genders, race, nationality, and sexuality. Indeed, at one point, when Bhadravati is Bud (seemingly a white cis man), Bud and Suniti have a conversation about men and women because Suniti believes that men are from Mars. Eventually Suniti asks, “Are you trying to tell me Men from Mars are really women?” (The Conversations of Cow 107). And Bud replies, “Yes. You’ve got it at last” (107). At first read, one might consider this a satirical take down of the self-help book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but this popular book was published in 1992, almost a decade after The Conversations of Cow. Either way, it seems like Bhadravati, through the many forms she takes, is trying to make Suniti see that some of her long-held assumptions need to be unpacked.

The novel’s ending provides important insight into Namjoshi’s oeuvre as a whole. Cow and Suniti tell each other that they like the other. Cow asks, “‘What? Even when I’m B or Baddy or Bud?’ ‘Even then,’ I reply. But I look at Cow and add quickly, ‘Even then I find you wholly engaging.’ We smile at each other” (The Conversations of Cow 125). Written in 1985, Namjoshi’s depiction of a happy ending for lesbian characters, where different positionalities and manifestations are welcome and not a cause for anxiety, places the author, in many ways, ahead of her time. Perhaps this is why, as Dasgupta points out, “most accounts of Indian writing in English or anthologies of critical essays on this writing either omit Namjoshi or mention her perfunctorily” (Dasgupta 101).

Published Works by Suniti Namjoshi

Fiction and Poetry

Poems. Writers Workshop, 1967.

More Poems. Writers Workshop, 1971.

Cyclone In Pakistan. Writers Workshop, 1971.

The Jackass and the Lady. Writers Workshop, 1980.

Feminist Fables. Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1981.

The Authentic Lie. Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1982.

From the Bedside Book of Nightmares. Fiddlehead Poetry Books & Goose Lane Editions, 1984.

The Conversations of Cow. The Women’s Press, 1985.

Flesh and Paper (with Gillian Hanscombe). Jezebel Tapes and Books, 1986; Ragweed Press, 1986.

The Blue Donkey Fables. The Women’s Press, 1988.

The Mothers of Maya Diip. The Women’s Press, 1989.

Because of India: Selected Poems and Fables. Onlywomen Press, 1989.

Feminist Fables, Spinifex Press, 1993

Saint Suniti and the Dragon. Spinifex, 1993; Virago, 1994.

Building Babel. Spinifex, 1996.

Goja: An Autobiographical Myth. Spinifex, 2000.

Sycorax: New Fables and Poems. Penguin Books, 2006.

The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader. Zubaan, 2012; Spinifex, 2012.

Suki. Penguin India, 2012; Spinifex, 2013.

Foxy Aesop aka Aesop the Fox. Zubaan, 2018; Spinifex, 2018.

Children’s Literature

Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey. Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1986.

Aditi and the Thames Dragon. Tulika Publishers, 2002.

Aditi and the Marine Sage. Tulika Publishers, 2004.

Aditi and the Techno Sage. Tulika Publishers, 2005.

Aditi and Her Friends Take on the Vesuvian Giant. Tulika Publishers, 2007.

Aditi and Her Friends Meet Grendel. Tulika Publishers, 2007.

Aditi and Her Friends Help the Budapest Changeling. Tulika Publishers, 2007.

Aditi and Her Friends In Search of Shemeek. Tulika Publishers, 2008.

Gardy in the City of Lions. Tulika Publishers, 2009.

Siril and The Spaceflower. Tulika Publishers, 2009.

Monkeyji and the Word Eater. Tulika Publishers, 2009.

Beautiful and the Cyberspace Runaway. Tulika Publishers, 2009.

Blue and Other Stories. (art work Nilima Sheikh). Tulika Publishers, 2012; North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2012.

Little i. Tulika Publishers, 2014.

The Boy and Dragon Stories (pictures Krishna Bala Shenoi). Tulika Publishers, 2015.

Works Cited

Dasgupta, Anannya. “‘Do I Remove My Skin?’ Interrogating Identity in Suniti Namjoshi’s Fables.” Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vanita. Routledge, 2002, pp. 100-110.

Guarracino, Serena. “Identity, Language and Power in Sunitin Namjoshi.” Muses India: Essays on English-Language Writers from Mahomet to Rushdie, edited by Chetan Deshmane. Jefferson, McFarland, 2013, pp. 134-145.

Kenyon, Olga. The Writer’s Imagination: Interviews with Major International Women Novelists. University of Bradford, 1992.

Mann, Harveen S. “Suniti Namjoshi: Diasporic, Lesbian Feminism and the Textual Politics of Transnationality.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 30, no. 1/2,1997, pp. 97-113.

Namjoshi, Suniti. Because of India. Only Women Press, 1989.

—. Sycorax: New Fables and Poems. Penguin, 2006.

—. The Conversations of Cow. The Women’s Press, 1985.

Singh, Jyotsna G. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory. The Arden Shakespeare, 2020.

Vanita, Ruth. “‘I’m an Excellent Animal’ Cows at Play in the Writings of Bahinabai, Rukun Advani, Suniti Namjoshi and Others.” Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture. Yoda Press, 2005, 290-310.

Vijayasree, C. Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor. Rawat Publication, 2001.

Anandi Rao

Poems by Suniti Namjoshi

Cardinal Sycorax: Prologue

The author would like to thank Jhani Randhawa for their editorial support.

Copyedited by Atul V. Nair.

Jul 24

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The Sufi in Winter | Ranjit Hoskote

By IWE Online Poetry No Comments

The hem of a robe,
a tree's callused bark,
a frosted beard,
a whiff of musk,
dust on a turban.

Nothing is lost
in translation,
not even a woollen sleeve
smelling of woodsmoke.

Published with permission from Penguin India.

Ranjit Hoskote. “The Sufi in Winter.” Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985-2005, Penguin, 2006.

Ranjit Hoskote on IWE Online

Emigrant

Image generated on DALL-E

Jul 17

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Cardinal | Suniti Namjoshi

By IWE Online Poetry No Comments

The female cardinal became jealous of the male one. 'Why
can't I be bright red? When I fly by I want people to say,
"There goes a cardinal, the flashiest bird  west of the Indies."
Why can't I be the norm of the species?'

The male cardinal turned his head away. He found her
discontent extraordinarily wearying; but with proper
forbearance he said to her what he had always said, 'My dear,
it is not given to all of us to shine. The cock shall sing and
the hen shall listen. That's how it is, and that's how it should
be.'

This was a lie and she knew it, though she had heard it
so often that by now it had acquired a virtual reality. She was,
as it happened, by far the better singer. She cleared her throat
and decided to ignore him. She began to sing.

She sang and sang. People stopped to listen. 'Wow! Look
at that cardinal!' they exclaimed to each other, Can she sing!'
Others admired her subtle colouring. This pleased her. She
recovered her good humour, and the male heaved a sigh of
relief. But after a while her success began to make him uneasy.
'What's your secret?' he asked one day.

'Repetition works,' the cardinal told him.

Suniti Namjoshi. Sycorax: New Fables and Poems. Penguin Books, 2006, p. 49.

Published with permission from Penguin Random House India.

More by Suniti Namjoshi

Sycorax: Prologue

Jul 09

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Migrations | Keki N. Daruwalla

By IWE Online Poetry No Comments

Migrations are always difficult:
ask any drought,
any plague;
ask the year 1947.
Ask the chronicles themselves:
if there had been no migrations
would there have been enough
history to munch on?

Going back in time is also tough.
Ask anyone back-trekking to Sargodha
or Jhelum or Mianwali and they’ll tell you.
New faces among old brick;
politeness, sentiment,
dripping from the lips of strangers.
This is still your house, Sir.

And if you meditate on time
that is no longer time –
(the past is frozen, it is stone,
that which doesn’t move
and pulsate is not time) –
if you meditate on that scrap of time,
the mood turns pensive
like the monsoons
gathering in the skies
but not breaking.

Mother used to ask, don’t you remember my mother?
You’d be in the kitchen all the time
and run with the fries she ladled out,
still sizzling on the plate.
Don’t you remember her at all?
Mother’s fallen face
would fall further
at my impassivity.
Now my dreams ask me
If I remember my mother
And I am not sure how I’ll handle that.
Migrating across years is also difficult.

From Collected Poems 1970-2005 by Keki N. Daruwalla

Published with permission from Penguin Random House India

Arundhati Roy | Vaibhav Iype Parel

By IWE Online Critical Biography No Comments

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Parel, Vaibhav Iype. “Arundhati Roy.” Indian Writing In English Online, 03 July 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arundhati-roy-vaibhav-iype-parel/ .

Chicago:
Parel, Vaibhav Iype. “Arundhati Roy.” Indian Writing In English Online. July 3, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arundhati-roy-vaibhav-iype-parel/ .

Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong in 1961. After completing her schooling from Ooty, Tamil Nadu, she left home at sixteen, to study architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. Interested in the alchemy of words, she never pursued a career in architecture, but urban planning and architecture left an indelible imprint in the ways she designed and visualised her future work.

She started her career as an award-winning writer of screenplays. She wrote her first screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) in which she also acted. This was a movie that discussed her experiences as an architecture student. It won her the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989. Later, she wrote for Electric Moon (1992). Both these films were directed by Pradip Krishen. Roy has also written for television serials such as The Banyan Tree (twenty-six episodes), and crafted the screenplay for the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).

Other than the Booker Prize in 1997, Roy won the Sydney Peace Prize and the Orwell Award in 2004, the Norman Mailer Prize in 2011, the St. Louis Award in 2022, and most recently, the 45^th European Essay Prize for the French translation of her compilation of essays titled Azadi. This global recognition is, however, unable to blunt the edge of controversy, anger, and hate that her writing often evokes. In fact, global recognition goes hand-in-hand with the controversy and hate that her writings arouse. Her criticism of the state is misunderstood as criticism of the nation itself. This easy and politically lazy conflation – of the state with the nation – makes her an ‘enemy’ of the nation.

Roy declined the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Algebra of Infinite Justice in 2005, stating that she could not accept an award from a government whose policies on big dams, nuclear weapons, increasing militarisation, and economic liberalism she was deeply critical of in the book for which she was being awarded the prize.[1] In 2015, she returned the 1989 National Award (for the best screenplay) in solidarity with other writers/artists to protest the rising religious intolerance in the country, as was evident by incidents of mob-lynching and the killing of rationalists. She wrote in The Indian Express, “If we do not have the right to speak freely, we will turn into a society that suffers from intellectual malnutrition, a nation of fools.”[2]

Fiction

In 1992, Roy started working on the draft of what would become her first novel, The God of Small Things (TGOST, 1997). It won her an advance of £500,000, and catapulted her to fame on the international literary stage when it won her the Booker Prize in 1997. Exquisitely written, the novel shows time to be a malleable construct. Memory, passion, and history are delicately interwoven into a rich tapestry where the past and the present inform each other, while also intermeshing in ways that obscure their separateness. This is achieved by a tightly controlled narrative that allows ‘History’ and ‘history’ to intertwine. The narrative is structured around Sophie’s death; her arrival, accidental death, and its aftermath all carefully create pathways for time, the history of small things/people/events, and their memories to coalesce around intimately explored questions of childhood, poverty, exploitation, and nature.

A fiercely feminist text, TGOST, signposts the violence that is meted out by abusive husbands and alcoholic fathers, while highlighting Ammu’s inability to possess legal rights to the property as a daughter, since she had no “Locusts Stand I” (57). As Roy calls it, TGOST “is about a family with a broken heart in its midst” (Azadi, 88). Whether it be the passionate inter-caste coupling of Velutha and Ammu, the incestuous love between Estha and Rahel, or the inter-national coming together of Chacko and Margaret, the novel speaks of love in all its shades. which, however, become threatening when their effervescence spills over the boundaries dictated by the “Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much” (328). The ways in which desires spill over, and the inability of the “Love Laws” to circumscribe, contain, and define the contours of desire becomes the central strand around which much of the novel revolves. The open, free, and deliberate social transgressions that we witness in the novel challenge the social status-quo in ways that remain deeply unsettling. In fact, the last chapter of the book offended purists in Kerala enough for them to bring charges of obscenity against Roy in a court. The case took a decade to be dismissed.

Roy’s deftly woven critique of Marxism impels the narrative into directions that force upon us the recognition of the nature of politics in the Kerala of the 1960s. Her criticism is particularly sharp when she equates the Inspector and Comrade with “mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine” (262). The novel’s audacious representation and critique of institutional complicity between the state and Marxism, while remaining deeply casteist – as evidenced by Comrade Pillai’s wife who does not allow the entry of the Paravan’s into the house – is a vector of sustained narrative tension, and attracted a sharp rebuke from the Communist Party.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (MUH, 2017), published twenty years later, is a dense work that mirrors the social and political changes in India in the twenty years that divide the two novels. Roy clearly wanted to do something different from her previous novel. MUH exemplifies the political as personal: whether it be the Hijras in Khwabgah, or the motley cast of residents in Jannat Guest House, Roy embraces liminality as an affective position through which to view the world. Political events like the Emergency, the Godhra riots, the insurgency and counter-offensives of the Indian Army in Kashmir, the 26/11 Mumbai attack, and the Naxalite movement feature in the novel not as distant political events that frame a background, but as personal events that have real consequences like births, deaths, and executions. The suffering and joy of the characters is narrativised through the personal, and the personal is always and unconditionally the political.

For Roy, MUH is:

a conversation between two graveyards. One is a graveyard where a hijra, Anjum – raised as a boy by a Muslim family in the walled city of Delhi – makes her home and gradually builds a guest house … where a range of people come to seek shelter. The other is the ethereally beautiful valley of Kashmir which … has become, literally, almost a graveyard itself (Azadi, 152-53).

As the city becomes a character in the novel, the poorest people and the most neglected socio-political concerns shine from the margins in an idiom that renders them unforgettable. Roy repeatedly makes visible the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor. Her fiction becomes most visceral when it mimics the cold and dispassionate indifference of the burgeoning middle-class to burning issues, questions, and concerns that lie at their doorsteps, that they are surrounded by, but are effectively blind(ed) to. Her anger, as it excoriates all shades of politicians for their apathy, raises pertinent questions about the functioning of our democracy, especially with the turn in the political fortunes of the Hindu right. The challenge that Tilo faces, “to un-know certain things” (262), resonates for the reader as well. Roy’s fiction becomes a document of our times even as she narrativises the story of many official documents like affidavits and memorandums for the reader.

Non-fiction

Compelled by a need to communicate, she follows different rhythms when writing fiction and non-fiction, by her own admission.[3] Writing fiction is a labour of joy, where she sets herself a challenging task: to close the gap between language and thought. The issues that inspire her non-fiction, however, evoke a more immediate response that is characterised by its urgency. She finds herself agitated, angry, and even sleepless. Roy’s first essay came soon after she won the Booker Prize. “The End of Imagination” (1998) was written as a response to India’s nuclear tests in May 1998 that were closely followed by Pakistan’s nuclear tests. Over the years, her writing has generated heated debates over questions of authenticity and expertise. One crucial example is her essay, “The Doctor and the Saint” that introduces B R Ambedkar’s seminal text, Annihilation of Caste (1936) that was published in a new critical edition of Ambedkar’s text by Navayana in 2014.

Roy was attacked for this essay by Gandhians and Dalits. On the one hand, scholars like Rajmohan Gandhi thought that hers was an unfair and biased representation of Gandhi.^[4] On the other hand, Dalit scholars and activists claimed that since she was neither a Dalit nor a scholar on Ambedkar, her essay was a disservice to the Dalit cause based on inauthenticity (of her position) and lack of expertise (as a scholar). The debate, as it swirled on various media forums, took various forms – reviews, opinion pieces, open letters, and Roy’s replies to many of her accusers.^[5] Surveying both sides of the debate, Filippo Menozzi argued in 2016:

In the case of Arundhati Roy’s debate with Dalit Camera, the witness is the one who is able to place oneself in the position of those who are oppressed, even if they have not lost their language, because they are living and they are able to speak. Assuming a Dalit standpoint is an epistemological act that does not aim at appropriating Dalit experience, but at becoming able to listen to Dalit perspectives by identifying with them; it is the precondition to challenging caste-blindness (“Beyond the Rhetoric,” 75; italics in original)

For Roy, then, it is her vocation as a writer – above all else – that allows her the freedom to intervene in political questions. In her essay, “The Language of Literature,” she explains how the struggle to communicate her political convictions to the widest audience possible impels her to find an idiom that is best suited to the task. She speaks of the form, language, narrative, and structure that she envisaged for non-fiction. She asks, “Was it possible to turn these topics into literature? Literature for everybody – including for people who couldn’t read and write, but who had taught me how to think, and could be read to?” (Azadi, 87). Describing these twenty years of writing non-fiction, she says, “I knew it would be unapologetically complicated, unapologetically political, and unapologetically intimate” (Azadi, 88). Her writing has remained, as she says, complicated, political, and intimate. The topics that have engaged her have ranged widely from the politics of the nation and the world, ecology, environment, dams, caste, the Naxals, to Kashmir, among others.

She wrestles with form and structure to allow an apparently seamless overlap between fiction and non-fiction. She gestures towards non-fiction being a universalised form of literature that is more open, democratic, and accessible, but one that is always inherently political. This overlap between what are considered distinct genres, is most evident in MUH. For Roy, “it would be a novel, but the story-universe would refuse all forms of domestication and conventions about what a novel could be and could not be. It would be like a great city in my part of the world in which the reader arrives as a new immigrant” (Azadi, 88). The topical political metaphor of the immigrant itself should alert us to the ways in which fiction and non-fiction intertwine in her writing.

Coming to fiction after having worked on screenplays, she wanted her novels to allow the multiple and playful interaction of image and metaphor in the mind of the reader. TGOST as Roy puts it, is a book “constructed around people … all grappling, dancing, and rejoicing in language” (23). It was after TGOST that she felt that she found “a language that tasted like mine … a language in which I could write the way I think” (23).

The opening essay of her collection, Azadi, is titled, “In What Language Does Rain Fall over Tormented Cities?” which is a line from a poem by Pablo Neruda. Here she explores questions of languages, translation, thought, and expression. The unsettled, uneasy, and constantly shifting relation between English, Englishes and other languages defines her fiction and non-fiction. While English has become the language of aspiration, inclusion and exclusion in India, and her novels are in English, the stories emerge “out of an ocean of languages, in which a teeming ecosystem of living creatures … swim around” (14). This multiplicity of languages/idioms, in turn, internally transforms English: “English has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and cadences of my alien mother’s other tongues” (9).

In her evocative words, her characters in MUH do not just use translation as a daily activity, but “realize that people who speak the same language are not necessarily the ones who understand each other best” (14). This was a language that was “slow-cooked” (23). As her characters like Dr Azad Bhartiya, Biplab Dasgupta (Garson Hobart), Tilo, and Musa begin to inhabit her mind and populate her fiction, boundaries between inside/outside, fiction/non-fiction become porous, permeable, and transparent. The Kashmiri-English alphabet becomes the final move towards creating a political idiom where the personal and the political integrally define each other, and are constitutively incomplete without each other. In a dramatic metaphor of reconstitution, she says, “I had to throw the language of TGOST off a very tall building. And then go down (using the stairs) to gather up the shattered pieces. So was born MUH” (32). Her answer to Neruda’s question – In What Language Does Rain Fall over Tormented Cities? – is “in the Language of Translation” (52).

Roy remains deeply suspicious of ‘causes’, and distances herself from titles like ‘activist.’ As she explains in an interview, this is because causes belong to everyone. Her engagement with various groups of people consciously remains an individual act that helps her to be constantly vigilant against attempts at appropriation by the establishment that may defang the critical impulse of her work. Humour in her writing allows flashes of rebellious and militant joy to erupt. Joy generates hope that adds yet another political dimension to her writing.

If writing can be a refuge and an expression of our collective rage, hope, and desire, it can also mark epistemological departures where multiple knowledges, languages, and ways of inhabiting the world intersect and interact. Roy’s writing opens for the reader critical vistas hitherto unexplored about the self and the world. With Roy, an unrelenting hope and rage are coupled with implacable courage born of the conviction that the job of the writer is to speak truth to power. In stubbornly refusing to be compartmentalised into externally imposed labels (like ‘fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’), her work exemplifies what it means to be human in the most profound ways possible. To ignore her is to ignore our humanity.

Primary Bibliography

Fiction:

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Flamingo, 1997.

____. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017.

Non-Fiction:

Roy, Arundhati. The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of Imagination. Flamingo, 1999.

____. Power Politics. South End Press, 2001.

____. The Algebra of Infinite Justice. Flamingo, 2002.

____. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Consortium, 2004.

____. Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. Penguin, 2010.

____. Walking with the Comrades. Penguin, 2011.

____. Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Verso, 2011.

____. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Haymarket, 2014.

____. “The Doctor and the Saint”. Introduction to S. Anand (ed), Annotated edition of B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. Navayana, 2015.

____. My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction. Haymarket. 2019.

____. Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction. Penguin, 2020.

Documentary

DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002). Last accessed 14 October 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlyZofTmUO4&ab_channel=theskeeboo

Interviews

“An Evening with 2022 St. Louis Literary Award Winner Arundhati Roy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-SVAFgEd5g (Last accessed 1 November 2022).

Aitkenhead, Decca. “‘Fiction takes its time’: Arundhati Roy on why it took 20 years to write her second novel.” The Guardian. 27 May 2017. Last accessed 17 October 2022.

Deb, Siddhartha. “Arundhati Roy, the Not-So-Reluctant Renegade.” The New York Times Magazine. 5 March 2014. Last accessed 3 October 2022.

Secondary Bibliography

Bose, Brinda. “In Desire and in Death: Eroticism as Politics in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1998, pp. 59-72.

____. ‘A fearless antinovel.’ Review of Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Biblio: A Review of Books. July-September 2017.

Fuchs, Felix. “Novelizing Non-Fiction: Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and the Critical Realism of Global Anglophone Literature.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 1187-1203, 2021.

Khair, Tabish. “India 2015: Magic, Modi, and Arundhati Roy.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 50, no. 3, 2015, pp. 398-406.

Menozzi, Filippo. “‘Too much blood for good literature’: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the question of realism.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 55, no. 1, 2019, pp. 20-33.

____. “Beyond the Rhetoric of Belonging: Arundhati Roy and the Dalit Perspective.” Asiatic, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 66-80.

Neumann, Birgit. “An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Published online: 29 April 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894211007916

Prasad, Murari (editor). Arundhati Roy: Critical Perspectives. Pencraft, 2006.

Rajan, Romy. “Where Old Birds go to Die: Spaces of Precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, 2021, pp. 91-120.

Ramdev, Rina. “Arundhati Roy and the Framing of a ‘radicalised Dissent.’” Rule and Resistance Beyond the Nation State: Contestation, Escalation, Exit. Edited by Felix Anderl et al, pp. 243-256, Roman & Littlefield, 2019.

St. John, D. E. “Mobilizing the past: The God of Small Things’ automotive ecologies.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 59, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-14.

Subramanian, Samanth. “The Prescient Anger of Arundhati Roy.” Review of My Seditious Heart. The New Yorker. 12 June 2019.

Tickell, Alex. “Writing in the Necropolis: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2018, pp. 100-112.

____. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Routledge Guides to Literature. Routledge, 2007.

____. “The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2003, pp. 73-89.

Notes:

[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/arundhati-roy-declines-sahitya-akademi-award/articleshow/1372130.cms The Times of India, 14 January 2006. Accessed 20 March 2023.

[2] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-i-am-returning-my-award/ 5 Nov 2015. Accessed 20 March 2023.

[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-SVAFgEd5g, interview with Roy where she explains her different approaches to fiction and non-fiction. Accessed 1 Nov 2022.

[4] Rajmohan Gandhi, ‘Response to Arundhati Roy’. Economic and Political Weekly. 25 July 2015, vol. 50, no. 30, pp. 83-85.

[5] See the following to get a sense of the contours of this debate:

Bojja Tharakam, https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/without-arundhati-roy-without-anand-without-gandhi-the-book-had-its-own-value-bojja-tharakam/ 23 March 2014. Accessed 25 March 2023.

Shivam Vij, https://scroll.in/article/658279/why-dalit-radicals-dont-want-arundhati-roy-to-write-about-ambedkar. 12 March 2014. Accessed on 22 March 2023.

G Sampath, https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/dl8AvXg2PYchgE9qGogzJL/BR-Ambedkar-Arundhati-Roy-and-the-politics-of-appropriatio.html 19 March 2014. Accessed 22 March 2023

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Jun 26

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Rajmohan’s Wife | Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

By IWE Online Fiction No Comments

Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra. “Rajmohan’s Wife.” The Modern Review, vol. 58, July-Dec 1935, pp. 41-43.

Jun 19

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“Language” by Sudeep Sen

By IWE Online Poetry No Comments

LANGUAGE

Without translation, I would be limited to
the borders of my own country. The translator is
my most important ally.
— Italo Calvino

My typewriter is multilingual,
its keys mysteriously calibrating

my bipolar, forked tongue.
Black-red silk ribbon spools, unwind

as the carriage moves right to left.
In cursive hand, I write from left to right.

My tongue was born promiscuous —
speaking in many languages.

My heart spoke another, my head
yet another — the translation, seamless.

Auricles, ventricles pump blood —
corpuscle-like alphabets, phrases, syntax

cross-fertilize my text, breathing life.
Texture enriched — music, cadence

spatially enhanced — osmotic,
polyglottal — a polygamy of grammar.

Letterforms dance, ligatures pirouette —
ascenders, descenders — pitch perfect.

Imagination isn’t caged in speech —
speech cannot be caged in language.

Published with the permission of the author. “Language” has previously appeared in Inkroci – Magazine of Culture and Cinema.

Jun 11

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‘In the Service of the Honourable East India Company’: Politics and Identity in Dean Mahomet’s Travels (1794) | Daniel Sanjiv Roberts

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv. “‘In the Service of the Honourable East India Company’: Politics and Identity in Dean Mahomet’s Travels (1794).” Indian Writing In English Online, 12 June 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/in-the-service-of-the-honourable-east-india-company-politics-and-identity-in-dean-mahomets-travels-1794-daniel-sanjiv-roberts/ .

Chicago:
Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv. “‘In the Service of the Honourable East India Company’: Politics and Identity in Dean Mahomet’s Travels (1794).” Indian Writing In English Online. June 12, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/in-the-service-of-the-honourable-east-india-company-politics-and-identity-in-dean-mahomets-travels-1794-daniel-sanjiv-roberts/ .

Acknowledgements:

This essay was published in Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 24 (2009), pp. 115-134.

Published with the permission of the author and the editors of Eighteenth-Century Ireland.

Daniel Sanjiv Roberts teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published scholarly editions of Robert Southey and Thomas De Quincey and has co-edited (with Robert Morrison) Romanticism and the Blackwood’s Magazine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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Tabish Khair

By IWE Online Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' No Comments

Cite this Interview

MLA:
Khair, Tabish. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online, 5 June 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/tabish-khair/ .

Chicago:
Khair, Tabish. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online. June 5, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/tabish-khair/ .

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?

Tabish Khair (TK): I could say it was because I went to an English Medium school, but this was Nazareth Academy in Gaya, not some top anglophone school in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore or even places like Ranchi. We spoke Hindi outside the classrooms, and between us in the classrooms too. Many of my classmates did not grow up to be fluent in English, let alone want to write in it. So the main reason was that I wanted to write, and English was the language that chose me. This was partly because I grew up in an Urdu-speaking family, but the school offered Hindi (and Sanskrit) as the second language, and the sad semi-communal language politics in Bihar (and India) in the 1970s-80s meant that my Urduised Hindi compositions were always given low grades in school. I grew up suspicious of both Urdu (which I saw, growing up among non-Muslims in the Hindi heartland) as a narrow Muslim language, and in due course I also grew suspicious of Hindi, despite writing some initial poems in it, because I was told by my teachers that I was not writing it well. But I was just writing it as I spoke it. Both Hindi and Urdu were minefields for a young boy like me, who loved literature and wanted to write. English was neutral territory. I knew where I stood with English. I started writing more in it and reading almost entirely in it. That, I think, was the decisive factor. By the time I realised how the stupid and communal politics of language in India had limited my scope, it was too late. I was in college and had read a hundred books in English for every one book that I had read in Hindi or Urdu. English was by then my first language. And one writes primarily in one’s first language.

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 19^thcentury pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20^th 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?

TK: Of course, I educated myself in college and later on, but in school we knew little about Indian poets, apart from those in the Hindustani tradition, such as Kabir, or Tagore in translation, and a scattering of Sarojini Naidu, a poem or two by Nissim Ezekiel or Kamala Das. This was the 1970-80s. In college and later, I read up all of them: Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Ramanujan, Daruwalla, Kolatkar, Agha Shahid Ali etc. I had to educate myself. (Just as I read up beyond the Yeats-Eliot generation outside India, because our school reading stopped largely there.) But to say that I consider my poetry to be part of this 200-year old tradition would be to exaggerate: there is much I share with some of them, and there is much I do not share. Just as there are elements that I feel I share with some non-Indian writers, and there are elements I do not. One makes one’s own extended family as one goes on, uncles and aunts and step-siblings, but writers like me are essentially bastards: we do not have any known parents. Just uncles, aunts and step-siblings. Distant cousins, more often than not. Literary parents are an impossible luxury for writers from the margin. Or you need to belong to a certain literary and economic class, usually metropolitan, in order to have them.

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?

TK: I do not think much about the readership. The thought might cross my mind when I write fiction, though it is not a significant worry, but poetry is something much more personal for me. Finally, you write it for yourself. You might publish it for other reasons, mostly because you feel that you have said something well that might appeal to others like you, but you write it solely for yourself. At least I do.

Q: Do you read, write, or translate poetry in a language other than English? If yes, how does it influence your poetry in English?

TK: I have translated the occasional poem, and would like to translate more from Hindi and Urdu, maybe Danish, when I have time. I read occasionally in Urdu (using the Devnagari script mostly), Hindi and Danish, but not too often. Again, time is the problem.

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?

TK: I have taught poetry, but with great reluctance. I would not even teach literature, even prose fiction, if I had a choice. But I need to earn my bread and butter. I don’t think literature, let alone poetry, can be taught. It can be learnt, but not taught. All a teacher can do is open a door or two; the student has to enter on her own, and then make the most of it.

Q: What are your views on the poetry that appears today on such popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram?

TK: At the moment, digital reading is too fast. It does not enable the deep attention, the contemplation that literature requires. Computerisation, it has been argued by philosophers, is opposed to contemplation. And contemplation, or deep attention, is essential to all art, literature, thought.

Born in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is a poet and novelist. He has authored several books including the poetry collections, Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000) and Man of Glass (HarperCollins, 2010), the studies, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001), The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (Palgrave, 2010), The New Xenophobia (OUP, 2016) and the novels, The Body by the Shore (2022), his most recent work and Night of Happiness (Picador, 2018). His novels have been shortlisted for 16 prestigious prizes in five countries, including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award.

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Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra. “Rajmohan’s Wife.” The Modern Review, vol. 58, July-Dec 1935, pp. 41-43.

“Language” by Sudeep Sen

Published with the permission of the author. “Language” has previously appeared in Inkroci – Magazine of Culture and Cinema.

‘In the Service of the Honourable East India Company’: Politics and Identity in Dean Mahomet’s Travels (1794) | Daniel Sanjiv Roberts

This essay was published in Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 24 (2009), pp. 115-134.

Published with the permission of the author and the editors of Eighteenth-Century Ireland.

Header Image: Wikimedia Commons

Tabish Khair

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