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Saleem Peeradina (1944-2023): A Critical Biography

Pramila Venkateswaran

Saleem Peeradina belongs to the generation of Indian poets who began to think differently from earlier poets such as Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu who wrote poetry imitative of Romantic and Victorian styles. As part of what is known as the “Bombay School,” Peeradina and his fellow poets redefined their place in an India that was just beginning to come to terms with life after Independence. The consequences of a two hundred-year colonial rule had left their mark on all aspects of life—political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual. He was among a group of Bombay poets writing in English who were grappling with existential questions about the self, the environment, the existence of God, and the nature of urban reality.

Saleem Peeradina was born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1944. He received his B.A from St. Xavier’s College in 1967, his M.A. from Bombay University in 1969, and another M.A from Wake Forest University in 1973. In 1980, he published his first volume of poems, First Offence. Peeradina’s poetry in the 1970s, collected in First Offence, shares with Nissim Ezekiel an Eliot-like crafting of language, blending English with the cadence of the regional language, and mixing colloquial with standard English. Peeradina’s distinctive style was the description of the minutiae of urban life, the ironic insight into daily moments, and locating the sublime in the mundane.

Writing about the self and exposing the foibles of society were common to intellectuals of his generation, regardless of their religious background, who were coming of age in a swiftly-changing India experiencing a newly-minted, post-Independence, constitutional democracy where every belief was examined, discarded, or retained. Like other modernist poets of his generation, Peeradina explored “both external and internal poverty and sorrow with remarkable persistence” (Paranjape 1055). In his poems, such as “Bandra,” (First Offence), we see his blending of the regional and the colloquial with standard English to capture the flavour of the everyday reality of urban India. Smells of meat in the streets and perfume from parked cars give way to “dirtheaped mohulla,” “kitchensweat guttersmell,” and the “shitmemorial lane” (Heart’s Beast 4). Combining words to create a lexicon that captures a language unique to a postcolonial culture was unique in the works of Peeradina and the Bombay school of poets. Nissim Ezekiel’s blurb on the cover of First Offence reads: “There are many ironic touches, passionate moments disciplined into clear, economical statements . . . and a frequent playfulness that I find altogether charming.” Peeradina juxtaposes poverty and modernity, “sewagewater” “thriv[ing] like a running boil” in a metropolis bursting with “shops, cafes, cinemas, churches, / hospitals, schools, parks,” as well as villas and lawns, decrepitude and beauty alike, a “versatile” “mud.”  (Heart’s Beast 3-5). In poems such as “Bandra” and “Group Portrait,” Peeradina wonders about the self in urban existence, maintaining its ironic distance from the throng and at the same time participating in city life.

After receiving an M.A. in English Literature from Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, in 1973, Peeradina returned to Bombay to teach at Sophia College, where he spearheaded the creative writing program in 1980 as part of the college’s innovative offering, the Open Classroom. In this novel space, he was able to practice his ideas of poetics, influencing young students who were becoming exposed to contemporary Indian poetry. There was a major shift in the Indian English poetry scene which began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Poets of the Bombay School veered away from a style imitative of British Romantic poets to one that was expressive of the modernity of post-Independence India. Peeradina was a contemporary of poets such as Adil Jussawalla, Dilip Chitre, Gieve Patel, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, Menka Shivdasani, Eunice De Souza, R. Parthasarathy, and Darius Cooper. In his landmark anthology, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: An Assessment and Selection (1972), Peeradina captures the poetry of the ’70s as the decade that witnessed the shift in Indian English poetry, in voice, subject matter, form, and approaches to poetry in general. In the “Indian counterpoint of Anglo-American modernism, . . . poets in practically every language broke away from traditional (often highly Sanskritized) meters, stanza patterns, styles, materials and themes to invent ‘free verse’ poetry” (Dharwadkar 189). Each of the poets writing in English had his or her own distinctive style, which brought to the fore the versatility of English as represented by specific linguistic, formal, and topical solutions. While Ezekiel’s poems exhibit dry humor, wit, and irony, Kolatkar’s poems are musical, blending the physical and emotional landscape with the voices of the region, and present an ironic expression of the human condition. Eunice De Souza’s poems are witty and sarcastic, and Parthasarathy’s are deeply personal. In his anthology, Peeradina was mindful of the changes demanded by modernity but kept his foothold on some of the traditions that sustained his work. He expresses candidly that it is important not to follow trends but to aim towards authenticity. This was his guiding principle in the anthology. As he exclaims, “why are we so hung up about a notion that is rammed down our throats by the hegemony of critical ideas of a Euro-centric origin? Shouldn’t we, as moderns, also be questioning and disagreeing with commandments handed down to us” (An Arc of Time 100)? He challenges the blind imitation of the European notion of alienation and angst used by all the regional poets as a norm.

Bruce King observes, Peeradina was “consciously concerned with and engaged in various changes India faces in the process of modernization including the retention and modernization of traditional culture so that it does not become a reactionary feudalism when challenged by change” (351). Like his contemporaries, he “sought greater emotional room, more opportunities for a free play of thoughts and feelings . . . with greater self-assurance and lesser inhibitions (Paranjape 1056). Peeradina describes the influence that the cinema and the songs he grew up with had on his poetry. The likes of Saigal and Hemanta Kumar are his “respectable literary ancestors,” rather than any “tool pulled out of the trick bag of modernism” (An Arc of Time 100-101).

In 1988 Peeradina moved to Michigan, and in 1989 he began teaching in the English Department at Siena Heights University. In 1992, he collected the poems he had written in the 1980s in the volume Group Portrait. In “Group Portrait,” the titular poem, we are offered not just a personal experience of a whole family on a “two-wheeler” (in this case, a scooter), enjoying a weekend getaway from the city to the beaches, but also a cultural portrait. We are offered a vignette of the typical Indian household finding freedom in this particular mode of travel in a congested metropolis and experiencing the joy of being close together. The opening lines offer us an urban vignette—freedom, family togetherness, finding beauty in the ordinary and making it special, and city life versus the outskirts. The acrobatic metaphor aptly conveys the idea of balance, so necessary in this precarious journey.

Four heads on a two-wheeler
is a tight-rope dance
promising edge-of-seat
suspense to the riders. For many,
This is an everyday machine of convenience.

No performer of tricks, or expert dodger,
this forced daredevilry. (Peeradina, Heart’s Beast 46)

Peeradina shows us that the typical male is socially constructed by urban culture to become an expert at balancing the many demands in his day-to day-life. The two-wheeler becomes the synecdoche for all matters precarious in the metropolis, from work and raising a family to basic resources such as water and electricity. Peeradina combines humor with the image of the “four heads on a two-wheeler” as an example of daredevilry, which at the same time captures the performance of daily life by a family living in an urban space, which is liberating as well as precarious. The experience he describes is of the children enjoying the simplicity of the family leaving the city for the seashore: “the children race into its open arms” (Peeradina, Heart’s Beast 46). In the 1980s the notion of life in a new capitalist economy was to work in the city’s cramped spaces and find freedom for a short span of time in nature. The new “independent” locomotion, seen in the affordability of a two-wheeler, symbolises individuality in capitalist modernity.

While juggling teaching and writing, Peeradina wrote some of his most important work. He moved from the “prosaic-ironic, self-and-society castigations” (Perry 265) that Perry describes as common among Peeradina and his contemporaries, to a more personal and affective mode. Inspired by A.K. Ramanujan’s translations of medieval devotional poetry and Hindi film songs (such as the Urdu poems performed by popular singers like Mohammad Rafi), Peeradina wrote Meditations on Desire, a series of sixty-four numbered sections, which came out as a book in 2003.

During this time, he worked on his memoir, The Ocean in My Yard, published in 2005. While there is much written about Peeradina’s poetry, not much has been said about his prose, which is animated by imagery, sound patterns, metaphor, symbolism, and other devices and techniques commonly associated with poetry. The opening chapter is about the family’s praise of baby Saleem’s feet. He writes, “my feet became protagonists in outlandish adventures;” “A lifelong student of the silvered surface, I was locked into an agonizing self-scrutiny that magnified my imagined flaws;” “the feet could successfully live a subterranean existence, but what could one do with an abnormal nose” (4-5)?  Feet become the metaphor for journeying through the stages of life as a young boy, man, poet, teacher, immigrant, husband and father. Humor and nostalgia combine to produce sentences that are sonorous and precise, elements that carry over to his poetry.

In this memoir, he writes about growing up in Bandra. He looks unsparingly at the vagaries of a strict Muslim upbringing which resulted in his deep questioning of everything religious and his awakening to the hypocrisies he encountered, such as the gap between what was preached and his experiences of discrimination in the family. Peeradina describes being deeply affected by the piety he was forced to observe but which did not translate to day-to-day life, where his mother and his sister were expected to adhere to patriarchal and religious rules and the children were threatened with punishment if they did not observe them. The “terror of damnation,” central to Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, and his own observation of familial “public display of piety” masking “a private reign of terror” (An Arc in Time 10-11) disenchanted the young poet, turning him into an agnostic. Feeling liberated by the absence of God in his life, Peeradina found support in the knowledge he garnered from existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus, and the rich intellectual life he cultivated in the cosmopolitan Bombay of the 70s and the 80s.

In “Erasing God,” the opening essay of An Arc in Time (2022), he quotes his poem, “Strange Meeting,” on the birth of his daughter as a moment that brings him close to the spiritual (14). He describes the moment of conception as a “yearning,” that attaches itself to the “flesh of its father,” aided by a force outside the human: “God alone could have sowed this urge / in the womb’s / Ancient slush. To initiate him / into the mystery / of His life-giving breath” (15). The child makes him witness “his own soul // Revealing to him the face / of a timeless love /That took his breath away” (15). Witnessing birth is the defining moment for Peeradina, where he experiences his spirituality intensely — very different from the dogma he learned as a child. His willingness to feel deeply can be attributed to his keen observation of the reality of life in urban India and his willingness to delve into “life that existed beyond the quotidian” (xv).

From his early work, we see Peeradina’s gentleness towards, empathy for, and understanding of, women. As Salil Tripathi notes in his introduction to An Arc in Time, “He writes about women as a father, a lover, a friend with a gentle tone and profound understanding. . . . His feminism is consistent” (xvii). He bridges the cultural gap between men and women by broadening his sensibility and thus expanding the beauty of his poetry.

His feminist poems are not acts of impersonation but of empathy and sensitivity. Acutely aware of how insensitive men often are towards women in general, how vulnerable and insecure women usually feel, and how unexpressed their conflicts and pains remain, he enters compassionately into the female consciousness and depicts the world (the men’s world) as a female would perceive it. (Dev 185).

Peeradina indicates in his essay, “Inner Worlds, Interior Lives,” the poet’s ability to enter imaginatively into the world of the other, “to interpret the other through the feminine consciousness. . . . You step out of the confines of your ‘self’ and discover other ways of looking and feeling. In close relationships, this is of great importance, particularly in the intimacy of man and woman” (An Arc in Time 158). We see his “feminist consciousness” operate most poignantly in “Ode to her Legs,” where he lists the ways in which women bear the burdens of society: the feet carry the weight of their work, pregnancy, caregiving, and emotional and mental burdens. The poet advocates:

think of them as pillars
That hold your world upright, that keep your days
In order. Everywhere—behind counters, desks,

Hospitals, mills, fields, factory floors;
In sweatshops, bazaars, stores, and offices—a woman
Is standing, waiting or running, her legs clocking

Miles in silence. When everyone else is off-duty
Her feet are still plodding. When there is no one else
To count on, she unfailingly answers

Your call. As for being bone-weary, you have no idea
What she endures.

He urges men to attend to the ache of a woman’s feet; feet become the synecdoche for women and all that is culturally demanded of them in a patriarchal world:

Cherish them

As if those legs were the most precious and prized
Of your belongings; as if you were under oath
To God to keep your holy promises. It may turn out

That Heaven lies underneath a woman’s feet.
Honor them as if they were—but they are–
Your beloved’s legs. (Peeradina, Heart’s Beast 130)

Conscious of “the treacherous relation between power and powerlessness as it operated behind the safety of four walls and in the wider social arena” (An Arc in Time 157), Peeradina breaks the masculine norm by presenting the modus operandi of male domination and its antidote, which is anti-oppressive behaviour. In a postcolonial India trying to find its voice against every kind of fundamentalism, patriarchy, and colonial domination, harnessing the feminist voice in men and women alike is indeed a major decolonising effort. We note his use of the imperative, as in “Cherish them,” and “Honor them,” which lends a didactic tone to the poem. He rises to the responsibility of the poet as society’s conscience keeper.

The poet’s politics of decolonisation deepened as a result of his relocation to the United States in 1988. Cultural dislocation became the dynamic subject of Peeradina’s poetry. His altered physical space contributed to the kind of turmoil most immigrants experience. His concerns were: Where do I belong and how? How do I fit in with American ways and how do I not fit in? How do I make meaning of the new kinds of experiences that now dominate my life, even circumscribe it in certain ways? These quandaries emerged for him as a father of daughters growing up in white-dominated Michigan of the 1990s, where Indians and Muslims were as alien as one can imagine.

The essay, “Giving, Withholding, and Meeting Midway: A Poet’s Ethnography,” published in Distant Mirrors: America as a Foreign Culture (1992), as well as the volumes of poetry, Slow Dance (2010) and Final Cut (2016), were Peeradina’s responses to the conundrum of the ever-shifting lines between belonging and not belonging, between desire and loss. To explore these themes further, he moves to genres other than poetry. For example, he writes in “Giving, Withholding and Meeting Midway,” about the differences between living in India and living in the American suburbia. He says, “People solemnly munch brown bag lunches in company without being the least bit self-conscious. The same scenario among Indians—an impromptu and jovial division of the spoils from bags and tiffin boxes to everyone present is undertaken” (An Arc in Time 27). Besides cultural differences, he notes the difference in undergraduate students’ attitude toward poetry as self-expression and therapy rather than a sustained engagement with the world of letters (36). In a 2015 interview for Ariel, he states:

Though not common knowledge, my essay writing has been an important part of my writing life. In Bombay, this had been central since I was a graduate student. In addition, I wrote reviews of movies, theatre, art, and of course books. I conducted interviews for print publications and later for a nascent television channel. Poetry came alongside, so I was going full throttle on several fronts (Venkateswaran 181).

During his tenure as a professor in Michigan, he published poems in journals, many of which became part of his volume Slow Dance, published in 2010. In his interview in Ariel he observes that writers are typically products of their environment and respond to it. To him, everything is a subject for poetry. “For me, writing poetry is like doing ethnography: as a poet and social commentator, I am always in the field. The gestures, products, and systems of culture are my raw material . . . . I am simultaneously witness, participant, and scribe” (An Arc in Time 300). Immigrant writers are not immune to the pushes and pulls of forces that buffet them. As a poet who is deeply cognizant of the realities of everyday life, Peeradina pays attention to his emotions in the context of his family, his community and work relations. He explains,

I am never off-duty. And while the altered states of being in a new place causes disturbances, even turmoil of a sort, for the writer it presents rich new resources. Through the heartache and spiritual disquiet, the central questions were always: How to make oneself at home? How to belong to the new community? How to understand American ways? How to give meaning to our lives? (Venkateswaran 181)

Poems such as “Michigan Basement 1,” “Sisters,” “Beginnings,” “Speculations,” and “A Sister’s Lament” draw us deep into the life of a poet who is doing the balancing act of writing and teaching while maintaining his family in the cold isolation of suburban America.

After his retirement from teaching, Peeradina published Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems in 2017, which maps the trajectory of his poetic oeuvre. Most recently, he has been anthologised in Future Library, published in 2022, edited by Anjum Hasan and Sampurna Chattarji.  As Adil Jussawalla observes in his blurb on the cover of Heart’s Beast, Peeradina “has kept faith with his listeners by having left himself open to varieties of response rather than to the echoes of solipsistic self-absorption” (Heart’s Beast). As the poet realises in “The Lesson,” even if we are travelling on the wings of imagination, we cannot afford to dwell someplace else. He instructs about the poetic imagination by using concrete examples of drawing the earth and the planets:

Place this sheet at one end

Of a panoramic scene and proceed to jump off the brink of our universe

Into neighboring galaxies spiraling outward, endlessly.

…

We have to make the journey back to reclaim the earth (Heart’s Beast 149).

Poetry is the act of taking imaginative leaps and finding our way back to the mundane. Peeradina defines his view of poetry as travelling from the inner to the outer world, “finding analogues in the visible world” to describe “one’s private concerns” (An Arc in Time 156).

Jerry Pinto, writing in The Indian Express about Peeradina’s 2017 collection, Heart’s Beast, remarks insightfully,

Peeradina never slips into the easy mode of othering, but he does not look away. This sense of unbelonging is not just a part of having a hyphenated identity. It is my contention, for instance, that everyone in India has a hyphenated identity, that segues across the blood-iron lines of caste, the crass lines of class, the cartographer’s lines on maps. Saleem Peeradina was perched on a hyphen long before he left India. (Pinto)

The sense of otherness is evident in all of Peeradina’s work; the poet’s ironic perception of himself and his world, as seen in “Body Primal,” (Final Cut 58) for example, was common among his contemporaries. The two stanzas, which are sonnet-like, mirror the disjunction between the wonder of the body and the “body lost in search of itself,” registering both the speaker’s praise and disgust for the body. Wondering about the materiality of the body, the speaker refrains from any religious inquiry, while engaging in a philosophical quest for its origins and purpose. Internal rhyme, the repetition of the “s” and “sh” sounds in the first stanza and the “l” and “ing” sounds in the second stanza, alliteration, and assonance make “Body Primal” musical, although the poem edges on uncovering the dissonance of the body. We hear and feel the disgust of the body in the repetition of sounds and assonance in “misshapen, spongy mess feeding / on ancient slime,” as opposed to the internal rhymes of “ing” suggesting sweetness, as in “body growing wings, leaping, dancing, taking off” (Final Cut 58). The poet holds the paradox of the body as beautiful and disgusting together with the harmony of sound patterns.

Peeradina’s philosophical inquiry extends into his ekphrastic work as well as his attention to the small things around him—objects, birds, and fruits. In “Exhibit A,” “Exhibit B, and “Exhibit C,” on Hiroshige’s art, his attention to the minute details of the paintings reveals his interior vision: “The figure of a wanderer // or recluse, modestly miniature drifts into the scene / Standing there to tell us…/ I am nothing” (Heart’s Beast 107). The wanderer is placed against the etching of cliffs and waterfalls, a raconteur who is paradoxically both nothing but also makes meaning of the world in which he is placed. The artist is “Everywhere. He missed nothing” (Heart’s Beast 109).

Whether Peeradina describes the flaring of the taste of persimmon on the tongue, or the calling of a crow that recalls other crows from history, everything unravels a mystery or becomes a koan. Thus, in Slow Dance (2010) and Final Cut (2016) he continues to explore the themes of the ever-shifting lines between desire and loss, belonging and exile, the need for simplicity to deal with chaos. His words in “Slow Dance,” “For me, this night blooming into day is enough” and “All I own I fit into a single bag” (Heart’s Beast 141) sum up his perception. Jai Dev observes that “Through most of his poems runs a celebration of the world and its every nuance and detail. This wondrous, celebrating love is a product of deep affection, sensitive concern and precise observation (Dev 188). His advice in “Tips on Eating With Your Hands,” can be taken for writing poetry or living one’s life: “you’ve got to stop watching / What you are doing to do it right. Loosen up, / And lose yourself in the meal” He follows his own instructions, losing himself in the journey of living and writing.

Works Cited

Works by Saleem Peeradina:

Poetry

Peeradina, Saleem. Editor. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: An Assessment and Selection. Macmillan, 1972.

_______. First Offence. Newground, 1980.

_______. Group Portrait. Oxford UP, 1992.

______ . Slow Dance. Ridgeway Press, 2010.

_______. Final Cut. Valley Press, 2016.

_______. Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems. Copper Coin, 2017.

Prose:

Peeradina, Saleem. The Ocean in My Yard. Penguin, 2005.

___________. An Arc in Time. Copper Coin, 2022.

Works about Saleem Peeradina:

Dev, Jai. “The Poetry of Saleem Peeradina.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, 1987, pp. 185-189, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40872974

Dharwadkar, Vinay, and A.K. Ramanujan. Editors. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry. Oxford UP, 1994.

Hasan, Anjum and Sampurna Chattarji. Editors. Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing. Red Hen Press, 2022.

King, Bruce. “Book Reviews.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 351–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40873259 . Accessed 4 Sep. 2022.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 18, May 2-8, 1998, pp. 1049-1056.

Perry, John Oliver. “Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” World Literature Today, Spring, 1994, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 261-271. http://www.jstor.com/stable/40150140 .

Pinto, Jerry. “Perched on a Hyphen.” Indian Express. 17 June 2017,  https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/perched-on-a-hyphen-4707811/. Accessed 4 Sep., 2022.

Venkateswaran, Pramila. “A Living Legacy: An Interview with Saleem Peeradina.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 46, no. 3, 2015, pp. 179-193, https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/35789. Accessed 4 Sep. 2022.