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Mar 06

Gieve Patel (1940–2023) | Graziano Krätli

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In Arundhati Subramaniam’s words, Gieve Patel the poet and playwright has been a “quietly enduring presence in the country’s literary scene for five decades” (x). Something along the same lines may be said of Patel the painter and sculptor, whose parallel and complementary career has progressed consistently and enduringly, and whose reputation, in India and abroad, today equals if not exceeds his literary achievement.

Born in 1940 in a Parsi family from southern Gujarat, Patel studied at St. Xavier’s College and Grant Medical College, both in Bombay (now Mumbai). A physician by profession, he practiced in both rural and urban India, gaining the experience, the sensibility, and the insights that would influence and define much of his poetry and art work. Likewise, his family background—small landowners “of rural stock, very devout, orthodox” on his father’s side, and more rationalistic and westernised practising Zoroastrians on his mother’s (including a grandfather and an uncle who were doctors) (De Souza 88). This background was largely responsible for his inquiring attitude towards, and his empathy for, the vulnerable and disadvantaged: the “servants” and the indigenous Warlis working on the family estate, the crippled beggars populating the pavements of Bombay, the elderly, the sick and dying. After his retirement from medical practice in 2006, Patel focused primarily on his art, while poetry occupied him only occasionally, or was put to the service of a long-standing translation project involving the seventeenth-century Gujarati mystic Akho (Akha Bharat).

Like many other Bombay poets, Patel found in Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004) a mentor and a friend who helped him shape and publish his first poems, reviews, and translations in literary periodicals (Quest, Poetry India) and anthologies (Young Commonwealth Poets ’65, Asian P.E.N. Anthology, Writers Workshop Miscellany). Ezekiel also published Patel’s first collection, Poems (1966). This was followed by How Do You Withstand, Body (1976), issued by Clearing House, the poetry publishing collective which Patel had started the same year with fellow poets Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Arun Kolatkar (who was also responsible for the stunning covers and the overall design of the books). The same year Clearing House published Jussawalla’s Missing Person and Mehrotra’s Nine Enclosures, while the Indian branch of Oxford University Press launched its New Poetry in India series, which went on to issue Mirrored, Mirroring (1991), Patel’s third and last collection of poetry. The three books were reprinted in 2017 as Collected Poems, which adds nineteen new poems and a few translations from Akho (but does not include previously uncollected poems, such as “Commerce,” originally published in the quarterly Mahfil in 1972). Patel’s three plays—Princes, Savaska, and Mister Behram—were first performed in Bombay in 1970, 1982 and 1987, respectively, and published in 2008. As for his many pieces on art and theatre, his book reviews, and his interviews—which appeared over the years in various magazines, journals, exhibition catalogs, and art books—have not been anthologised yet.

Compared with most of his Indian contemporaries, Patel’s poetic output is rather limited, which may or may not account for the lack of scholarly and critical attention of the kind that, for example, has been paid to the work of Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan, or Agha Shahid Ali. This may have to do, at least in part, with Patel’s slow and ruminative creative process, which he explained in an interview with fellow Bombay poet Eunice de Souza.

Most often the first draft is just a few lines or a couple of pages. Very rarely do I get a completed poem at first go. The draft is put away and looked at occasionally every few months. This can go on for years. Something keeps hovering between the poem and me, an incomprehension. I keep working towards the point at which the images, the philosophical angle, a certain sequence of words or rhythm come together in a way I want them to. (De Souza 97)

In the same interview, Patel traces the origins of a central theme in his poetry to two concurrent events: the premature death of a cousin and his own puberty.

Knowledge of the death trauma and the awakening of sexuality coming at the same time made me realize that the body is an important vehicle for the understanding of our sojourn through this world. I had seen a very beloved person perishing at the same time that I became aware of my own physical sexual needs. The physical became for me a permanent obsessive focus. There is the body as sexual object, perishing object, subject to unbearable pain, and almost unbearable ecstasy, women’s bodies and the violence done to them, and so on. (De Souza 90)

In the poem that opens his first collection, “On Killing a Tree,” the body is only metaphorically human, but the humiliation and the devastation it suffers are distinctly anthropomorphic, and, like in subsequent poems depicting actual human bodies, hint at the larger bodies of community and society. In Patel’s poetry the anatomical, the physiological, and the pathological are always patently political. The third stanza, in particular, reveals the extent to which the execution of the poem (i.e., the carrying out of its plan) coincides with the execution of the tree (the carrying out of its death sentence):

The root is to be pulled out —

Out of the anchoring earth;

It is to be roped, tied,

And pulled out — snapped out

Or pulled out entirely,

Out from the earth-cave,

And the strength of the tree exposed,

The source, white and wet,

The most sensitive, hidden

For years inside the earth.

(Poems 1)

Repetition and detail (pulled out, snapped out, out of, out from) lead to the pivotal line, “And the strength of the tree exposed,” linking the effort (and the frustration) to its final, fatal results. More than the roping, the tying, the snapping and the pulling out of the root, it is the exposure of the strength of the tree, what was “hidden / For years inside the earth,” which represents the ultimate mortification and annihilation of the body, and finds equivalents in the autopsy (“It is startling to see how swiftly / A man may be sliced / From chin to prick” [“Post-Mortem” 21]) and Patel’s future “torture poems.”

Poems is a portrait of the artist as a young man exploring the borderlines of his empathy and sensibility. A landowner’s son and a medical student with an inquiring attraction to liminal, transactional spaces (the servants’ quarters on his family estate, a mendicant leper, a dying child, or a dissected body), he articulates his interest early on in a diptych consisting of a short question (“Grandfather”) followed by a longer answer (“Servants”). “But for what, tell me, do you look in them, / They’ve quite exhausted my wonder,” asks the grandfather to his young, city-educated grandson (“Grandfather” 2). The reply, instead of an explanation, provides a visual (almost voyeuristic) exploration of the point at issue. Prompted by a slant-rhyming closed couplet (“They come of peasant stock, / Truant from an insufficient plot” [“Servants” 3]), it describes the furtive experience of observing the servants as they “sit without thought” and smoke in the dark. When the “Lights are shut off after dinner,” the servants revert to a dim, uncommunicative universe of their own. Like their skin, “The dark around them / Is brown, and links body to body,” suggesting an archaic and mysterious complicity with nature and introducing the punchline comparison to cattle “resting in their stall”—a far cry from the romanticised and glorified depictions of low-caste or tribal subjects that are typical of much Indian poetry, both from before and after the independence. Later on in the book, Patel returns to the scene when, in “The Solution of Servants,” he interrogates his own marginal relation to them.

If I were suddenly to open

The door, switch on the lights,

And break in before them smiling,

There would be a scramble,

Separation, and then

An air of apology, not anger.

Yet on my leaving wouldn’t they

Continue as before?

(Poems 17)

In poems like “Nargol,” “Catholic Mother,” “Cord-Cutting,” “Old Man’s Death,” “Post-Mortem Report,” “In the Open,” and “Pavement,” Patel-the-Poet examines Patel-the-Medical-Student or the-Young-Doctor as he confronts powers “too careless / And sprawling to admit battle,” such as poverty, death, or the simple fragility and vulnerability of the human body. At the same time, by exploring and questioning his empathy with marginality in all its forms (including old age, in “Grandparents at Family Get-Together”), Patel explores his own difference as a member of a dwindling minority (the Parsis), which makes him an outsider in a country dominated by larger cultural and religious groups. This “ambiguous fate” is the subject of “Naryal Purnima,” the longest poem in the collection and one of Patel’s most ambitious attempts to articulate a political self. The pause between the first and second monsoon rains, which the first stanza describes (and the Naryal Purnima: the traditional offer of the Coconut [Nariyal] Full Moon [Purnima] ), acquires a symbolic meaning in the collapsed cameos of the second stanza, tracing the watershed between the time when the “country pushed root, prepared to fling / An arc of branches” that would eventually lead to self-affirmation and independence, and the “ambiguous implications” of the present, when “Only a faded haze remains / Over academic portraits in public buildings.” Sitting on the promenade of Marine Drive, his back “set / To the rich and the less rich as they come / Scrubbed and bathed, carrying a dirty little satchel / With a nut for the gods” the poet reflects on his allegiances “with the others – the driftwood / From the South, poised black and lean / Against a blinking sea – / Their minds profanely focused / On the wave-pitched gifts.” (Poems 24) The underlying question (“Do I sympathize merely with the underdog? / Is it one more halt in search for ‘identity’?”) leads to a much more sensitive topic, namely the preferential treatment received by the Parsis under British rule, which in turn reflects the complexity and the ambiguity at the heart of this “search for ‘identity’”—as an individual as well as a member of a minority and a citizen of the country as a whole.

Our interiors never could remain

Quite English. The local gods hidden in

Cupboards from rational Parsi eyes

Would suddenly turn up on the walls

Garlanded alongside the King and the Queen.

And the rulers who had such praise for our manners

Disappeared one day. So look instead for something else:

Even accept and belong.

(Poems 24)

But accepting and belonging to what, exactly? Confronted with this predicament, the poet finds temporary relief in turning “From these suppliants to the urchins,” and seeing in their “meagre flesh” and their hunger an “indisputable birth-mark / To recognize / Myself and the country by” As the urchins “strip to plunge,” and the “oily ones are startled [and] imperiously order them / Away” while “coconuts are tossed and touch water” (Poems 25), the poet performs a symbolic act of identification with the underdogs. This act allows the poet’s “present identities” to emerge as a more pluralistic and inclusive self, as the concern for the possibility that “Our prayers may go unheard” (Poems 26; emphasis added) clearly suggests. Similarly, in a previous poem, the humiliating defeat of giving in to the persistent requests of a mendicant leper marks the beginning of a possible political consciousness, as “Walking to the sea I carry / A village, a city, the country, / For the moment / On my back” (“Nargol,” Poems 9).

This scrutinising, self-inquiring attitude culminates in the single suggestive stanza of “Evening,” a subtly complex meditation on the promises and pitfalls of decolonisation.

Our English host was gracious

We were soon at ease;

Or almost:

The servants

were watching.

(Poems 28)

This perfectly balanced cinquain consists of two opening lines and two closing lines linked by a conjunction and a conjunctive adverb in the middle. The first two lines make a dual statement (one for each of the parties involved) and convey a relaxed convivial ambience. The authenticity of this (ideal) situation is then questioned by the conjunction-adverb combination suggesting a possible alternative, while the colon introduces the couplet that ends the poem on edge. The reader will notice the similarity, indeed the specular relationship, between the three clauses (“Our English host was gracious / We were soon at ease” and “The servants / were watching” [Poems 28]); but the significant difference between the end-stopping of the first two and the enjambment of the third calls into question the equilibrium—and the nature itself—of such a relationship. What is truly under scrutiny here is neither the silent watchfulness of the servants nor the graciousness of the English host, but the questionable ease and legitimacy—indeed the anxiety—of the Indian guests, as members of the indigenous ruling class confronted with its new roles and responsibilities in the independent country.

How Do You Withstand, Body, published ten years after Poems, has been significantly influenced by the period in which it was written, strife with political violence and armed conflict, . The communal riots in Gujarat (1969), a new military confrontation with Pakistan (1971), and a state of emergency (1975–1977) that result in widespread political repression and the curtailment of civil liberties threaten to dismantle India. A notion of metaphorical and metaphysical “bodiness” permeates the book, starting from the cover picture: a frontal view of a male torso cut out in the shape of a kite, nipples on the lookout and navel nosing downward. The medical student or the fledgling doctor who fathomed the dissecting room, or found a difference in the morgue, has become a seasoned practitioner, self-consciously proud of his achievement. “How soon I’ve acquired it all!” He declares at the beginning of “Public Hospital”; then goes on to describe how

Autocratic poise comes natural now:

Voice sharp, glance impatient,

A busy man’s look of harried preoccupation—

Not embarrassed to appear so.

My fingers deft to manoeuvre bodies,

Pull down clothing, strip the soul.

Give sorrow ear up to a point,

Then snub it shut.

Separate essential from suspect tales.

Weed out malingerers, accept

With patronage a steady stream

Of the underfed, pack flesh in them.

Then pack them away.

(How Do You Withstand 15)

The poem is less a self-mocking portrait than a depiction of professional arrogance based on power and its multiple and seamless applications. Whether it is used to heal, torment, or destroy, the ability to “manoeuvre bodies,” “pull down clothing” and “strip the soul” is a power that legitimizes and justifies itself. Control over the body (to expose the strength and strip the soul) is the faculty of the doctor, the torturer and the executioner, and in “Forensic Medicine Text Book” Patel illustrates all the possible ways in which such a textbook can be used as a torture manual, or a blueprint for all kinds of bodily violence. The anatomical, human body (the poet’s body “constituted of organs”) is also the metaphorical—but no less physical—urban body described in “Public Works” or “City Landscape;” or the battered, exploited, developed natural landscape; or even the Earth as a suffering whole (although Patel does not pursue this thematic approach, leaving it to more environmentally-conscious poets to pursue). Whichever the case, as a seat of reproductive power, the body is always a battlefield, thence Patel’s rhetorical question

How do you withstand, body,

Destruction repeatedly

Aimed at you? Minutes,

Seconds, like gun reports,

Tatoo you with holes.

(How Do You Withstand 12)

Or, if not a full-fledged battlefield, a conflict zone; and whether urban, natural, or planetary, always intrinsically feminine, “target spot / Showered / With kisses, knives” (“What Is It Between” 37). Rather than a boundary between incompatible territories defined by age, health, caste and other socially discriminating conditions, the body is now seen as a tragic territory in its own, perpetually contended, beleaguered and blasted by ferocious and merciless enemies. A “priceless rag soaked in desires,” torn between the blinding opposites of carnality and carnage, and constantly subject to the ravages of time and space, as “Your area of five / By one is not / Room enough for / The fists, the blows” and “All instruments itch / To make a hedgehog / Of your hide” (“How Do You Withstand, Body” 12). The difference is not between the morgue and the dissection hall anymore, but rather between dissection and dismemberment, the forensic pathologist’s scalpel and the savage brutality of the eye-gouging penknife, the tongue-chopping tongs, and the infinite other tools and techniques listed in the “Forensic Medicine” poem mentioned above.

Mirroring the violence against the human body is the constraint man puts upon nature, as represented in two juxtaposed urban landscapes, “Public Works” facing “How Do You Withstand, Body” and “City Landscape” facing “The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel.” In the former case, body-scape and city-scape are linked by such words as “destruction” and “demolition,” “fists” and “blows,” “stab wounds” while all instruments itching to drill the skin are matched by “builders slicing the ocean / Down to blue ribbons”, which in turn, in “The Ambiguous Fate”, find a correspondence in the “milk-bibing, grass-guzzing hypocrite / Who pulled off my mother’s voluminous / Robes and sliced away at her dugs.” (“The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel” 26). Likewise, the human body as a “poor slut” reduced to “Dumb, discoloured, / Battered patches; meat-mouths / For monster’s kisses” finds a parallel in the overturned city bus described as a “wrecked, mangled monster” and also in the child mangled “out of my arms” by a circumcised butcher in “The Ambiguous Fate.” (26) Yet, while both “Public Works” and “City Landscape” begin with an image of urban constraint and imprisonment (“Day after day the sea enchained / Behind granite buildings”, or seen “through / slats of buildings,” “City Landscape” 27), they significantly evolve in different directions. With the “slicing [of] the ocean / Down to blue ribbons,” the former poem takes a somewhat Freudian plunge into childhood territory, where a simple game (“All walls / Against Water”) may turn into a nightmarish “sewage trickle between my legs” and trigger a vision of “the island-city sinking” and “taps in each little household / Bursting in sympathy with the revolt” (“Public Works” 13). Such a revolt is temporarily contained by public works (“Now taming / is here”), but eventually leads to a grown-up version of the previous fantasy, with scenes of urban chaos culminating in the carnage of an overturned bus. Similarly, “City Landscape” portrays a landscape of urban decay, where human debris changes, under the feet of the strolling poet, from “Muck, rags, dogs, / Women bathing squealing / Children in sewer water, / Unexpected chicken” to more visionary “miles of dusty yellow / Gravel straight / From the centre of some planet / Sucked dry by the sun, / And as radio-active as you wish” (“City Landscape” 27). Yet

The sea daily changes

From blue to green, to gray,

And breezes vaguely

Pull at the season. The sea holds

Netfuls of possibility,

Silver fish shining

Under a thin skin of water.

(“City Landscape” 27)

Whereas in the former poem the view of the captive sea led to sadistic childhood fantasies of destruction and disarray, the latter ends with a paean to the healing powers of imagination

… My sight

Like an angler’s rod,

Springs across dust and buildings

To claim a few fish.

They tickle the inside of my chest

As I carry them across the city

Dancing on a scooter.

(“City Landscape” 27)

The image of the poet’s sight springing like an angler’s rod “across dust and buildings / To claim a few fish,” suggests, like a previous poem in the same collection (“The Sight Hires a Boat It Sees”), a projective process that finds a more complex and sophisticated expression in the cinematic techniques deployed in Mirrored, Mirroring. In “Hill Station”, the narrator watches a group of monkeys lice-picking and copulating outside his hotel window. His “vision” is both encumbered and enhanced by the meshed window screens, although his attention is really focused on things he “cannot see,” meaning the couple next door, “hideously / Silent through the flimsy / Hotel partition” (“Hill Station” 94). Having met them earlier, and heard their obnoxious, petty bourgeois complaints about the place (the last straw being “The slim, mysterious tribals you see everywhere / They degrade by talk of ‘servant classes’”), he has developed a visceral aversion that now, confronted by their challengingly suggestive silence, conjures images of metaphysical disgust and sheer physical violence (“Hill Station” 95). Yet, instead of breaking down their door, he simply shrugs and enters his own room, there to notice “the monkeys … have hardly stopped,” and to encounter the “quiet, happy glance” of his wife snugly reading comics in bed. This encompassing vision of “[t]he monkeys, us, / And the lurid couple” brings about an epiphanic acquiescence in which “[e]ach ecstatic thrust is / Freely contaminate [sic] with an appetite for lice, / Comics, and many more such distractions.” (“Hill Station” 95)

Published fifteen years after How Do You Withstand, Body, the collection of poems titled Mirrored, Mirroring (1991) marks a passage to the age of retrospection and reconciliation, partly inspired by Patel’s talks and epistolary exchange with the mystic Madhava Ashish (born Alexander Phipps), head of the Mirtola Ashram in the northern state of Uttarakhand. The first poem is a candid statement, ingeniously parodic and tongue-in-cheek, whose profound implications set the tone for the rest of the book.

In the beginning

it is difficult

even to say,

‘God’,

one is so out of practice.

And embarrassed.

Like lisping in public

about candy.

At fifty!

(“The Difficulty” 79)

Once this admission is made, the difficulty becomes “Simple” in the next poem, which consists of a bold, almost arrogant, confession of faith: “I shall not / be humble before God. // I half suspect / He wouldn’t wish me to be so” (80) This is followed by a clear and very simple (although far from simplistic) explanation of what turned the poet away from God (not “arrogance or / excessive / self-regard,” but the refusal of “having my nose ground / into the dirt”) and what brought him back to Him (“I have been given / cleaner air to breathe // and may look up / to see what’s around” [80]). This explanation marks a point of departure from Patel’s previous thematic concerns, and the new direction is indicated by a change in position as well as by a sensory progress: from prostrate submission (with the “nose ground / into the dirt”) and from smell and taste (the “older” and more “primitive” of the five senses), to stand-up sight and seeing (I “may look up / to see what’s around”) as the expression of a more mature and independent form of spiritual quest (80). What makes this progress particularly interesting—and relevant to the collection as a whole—is the role breathing plays in it. The poet may now “look up / to see what’s around” because he has been “given / cleaner air to breathe” (i.e., he has been purified). The nose, from vulgar organ of smell, “ground into the dirt,” has been upgraded, indeed elevated to a complex and sophisticated process of spiritual development, in which breathing represents a link between man and God (“Simple” 80). While anatomy and physiology may be the same, smell represents the sensual stage of breathing, the Purgatory which one may traverse and overcome in order to attain the higher spheres of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.

References to smell and breathing (as well as to elevation, death and departure) recur throughout the book, adding a physical dimension to its meandering and inquisitive spiritual journey. In “From Bombay Central” (81-82), a poem whose “visual, auditory and olfactory impact” has been noted by railway historian Ian J. Kerr (317), the “odour of human manure” that pervades the railway station, but “does not offend,” anticipates the more substantial “eternal / station odour[s]” permeating the second stanza. “Hitting the nostrils as one singular / Invariable atmospheric thing,” this mixture of odours acts like a “divine cushion,” buffering the poet-passenger as he sinks in his “hard wooden / Third-class seat,” there to begin a “meditation / On the nature of truth and beauty.” This liminal experience finds an equivalent and ultimate complement in the desire, when “Time’s Up” (119), to have “my / soul / carried away … by transport // none other / than / Indian Railways: a / third-class carriage / with open windows / on a day / not / too crowded.” The same window of a train “Speeding” (109) offers the opportunity to “Best enjoy Nature from a distance … So each detail is spared you, / And elation results” (109). Such (or similar) is the “fate of God / … to see His universe so, / In overview” and to “find it good” (109). But good is neither good nor godly enough for God, thence “the temptation to rain Himself down, disguised / As the hundred godlings of mythology, down / From a pristine vision of the Creation, / Vulgarly to mingle with us, to become / Embroiled in detail” (109). The telling, graphic sequence of examples simultaneously links back, to the many previous examples of abuse, assault and violation, and looks forward, in the form of a theological meditation on the truth and tragedy of divine descent, of “God / Rooting into the intoxication of His Dump” (109). What in How Do You Withstand, Body marked the progress from a pathological to a political view of life, Mirrored, Mirroring turns the political into a spiritual, if not a theological, exploration of God’s experience of his own creation.

Past excursions in the dissection hall and the torture chamber provide the reformed anatomist with the material and the experience to argue that

It makes sense not

to have the body

seamless,

hermetically sealed, a

non-orificial

box of incorruptibles.

Better shot through and through!

Interpenetrated

–with the world.

(“It Makes” 107)

A few pages later, Patel uses the same phrasal verb to describe the intimate, violent, and overpowering experience of a (possible) divine revelation: “God or / something like that / shot / through each part of you” (“God or” 117). Both the language and the dubitative element come from the bhakti tradition, while the invasive approach and bodily interpenetration draw upon the anatomical knowledge and experience of doctors (“Sticking their fingers up / Everywhere”) and torturers. For a comparison with other (especially Western) forms of religious devotion, we must turn to “A Variation on St. Teresa” (111), which describes a subjective condition rather than a sudden occurrence:

Whenever You withdraw

only a little way from me I

immediately

fall to the ground.

I wait upon

the strings You hold.

(…)

My limbs

at best may be infused

by an outer force; and so

inconsolably

I await Your storms, etc.

True to its title, Mirrored, Mirroring spreads a net of specular relationships and references, both internal and to poems in the two previous books. Typical Patelian themes, motifs, and “permanent obsessive foci” are reworked, updated, alluded to, or sublimated into more spiritual or philosophical concerns, as the poet is trying to make sense of the possibility and plausibility of God in this world, while simultaneously visualizing his own departure from it.

When he published Mirrored, Mirroring, Patel was fifty-one. Another twenty-six years passed before he added nineteen “new poems” to a collected edition that brings the total to one hundred and five. It is unlikely that more poetry will appear in the form of a posthumous book; or that, if such a book materialized, it would expand or enrich a canon that, while quantitatively modest, represents one of the peaks of Indian poetry in English. But it is not unreasonable to expect, or hope for, a collection of Patel’s translations (of medieval and modern Gujarati poetry), criticism, and prose, to complement and round off his remarkable achievement as a poet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poetry

Poems. Bombay: Nissim Ezekiel, 1966.

How Do You Withstand, Body. Bombay: Clearing House, 1976.

Mirrored, Mirroring. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Collected Poems. With an introduction by Arundhati Subramaniam. Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2017.

Plays

Mister Behram and Other Plays. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008.

Edited volumes

Poetry with Young People. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007. A collection of poems written by students of the Rishi Valley School, in Andhra Pradesh, where Patel taught an annual poetry workshop for many years.

Prose

“The National School of Drama.” Quest 54,July/September 1967, pp. 63-66.

“Contemporary Indian Painting.” Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4,Fall 1989, pp. 170-205.

“To Pick Up a Brush.” Contemporary Indian Art from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, 1985, pp. 9-16.

Secondary sources

De Souza, Eunice. Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Kerr, Ian J. “Representation and Representations of the Railways of Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies, vol.37, no. 2,May 2003, pp. 287-326.

Subramaniam, Arundhati. “Introduction.” Gieve Patel, Collected Poems. Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2017.

Feb 25

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A.K. Ramanujan | Guillermo Rodríguez Martín

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MLA:

Martín, Guillermo Rodríguez. “A.K. Ramanujan.” Indian Writing In English Online, 26 February 2024, <link to the post> .

Chicago:
Martín, Guillermo Rodríguez. “A.K. Ramanujan.” Indian Writing In English Online. February 26, 2024. <link to the post> .

A.K. RAMANUJAN (1929-1993)

Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born on 16^th March 1929 in Mysore, Karnataka, as the second of six children. His father, Attipat Asuri Krishnaswami Iyengar (1892-1953), a Tamil Vaisnava Iyengar Brahmin from Triplicane, (Madras), was a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Mysore. His mother, Seshammal, a Tamilian from Srirangam was not college-educated, but widely read in Tamil and Kannada regional literatures. Ramanujan’s upbringing in the Mysore family house, where he was exposed to multiple environments through kinship relations, multilingualism, and his father’s multidisciplinary education, provided the basis for his miscellaneous intellectual and artistic productivity. Ramanujan grew up surrounded by four languages (Kannada, English, Tamil, Sanskrit) and received a tri-lingual formal education (in Kannada, English, and to a lesser extent, in Tamil). He did not learn Sanskrit formally but absorbed it as a religious language and ritual code. Like most Brahmin children he inherited the orthodox religious conventions at home from his father and elders. At the age of sixteen, though, he renounced the Brahmin tradition, and threw away his sacred thread.

Since Ramanujan underwent most of his education in modern Kannada and English, these two became his literary languages. He acquired formal knowledge of Tamil only at the college level. He completed his BA with Honors in English Language and Literature from Mysore University in 1949 and his MA the following year. For the next eight years, he was a lecturer in English at various Indian colleges: S.N. College, Quilon (Kerala), Thiagarajar College, Madurai (Tamil Nadu), Lingaraj College, Belgaum (Karnataka) and M.S. University, Baroda (Gujarat). In 1958, he received a graduate diploma in linguistics from Deccan College, Poona (Pune). The following year, Ramanujan travelled to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, enrolling at Indiana University, where he obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1963. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1962 as an assistant professor and was appointed professor in 1968. At the time of his premature death in 1993, he was the William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Linguistics, and the Committee on Social Thought. He had also held teaching assignments as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Michigan. Ramanujan received many honours and prizes, including the Padma Shri awarded by the Government of India in 1976 for his contributions to Indian literature and linguistics, and a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1983. In 1988, he delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Soul’s College, Oxford. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. In 1999, he was posthumously awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in English for The Collected Poems (1995). He was the author and/or translator of twenty-four books, including posthumous works, and he co-authored and edited various other seminal publications. While still alive, he published seven volumes of original poetry in English and Kannada and landmark translations of verse from Tamil (ancient Sangam classics and medieval Alvar saints) and Kannada, including his famous book of poetry from medieval Kannada mystics, Speaking of Śiva (1973), which was nominated for the National Book Award in the United States. His translation of U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Kannada novel Samskara is considered a classic. His last published book was Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-Two Languages (1991).

Ramanujan was one of the pioneers of post-Independence Indian poetry in English who introduced multiple Indian traditions (classical pan-Indian, regional, and oral) into modern Indian poetry—as well as modern translation theory and practice. He was also a multi-disciplinary scholar, linguist, and folklorist, all of which impregnated his many-layered poetic work. He is recognised today as an influential essayist, translator, and bilingual poet (in English and Kannada). Although he worked from 1959 to 1993 in American universities and many of his essays on a variety of Indian literary and cultural subjects appeared in academic publications in the United States, most critical studies on his work are dedicated to his poetry in English and were published in India. This asymmetrical situation can be traced to his categorisation as one of the stalwarts of modernism in Indian poetry in English, and to the growing critical output in India after the 1970s on post-Independence Indian poetry in English, shaped mainly by Indian professors of English and fellow poets who followed a similar poetics influenced by British and American modernists.

Ramanujan’s interest in poetry started as a teenager writing in the Kannada language in Mysore, and he soon began to read T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and other modern poets, and to write poetry in English in the mid -1940s. He is said to have been influenced by Gopal Krishna Adiga, a Kannada Poet who had already absorbed the style and techniques of modern European literature, particularly Eliot. His first poetry collection in English was published much later, when he was already living in the U.S. The Striders was brought out in 1966 by Oxford University Press from London at the recommendation of Girish Karnad, a fellow Kannadiga who was working at the Madras office of the prestigious English publishing house. The book received the Poetry Book Society spring recommendation. In the decades that followed, Ramanujan`s poetry in English became part of the canon of Indian Poetry in English that was being established by influential critical anthologies; he was also considered a poet of the Navya (new) movement in Kannada that arose in the 1950s led by poets like Adiga. Ramanujan was labelled a modernist in both literary circles since much of his poetry of the 1960s and 1970s was characterised by imagism, irony, and experimental formal devices.

On the other hand, in western academia he was foremost known as a folklorist, a researcher of oral traditions, and as a groundbreaking translator of South Indian medieval mystic poetry traditions such as the Kannada vachana poetry (10^thcentury CE) and Tamil Alvar poetry (6^th to 9^th centuries CE), as well as of the Tamil classical Sangam poetry (3^rd century BCE to 3^rd century CE). His translations have had many admirers in India and the West, as well as detractors, such as Tejaswini Niranjana and H.S. Shivaprakash, who dismissed his medieval Kannada poetry translations as being too steeped in irony and other modernist techniques.[1]

Ramanujan started publishing poetry in English in Indian journals such as The Illustrated Weekly of India, Quest, and Thought in the years from 1956 to 1958. His multi-lingual education and avid interest in English literature as a student and lecturer in India gradually led him to linguistics in his late twenties. Like many bright fellow Indians in the 1950s, Ramanujan had been given the chance to pursue higher studies, and a possible career in the United States under the Fulbright and Smith-Mundt Program. His life in America from 1959 (aged 30) undoubtedly shaped his poetics and translational work, though he did not consider himself an Indian diaspora writer, and he travelled to India regularly for research, academic programs, and cultural ‘re-fills’. It was his scholarly thirst, his desire to explore new disciplines, as well as his natural curiosity for different things, that took him to the United States. He was set on studying linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, and there he absorbed the prevalent structuralist theories from some of its leading exponents. The new environment also enriched his social life and writing skills; he deftly recorded his interactions and encounters with intellectuals, poets and everyday Americans in his diaries, extracts of which were published posthumously as Journeys: A Poet`s Diary (2019). His experience there — and studies in linguistics—had an immediate impact on his poetry from the early 1960s, of which only a narrow selection was published in his first poetry collection, The Striders (1966). In the early compositions of the 1960s, from Mysore to distant Chicago and looking back, Ramanujan takes on his Hindu tradition, as well as his multi-cultural identity, with an irony grounded in comparison and contrast:

 Self Portrait            

I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
despite the well-known laws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father. (21)



Conventions of Despair

Yes, I know all that. I should be modern.
Marry again. See strippers at the Tease.
Touch Africa. Go to the movies.

Impale a six-inch spider
under a lens. Join the Test-
ban; or become The Outsider.

Or pay to shake my fist
(or whatever-you-call-it) at a psychoanalyst.
And when I burn

I should smile, dry-eyed,
and nurse martinis like the Marginal Man.
But, sorry, I cannot unlearn

conventions of despair.
They have their pride.
I must seek and will find

my particular hell only in my hindu mind:
must translate and turn
till I blister and roast

for certain lives to come, ‘eye-deep’,
in those Boiling Crates of Oil; weep
iron tears for winning what I should have lost

see Them with lidless eyes
saw precisely in two equal parts
(one of the sixty four arts

they learn in That Place)
a once-beloved head
at the naked parting of her hair.

Must go to bed
with frog-eyed dragons,
once my dream-dark queens

when I had a cavalry of princeling sons.
And I must draw, ductile,
the sudden silver of a glimpse

through the hole of a stare
and see a grandchild bare
her teen-age flesh to the pimps

of ideal Tomorrow’s crowfoot eyes
and the theory of a peacock-feathered future.
No, no, give me back my archaic despair:

It’s not obsolete yet to live
in this many-lived lair
of fears, this flesh. (32-33)

Ramanujan accepted his self-imposed ‘exile’ both as a mediating role between Indian and American scholarship (calling himself ‘the hyphen’ in Indo-American Studies) and as a creative dialogue with himself that provided a double resource for his writing, a creative give and take. As an artist and scholar transacting between cultures, he accepted his ‘hyphenated’ condition with ambivalent ease. He was equally at home in India and America, though his personal life, as his diaries reveal, was full of existential self-doubt, marital tensions, and lifelong fears. He often noted, ironically, that his academic life was a ‘curious perversity’: he had taught Western literatures to Indian students as a college lecturer (like many other Indian writers in English), and he ended up lecturing on Indian literary traditions in the United States, as he was part of a pioneering programme to introduce Dravidian studies at the University of Chicago. Drifting into routine and campus life there, Ramanujan made new ‘discoveries’ researching his Tamil literary heritage. In 1962, he chanced upon an anthology of Tamil classical poetry by U. Ve. Caminataiyar in the basement of the Harper Memorial Library, University of Chicago. This encounter with the ancient Tamil poets of the Sangam period was a milestone in his academic and poetic career. The more he became engaged with this ancient ‘fraternity of poets,’ the more the art of translation—that is, of transacting between languages, traditions and times—became for him a way of thinking and of explaining his self. In 1967, Ramanujan published his first landmark volume of classical Tamil Sangam poems, titled The Interior Landscape, which contained translations of the akam (love) genre from the Kuruntokai anthology (first three centuries CE). The poems were masterpieces in the economy of language, much to the taste of American New Criticism, and revealed to modern readers a ‘language within a language’ that the poet-translator pursued throughout his creative career. Ramanujan also encouraged fellow Indian poets, such as Nissim Ezekiel, R. Parthasarathy and Adil Jussawalla, to enlarge their scope and explore a multicultural identity—as Indian poets writing in English—by translating from their own mother tongues.

Several other formal features of his poetry, prevalent since the 1950s (before his engagement with Tamil classical poetry), can be traced to both Indian and Western sources. For instance, the distinctive employment of free verse, and the stylistic convention of beginning a poem ‘in medias res,’ were typical techniques adopted from the modernist poets as well as from the oral traditions that Ramanujan researched as a hobby in his youth, including the vachanas (sayings) of the medieval Virasaiva lingayyat mystics in Kannada he had been exposed to since 1947. Ramanujan had absorbed the skill of free verse from his early studies of American and English poetry in India, and he admired Whitman’s pioneering use of it in Leaves of Grass. In line with T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins (and other poets he read and studied profusely), he was convinced in his early days as a poet that the natural, organic quality of poetry could only be achieved by bringing the verse close to speech. Both in Kannada and English, he wanted his poetry to sound as if he were talking to someone in an ordinary conversation, and made his point in the imagistic poem that opened his first collection:

The Striders

And search
for certain thin
stemmed, bubble-eyed water bugs.
See them perch
on dry capillary legs
weightless
on the ripple skin
of a stream.

No, not only prophets
walk on water. This bug sits
on a landslide of lights
and drowns eye-
deep
into its tiny strip
of sky. (1)

In a typical Ramanujan composition of this period, an idea—often a childhood memory—, comes alive through its formal devices, line breaks, formal shape, language, sound, etc., as much as through the theme and metaphors. His training in linguistics impregnated his verse with a personal style that showed a scrupulous concern with language and a unique poetic idiom. In these poems the aesthetic experience arises from a well-formed image, which comes alive out of an unwilled and unconscious act, not unlike the workings of a casual conversation recounting a dream or a nightmare. Further, this real or ‘imagined’ experience is delivered in well-crafted artefacts, culled out of language and words on the page. The formal structure (linguistic, logic, and visual) of a poem and the style of poetry, the skill of playing with language, of putting words together to convey a particular meaning, remained a life-long preoccupation with Ramanujan.

Another early feature of his poetry is the use of the mask to distance his personal feelings, as he takes up a plurality of identities to hide his self in passivity and irony. This makes his poems seem personal yet distant as if he were watching himself perform. It is an observant state of being allowing for freedom and transparency. Again, the acceptance of a plural identity may seem a modern poetic strategy (for years in India he had been pursuing Yeats’ concept of the ‘mask’), but Ramanujan derived this practice also from the dramatis personae (female and male) employed by the ancient Tamil poets to speak to ‘others.’

The method of association, by which events and things are recalled, linked and creatively juxtaposed within the poet’s psyche, is also a typical characteristic of Ramanujan’s verse. It makes his poetry highly metaphorical in nature as he constantly moves between the objective and the personal, the cultural and the archetypal, the conscious and the unconscious. This technique, influenced by Jungian psychoanalysis, as well as the Vaisnava belief of continuity through change and the metonymical insets (ullurai) of Tamil poetics, enables him to present within the framework of a few lines the entire complexity of his thoughts and feelings, as well as the shifting identities of the self. The narrative mode and the insertion of a ‘dramatic scene’ to render the nuances of a particular experience, are devices used in longer imagistic compositions like “Snakes,” the second poem in The Striders collection:

Snakes

No, it does not happen
when I walk through the woods
But, walking in museums of quartz
or the aisles of bookstacks,
looking at their geometry
without curves
and the layers of transparency
that make them opaque,
dwelling on the yellower vein
in the yellow amber
or touching a book that has gold
on its spine,
I think of snakes,

The twirls of their hisses
rise like the tiny dust-cones on slow-noon roads
winding through the farmers' feet.
Black lorgnettes are etched on their hoods,
ridiculous, alien, like some terrible aunt,
a crest among tiles and scales
that moult with the darkening half
of every moon…. (2-3)

Ramanujan’s ideas on poetic inspiration are inextricably rooted to the physical body and the senses, and he often connected biological time with nature, personal history, folklore, memory, and the process of writing. Thus, many compositions have a meta-poetic significance associated with the natural world and folk wisdom: plants, leaves, fruits and seeds, or the instinct of fear of certain animals such as reptiles and insects, may evoke natural or inborn responses and even give birth to poems:

Which Reminds Me

I have known
that measly-looking man,
not very likeable, going to the bank
after the dentist,
catching a cold
at the turn of the street
sitting at the window of the local bus,
suddenly make
(between three crossings and the old
woman at the red light)
a poem.

Which reminds me
of the thrown-away seed
of the folktale tree
filling with child the mangy palace dog
under the window,
leaving the whole royal harem
barren. (23)

The bodily senses entail an immediate presence and a reaction, but they can leave lasting resonances. In Ramanujan’s second collection of poems Relations (1971), which contains reworked compositions from the 1960s, the poem on “Eyes, Ears, Nose, and a Thing about Touch,” for instance, is a review of the human body and how it “remembers” through the senses:

Eyes, Ears, Nose, and a Thing about Touch

Eyes are fog,
are trees green or on fire,
a man’s face quartered by the cross-
hairs of a gunsight. Crows, scarecrows,
eyes in others’ eyes. A brown dog
dipped and gilded in the sunshine,
or blurred through someone else’s glasses.

When lucky
it dawns birdcries,
the ear has children with bells;
the fall, delay, and fall
of a wooden doll on the wooden
stairs, what mother says
to cook and early beggar.

Urine on lily,
women’s odours
in the theatre, a musk cat’s
erection in the centre of a zoo,
the day’s bought flowers
crushed into a wife's night
of grouses: the sudden happiness

of finding
where noses can go.
Touch alone has untouchables,
lives continent in its skin, so
segregating the body
even near is too far.
Through all things that press,

claw, draw blood,
yet do not touch,
it remembers a wet mouth
on a dry;. . . . (21-22)

Another persistent idea Ramanujan explored during the 1970s was that of an external force that heightened the bodily senses and could inspire poets. In fact, a first-hand experience with the hallucinogenic substance mescaline, recorded in his diary in 1971 under the effects of the drug, lingered in him for many years. The multiple ramifications (physical, aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual) of this experiment—which may be considered an artistic failure and a revelation at the same time—, and a renewed interest in the Hindu concept of soma, became almost an obsession as he kept drafting and re-visiting a series of poems around this theme from the 1970s until the early 1980s. His concern with the myth of soma, referred to in the Vedas both as a god and a divine drink, resulted in an unpublished sequence of poems he intended to bring out under the title ‘Soma’ as a new collection in 1982. As he explained in a 1981 interview, his personal take on the ancient concept was above all an attempt at demythologisation of “whatever one calls ‘divine’ in our ordinary life.” The volume was eventually discarded, as he was unsure of its poetic import and worried that readers would associate his new work with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. After Ramanujan divorced his wife Molly Daniels (who left for India with their two children) in the crucial year of 1971, he went through a psychological depression that resurfaced in later years, as several diary entries reveal. He found respite and inspiration in the south Indian mystics, for in the years that followed, he published two volumes of poetry translations from medieval Kannada and Tamil. His landmark volume, Speaking of Śiva (1973), shows him repossess the revolutionary Kannada Virasaiva poets that inspired him in his native Mysore as a rebellious teenager. From 1976 onwards, he immersed himself in the Vaishnavite Alvar poetry while he was translating the Tiruvaymoli by Nammalvar, published as Hymns for the Drowning in 1981. The poetry of the medieval Tamil Alvar mystics remained one of the deepest influences in his life and made him emulate a poetry of ‘possession’ and of ‘connections.’

Thus, the discarded Soma poems, published posthumously in 2023 in a contextualised collection, mark a transitional point between Ramanujan`s earlier poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, and his more mature poetry of the 1980s, which was more metaphysical, abstract, and meta-poetic in an existential sense. The later Ramanujan from the mid-1980s onwards was shaped not only by the Alvar poets, but increasingly also by the Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy, which he rediscovered after travelling to Sri Lanka in 1983. His poetic vision expanded from the body-Soma personal relation to the larger Body-Universe consciousness in his third volume of poems titled Second Sight (1986). The Upanishadic caterpillar motif, food-cycle poems, connected to Whitman’s notion of the poetic ‘I’ as cosmos, bioenergetics, yoga, psychoanalysis and an eco-logical world view, are at the back of the concerns that poured into this last poetry collection published during his life. And so, with this volume Ramanujan explored larger themes, reaching out to another level of consciousness and inter-connectedness, one that also reflected his intellectual evolution, from structuralism (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss) to poststructuralism reminiscent of Barthes and Derrida combined with Indian philosophical traditions. Here were the same life-long ideas in his poems, re-circulated in a larger continuum of ancient traditions and post-modernity, adding even more layers of interpretation to the multiple identities hidden in the verse lines, in a complex design of inter-related poems that was not immediately understood by readers and critics. Without wholly dropping his ironic distance (and mask), the poet-speaker of these poems embraces his passive-active paradox (the Upanishadic watchers closing in on the poetic ‘I’) and seems to be conscious that his entire output is a meta-poetic exercise of ‘connecting’ words, images and thoughts, constructing and deconstructing, just as the cycle of life and death (the entire cosmic history) is a never-ending process:

Connect! 

Connect! Connect! cries my disconnecting
madness, remembering phrases.~
See the cycles,

father whispers in my ear, black holes
and white noise, elections with four-year
shadows, red eclipses

and the statistics of rape. Connect,
connect, beasts with monks, slave economies
and the golden bough.

But my watchers are silent as if
they knew my truth is in fragments.
If they could, I guess

they would say, only the first thought
is clear, the second is dim,
the third is ignorant

and it takes a lot of character
not to call it mystery, to endure
the fog, and search

the mango grove unfolding leaf and twig
for the zebra-striped caterpillar
in the middle of it,

waiting for a change of season. (73)

A careful reading of the Second Sight poems allows one to ‘literally’ connect a sequence of inter-related poems that echo similar themes with the same verse structure. Many of the poems in this collection were part of an earlier unpublished long ‘Composition’ consisting of 26 sections that was later decomposed into twelve published poems. Ramanujan opted at some point in 1984 to dismember the long poem and let his philosophy of life take over. Picking up the main themes of The Striders and Relations, his fears and anxieties, and the belief that ‘truth’ is in ‘particulars,’ Second Sight reveals his pragmatic belief in a paradoxical and fragmented reality. The poet wants to return to the world of senses and instincts but knows all the same that any active involvement in the world, that is, the experiencing of fear and desire as the Buddhists say, only leads to anxiety and suffering. This collection, which contains many new poems composed in the verse format of two and half lines, inspired by the fourth-century Tamil prosodic form of the kural, includes also earlier discarded drafts from the 1960s and 1970s grafted into new work, turning his poetic belief in the artistic ‘continuum’ into practice. Thus, the central theme of the body composing and decomposing into macro and micro elements within the continuous flux of life (lives) is carried over to the creative act. A poem for Ramanujan is a ‘composition’ made of textual tissue, words, and images that are fragments from and of his mind and body. In this manner he presents the creative cycle of poetry and poetry writing as a natural process: like breathing air or ingesting food, for poetry, as the mirror-window of the chain of life, passes through all ‘elements of composition’ of which life is made. According to this view, the art of ‘composition’ takes part in the never-ending process of creation and incarnation of elements, which include the poet, the poem, the words in the poem, and the reader in a transformative aesthetic experience. This circulating organic process is a fundamental metaphor of Ramanujan`s poetics of metamorphosis, and is expressed, for instance, in poems like “Elements of Composition”:

Composed as I am, like others,
of elements on certain well-known lists,
father’s seed and mother’s egg

gathering earth, air, fire, mostly
water, into a mulberry mass,
moulding calcium,

carbon, even gold, magnesium and such,
into a chattering self tangled
in love and work,

scary dreams, capable of eyes that can see,
only by moving constantly,
the constancy of things

………….....................

I pass through them
as they pass through me
taking and leaving

……………….…

and even as I add,
I lose, decompose
into my elements,

into other names and forms,
past, and passing, tenses
without time,

caterpillar on a leaf, eating,
being eaten. (11-13)

Ramanujan shunned unifying theories and was always suspicious of grand ideas and wary of epiphanies and revelations. He was incapable of making his larger poetic design—and aesthetic belief—too visible to others, as his own doubts and stated lack of self-esteem made him go back and forth in his particular ‘hindu hell’ (The Striders 32). So he preferred to let poem flow into poem, his thoughts and images ‘clinching’ on and off, running like an intermittent waterfall into a river. His poetic ideal envied the fraternity of classical Tamil Sangam poets and their ‘secret language’ embedded in a long tradition of poems that spoke to each other. This was a life-long aspiration of Ramanujan, which went back to W.B. Yeats and his first readings of Eliot`s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as a student of English literature. He had hoped to bring his ‘design’ to the fore more effectively with a larger body of writings he was building up. But the work of one of India`s most talented poet-translators and scholars remained unfinished. Ramanujan`s sudden death in 1993 left many works—literary and academic—incomplete and ‘fragmented’.

The Black Hen was the editorial title given to a group of posthumous poems included in The Collected Poems in 1995. It contains poems drafted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Ramanujan was suffering from increasing physical pain due to an adverse spinal condition and experienced renewed tensions in his personal life (he remarried Molly Daniels in 1976 and they divorced again in 1988). These late poems go deeper into metaphysical questions and move into darker mind spaces. In the opening poem he re-visits the Keatsian romanticism of his youth intermingled with old animal fears through the lens of a reflective existential pessimism, and there are also other poems that move beyond anxieties of transmigration and disintegration to forebodings of death:

The Black Hen

It must come as leaves
to a tree
or not at all

yet it comes sometimes
as the black hen
with the red round eye

on the embroidery
stitch by stitch
dropped and found again

and when it’s all there
the black hen stares
with its round red eye

and you’re afraid… (195)


Death in Search of a Comfortable Metaphor

Grandmother's version
of how scorpions die
to give birth
may not be true
but sounds right.

Maybe death is such
a scorpion: bursts its back
and gives birth
to numerous dying things,
baby scorpions,

terrifying intricate
beauties, interlocked
in male and female,
to eat, grow, sting,
multiply, burst their backs

in turn, and become feasts
of fodder for working
ants, humus for elephant
grasses that become elephants
that leave their herds
to die grand lonely deaths.

But when did elephants
console the living
left behind by a death?

16 March 1992

[the poet's sixty-third birthday] (273)

A year later, on 13 July 1993, A.K. Ramanujan died unexpectedly in a Chicago hospital of a heart attack. We can only imagine where his diaries, journals, poetry and scholarship would have led him had he lived longer. Ultimately, the greatest honour for any writer lies in one’s work being read well after life has passed. Ramanujan’s poems, prose, essays and translations have left a vast legacy. They keep inspiring and influencing new generations of poets and scholars, and enthral readers to this day. Since his passing there has been a regular output of posthumous publications of his prose and poetry (in English and Kannada), which keep adding new layers and revelations to his body of work. His books of translations, essays, and collections of folktales have become classics. They continue to be reprinted in the United States and India, and they are also being translated into other languages around the world .

Select Bibliography

Poetry in English

Collections

The Striders. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Relations: Poems. London, N. York: O.U.P., 1971.

Selected Poems. N. Delhi, N. York: O.U.P., 1976.

Second Sight. N. Delhi, N. York: O.U.P., 1986.

Posthumous collections

The Black Hen in The Collected Poems of A.K Ramanujan. New Delhi: O.U.P., 1995. Contains also The Striders (1966), Relations (1971) and Second Sight (1986).

Uncollected Poems and Prose. Edited by Molly A. Daniels–Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. London and New Delhi: O.U.P., 2001.

The Oxford India Ramanujan. Edited by Molly Daniels–Ramanujan. New Delhi, O.U.P., 2004. An omnibus collection that includes all the poems from the previously published books of poetry in English (1966, 1971, 1986, 1995, 2001) listed above, and the four collections of poetry translations from medieval Kannada and classical and medieval Tamil (1967, 1973, 1981, 1985) listed below.

Soma. Poems by A.K. Ramanujan. Edited by Guillermo Rodríguez and Krishna Ramanujan. Gurgaon, Haryana: Penguin Viking, 2023.

Posthumous collections of prose in English

The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. Edited by Vinay Dharwadker. New Delhi: O.U.P., 1999.

Uncollected Poems and Prose. Edited by. Molly A. Daniels–Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. London and New Delhi: O.U.P., 2001.

Journeys: A Poet’s Diary. Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez. Gurgaon, Haryana: Penguin Random House, 2019.

Books of translations

Tamil and Kannada poetry in English

The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967.

Speaking of Śiva. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1973,

Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammāḻvār. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long poems of Classical Tamil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

The Oxford India Ramanujan. New Delhi: O.U.P., 2004.

Kannada fiction into English

Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man (Samskara). By U.R. Ananthamurthy. New Delhi: O.U.P., 1976.

3.3. English fiction into Kannada

Haladi Meenu (The Yellow Fish). By Molly Daniels–Ramanujan. Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1966.

3. Collections of Indian folktales in English

Folktales from India. A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-Two Languages. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India. Edited by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes. Berkeley: University of California Press; New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 1997.

Other co-authored or co-edited works in English

A.K. Ramanujan and Edward C. Dimock Jr. et al., eds. The Literatures of India. An Introduction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974. London: O.U.P., 1975.

A.K. Ramanujan and Stuart Blackburn, eds. Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. London: O.U.P., 1986.

A.K. Ramanujan, V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, eds. When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; New Delhi: O.U.P., 1995.

A.K. Ramanujan and Vinay Dharwadker, eds. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry. New Delhi: O.U.P, 1994.

Works in Kannada

5.1 Poetry collections in Kannada

Hokkulalli Hoovilla (No Lotus in the Navel). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1969.

Mattu Itara Padyagalu (And Other Poems). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1977.

Kuntobille (Hopscotch). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1990.

5.2 Novella in Kannada

Matthobhana Atmacharitre (Someone Else’s Autobiography). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1978.

5.3 Collections of proverbs in Kannada

Gadegalu (Proverbs). Dharwar: Karnataka University, 1955. Dharwar: Karnataka Visvavidyalaya, 1967. Dharwar: Manohar Granthamala, 1978.

5.4 Posthumous collected works in Kannada

A.K. Ramanujan Samagra (Complete Kannada Works) Edited by Ramakant Joshi and S. Divakar. Dharwar: Manohar Granthamala, 2011.

Translations of A.K. Ramanujan’s Kannada books into English

Kannada poetry

No Lotus in the Navel (Hokkulalli Hoovilla, 1969). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. Advisory ed. Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi. New Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 3–58.

And Other Poems (Mattu Itara Padyagalu, 1977). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. N. Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 59–126.

Hopscotch (Kuntobille, 1990). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. N. Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 127–186.

Kannada novella

Someone Else’s Autobiography (Matthobhana Atmacharitre). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. N. Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 214–323.

Further reading

Rodríguez, Guillermo. When Mirrors are Windows. A View of A.K. Ramanujan`s Poetics. New Delhi: O.U.P., 2016.

Notes:

[1] See Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 181-185, and H.S. Shivaprakash, “Introduction,” I Keep Vigil of Rudra: The Vachanas (N. Delhi: Penguin Books, 2010).

Oct 30

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Arun Joshi | Kanak Yadav

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MLA:
Yadav, Kanak. “Arun Joshi.” Indian Writing In English Online, 30 Oct 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arunjoshi_kanakyadav/ .

Chicago:
Yadav, Kanak. “Arun Joshi” Indian Writing In English Online. October 30, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arunjoshi_kanakyadav/ .

Introduction: The Writer and Indian English Canon

Arun Joshi (1939-1993) was born in an academic environment as his father, the botanist A. C. Joshi served as the vice-chancellor of two leading Indian universities, namely, Punjab and Banaras Hindu University (Randhawa). Joshi was himself academically oriented holding a Master’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. After completing his education, he returned to India and joined the Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, a Delhi-based NGO and served as its Executive Director until his death on April 19, 1993 (Indian Journal of Industrial Relations).

Despite having a prolific writing career publishing five novels and a collection of short stories, Arun Joshi has remained an elusive figure in the canon of Indian fiction in English. Alongside his career as the Head of the research institute and as a journal editor, Joshi successfully managed another career as a writer. His skillful prose brings out the thematic complexity of his fiction which explores issues like inequalities in the Indian social structure, moral decadence, the futility of materialistic pursuits, the conflict between individual desire and societal repression, the crisis of enlightenment, and how a foreboding sense of alienation preoccupies the human subject. Joshi was also a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award in 1982 for his novel The Last Labyrinth (1981). Nevertheless, he continues to be undervalued, both in the literary marketplace and in academic circles despite his significant contribution to Indian Writing in English, which leads Pavan Kumar Malreddy to question: “How do we explain this glaring discrepancy between the prolific output on Joshi’s literary oeuvre and his almost neglected place in the pantheon of the postcolonial canon?” (3-4).

One possible reason for the obscurity of Arun Joshi’s fiction could be its unavailability. His works remained “out of print” (Sudarshan 2013) until a decade ago when his Delhi-based publisher, Orient Paperbacks, republished some of his works under their venture called, “Library of South Asian Literature.” Joshi’s fictional world, which was otherwise confined to the dusty shelves of old Indian libraries, has now been rediscovered by an entirely new generation and a global audience with the reprinting and availability of e-copies. Joshi’s early death at the age of 54 and his books not being marketed outside the subcontinent even when international publishers had entered the Indian literary market (Sudarshan 2013) are some of the contributing factors for the cultural amnesia that he has suffered.

The struggle to situate Arun Joshi within the corpus of Indian English Literature is a real one since his subject-matter is unlike any of his peers. According to Madhusudan Prasad, Joshi’s fiction is “singularized by certain existentialist problems and the resultant anguish, agony, psychic quest, and the like” (103). His fiction evidently draws influence from twentieth-century Western philosophers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre who question the existence of God and the purpose of human existence. Generally labeled as “existentialists,” a term which many writers so categorised have invariably rejected, their literature demonstrates the individual trapped in a crisis of identity as seen in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1916), breakdown of language and selfhood in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1952), and the absence of God and the absurdity of life in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Stranger (1942). The philosophical issues explored in Arun Joshi’s fiction bear close resemblance to existentialist philosophy to the extent that critics have interpreted Joshi’s first novel The Foreigner (1968) as inspired by Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger (Prasad 104). Similarly, O. P. Mathur interprets the protagonist of The Foreigner (1968), Sindi Oberoi, as a “Sartrean protagonist” who embodies the journey from alienation and detachment to “right and useful action” (425). The influence of Western philosophy on Joshi’s fiction has also contributed to creating a disconnect between him and the Indian English canon.

Arun Joshi’s literary vision has made it difficult to label him a quintessentially “Indian” writer particularly since, in the early years, the formation of the Indian English canon was mainly developed upon the idea of how it was lending a voice to the postcolonial nation state. As such, Joshi is either canonised as a divergent voice in the various histories and anthologies of Indian Writing in English, or else his “Indian sensibility” is overdetermined to fit him neatly in the field. For instance Meenakshi Mukherjee interprets Joshi’s first novel The Foreigner (1968) within the framework of the “East-West” (207) cultural encounter and reads its sense of alienation through the lens of cultural difference and an individual’s sense of conflict. M.K. Naik’s A History of Indian English Literature (1982) offers a comprehensive critical account of Joshi’s novels and identifies him as one of the “most striking” (270) voices of the seventies. In Naik’s words, “Joshi is a novelist seriously interested in existential dilemmas and equally acutely aware of both the problems of post-Independence Indian society and the implications of the East-West encounter” (292). Naik clubs the psychological and intellectual struggles of Joshi’s flawed protagonists into an “East vs West” debate in order to affirm their postcolonial ethos. Joshi’s fiction, however, refuses convenient labels: neither could it be categorised as “existentialist” literature alone, which is imitative of western philosophy, nor could its subject be reduced to a cultural clash between eastern “tradition” and western “modernity.” If there is anything substantial that one can conclude from Joshi’s representation of the conflict between the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ worlds, the individual and the society, the body and the mind, and desire and its repression, it is that he does not perceive these categories as antithetical. Instead, he intertwines these seemingly opposing worldviews to reflect upon metaphysical questions pertaining to life and its meaning.

The Politics of Joshi’s Fiction

Arun Joshi’s writing has focused on the individual psyche, its struggles and the pretentious world of the Indian elites without manifestly engaging with larger events like the Indian independence and the social ills plaguing the postcolonial nation state, concerns which have been crucial in defining and shaping the canon of Indian Writing in English. Furthermore, because of Joshi’s metaphysical inquiries into life’s meaning, subjecthood, and the alienating effects of modernity, the socio-political aspects of his narrative also tend to get overlooked in the overarching frame of the individual’s quest for meaning. For instance, the crisis of selfhood plaguing Joshi’s fatalistic protagonists, and the attempts to resolve it, cannot be separated from their male privilege and their upper-class, upper-caste background. His fiction often centers around a privileged male subject who feels alienated despite having all the comforts. However, the novels do not simply serve as mouthpieces to these flawed protagonists but remain critical of their worldview and ideologies. As Joshi focusses on the psychological instead of the manifestly political, he remains critical of upper-class values and culture.

In The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971), tribal culture exists as an antithesis to the modern society and is romanticised in order to strike a contrast with the culture of big Indian cities. Makarand Paranjape draws a parallel between Joshi’s novel and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to comment on how the former is a “Conradesque journey into the heart of the Indian darkness” (1052). For instance, Billy’s position within the tribal group can be compared to Kurtz’s relationship with the African natives especially in terms of his God-like status among the tribes. However, the comparison also ends there as Billy is completely integrated into the tribal culture without showing any moral superiority for his own civilisational values. The novel, therefore, privileges indigenous knowledge but only to contrast and critique the world inhabited by the urban elite.

The connection between the protagonist’s quest for identity and his own caste and class privilege is also present in The Last Labyrinth (1981). Som Bhaskar’s existentialist dilemma is tied to his caste identity as a Brahmin millionaire. The question that Anuradha poses to Som Bhaskar towards the beginning of the novel, “What is a Bhaskar doing in business?” (Joshi, The Last Labyrinth 11) implicitly links his spiritual crisis with the quest for transcendence that is associated with his identity as a Brahmin man. Som Bhaskar is a millionaire who despite his successful business and relationships suffers from an inexplicable cry, “I want. I want.” (Joshi The Last Labyrinth 9). This unquenchable desire not only takes him to Banaras but also to a Krishna temple in the mountains that leads him to the spiritual awakening of how Anuradha miraculously saved his life when the doctors had given up faith. The manner in which the novel upholds the unknown, mysterious elements of life makes it difficult to separate Bhaskar’s spiritual crisis with his Brahmin identity.

Joshi’s existentialist fiction, therefore, appears as a world occupied by upper-class/upper-caste men who are oblivious to their caste and cultural privilege, which seems to be a major limitation in his writings. However, it is their relinquishment of material comfort and privileges that leads to meaningful insights over individual freedom, morality, the crisis of selfhood, and societal expectations. While this is overtly manifested in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) as Billy abandons Delhi to search for greater truths in the expanse of the forests, The Last Labyrinth too explores the idea of renouncing metropolitan life to find comfort in the old world order epitomised by the Lal Haveli in Banaras. Even The Apprentice (1974) – which follows a different trajectory since the protagonist, Ratan Rathor, belongs to a humble background – explores the idea of repentance for one’s wrongdoings by indulging in good deeds. Ratan Rathor’s dramatic monologue which narrates his rags-to-riches story comes to an end with his confession of becoming the almighty’s “apprentice” by visiting the temple daily to “wipe the shoes of the congregation” (Joshi, The Apprentice Chap. 12). Given the unreliability of Rathor’s story, it is doubtful if he has truly mended his ways after clearing the defective order which cost him the life of his close friend, the Brigadier. However, The Apprentice (1974) also manages to tease the other possibility of Rathor seeking redemption by rising above his greed for material comforts. Hence, Arun Joshi’s anti-heroes question and critique the world of privileges, its corrupt value system, and the social divide it perpetuates.

The City and the River (1990) is distinctive when compared with Joshi’s other works which are thematically centered around an alienated subject. This allegorical tale, recounted by the Great Yogeshwara to his disciple, the Nameless One, shows the power struggle between politicians and citizens, law enforcers and law abiders, and the haves and the have-nots respectively. The tussle between the Grandmaster and the scheming Astrologer on one side and the underprivileged like “the mud people” and “the boatmen” on the other, is symbolic of class struggle as the Grandmaster dictates and commands without any consideration for the needs of the masses. However, this is not a simplistic tale of conflict between the ruling class and the working class, as Nirmala Menon tellingly reminds us how the novel critiques “both social institutions and its subjects” (74). She argues that the novel allegorically refers to the Indian Emergency (1975-1977) whether it is through the usage of the phrase “‘The Era of Ultimate Greatness’” or the “mass arrests” that are carried out in the text (Menon 74). Furthermore, the policy of “one child to a mother or two to a home” enforced by the Grandmaster suggests the two-child policy and mass sterilisation that was promoted during the Emergency (Joshi, The City Chap. 1). The City and the River (1990) is a political text which connects politics to philosophical enquiry. Unlike Joshi’s other novels which are centered around the psychology of the individual, The City and the River (1990) focusses on the “politics of collective” (Menon 65).

Beyond Dualisms

As argued previously, Arun Joshi’s fiction cannot be interpreted solely in terms of binaries like “East vs West,” “tradition vs modernity,” and “individual vs society,” as his novels challenge such dualisms to show their interconnections. For instance, Joshi’s first novel, The Foreigner (1968), demonstrates the lonely world occupied by the anti-hero, Sindi Oberoi, who despite his multiracial background feels like a “foreigner” in whichever country he goes to. According to Madhusudan Prasad, the novel “relates the pathetic story of its narrator, Sindi Oberoi, who reflects helplessly on his meaningless past and is apprehensive of his equally meaningless future” (104). Born to an interracial couple, an English mother and an Indian father, Sindi lost his parents at an early age and was brought up by his “uncle in Kenya” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 2). His education was also “global” as he studied in East Africa, London, and the United States (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 3). Sindi’s character embodies what Homi K. Bhabha has termed “cultural hybridity” (6). However, instead of accepting and acknowledging his multicultural background, he fails to belong to either Kenya, America, or to his Indian origins. Sindi’s “in-between” identity and his life’s philosophy of detachment alienate him from the world-at-large. (Bhabha 2).

In not belonging completely to any particular country or race, Sindi Oberoi is not uprooted and detached as he would like to convince himself, but his existence lies between cultures and spaces such that he could belong anywhere in the world: a message which he learns only by the end of the novel when he has already lost Babu Rao Khemka and June Blyth because of his philosophy to “live without desire and attachment” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 11). Sindi’s absolute belief in non-commitment and inaction was a ruse for self-preservation and it is only by the end of the novel that he realises this truth when an office employee, Muthu, shares his own understanding of detachment: “Sometimes detachment lies in actually getting involved” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 18). Seen in this context, Sindi’s decision to stay back and manage Mr. Khemka’s business for the sake of the employees is intellectually enlightening for him as he arrives at a pluralistic sense of modernity which values action. After losing Babu Rao Khemka and June Blyth, Sindi realises that “detachment consisted of right action and not escape from it” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 15). His modernist angst, which was founded upon loneliness and a crisis of faith, finds a temporary resolution towards the novel’s end as he recognises an alternative worldview where attachment and detachment are not mutually exclusive.

Similarly, interpreting The Foreigner (1968) in terms of the conflict of “East vs West” is far too simplistic, as the novel does not privilege one set of cultural values over the other. The two characters who symbolise the eastern and western civilisations – Babu Rao Khemka and June Blyth respectively – struggle to survive because of their absolute values, not to mention Sindi’s “withdrawing” attitude (Prasad 104). In the character of Sindi Oberoi, the novel brings together “eastern” and “western” values to uphold a pluralistic culture. As Sindi, the rootless, alienated protagonist starts running Mr. Khemka’s business, the novel challenges his bad faith to uphold a vision of modernity that does not demand a transcendence from the material world but a willful engagement with it.

Joshi’s second novel The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) also disputes the purpose of existence, enlightenment, and the apparent progress of human civilisation by portraying the eccentric life of Billy Biswas. Billy Biswas was an Indian anthropologist trained in the United States and working with Delhi University, who withdraws from the elite circles of his Delhi household to settle among a tribal group, the “bhils of the Satpura Hills” (Joshi, The Strange Case 7). The novel critiques the normative modernity of English-speaking urban elites and their demand for social conformity as it tragically recounts the fate of Billy Biswas who is hunted down and eventually killed when his family attempts to reclaim him from his tribal life.

Recounted through the perception of the second-person narrator, Romi Sahai, a civil servant who befriended Billy in New York, the novel reflects on the social rebellion of Billy Biswas against the upper-class Indian society and its understanding of development, culture, and modernity. By contrasting the enriching lives led by the tribal groups against the materialistic, civilised world of metropolitan spaces, Joshi explores the divide between nature and culture, rural and urban spaces, indigeneity and modernity, and theory and praxis. Billy’s decision to assimilate himself within the local tribe and abandon his family serves as a comment not only on his passion for the unknown mysteries of life but also on his willingness to bridge the intellectual gap by privileging indigenous knowledge structures which the civilised world may frown upon.

Billy Biswas could be considered a misfit in the society as he recklessly leaves behind his entire family by disappearing into the woods. However, his unreasonable, self-serving quest for meaning that drives him to withdraw from civilisation is also a greater search for “one’s true self” (Mathur 426). In his first encounter with the tribes and their festivities, Billy Biswas feels a connection and a calling to be his “primitive self” (Joshi, The Strange Case 101):

He stood on a rock and saw in the night sky a reality that blinded him with its elemental ferocity. It was as though his life had been reduced to those elements with which we all begin when we are born. (Joshi The Strange Case 102).

This meeting with the tribe awakens something primordial in Billy since the tribe stood in stark contrast to the sophisticated world from which he had arrived. In order to contrast the world of the city as egotistical and predetermined by social pretensions and material worth, Arun Joshi romanticises tribal life through the character of Billy, by privileging their legends and myths, without dealing with them critically. By contrasting the culture of the city with tribal life, the novel critiques the superficiality of the modern Indian society. In this process it touches upon elements that remain questionable from a representative point of view, such as Billy’s god-like stature among the tribes and the overt sexualisation of Bilasia who is meant to symbolize feminine energy. The novel uses such problematic elements to provide answers to philosophical questions that had haunted Billy as an academic and which he only understood once he acquired alternative knowledge by living with the tribes. The novel synthesises western enlightenment and indigenous knowledge structures, reason and myths in the character of Billy whose pursuit of anthropology as a field of study led him to deeper inquiries which he could only comprehend after annihilating his “modern,” urban self. Although the novel’s engagement with tribal culture stems from its desire to interrogate urban Indian culture, it, nevertheless, ends up broadening the meaning of culture and modernity by privileging cultural differences that may otherwise be conveniently disregarded as primitive.

The Last Labyrinth (1981) explores a married business tycoon, Som Bhaskar’s obsession with a woman named Anuradha through whom he wants to conquer his unquenchable thirst for wanting more. By overlapping the desire for material possession (Aftab’s shares) with the immaterial like spiritual fulfillment, sexual bliss, love and transcendence, Joshi synthesises opposing elements to comment on the inherent contradictions in human desire. The novel begins with Som Bhaskar’s desire to capture Aftab’s business which he eventually obtains but without contentment, and ends with an unsatisfied Som, who is scared and on the verge of self-harm, as Anuradha has disappeared from his life. The novel concludes in an open-ended manner, as it is unclear whether Anuradha has willingly gone missing or has been subject to violence within the mysterious folds of the labyrinthine Haveli. In the Som-Anuradha relationship, social conventions are flouted to establish a connection between the known and the unknown, the spiritual and the sexual, and the body and the mind respectively. For example, Som Bhaskar’s physical fixation with Anuradha attains a mystical dimension when he gains the knowledge that Anuradha saved him from dying because of their “spiritual” connection. Similarly, in Anuradha’s disappearance, the novel seems to point to the unknown, mysterious elements of human desire which can never be understood fully.

Conclusion

From critiquing the upper-class of the Indian society to the quest for meaning in an absurd world, Joshi’s anti-heroes embody the modern dilemma to both belong and transcend the world. Whether it is through material possessions, sexual bliss, intellectual pursuits, detachment, or even religious devotion, his nonconformist characters are not just meant to demonstrate the wrongs of the society. Instead, they are intended to challenge the fundamental premise of human civilisation. From Billy Biswas abandoning the civilised spaces of Delhi to live amidst tribal groups to Sindi Oberoi’s theory of detachment in The Foreigner (1968), to Som Bhaskar’s sexual and spiritual obsession with Anuradha and the maze-like structure of Lal Haveli in Banaras, which preserves an older world, in The Last Labyrinth (1981), Joshi’s preoccupation lies with metaphysical enquiries which he addresses by exploring the limits of human reason, faith, morality, desire, and sexuality. Undoubtedly, Joshi’s philosophical engagement is not apolitical since most of his protagonists come from privileged backgrounds, except for Ratan Rathor in The Apprentice (1974) who represents the common man’s struggles to “arrive” in the city. Nevertheless, Joshi remains vehemently critical of the social class he represents. It can be argued that Romi Sahai, the narrator in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) serves as the author’s mouthpiece when he says how “life’s meaning lies not in the glossy surfaces of our pretensions, but in those dark mossy labyrinths of the soul that languish forever […]” (8). Joshi’s fiction explores the psychological realms of this world which otherwise lie buried within the human subject.

Bibliography:

Joshi, Arun. The Apprentice. Orient Paperbacks, 1974.

—. The City and the River. Orient Paperbacks, 1990.

—. The Foreigner. Orient Paperbacks, 1968.

—. The Last Labyrinth. Orient Paperbacks, 1981.

—. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Orient Paperbacks, 1971.

Works Cited:

“Arun Joshi.” Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 28, no. 4, 1993. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27767266 . Accessed 12 July 2023.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Joshi, Arun. The Apprentice. Orient Paperbacks, 1974.

—. The City and the River. Orient Paperbacks, 1990.

—. The Foreigner. Orient Paperbacks, 1968.

—. The Last Labyrinth. Orient Paperbacks, 1981.

—. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Orient Paperbacks, 1971.

Malreddy, Pavan Kumar. “Arun Joshi: Avant-Garde, Existentialism and the West.” Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 62, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3-12. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2014-0002 .

Mathur, OP. “Survival and Affirmation in Arun Joshi’s Novels.” World Literature Today, vol.63, no. 3, 1989, pp. 425-428. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40145317 . Accessed 13 July 2023.

Menon, Nirmala. “Peripheral Identities and Hybridity in Arun Joshi’s The City and the River” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 62, no. 1, 2014, pp. 63-6. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2014-0007.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. Heinemann, 1971.

Naik, MK. A History of Indian English Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1982.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 18, 1998, pp. 1049–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406729 . Accessed 15 July 2023.

Prasad, Madhusudan. “Arun Joshi: The Novelist.” Indian Literature, vol. 24, no.4, 1981, pp. 103-114. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23330214 . Accessed 13 July 2023.

Randhawa MS. “Amar Chand Joshi (1908-1971).” Indian National Science Academy, https://www.insaindia.res.in/BM/BM15_9214.pdf .

Sudarshan, Aditya. “The strange case of Arun Joshi.” The Hindu, March 2, 2013, https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/the-strange-case-of-arun-joshi/article4465223.ece .

Kanak Yadav

Aug 07

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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 03

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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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May 22

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Saleem Peeradina | Pramila Venkateswaran

By IWE Online Critical Biography One Comment

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Venkateswaran, Pramila. “Saleem Peeradina (1944-2023): A Critical Biography.” Indian Writing In English Online, 22 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/saleem-peeradina-pramila-venkateswaran/ .

Chicago:
Venkateswaran, Pramila. “Saleem Peeradina (1944-2023): A Critical Biography.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 22, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/saleem-peeradina-pramila-venkateswaran/ .

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.

May 08

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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | Nalini Iyer

By IWE Online Critical Biography No Comments

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Iyer, Nalini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Indian Writing In English Online, 08 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/chitra-banerjee-divakaruni-nalini-iyer/ .

Chicago:
Iyer, Nalini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 08, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/chitra-banerjee-divakaruni-nalini-iyer/ .

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a prolific and a popular South Asian American writer. Her works combine storytelling and social justice with a focus on immigrant rights, gender, citizenship, and belonging. In a blog post on her author website, Divakaruni writes: “Sometimes I’m asked if I would have become a writer if I hadn’t moved to the United States. I don’t know the answer to that question. I do know, though, that I couldn’t have written the same kinds of stories, hybrids born out of the melding of the Indian and American cultures”(https://www.chitradivakaruni.com/blog/2013/7/7/america). Divakaruni who is a poet, novelist, activist, and academic was born in Kolkata on July 29, 1956. After receiving a B.A. from the University of Calcutta, she moved to Wright State University in the United States for an M.A. She completed her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. She has taught at several American colleges and universities and is currently the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Texas. As an activist, she is the founder of Maitri, an organization in San Francisco that supports women who are victims of domestic violence. She also serves on the board of Daya, a Houston based organization that does similar work. Her literary works have won several awards including the American Book Award (1996), the PEN Josephine Miles award (1996), and she has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize (1997).

Divakaruni’s work is shaped by her experiences as an immigrant woman, and many of her works focus on how women navigate the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience. She also depicts strong women characters who overcome adversity and establish life pathways for themselves. In recent years, she has turned to reworking Indian mythology and history from the perspective of women and thus her The Palace of Illusions (2008) retells the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective, and the The Forest of Enchantment (2019) presents the Ramayana from Sita’s viewpoint. Her most recent novel, The Last Queen (2021), tells the story of Jindan, the youngest wife of Maharajah Ranjit Singh and her struggle against the British Empire while serving as a regent who protected her young son’s rights.

The Immigrant Experience:

Like many middle-class and upper-caste Indians who emigrated to the United States, Chitra Divakaruni also arrived there as a graduate student. In 1965, the United States passed the Immigration and Nationality Act which provided opportunities for educated Indians to study and work in the United States. While such changes in the law benefited many in the technical and scientific fields, there were people who also pursued studies in the Humanities like Divakaruni. Her first publication was a poetry collection Black Candle (1991) that garnered praise for its South Asian metaphors and images. For example, in “The Garba” set during the Navaratri, “Light glances/off the smooth wood floor of the gym/festooned with mango leaves/flown in from Florida” (43), the poet simultaneously invokes the nostalgia and displacement of the diasporic subject. Some of the poems were inspired by the art and film of others. For example, “The Rat Trap” was inspired by Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film Elipathayam and “Two Women outside a Circus, Pushkar” was influenced by one of Raghubir Singh’s photographs. Her second collection Leaving Yuba City (1997) is notable for its final sequence of poems in which Divakaruni tells the stories of the early Sikh immigrants to the Imperial Valley in California. Her poignant poems speak to the loneliness of the immigrant men who were either single or had left their wives behind. She writes of the bewilderment of the women who arrive years later to find their husbands changed, of young men whose interracial marriages to Mexican women transformed their everyday lives, and of the daughters of the early immigrants who struggled to escape strict homes. These poems frame lyrical narratives in the context of the lesser-known history of South Asians in the Pacific Coast.

Divakaruni’s first work of fiction was Arranged Marriage (1995), a collection of eleven women-centric stories that focused on urgent topics such as domestic violence, the isolation of immigrants, and the stigma of divorce. Divakaruni’s stories in this collection are notable for raising awareness about violence within immigrant families that are exacerbated by the challenges of migration. In the 1990s her fiction addressed topics that were relatively underexplored in South Asian American writing. Divakaruni’s first important novel The Mistress of Spices (1997) marks her shift from the realist mode of her debut short stories to a melding of realism and fable. Her protagonist Tilo has magical healing powers and arrives in a spice store in San Francisco, where her customers share their stories of struggle and she offers them spices that give them solace. She falls in love with a Native American man, Raven, and in committing to him breaks the code for spice mistresses. Her choice between conformity to the mistress’s code and autonomy mirrors the struggles of her clients. The narrative is thus a celebration of Tilo’s autonomy. Scholars like Inderpal Grewal have critiqued the novel’s dismissal of the violence of the spice trade and its embrace of an American vision of multicultural solidarity by “producing ethnic identity through exotic difference” (Grewal 76). However, as I have argued elsewhere, the spice store setting shows Divakaruni’s understanding of that violent history and traces its continuity in current times as an exotic grocery store in the Bay area where, ironically, the customers unaware of the history of the spice trade are nevertheless experiencing racism, alienation, and prejudice that trace their roots to that colonial trade (Singh et al., 7).

Divakaruni’s depiction of the immigrant experience takes a significant turn after 9/11 when she begins documenting the struggles of South Asian immigrants in the United States in the new racialized regime with intensified Islamophobia. In an essay she published in the LA Times, Divakaruni writes about how 9/11 led to her displaying an American flag in her home because she cherished American values of liberty, equality, and justice and notes also that immigrants like her are always viewed with a suspicious lens (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-21-op-59757-story.html). In Queen of Dreams (2004), she once again works with magical realism as she had done in The Mistress of Spices. Rakhi, her protagonist, the child of Indian immigrants, is distanced from her mother who had the ability to interpret and experience the dreams of others. In exploring her mother’s dream journals after her death, Rakhi learns much about her family history. When 9/11 shatters Americans’ sense of security and invulnerability, Islamophobia dramatically increased in the United States. There were many violent attacks on South Asian immigrants, including Sikhs, who were misidentified as the Taliban. This rise in violence shattered many immigrants’ ‘American Dream.’ Rakhi’s child who has inherited her grandmother’s ability to interpret and experience dreams struggles with her nightmares about burning buildings. Rakhi and her friend Belle witness violence against their Sikh friend who is mistaken for a Muslim. Their café and restaurant, like Tilo’s spice store, become a space for community and solidarity for immigrants of color.

In Oleander Girl (2013), Divakaruni once again explores the impact of 9/11 on Indian immigrants when her protagonist, Korobi, visits from Calcutta to search for her father whom she had believed dead. Using her family’s wealth and business connections, Korobi embarks on a search for her father. Her quest takes her from New York to California. Korobi, who has been raised in a wealthy Calcutta family, and is about to marry into a wealthier one, has a limited understanding of race and racism. She has experienced prejudice in India for her dark skin, and in her travels in the United States, she learns of the hardships and racism that Indians have experienced in post 9/11 America. She witnesses domestic violence and marital breakdown due to racism in the lives of the Mitras, the couple who host her in New York. The Mitras manage an art gallery for the Boses, Korobi’s prospective in-laws, and the attacks on their business threatens their economic stability and also that of the Bose family. She undertakes a road trip to meet her father and is surprised to learn that he is Black. Her assumption as a child was that her American father was white, and her discovery that she is half-Black leads to a recalibration of her identity and her experiences with colorism. In meeting her father, she learns about her parents’ romance but little about her father’s experience of race as a Black man. She understands that the rejection of her father by her grandparents and the subsequent secrets about her birth reflect an intertwining of anti-Black racism with both caste and colorism in India. The novel undermines the popular idea of Indian Americans as upwardly mobile and wealthy professionals. Through the story of the Mitras and of Vic, a working-class Indian American man, Divakaruni challenges the model minority myth. However, when Korobi returns to India to marry Rajat Bose, she seems to set aside her African-American heritage and fully embrace her Indian identity. Thus, while Divakaruni draws a connection between the experiences of racism in the US and the anti-Black views in India, the novel’s ending emphasizes Korobi’s re-assimilation into her wealth and privilege.

Reworking Myth and History:

In recent years, Divakaruni has shifted the focus of her fiction to Indian myth and history. As a feminist writer, she seeks to recover lost or marginalized women’s voices through fictionally reimagining well-known narratives from women’s perspective. Her The Palace of Illusions (2008) rewrites the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, from the perspective of Paanchali (Draupadi). She presents Paanchali’s story of birth, her marriage to five brothers, her deep involvement in her husbands’ quest for their lost kingdom, and her relationship with Lord Krishna. In The Forest of Enchantments (2019), Divakaruni retells The Ramayana from Sita’s perspective. Framed as a feminist retelling, the novel not only makes Sita the protagonist, it also highlights and reworks perspectives on other female characters including Surpanakha (Ravana’s sister), Mandodari (Ravana’s wife), and Sunaina (Janaka’s wife). Divakaruni’s retelling of the Hindu epic participates in the long tradition of retellings, what Paula Richman has called “many Ramayanas,”(9) through which the epic is kept alive. Divakaruni portrays Sita as a warrior princess who is skilled in archery and also as a healer and an eco-feminist. Drawing not just from Valmiki’s Ramayana but also from Krittibas, Kamban, Adbhuta Ramayana, and Jaina traditions, Divakaruni remains focused on not just the greatness of Rama but the role of the women in his life. Kaikeyi is portrayed with compassion and Lakshmana’s wife Sumitra as one devastated by his decision to exile himself with his brother. In her retelling, Divakaruni also suggests the possibility that Sita is the child of Mandodari and Ravana who is abandoned by her parents because her birth foretells the doom of her father and thus hints at an incestuous relationship between Ravana and Sita. Divakaruni imagines the everyday life of Sita as Queen when she returns to Ayodhya and needs to resurrect a household that has been neglected for many years. She also explores palace intrigues in great detail and adds in the human dimension to a narrative that is often read as divine.

In The Last Queen (2022), Divakaruni returns once more to a Queen whose story, like Sita’s, has been overshadowed by that of her warrior husband. Jindan, the youngest wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, is the center of this narrative and Divakaruni writes of the King’s courtship of the young daughter of one of his employees, a keeper of horses. The teenage Jindan falls in love with a much older king and the marriage occurs by proxy when the girl marries Ranjit Singh’s sword because he is absent, being at a war. The courtship of Ranjit Singh and Jindan is portrayed as in any contemporary romance novel, and as with The Forest of Enchantments, much narrative energy focuses on palace intrigues—power plays amongst queens and concubines, poisonings, household factions and so on. Once Ranjit Singh dies, Jindan finds herself and her baby son in danger. But with clever political maneuverings she becomes the regent when her child, Dalip, is installed as Ranjit Singh’s heir. When the Sikh Empire falls to the British, Dalip is sent to England as the ward of Queen Victoria and his mother is imprisoned. She tricks her way out of prison and makes a harrowing journey to Nepal where she is at first welcomed and offered refuge, and later despised for her politics. The narrative traces her reunification with her anglicized adult son, and her eventual death. The novel is both a critique of how women’s roles in politics are overlooked by historians and an examination of the British destruction of the mighty Sikh Empire. Although The Forest of Enchantments rewrites an epic and The Last Queen draws on a historical figure, the narratives depict the women protagonists similarly—beautiful, clever, able to manipulate palace intrigues, and sexually empowered. Such similarities in character development render these women almost anachronistically contemporary and framed by second-wave American feminism as developed by critics such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, among others. Second-wave feminists focused on recovering the works of overlooked women writers (Showalter) and in understanding Victorian women writers and their female characters (Gilbert and Gubar). Thus, Divakaruni’s feminist depictions run the risk of what Chandra Mohanty identified in “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonialist Discourse”—the production of a monolithic “third world woman” (51, Indian woman in Divakaruni’s case), and producing feminist knowledge about India using Western strategies and analytic categories. This alignment with second-wave feminism makes Divakaruni popular with North American readers.[1] By foregrounding women of color in her fiction and for telling stories of their struggles against a stereotypical Indian patriarchy, Divakaruni’s writing aligns with the North American publishing market’s drive for diversity in their lists.

Divakaruni’s most recent novel is Independence (India, 2022; United States, 2023) in which she tells the story of three sisters—Deepa, Priya, and Jamini—and their quest for autonomy set against the backdrop of Indian independence and Partition. Using brief epigraphs to sections of the book, she gestures toward the larger political issues such as the Radcliffe line or Gandhi’s satyagraha movement. She also examines the Partition’s impact on the lives of the three sisters and their mother. The family loses the father in the violence following Direct Action Day in 1946 in Calcutta and experiences growing poverty in their small rural community. As they strive to make ends meet, they are helped by an avuncular local wealthy man, and each sister forges her own path. Deepa elopes with a Muslim doctor and moves to Dhaka; Jamini struggles with her disability and her unrequited love for Amit, her sister Priya’s fiancé; and Priya is forced to choose between her aspirations to study medicine in Philadelphia and her impending marriage to Amit. Sisterly relationships, women’s struggle for autonomy, the challenges of living in a patriarchal society are the themes that are echoed from Divakaruni’s prior fiction. The sections outlining Priya’s life as a medical student in the 1940s in America is reminiscent of Divakaruni’s ongoing interest in pre-1965 Indian immigrant history demonstrated by her Yuba city poems. As a historical novel, Independence is noteworthy for its focus on the Bengal partition and the political challenges in East Pakistan that eventually led to the formation of Bangladesh.

The first anthology of criticism, Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora, was published in 2022. It contains 12 critical interviews on a range of Divakaruni’s work and 3 reprinted interviews as well as a substantive introduction by the editors. In the scholarly works published on Divakaruni, certain novels predominate, and these include The Mistress of Spices, Queen of Dreams, and The Palace of Illusions. Much of the scholarship examines themes of diaspora, displacement, feminism, and women’s empowerment. Divakaruni herself maintains an author website www.chitradivakaruni.com that is a useful resource for her readers.

Chitra Divakaruni is an important voice in South Asian diasporic fiction. She explores a range of forms and techniques in her writing- from poetry and essays to realist short fiction, magic realism, and historical fiction. As a feminist writer, she has (along with Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri) foregrounded the experiences of Indian middle-class women with immigration, alienation, family struggles, and racism. Her focus on women overcoming hardships and finding autonomy offers a hopeful approach to the challenges of diasporic living. Divakaruni has contributed significantly to the mainstreaming of South Asian American voices in the realm of ethnic literature in the United States.

Primary Texts

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Black Candle. Calyx Books, 1991.

—. Arranged Marriage. Anchor, 1995.

—. Leaving Yuba City. Deckle Edge, 1997.

—. The Mistress of Spices. Anchor, 1997.

—. Queen of Dreams. Doubleday, 2004.

—. The Palace of Illusions. Anchor, 2009.

—. Oleander Girl. Simon and Schuster, 2013.

—. The Forest of Enchantments. Harper Collins, 2019.

—. The Last Queen. Harper Collins, 2021.

—. Independence. William Morrow, 2023.Selected Bibliography on Divakaruni

Buley-Meissner, Mary Louise. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A Bibliographic Review of Resources for Teachers.” Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies, vol. 1, no.7, 2010, pp. 142-153.

Erney, Hans-Georg. “Draupadi Returns with a Vengeance.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 55, no.4, 2019, pp. 486-497.

Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diaspora, Neoliberalisms. Duke UP, 2005.

Iyer, Nalini. “Embattled Canons: The Place of Diasporic Writing in Indian English Literatures.” Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India, edited by Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Sue Zare, Rodopi/Brill, 2009, pp. 3-21.

Rasiah, Dharini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung, U of Hawaii P, 2000, pp.140-153.

Shankar, Lavina Dhingra. “Not too Spicy: Exotic Mistresses of Cultural Translation in the Fiction of Chitra Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri.” Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India, edited by Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Sue Zare, Rodopi/Brill, 2009, pp. 23-52.

Singh, Amritjit, Robin E. Field, Samina Najmi, editors. Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora. Lexington Books, 2022.

Works Cited

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination. Yale UP, 1980.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 , vol.12, no. 3, 1984, pp. 333-358. Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. U of California P, 1991.

Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Viking, 1990.

[1] Actual data on point-of-sale numbers for books is only accessible to publishers. Mistress of Spices was reviewed in the New York Times and was on their bestseller list. Her latest, Independence, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her One Amazing Thing made it to citywide reading programs in nine American cities and was on all “campus-reads” programs on twenty-three college campuses.

Nalini Iyer

Edited by: Sreelakshmy M

Apr 17

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Aravind Adiga | Ulka Anjaria

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MLA:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online, 17 April 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .

Chicago:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online. April 17, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .

“What we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings… But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind… We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour’s children in five minutes, and our own in ten.”

—Aravind Adiga, Selection Day (233)

Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Chennai, and completed his schooling and advanced degrees in India, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is best known for his novel The White Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 2008. He is also the author of several short stories as well as three additional novels: Last Man in Tower (2011), Selection Day (2016), and Amnesty (2020).

The White Tiger broke new ground in Indian English fiction for its move away from some of the genre’s common themes and aesthetics. In contrast to the writings of previous Indian winners of the Booker Prize, The White Tiger noticeably eschews pathos and rejects the sensitive and emphatic portrayal of characters from marginalized sections of society as seen in the writings of Rohinton Mistry, and the righteous sense of injustice or anger against the system as seen in Arundhati Roy. Rather, Balram Halwai, The White Tiger’s protagonist, is a ruthless self-promoter, his frustrations at the obstacles put in the path of his social advancement generating a sense of gritty motivation that leads him to become a social climber at all costs. He uses the language of late capitalism to articulate his own aspirations; he is a self-styled “entrepreneur” (1). He is a member of an underclass that does not seek pity or empathy but faces challenges with a hard-nosed pragmatism that is at once cynical and agentive. If some of the most famous Indian novels in English of the 1980s and 1990s reflect a profound disillusionment with the failures of the Indian nation-state, Adiga’s works mark a newer era in the genre, which we might call post-disillusion, when there is nothing of the illusion left at all and so rather than lament its loss the only thing to do is pick up the pieces and stitch together a livable life from them.

The White Tiger is set in a contemporary India that has been stripped of its moral values. Any symbol or model of moral righteousness – Gandhi, Nehru, literary icons, spiritualism, secularism, socialism – is presented in his works through a cynical gaze, upturning conventional morality so that, at its extreme, right is wrong and wrong is right. For instance when Balram walks into a tea shop for his first day at work, he sees the shopkeeper “sitting under a huge portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, and [he] knew already that [he] was going to be in big trouble” (31); the image of Gandhi, which might have once signaled virtue, now represents its opposite. Balram scoffs at the men working in tea shops in rural India who “do [their] job well – with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt” (43), aware that their hard work will get them nowhere in life. By contrast, Balram claims, “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience” (43), while this is a humorous inversion of conventional ideas of education and enrichment, it is also a perceptive critique of the limitations on social advancement in contemporary India, where if you’re poor or otherwise marginalized, hard work is futile. Instead, Balram “used [his] time at the tea shop… to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said. [He] decided that this was how [he] would keep [his] education going forward” (43). Balram presents street smarts and cleverness, rather than belief in the virtue of labor, as the only option for social mobility in a profoundly broken system.

Although The White Tiger advances a social critique, there is no hope of reform; patriarchy, capitalism, casteism, greed and selfishness have so completely taken over that the only “hope” (which is in fact a cynical gloss on hope) is to bend these forces to one’s advantage. Thus, victimhood can become agency, even if that agency involves theft and murder. In The White Tiger, Adiga replaces the bleak/fatalistic attitude of an earlier generation of Indian writers in English with a more cynical/pragmatic perspective that is always on the lookout for an opportunity for breaking out of one’s social circumstances but is not at all interested in reforming the whole system. For this reason, The White Tiger has been criticized by some scholars as being neoliberal –celebrating a rags-to-riches, bootstraps narrative rather than offering a concerted critique of structural inequalities. Certainly, there is very little that is Marxist about The White Tiger; there is no class solidarity and the narrative of advancement is not only individualistic but actively anti-collective. This is less a progressive critique of capitalism than a perceptive recognition of a new world order in which the very possibilities for subaltern advancement have already been tainted by half-a-century of corruption that has saturated the very fibers of Indian society.

Indeed, one wonders if these critiques of The White Tiger had some influence in shaping the direction of Adiga’s subsequent novels. In all three, the cynicism is still there, as are characters who have no moral compass and who, like Balram, reject the language of liberalism and act in extremely self-serving and socially destructive ways. However, in contrast to The White Tiger, at the center of each of the three later novels is a protagonist who has a heart and who does his (they are all men) best to resist the forces of the deeply corrupt world around him. While Balram found criminality as the only path forward in a nation of criminals, the protagonists of the other novels try to remain ethical despite the pressures around them.

Last Man in Tower’s Masterji is a former teacher and elderly resident of a Mumbai apartment building targeted by a builder for redevelopment, providing that all owners agree to the deal. The rest of the residents are gradually convinced, but Masterji remains steadfast in his refusal to sell, partly because of the memories of his deceased wife that still pervade his flat. The other residents get impatient as the deadline comes closer, and in a bid to get the deal through, one of them pushes Masterji to his death, off the building terrace. In this novel, the middle-class society is represented as thoroughly amoral and materialistic. Though Masterji, tries to stay true to the values of learning, family, and morality, he is ultimately a victim to it.

Selection Day is also set in a world,among characters,completely warped by violence and greed. Radha and Manju are brothers and cricket prodigies. They live with their unemployed, controlling, and at times violent father who treats them as his property. Manju, the younger brother, is the novel’s protagonist. Not only does he grow up in the shadow of his older brother and gradually outshine him in cricket, earning both Radha’s and his father’s anger, but he also finds himself sexually attracted to a wealthy boy, Javed, who treats him alternatingly with affection and disdain. Selection Day is a cricket novel – a critique of the business of cricket in contemporary India, from match fixing to corporate sponsorships to the recruiting industry. Manju resembles Balram in that he too must make compromises to succeed. But unlike Balram, who murders his boss and never faces the consequences, Manju’s denial of his sexuality and his abandonment of Javed for the sake of his cricketing career prove ultimately hollow. Manju remains a sympathetic character throughout, from his childhood when he is the victim of emotional and physical abuse by his father, through his adolescence and the eponymous selection day, and beyond, into his listless adulthood. Unlike Balram, the novel focalizes its narration through Manju, allowing us to glimpse his hazy memories of his mother who left when he was a child, his love of the television show CSI, his secret dream to work in a morgue rather than be a cricketer, his fear of his brother and his father, and his unarticulated desire for Javed. In the midst of the ruthless world in which he lives, and despite his own flaws, Manju remains profoundly human.

Danny, the protagonist of Adiga’s most recent novel Amnesty, is also a sympathetic character in an unforgiving world. As an undocumented Tamil Sri Lankan having escaped the Civil War and state repression, Danny lives in Sydney when the novel begins and works as a house cleaner. The novel takes place over the course of a single day that begins with Danny learning that a former client named Radha Thomas has been murdered. In a series of flashbacks, we learn more about Danny’s strange relationship with Radha and her extramarital lover, Dr. Prakash, who were both gambling addicts and highly unlikeable people. Additionally, they knew of Danny’s illegal status and were using it to try to control him. Danny immediately suspects Dr. Prakash as Radha’s murderer, having witnessed violent arguments between them, but realizes that turning Dr. Prakash in to the police would require implicating himself – living in Australia illegally – to the authorities. Danny struggles with the decision over the course of the day, calling the police hotline several times but ultimately hanging up. Finally, having realized that Dr. Prakash is planning to murder Radha’s husband next, Danny does the right thing. The last page of the novel is a press release that reports the tip that resulted in the arrest of Dr. Prakash and in preventing the second murder, but also notes that “the person who tipped police off on the hotline confessed during questioning to being illegally present in Australia and is now being processed for deportation to his home country”(217). Danny’s sacrifice of his own happiness – contrary to his repeated mantra, “I am never going back home” (207) – exposes, once again, the immorality of the outside world through the foil of a character who is able to act morally despite it.

These various male protagonists who struggle to make it for themselves under the ruthless logic of late capitalism also demonstrate the ways in which Adiga links masculinity and class. We see this in the scene in The White Tiger where Balram tries to imitate Mr. Ashok, his employer by hiring a blonde prostitute. Balram is devastated when he discovers that her hair is dyed. The fact that the idiom of Balram’s desire for social and economic mobility is that of sex suggests the deep imbrication of class and sexuality. The portrayal of sexuality is more nuanced in Selection Day, where Manju’s burgeoning understanding of his own queer sexuality makes him the target of homophobic taunts from his father and peers, but – and more importantly – gives him a new perspective on ordinary things that allows him, at times, to detach himself from the world around him. In this novel, queerness is presented not only as a question of desire but also as a kind of secret world of survival that enables Manju to develop a sense of self which is at times magically distant from the crude material needs, both bodily and financial, of everyone else around him. Indeed, it is only when he turns his back on his own queerness does his life relapse into mediocrity.

Adiga’s interest in questions of masculinity does not really extend to women, and across the four novels there are very few notable women characters. The White Tiger’s Pinki Madam is a morally reprehensible, wealthy NRI who drives drunk one night, ends up killing someone sleeping on the street, and forces Balram to take the blame. In Amnesty Danny has a healthy relationship with Sonja (probably the only living healthy relationship across all Adiga’s fiction), but the main female presence is the murdered Radha Thomas who appears in Danny’s flashbacks as domineering,manipulative, and entirely reflective of the privilege of her elite class. Yet, while all the female characters verge on caricatures, most of the male characters do as well – the vast majority of characters in Adiga’s fictional worlds are reflections of the corruption of the late capitalist order and have little redeeming about them at all.

Adiga also inhabits a new “transmedia” arena marked by a more complex relationship between literature and other forms of media. Arundhati Roy refused to authorize a screen adaptation of The God of Small Things, and while there have been adaptations of earlier Indian novels in English (perhaps most famously Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the BBC’s recent miniseries A Suitable Boy), the classic IWE texts of the 1990s have rarely been adapted for the screen. But this changed in the first decades of the 21^st century, not only with OTT platforms allowing for a wider distribution of varied types of content, but also because authors started writing with adaptation in mind. This is clear in the works of authors such as Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan, among others, whose fiction reads as somewhat filmi in its characterization, narrative arc, and at times rapid “cuts” between scenes. Both authors’ books have been made into films. Adiga’s novel Selection Day was similarly released as a series by Netflix in 2018, and three years later the film adaptation of The White Tiger was released on the same platform. As Sangita Gopal reminds us, this is not just a question of unidirectionally adapting fiction into film, but of upturning the idea of an original versus an adaptation; a transmedia project means that a film or television series is not a secondary version of an original fiction but that the book too is a version that might find form in another medium. Adiga’s participation in this arena is part of a new moment in Indian literary production in which the sanctity of the book is replaced by a more lateral proliferation of possible forms.[i]

Unlike many contemporary writers, Adiga is a private person who stays largely out of the public domain. He is not active on social media and has never attended the high-profile Jaipur Literary Festival, despite his popularity and the critical acclaim garnered by his works. In this sense he seems to have avoided the pressures that contemporary writers often face to be political commentators as well as practitioners of their craft. But this reclusiveness does not lend his writings a sense of apartness; rather, his stories are marked by their contemporary quality, their grittiness and their refusal of pity or sentiment. For these reasons, his impact on the field of Indian writing in English will continue to grow.

Primary Sources

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. Atlantic Books, 2008.

—. Between the Assassinations. Picador, 2008.

—. Last Man in Tower, Atlantic Books, 2011.

—. Selection Day. Picador, 2016.

—. Amnesty. Scribner, 2020.

Selected Adiga Criticism

Anjaria, Ulka. Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture. Temple University Press, 2019.

—. “Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 1,2015, pp. 114-137.

Detmers, Ines. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘Condition-of-India Novel.’” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 5,2011,pp. 535-545.

Mendes, Ana Cristina. “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 275-293.

—. and Lisa Lau. “Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminality.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2022, doi: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099940

Shingavi, Snehal. “Capitalism, Caste, and Con-Games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 9, no. 3,2014, pp.1-16. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1837.

Walther, Sundhya. “Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 2014, pp. 579-598.

[i] Sangita Gopal, “‘Coming to a Multiplex Near You’: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema,” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 359-372.

Ulka Anjaria

Edited by: Sreelakshmy M

Dec 26

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Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) | Graziano Krätli

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Krätli, Graziano, “Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004).” Indian Writing In English Online, 26 Dec 2022, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/ezekiel-bio/ .

Chicago:
Krätli, Graziano, “Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004).” Indian Writing In English Online. December 26, 2022. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/ezekiel-bio/ .

For more than three decades, from the early 1960s until the mid-1990s, Nissim Ezekiel was a pivotal figure in the cultural life of Bombay/Mumbai, as his work as poet, editor, critic, and teacher influenced and inspired younger writers and artists, helping shape the canon of Indian poetry in English along the way.

Born on December 16, 1924, in Bombay, Nissim was the third of five children, three boys and two girls. His parents, Diana and Moses Ezekiel Talkar, were both members of the Bene Israel (“Children of Israel”), the oldest and largest of the three Jewish communities in India. They were also part of the first generation who moved to the city from their ancestral homeland near Alibag, in the coastal region south of Mumbai. (Talkar, the additional toponymic which Moses Ezekiel added to, and eventually dropped from, his surname, refers to the native village of Tar, in the Raigad district). Both parents were teachers: Moses a lecturer in Botany and Zoology at Wilson College, and Diana a schoolteacher before starting her own nursery school. Liberal and progressive in their religious beliefs and practices, they held evening prayers (in Hebrew or English) and visited the synagogue on Yom Kippur. At home they spoke Marathi, a language Nissim never mastered enough to be able to write poetry in it, as some of his Maharashtrian contemporaries, such as Arun Kolatkar (1932‒2004) and Dilip Chitre (1938‒2009), did. (His only book of translations of Marathi poetry was done in collaboration with a university colleague.) Nissim’s formal education started at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, continued at the Antonio De Souza High School (both Roman Catholic), and was capped with a bachelor’s (1945) followed by a master’s (1947) in English Literature at Wilson College. Around this time, he published his first poems in the college magazine and elsewhere. After graduation, he taught for a year at Khalsa College, freelanced for various newspapers and magazines, and worked for M.N. Roy’s Radical Democratic Party, eventually distancing himself from politics to focus on poetry and the arts. The change was partly due to the influence of a new friend, Ebrahim Alkazi, a student at St. Xavier’s College and a member of Sultan Padamsee’s Theatre Group. Upon graduation, Alkazi decided to continue his studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and convinced Nissim to join him by offering to pay his fare.

In London, where he arrived in November 1948, Nissim spent much of his time reading in the library of India House, the headquarters of India’s diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom, until the High Commissioner, V.K. Krishna Menon (a close friend of Nehru and a future Union Minister for Defence), offered him a job in the Internal Affairs Department. At the same time, Nissim enrolled in evening courses (Chinese, Western Philosophy, Art Appreciation, etc.) at the City Literary Institute, an adult education college nearby, and attended philosophy classes at Birkbeck College, University of London, without completing the BA program. A couple of visits to Paris, in late December 1949 and August 1951, resulted in a strong desire to move there. (Incidentally, Srinivas Rayaprol, an almost contemporary of Ezekiel, had the same impulse after visiting the City of Light in 1951, following a three-year residence in the United States. We may wonder whether either of them would have been a different poet, or a different author altogether, had he followed this impulse and settled in the French capital. (Just like we may wonder what kind of poet and scholar would have been Ramanujan, had he pursued his academic career at Cambridge or Oxford rather than Chicago; or what would have become of Dom Moraes, as a poet and journalist, had ne never left India). But we can only speculate. What we know is that, early on, London brought out Ezekiel’s vocation to be a poet, and he acted upon it with determination and perseverance. After one year at India House, he quit his job to devote all his time to reading and writing, living frugally and supporting himself with menial jobs and money occasionally sent from home. As he would characterize this period in “Background, Casually,” one of his most autobiographical (and anthologized) poems, “Philosophy, / Poverty and Poetry, three / Companions shared my basement room”. The result of this self-imposed, creative confinement was a manuscript which Reginald Ashley Caton, founder of the Fortune Press, accepted for a ten-pound publishing fee. (The house had previously published other South Asian poets living in England, among them Fredoon Kabraji and M.J. Tambimuttu, as well as British and American authors such as Kingsley Amis, Cecil-Day Lewis, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Penn Warren, in addition to French, Greek, and Latin classics). Ezekiel then turned his efforts to planning his trip back to India, and eventually found a way to pay his fare by working on a cargo ship that was carrying ammunition to French Indo-China. The return trip took more than two months, from March to May 1952, as the ship made several stops; but at one of them, in Marseilles, the impromptu deckhand found copies of A Time to Change waiting for him.

Soon after his arrival in Bombay, Ezekiel was offered a job as sub-editor for The Illustrated Weekly of India. In the same year, he also began a long association with the P.E.N. All-India Centre and its founder, the Colombian-born Indian theosophist Sophia Wadia, initially assisting with the editing of The Indian P.E.N. and The Aryan Path, then, after Wadia’s death in 1986, editing the former newsletter and running the Centre from its offices in Theosophy Hall, Churchgate, a dual position he held until his failing health forced him to quit in 1998. As pointed out by one scholar, it was Ezekiel’s influence that eventually “helped transform the PEN All-India Centre from a formal institution which functioned primarily as a mediator, into a more flexible meeting place for new and established poets” (Bird 213). Before the year ended, Ezekiel married a member of the Bene Israel community, Daisy Jacob Dandekar. The couple will have two daughters (Kalpana and Kavita) and one son (Elkana). In May 1954, Ezekiel resigned from the Weekly to work for the Shilpi advertising agency, first as copywriter and then in a managerial position that allowed him to spend six months in New York for professional development. This gave him the opportunity to visit California and to attend poetry readings and other cultural events in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (Although the 1956 poetry scene in the Bay Area did not impress him as much as it did Rayaprol, who had experienced it only a few years before while a student at Stanford University.)

Not long after this trip, Ezekiel left Shilpi for a job at the Chemould Frames company, where his duties as factory manager did not prevent him from developing a lasting relationship with his employer, the art entrepreneur Kekoo Gandhy. This helped the young poet and critic to expand his links to the Bombay art world, and in turn prompted Gandhy to open Gallery Chemould in 1963, one of only two commercial galleries at the time, which Ezekiel would manage for a while.

With his appointment as lecturer and head of the English Department at Mithibai College, in 1961, Ezekiel eventually settled in the teaching profession of his parents, thus embarking on an academic career that would continue at the University of Bombay and include visiting professorships at the University of Leeds (1964) and the University of Chicago (1967), and a three-month residency at the National University of Singapore (1988‒89). However, if teaching represented the backbone of Ezekiel’s professional life for two decades and a half, it was through the correlated activities of literary editor, critic, book reviewer, and cultural organizer that the he acquired the reputation and exercised the influence which would grant him a foundational (if not patriarchal) status within the canon of postcolonial Indian poetry in English.

Sometime in the early 1950s, Ezekiel became involved with the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF), an affiliate of the Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose various activities, focused on literature and the arts (and secretly funded by the CIA), were meant to counter Soviet influence in western Europe, Africa and Asia. In India, two of the initiatives sponsored by the ICCF were the monthly newsletter Freedom First (1952‒2015) and the bi-monthly of arts and ideas Quest (1955‒76). Ezekiel was the first editor of Quest (August 1955‒February 1958) and subsequently served as its reviews editor (1961‒67). He also contributed articles and book reviews to both publications, and in 1980‒83 served as editor of Freedom First, his focus then being on current events and political issues, consistent with the ideology of the journal. (Another Bombay periodical funded—in this case directly—by the CIA was Imprint, which published mainly condensed versions of Western bestsellers. Run by a couple of American expatriates, it was edited by the Australian journalist Philip Knightley with Ezekiel as associate editor from 1961‒67.) Under Ezekiel’s editorship, Quest was a significant venue for the new poetry, publishing such emerging authors as Kersey Katrak, Arun Kolatkar, Dom Moraes, R. Parthasarathy, Gieve Patel, Srinivas Rayaprol and others, and paving the way for the special issue on contemporary Indian poetry in English (January‒February 1972), guest edited by Saleem Peeradina and subsequently published as a book, which was one of the earliest and remains one of the most influential postcolonial anthologies of its kind. Even more innovative, if short-lived, was the quarterly Poetry India, which featured poems written in English or translated from the main regional languages, plus an international section represented by British and North American authors (but also including translations from the Hebrew). Ezekiel edited all six issues (January‒March 1966 through April‒June 1967), and, with the second, took over the ownership and management of the publication from the Bombay-based Parichay Trust (The original plan included a series of books, but the only one which Ezekiel was able to publish, under his own name, was Gieve Patel’s first collection, Poems, in 1966).

A few years later, the model adopted by Ezekiel in Poetry India (in which English served as both creative and target language) inspired another little magazine, Vagartha, founded and edited by the scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee with the financial support of the Joshi Foundation. In the course of twenty-five quarterly issues published over six years (1973‒79), Vagartha featured contemporary poetry as well as short fiction, critical essays, discussions and interviews, either in English or translated from other Indian languages, namely Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu. Ezekiel contributed a total of six poems (five of his and one translated from the Marathi with Vrinda Nabar), as well as the translator’s note to Snake-skin and Other Poems of Indira Sant (1975). A decade after the magazine closed down, Ezekiel was behind the idea of “[p]reserving the best of Vagartha in book form” (Ezekiel and Mukherjee, 13), which resulted in Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry (1990), co-edited with Mukherjee (ironically, the title was suggested to Mukherjee by Naipaul, during a “casual encounter” in Delhi in early 1989).

Overall, the 1960s were Ezekiel’s most productive decade. In addition to his academic and editorial responsibilities, his art and literary criticism for various publications, and his involvement in conferences and seminars (especially those organized by P.E.N. India and the ICCF), he managed to publish two collections of poetry (The Unfinished Man, 1960, and The Exact Name, 1965) and one of plays (Three Plays, 1969), in addition to five edited books: Indian Writers in Conference: Proceedings of the Sixth P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Mysore, 1962 (1964), Writing in India: Proceedings of the Seventh P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Lucknow, 1964 (1965), An Emerson Reader (1965), A Martin Luther King Reader (1969), and Poetry from India (co-edited with Howard Sergeant, 1970).

In 1972 Ezekiel joined the English Department at the University of Bombay as reader in American Literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1984. The subject was as new to the Indian universities as the Poet was new to the subject, but his appointment, like his rapid promotion to the rank of full professor, disregarded his lack of a doctoral degree or other scholarly credentials and considered instead his reputation as a poet and critic, his recent volumes on Emerson and Dr. King, and his visits to the United States, especially the second, in 1967, when among other things he was invited to give a talk at the Thoreau Festival at Nassau Community College, in Garden City, New York. Another significant change, and a step forward in the process of canonization, was Ezekiel’s moving from Writers Workshop (recently founded by the poet, critic and translator P. Lal, who had been one of the first reviewers of A Time to Change) to the more established and prestigious (as a colonial legacy) Oxford University Press, which would publish his next four books, namely the poetry collections Hymns in Darkness (1976) and Latter-Day Psalms (1982), a volume of Collected Poems: 1952-1988 (1989), and one of Selected Prose (1992). The first two books appeared in the New Poetry in India series, launched in 1976 and also featuring Keki Daruwalla’s Crossing of Rivers, Shiv K. Kumar’s Subterfuges, R. Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage, A.K. Ramanujan’s Selected Poems, and Parthasarathy’s anthology, Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. (Parthasarathy, in his role as OUP editor, was probably the link between his former colleague at Mithibai College and the publisher). Ezekiel’s growing reputation as the standard-bearer for Indian poetry in English is further evidenced by the frequent interviews he gave to literary journals and popular magazines (making him probably the most interviewed poet in the canon); by the many lecture tours and conference he attended over the next two decades, both in India and abroad; by his editorial consultancies for publishers and poetry series; by the Sahitya Akademi Award (1983) for Latter-Day Psalms and the Padma Shri (1988) for his contribution to Indian literature in English; and by the growing number of periodical issues (Journal of South Asian Literature 1976, The Journal of Indian Writing in English 1986) and monographs (Karnani 1974, Rahman 1981, Raizada 1992, Das 1995, Sharma 1995, etc.) devoted to him.

In Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987), the first comprehensive and detailed overview of the field, the American scholar Bruce King presented Ezekiel as a watershed in the evolution of Indian poetry in English; the poet who “brought a sense of discipline, self-criticism and mastery to Indian English poetry”, separating poetry as a “hobby, something done in spare moments” from poetry as a vocation, to be pursued with “craftsmanship and purposefulness”. In King’s lapidary statement, “Other wrote poems, he wrote poetry” (91). A few years later, King included Dom Moraes and A.K. Ramanujan in his study of the Three Indian Poets (1991) who “may be considered the founders of modern poetry in English” (2005, 1). A genealogy was thus created, with Ezekiel as the oldest of the three, as well as the one with the longest and strongest connection to India. (Moraes, it should be remembered, first acquired literary fame in England and was considered a British poet until he returned to India, as a “stranger”, in the 1970s; while Ramanujan lived in the United States since the 1960s).

But canonization is a double-edged sword, and by the early 1990s Ezekiel’s stature as the founding father and doyen of Indian poetry in English was being questioned and scaled back, as some anthologists (Vilas Sarang and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in particular) expressed reservations about his achievement. Likewise, his critical authority and judgment came occasionally under scrutiny when, as a consultant, his advice resulted in the publication of some younger poets to the exclusion of others; or also in relation to the ban imposed on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in India (1988) and Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja in Bangladesh (1994), decisions which Ezekiel supported (as did the Indian P.E.N. and many other Indian intellectuals and writers).

While continuing to publish articles and book reviews, and to write poetry (often in response to requests from magazine editors, and as yet uncollected), most if not all of this late work is more a testimony to Ezekiel’s reputation and influence than a proof of his enduring strength and relevance as a poet or critic.

During the four-year period (1994‒98) when the writer and academic R. Raj Rao (a former student of Ezekiel’s at the University of Bombay) met regularly with him to gather information for an authorized biography, the poet’s memory and living conditions progressively deteriorated, until he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and admitted to a nursing home, where he died on 9 January 2004. His passing marked the beginning of what has been called the annus horribilis of Indian poetry in English, which also claimed the lives of Moraes and Kolatkar, on June 2^nd and September 25^th, respectively.

Spanning more than four decades, Ezekiel’s eight poetry collections represent a remarkable achievement per se, let alone when considered along with the poet’s concomitant activities as teacher and mentor, editor, reviewer, cultural organizer and public intellectual at large.

If A Time to Change passed virtually unnoticed in England, in India the reviews were more than a few and generally appreciative. Not surprisingly, the twenty-eight-year old’s inquiring, self-analytical and quintessentially urban poetic persona, combined with a conscious disregard for the nationalistic, spiritualistic, or folkloric themes characteristic of most Indian poetry written before and after the Independence (most notably by such prominent figures as Sarojini Naidu and Sri Aurobindo), and a corresponding indifference to India’s past or present history, archeological landscape, and current events appealed immediately to a younger generation of urban, college educated, anglophone readers and emerging writers, some of whom were about to study abroad themselves (Jussawalla, Moraes, Ramanujan), or had recently returned (Rayaprol), while others simply shared Ezekiel’s connection to Bombay’s vibrant cultural scene (Eunice de Souza, Katrak, Kolatkar, Patel, etc.). The book begins with a secular hymn and ends with five examples of prose poetry (a genre which Ezekiel, regrettably, did not follow up), their increasingly religious overtones culminating in the visionary call of “Encounter” (“Within the pandemonium of the street I felt his voice, like a command”). The voice’s imperative advice (to “Simplify,” to “Move in living images”) provides a programmatic answer to the question raised at the beginning, in the Eliotian call for renewal, regeneration and redemption: “How shall we return?” The introspective, questioning approach of “A Time to Change”, and its underlying preoccupation with the conflict between reason and emotion (the “passion of mind or heart”, in which the intellect struggles to comprehend and therefore control the relentless power of bodily desires), set the tone for the entire book and, to some extent, define Ezekiel’s poetic quest throughout his career. If this quest has a religious dimension, it is initially the modern man’s coming to terms with a state of godlessness, and the consequent need—liberating and terrifying at the same time—to make his own laws and fashion his own creed. (A patent masculine attitude toward religion, rooted in the Old Testament and defined by oedipal impulses and anxiety). The title poem provides a crescendo of Ezekiel’s concerns: “The pure invention or the perfect poem, / Precise communication of a thought, / Love reciprocated to a quiver, / Flawless doctrines, certainty of God” (the word “god”, either capitalized or not, singular or plural, recurs eighteen times in the thirty-one poems that make up A Time to Change), ending with a realization that is also a course of action (“These are merely dreams; but I am human / And must testify to what they mean”). Not to discard or disregard these “dreams” but “testify to what they mean” (that is, to use them as evidence of their fallacy); and not a mere possibility but the only possible way, which for a poet means “To own a singing voice and a talking voice”. This double ownership (involving technical mastership as well as control over its results) is indeed what makes a poet and defines his art and belief; therefore “Practising a singing and a talking voice / Is all the creed a man of God requires”—a simple yet genuine profession of faith that simultaneously prefigures Ezekiel’s career as poet and critic.

Life in the English metropolis helped Ezekiel view his hometown of Bombay as a metropolitan space to be lived, experienced and described not only as a physical and social environment, made of “markets and courts of justice, / Slums, football grounds, entertainment halls, / Residential flats, palaces of art and business houses, / Harlots, basement poets, princes and fools” (“Something to Pursue”), but also as a projection and a reflection of the poet’s Geistesleben, or life of the mind. As such, it may be alternately oppressive, menacing, unnerving, enticing or liberating. It may combine the sense of being “continually/ Reduced to something less than human by the crowd” (“The Double Horror”) with the contrasting feelings (desire and deceit, excitement and dissatisfaction) that are the inevitable outcome of clandestine love affairs for which a big city, with its variety of anonymous public spaces, provides an opportunity as well as a backdrop. The “primeval jungle” evoked in the ekphrastic “On an African Mask” becomes the metaphoric urban jungle of poems such as “The Double Horror” and “Commitment”, where the strong imagery seems to draw on German Expressionist cinema, as

vast organised

Futilities suck the marrow from my bones

And put a fever there for cash and fame.

Huge posters dwarf my thoughts, I am reduced

To appetites and godlessness. I wear

A human face but prowl about the streets

Of towns with murderous claws and anxious ears,

Recognising all the jungle sounds of fear

And hunger, wise in tracking down my prey

And wise in taking refuge when the stronger roam.

(“Commitment”)

One of the distinguishing features of A Time to Change (and most of Ezekiel’s poetry until the mid 1960s) is a formal awareness that manifests itself in the consistent (and occasionally self-conscious) adherence to simple metrical structures. It features both stanzaic and free verse poems (the former typically consisting of three or four heroic quatrains rhyming ABAB, with variants made of seven or ten unrhymed lines each); and while it stands in obvious contrast to the recycled Victorian and Edwardian models of Ezekiel’s predecessors (and some of his lesser contemporaries), its actual achievement is rather more conservative (and subtly bifronted) than most critical assessments, focused as they are on the break with the past, seem prepared or willing to admit.

Ezekiel’s second collection is titled Sixty Poems (1953), but actually consists of sixty-five: nineteen written since the publication of A Time to Change, thirty-seven dating from the London years (1950‒51), and nine from the period immediately before (1945‒48), starting when Ezekiel was a graduate student at Wilson College. This was followed by The Third (1959), featuring thirty-six poems written over five years (January 1954‒December 1958) and showing a crystallized emphasis on the poet’s main subject so far, namely a sustained effort to scrutinize, analyze, and rationalize his own self from different angles, perspectives and grammatical persons (first as well as second or third). This may be challenging, daunting, intimidating, as the poet himself admits, confessionally, in “What Frightens Me”.

Myself examined frightens me.

(…)

I have long watched myself

Remotely doing what I had to do,

At times ashamed but always

Rationalising all I do.

I have heard the endless silent dialogue

Between the self-protective self

And the self naked.

I have seen the mask

And the secret behind the mask.

Subtly undermined by the ambiguity of “remotely” (does it refer to “watched” or “doing”?), as well as deflated by the hyperbolic “always rationalising all I do”, this self-awareness exercise ultimately leads to the disconcerting realization that the process of identity construction (the “image being formed”) has uncertainty as its end result. Thus the self is always, inevitably (but also salvifically) both a project and a projection of its own self.

If the three collections published in the 1950s document Ezekiel’s poetic development and growing influence, the next two represent the culmination of such a progress, resulting in the establishment of a solid reputation as the foremost representative of the “new poetry” in India.

The Unfinished Man was inscribed with a stanza from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by W.B. Yeats (one of Ezekiel’s early influences) and consists of ten poems written in 1959; while The Exact Name (1965) bears an epigraph from the Spanish poet (and recent Nobel Prize winner) Juan Ramón Jiménez, and features twenty poems written between 1960 and 1964. Thematically, they represent a broadening and sharpening of ongoing or lingering concerns, articulated in a style that is more accomplished and self-confident, but also less spontaneous and more controlled by metrical patterns that are responsible for the overall rhythmic regularity, mannered elegance and emotional detachment of the collection.

The “barbaric city sick with slums”, with its “million purgatorial lanes, / And child-like masses, many-tongued”, may still be grim and overwhelming, but instead of a nightmare it manifests itself as an “old, recurring dream” (“A Morning Walk”, from The Unfinished Man), or a daydream in which the poet indulges as he “moves / In circles tracked within his head” and

dreams of morning walks, alone,

And floating on a wave of sand.

But still his mind its traffic turns

Away from beach and tree and stone

To kindred clamour close at hand.

(“Urban”, from The Unfinished Man)

In either case, it is a less threatening and more accommodating environment, and one that points to a future gesture of acceptance and reconciliation. The Exact Name features some of Ezekiel’s most anthologized and critically discussed poems, most notably “The Night of the Scorpion” and “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher”, but also a few lesser results (“In India”, “Fruit”, “Art Lecture”), and at least one (“Conjugation”) that reads more like an impromptu exercise than anything worthy of publication.

Eventually the watcher and the watched (whose interplay defines much of Ezekiel’s self-analytical verse up to this point) merge in one poetic voice in the more spontaneous and straightforward poems written in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, which in Collected Poems form two sections, “Poems (1965‒1974)” and “Poems Written in 1974”, placed between The Exact Name (1965) and Hymns in Darkness (1976). They are marked by a more direct and confrontational approach to religion, as in “Theological” (“Lord, I am tired / of being wrong … Your truth / is too momentous for man / and not always useful”), but also a more confident and questionable display of sexist attitudes (“My motives are sexual, / aesthetic and friendly / in that order”, from “Motives”), while the unprecedented attention to the lower strata of society (“The Truth about Dhanya”) lacks either empathy or originality. Formally, they show a preference for free verse and, with “The Poet Contemplates His Inaction”, the introduction of the three-line stanza that will characterize much of Ezekiel’s later poetry.

Hymns in Darkness gathers twenty-seven poems written mostly in the early 1970s, including a few that are among the poet’s most significant and popular. Early on in the book, “Background, Casually” and “Island” (respectively Ezekiel’s most directly autobiographical poem and his most eloquent poetic transfiguration of Bombay) stand next to each other to stress a double commitment—“to stay where I am” and to be where I stay (or we could say, more existentially, where I dwell). The background of the title finds a more eloquent and ironic expression in the poet’s admission to “have become a part of [the Indian landscape] / To be observed by foreigners” (like a monument as well as a result of literary canonization). As for the background itself, “Unsuitable for song as well as sense” (a tongue-in-cheek statement, which the poem vividly contradicts), “the island flowers into slums / and skyscrapers, reflecting / precisely the growth of my mind. / I am here to find my way in it”. Thus Ezekiel renews his commitment to both, his birthplace (“I cannot leave the island, / I was born here and belong”) and reason as a way to navigate and find one’s bearings in both, urban sprawl and mind growth.

Overall, Indian subjects are more prominent and diverse in this than in Ezekiel’s previous collections. The often-quoted “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T. S.” and “The Railway Clerk” provide a first taste of an ongoing series called “Very Indian Poems in Indian English”, whose main goal is to render the peculiarities of a demotic idiom that, typically (and perhaps inevitably), has more potential and opportunities in fiction than in poetry. “The Truth about the Floods” and “Rural Suite” are unprecedented excursions in the countryside, the former a found poem based on a newspaper account, the latter apparently derived from a letter; “Guru” and “Entertainment” offer disillusioned portraits of spiritual leadership and street life; while “Ganga” conveys the truth about domestic employment in a way than “The Truth about Dhanya” had not cared to do (to the extent that the closing line, “These people never learn”, may refer to the employee or the employers—or both). A different, more subtle Indian thread running through this collection is represented by Ezekiel’s dialogue with the country’s Vedic and classical Sanskrit literature, as documented by such poems as “Tribute to the Upanishads”, the nine “Poster Poems” (based on Daniel H. H. Ingalls’ 1965 translation of Vidyākara’s Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, a major compilation of Sanskrit love poetry), and especially the sixteen “Hymns in Darkness”, inspired by the Vedic hymns which Ezekiel read, in English translation, in a darkened room of his apartment on Bellasis Road (King 55).

The “Very Indian Poems in Indian English” and the “Poster Poems”, like “The Egoist’s Prayers”, the “Passion Poems”, the “Songs for Nandu Bhende”, the“Postcard Poems”, “Nudes 1978”, “Blessings”, and “Edinburgh Interlude”, are groups of poems which Ezekiel started writing in the 1970s and included, partially, in Hymns in Darkness, Latter-Day Psalms and the final section of Collected Poems, featuring poems from 1983–1988. The “Poster Poems”, “The Egoist’s Prayers” and the “Passion Poems” were originally exhibited on posters, while the “Songs for Nandu Bhende” were written for, and set to music by, Ezekiel’s nephew, resulting in an album the two co-produced. Altogether, these groups of poems are representative of Ezekiel’s later poetry, characterized by a more consistent use of free verse and condensed forms, such as hymnic or aphoristic utterances, often delivered in brief stanzas of variable length. This original style, combining a dialogic approach with an exegetic impulse, has a precedent in “For William Carlos Williams” and a more recent (and complex) manifestation in “Tribute to the Upanishads”; but its most substantial and ambitious formulation is to be found in “Hymns in Darkness” and “Latter-Day Psalms”, each representing Ezekiel’s poetic response to a major text in Hinduism and Judaism, the two religions that are closest to his Indian background and his Jewish ancestry, respectively. Written in June 1978 in a hotel room in Rotterdam, the “Latter-Day Psalms” consist of nine poems corresponding to Psalms 1, 3, 8, 23, 60, 78, 95, 102 and 127 (and “chosen as representative of the 150 Psalms”), followed by a personal commentary on the book as a whole. (Incidentally, the same, nine-plus-one structure reappears in the “Ten Poems in the Greek Anthology Mode,” written between 1983 and 1988 and included in the final section of Collected Poems).

Inevitably, Ezekiel’s poetry and reputation as a poet have somehow detracted scholarly and critical attention from his prose. Although some articles (most notably “Naipaul’s India and Mine” and “Poetry as Knowledge”) have been reprinted more than once, at the time of this writing (2022) Ezekiel’s journalistic work can be sampled in Adil Jussawalla’s 1992 selection and in the 2008 commemorative volume Nissim Ezekiel Remembered. Together, they provide a representative and eloquent if partial view of the poet’s achievement as public intellectual, book reviewer, art critic, editorialist, and newspaper columnist. Indeed, his critical spectrum and adaptability were such that he wrote with equal comfort and acumen for highbrow journals such as Quest, its continuation New Quest, and Freedom First, but also for daily newspapers (Times of India, Sunday Times), and popular magazines (Mid-Day), while his contributions ranged from papers delivered at international conferences and seminars to art and literary criticism, and from reviews of books, exhibitions and theater productions to current events and politics, social commentary (e.g., the “Minding My Business” columns in the Sunday Times of 1980‒82) and even television programs (for The Times of India in the mid-1970s and for Mid-Day a decade later).

As a pathbreaking poet, mentor, editor and critic, Ezekiel played an important, indeed unique, role in the development of a canon for Indian poetry in English. No survey or assessment of the field would be complete without acknowledging his various and substantial contributions to it, just like no such acknowledgment would be fair which did not consider the particular, historical as well as geographical, extent and limitations of Ezekiel’s role and influence. While many Bombay poets who emerged in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s benefited from his mentoring skills, his editorial advice and his overall support, many others looked elsewhere for updated models: to American modernism, the Beat Generation or even more experimental forms such as concrete and minimalist poetry. The same historical perspective is necessary to properly appreciate Ezekiel’s own poetry, its formal adherence to pre- and post-World War Two British models (Yeats, Eliot, Auden, all the way to the Movement), its content-related concerns and its particular cultural context. It may also help explain and understand why Ezekiel’s poetry does not speak to Indian poets and readers today in the same way as does the poetry of some of his contemporaries, such as Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra or A.K. Ramanujan, all of whom, unlike Ezekiel, have been the subject of recent and substantial international critical attention.

Poetry

A Time to Change. London: Fortune Press, 1952.

Sixty Poems. Bombay: Ezekiel, 1953.

The Third. Bombay: Strand Bookshop, 1959.

The Unfinished Man. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1960.

The Exact Name. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1965.

Hymns in Darkness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Latter-Day Psalms. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Collected Poems: 1952-1988. Introduction by Gieve Patel. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989 and 2005.

Prose

Selected Prose. Introduction by Adil Jussawalla. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Plays

Three Plays [Nalini – Marriage Poem – The Sleepwalkers]. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1969.

Song of Deprivation. Delhi: Enact, 1969.

Don’t Call It Suicide: A Tragedy. Madras: Macmillan, 1993.

Translations

Snake-skin and Other Poems, s of Indira Sant. Translated from the Marathi by Vrinda Nabar and Nissim Ezekiel. Bombay: Nirmala Sadanand Publishers, 1975.

Edited Books

Indian Writers in Conference: Proceedings of the Sixth P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Mysore, 1962. Bombay: PEN All-India Centre, 1964.

Writing in India: Proceedings of the Seventh P.E.N. All-India Writers’ Conference, Lucknow, 1964. Bombay: PEN All-India Centre, 1965.

An Emerson Reader. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1965.

A Martin Luther King Reader. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1969.

Poetry from India. Edited by Nissim Ezekiel and Howard Sergeant. Oxford; New York: Pergamon, 1970.

Artists Today: East-West Visual Arts Encounter. Edited by Ursula Bickelmann and Nissim Ezekiel. Bombay: Marg Publications, 1987.

Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry. Edited by Nissim Ezekiel and Meenakshi Mukherjee. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990.

Secondary Sources

Anklesaria, Havovi, ed. Nissim Ezekiel Remembered. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008.

Balarama Gupta, G.S. Nissim Ezekiel: A Critical Companion. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2010.

Bharucha, Nilufer E., and Vrinda Nabar, eds. Mapping Cultural Spaces: Postcolonial Indian Literature in English: Essays in Honour of Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Vision Books, 1998.

Bharvani, Shakuntala. Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008.

Bird, Emma. “A Platform for Poetry: The PEN All-India Centre and a Bombay Poetry Scene.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1-2, 2017, pp. 207-220.

Chaudhuri, Amit. “Nissim Ezekiel: Poet of a Minor Literature.” A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 205–22.

Chindhade, Shirish. Five Indian English Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, R. Parthasarathy. Atlantic, 1996.

Das, Bijay Kumar. The Horizon of Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry. B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1995.

Dwivedi, Suresh Chandra, ed. Perspectives on Nissim Ezekiel: Essays in Honour of Rosemary C. Wilkinson. Kitab Mahal, 1989.

Karnani, Chetan. Nissim Ezekiel. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1974.

King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford University Press, 1987.

King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets: Ezekiel, Moraes, and Ramanujan. Delhi; Oxford University Press, 2005.

Krätli, Graziano. “Crossing Points and Connecting Lines: Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes in Bombay and Beyond.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1–2, March 4, 2017, pp. 176–89.

Kurup, P.K.J. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: With Special Reference to the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan, and R. Parthasarathy. Atlantic, 1991.

Mahan, Shaila. The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Classic, 2001.

Mishra, Sanjit. The Poetic Art of Nissim Ezekiel. Atlantic, 2001.

Narendra Lall, Emmanuel. Poetry of Encounter: Three Indo-Anglian Poets. Sterling, 1983.

Raghu, A. The Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Atlantic, 2002.

Rahman, Anisur. Form and Value in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Abhinav, 1981.

Raizada, Harish. Nissim Ezekiel, Poet of Human Balance. Vimal Prakashan, 1992.

Rao, R. Raj. Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography. Viking/Penguin Books India, 2000.

Samal, Subrat Kumar. Postcoloniality and Indian English Poetry: A Study of the Poems of Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra and A.K. Ramanujan. Partridge, 2015.

Sharma, Tika Ram. Essays on Nissim Ezekiel. Shalabha Prakashan, 1995.

Talat, Qamar and A.A. Khan. Nissim Ezekiel: Poetry as Social Criticism. Adhyayan, 2009.

Thorat, Sandeep K. Indian Ethos and Culture in Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry: A Critical Study. Atlantic, 2018.

Tilak, Raghukul. New Indian English Poets and Poetry: A Study of Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A K Ramanujan and Jayanta Mahapatra. Rama Bros., 1982.

Graziano Krätli

Read Nissim Ezekiel on IWE Online

Prayer Poems Night of the Scorpion & Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher

Critical Biography

Gieve Patel (1940–2023) | Graziano Krätli

A.K. Ramanujan | Guillermo Rodríguez Martín

3. Collections of Indian folktales in English

5.2 Novella in Kannada

Arun Joshi | Kanak Yadav

Kanak Yadav

Imtiaz Dharker | Shalini Srinivasan

Shalini Srinivasan

Read Imtiaz Dharker on IWE Online

Copyedited by Atul V. Nair.

Suniti Namjoshi | Anandi Rao

Works Cited

Anandi Rao

Poems by Suniti Namjoshi

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

Copyedited by Atul V. Nair.

Arundhati Roy | Vaibhav Iype Parel

Header Image: Wikimedia Commons

Saleem Peeradina | Pramila Venkateswaran

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | Nalini Iyer

Nalini Iyer

Edited by: Sreelakshmy M

Aravind Adiga | Ulka Anjaria

Ulka Anjaria

Edited by: Sreelakshmy M

Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) | Graziano Krätli

Graziano Krätli

Read Nissim Ezekiel on IWE Online

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