Poetry

A fellow poet who writes in another Indian language recently asked me what I proposed to write in the preface to an anthology on Anglophone poetry in India. “The usual sales pitch about Indians writing in English?”, he asked dryly.

The question gave me pause. It reminded me of the way in which Indian poets in English are often viewed – as a self-congratulatory bunch of cronies. Ironically, those within the scene are aware of a very different lived-in reality – one of simmering disagreement, a fair share of self-doubt, near-inaudibility (compared to their compatriots working on the novel), and hours of plodding work, punctuated, if they are lucky, by an occasional murmur of appreciation.

Getting past the knee-jerk suspicion isn’t always easy, however. Mention ‘post-Independence Indian poetry in English’ and you usually find you’ve stepped into a minefield of clichés at every word. Take an overview of the minefields and you’re in nothing short of a war zone.

What makes this a particularly dodgy war zone is its state of terminal triviality, at least in public perception. A war zone that offers no fodder to high-decibel media broadcasters, hungry for sound-bites, or to a certain tribe of academics that reads literature for sociology over sensuousness, is considered to be of little consequence. And so, the chances of a cease-fire are dismal, and the barrage of stereotypes persists.

At international literary conferences, Indian poets in English are still asked at least once why they don’t write in their ‘own’ languages – and on occasion, less euphemistically (and in a blithe display of cultural illiteracy), why they don’t write in ‘Indian’. At literary conferences within the country, the same poets are invariably informed at some point ( always in English) that their work is crafty but inauthentic, dexterous but derivative, cosmopolitan but cosmetic. Caught in this crossfire of self-perpetuating clichés, the lot of the Indian poet in English isn’t particularly enviable. That is, it must be added, until she writes her first successful novel. At that point, the glamour of international markets and media attention often confers upon her a certain blessed immunity.

Despite the clunky discourse that continues to hover around it, however, Indian poetry in English endures, even flourishes, seventy years after Independence. Publishers may be few and far between, the royalties meagre, the critical climate thick with indifference or theoretical bluster, and the poets themselves bewildered by disputes over their identity, even their existence. But poetry, in its mysteriously resilient fashion, continues to be written, shared and discussed (if sometimes with more passion than discernment).

To any genuinely interested reader – one who is willing to be surprised, one who reads poetry for reasons of enchantment, insight, the sudden start of recognition – it is evident that this is a scene of considerable vibrancy. It is clear that English is employed here not as a language on loan, but as the rich, spluttering resource of the marrow and the bloodstream. It is just as clear that the formal poise of the best of this verse is not the result of a soulless craft, but of the ongoing struggle to wrest the magical out of the mundane. It is equally clear that in their most interesting work, these poets aren’t trying to be Indian or contemporary or cutting-edge or postcolonial in any trite or self-conscious way. They are merely working their way through perennially challenging terrain – between the wastelands of language, pulverized into truism, and those dark holes of human experience, never quite domesticated by syntax.

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The above is a series of extracts from an anthology of Indian Poetry in English that I had edited for the Sahitya Akademi six years ago. Since that Introduction, the exuberance in the poetry scene seems greater than ever. It may not be high noon yet, but it may well be 9 a.m. for English poetry in India.

“Contemporary Indian Poetry” illustrated by Guru G

New manuscripts surface every few weeks. At poetry competitions, the submissions of verse are often remarkably self-assured. There is a rising curiosity about performance poetry. The ubiquitous literary festival, although often dominated by an unimaginative panel discussion format, seems to have realised the importance of carving out a niche for poetry ­ primarily because poetry is increasingly recognised as a spoken form, arresting for its temporality, directness, and immediacy (characteristics it shares with the performing arts). The internet and social media are flooded  with verse, and spontaneous poetry addas and writers’ groups seem to have mushroomed in big cities and small towns all over India.

It could be argued that there seems at times to be more heat than light, more amateurism than an attention to poetry as an art of verbal rigour. However, festivity is in the air. And it is welcome.

What assails Anglophone poetry is primarily an excess of misguided comment and opinion. There are various brands of nativism and cultural dogmatism that continue to bemoan its one-dimensionality, its lack of rootedness, its architecture of frontage without courtyard, its inauthenticity, its elitism. These allegations may seem to be old hat. And yet, the arguments perpetuate themselves in various ways. Journalistic reviews and academic commentary continue to reflect some of these biases. The danger of such naïve slotting is its impact on poetic practice: the insidious pressure it puts, particularly on emerging practitioners, to fit into pigeonholes and easily definable categories.

Periodically, questions are aired about whether the poetry of the past couple of decades is ‘different’ from the earlier decades. How is it distinct, for instance, from Arun Kolatkar’s imagistic precision in invoking a dusty pilgrimage town or a pageant of Mumbai’s pavement dwellers, Kamala Das’ exploration of female sexuality, Agha Shahid Ali’s soaring poetry of loss and longing for Kashmir, Keki Daruwalla’s hawk’s eye view of history and civilisation, Jayanta Mahapatra’s unflinching gaze at the landscape of Odisha or Adil Jussawalla’s fragmented, temporally fractured verse of the 1970s? These are reductive questions that do scant justice to the breadth and variety of the scene – either of the past or the present. Instead, they give rise to a ‘hashtag’ approach which reduces poetry to a set of easy labels or Unique Selling Points. Implicit in them is an unwillingness to engage with a poet’s oeuvre with any depth or attentiveness.

And so, the scene is often needlessly polarised and demarcated into ‘political’ and ‘experimental’ or ‘language’ poetry, utterly disregarding its complexity and variety. In this attempt to extract rudimentary theory or glib conclusions what is lost is a capacity to respond to the aliveness of verse – the compound of content, style and tonality, and its interplay with a cultural context and historic moment that makes a poem live.

Looking back at the past couple of decades, there is evidence of much ferment and variety. In some of the finest work, there is a curiosity and cultural self-awareness that is neither naively parochial, nor at variance with a cosmopolitan outlook. There is a political alertness that is not at loggerheads with self-reflexivity. There is a formal vigilance that does not spell a commitment to obscurity. There is a capacity for social engagement that does not spell disdain for the craft.

Stylistically, the sonnet is to be found cheek by jowl with the ghazal, the villanelle with the cadence of the Vedic chant. Free verse forms are equally dynamic and fluid, used with no less daring and self-assurance. Tonally, the poetry is more varied than ever before. A common charge has been the predominance of irony in English poetry. Irony certainly continues to remain a presence, but an abundance of other modes and tenors are also to be found.

There is, for instance, the terse, minimalist mode of C.P. Surendran, the economy and astringent wit of Vijay Nambisan, as well as Jeet Thayil’s ability to follow imperatives of mood and melody to arrive at a kind of ‘sound sense’, a versatile soundtrack that is as reflective as it is lyrical. There is the intellectually exploratory, chiseled verse of Ranjit Hoskote as well as Mamang Dai’s elegiac lyricism on the animistic memory that suffuses the forests and rivers of Arunachal Pradesh. There is Manohar Shetty’s deft capacity for biting satirical statement (that is far from monochromatic in its use of irony), as well as Anand Thakore’s lush, full-throated musicality, particularly evident in his book, Mughal Sequence. There is Sudeep Sen’s curiosity about the Sanskrit shloka and the Italian ottava rima as well as Ravi Shankar’s playful need to invoke the Bop and the pada.

The preoccupations are no less varied. There is Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s need to implicate cultural studies and literary theory in poetry as well as Meena Alexander’s need to speak of the Pamba river and the ash trees of New York in the course of a single poem. There is Vivek Narayanan’s impulse to explore the verbal succulence of the 12^th century Tamil Ramayana of Kamban as well as Anjum Hasan’s atmospheric, unhurried evocation of Shillong captured at a moment in personal history. There is Karthika Nair’s powerful engagement with the women of the Mahabharata as well as Sampurna Chattarji’s need to understand how an extraterrestrial protagonist might perceive the contemporary world.

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It would be unfortunate to ignore the many shades of political comment in Anglophone poetry. To dismiss it as politically pasteurised, as some have done, is quite simply to not read it. There are, on the one hand, the overt voices of protest against caste violence associated with poets such as Meena Kandasamy, or more recently, Chandramohan Sathyanathan. There are several unequivocal and strong poems here that demand a hearing.

At the same time, there is nothing anaemic or apolitical about the voice of Hidimbi in Karthika Nair’s retelling of the Mahabharata, in which the voice of the tribal woman articulates issues of marginalisation and powerlessness in an adroit blend of conviction and craft. Or in E.V. Ramakrishnan’s “Falling Figures”, about the chilling newspaper image of the “mob with petrol bombs” moving deeper “into the eyes of a man/ frozen in fear, his hands folded”. Or in Imtiaz Dharker’s anthem to all those who are proud to owe allegiance to alternative modes of citizenship, proud to proclaim they “must be from another country”. Or in Mona Zote’s poem about Ernestina, a woman sitting on the hills of modern-day Aizawl, contemplating the sinister political and spiritual wasteland about her.  Or in Tabish Khair’s “Immigrant”, in which a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale becomes a device to articulate a resonant question about cultural and political identity. These are random examples. There are many layers of political comment and pungent social critique that are simply waiting to be unravelled by vigilant readers.

Myth remains important, but not narrowly revivalist. Vijay Seshadri’s compelling poem on the close of the Mahabharata, “The Long Meadow”, raises searching questions about dharma, love, and human bewilderment in a world where “only the complicated, ambiguous victories are worth having.” My own work (including recent poems on archetypal figures such as Shakuntala, Kartikeya and Avvaiyar) is often fuelled by an impulse to blur the sensual and the spiritual, the secular and sacred, and yet remain alert to dogmatism on both sides of the divide.

Interestingly, several Anglophone poets have been involved with serious translation projects, working closely with various regional literatures. The ways in which such an ongoing transaction makes for mutual dialogue and synergy are obvious. This should lay to rest the unexamined charges of cultural insularity and exclusivism that are frequently laid at the door of this poetry.

There have been translations by bilingual poet Robin Ngangom of contemporary Manipuri poetry, Desmond Kharmawphlang and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih of Khasi poetry and folklore, Sudeep Sen and Sampurna Chattarji of modern Bengali poetry, Mustansir Dalvi of Marathi and Urdu poetry, E.V. Ramakrishnan of contemporary Malayalam poetry, to cite just a few examples.

Additionally, the engagement with varied strands of a traditional literary inheritance is clearly deep and committed, laying to rest the equally unsubstantiated charge of ahistoricity. A.K. Ramanujan’s translations of the Kannada vachana poets and Tamil Shaiva poets as well as Dilip Chitre’s renditions of Tukaram have been followed by several significant translation projects in recent times.

Mani Rao’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, K. Srilata’s translations of medieval Tamil poetry, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translations of Prakrit love poetry reveal a fascination with a spectrum of literary traditions: from the sacred to the secular.

Indeed, it is quite remarkable how many contemporary Anglophone poets have been motivated to create spirited, modern-day versions (often colloquial, vigorous and slangy) of the rich counter-cultural legacy of Bhakti poetry. These include independent volumes of translation by Vinay Dharwadker and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra of Kabir, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Ravi Shankar’s work on Andal, Ranjit Hoskote’s translations of Lal Ded, Jerry Pinto’s of the Marathi women Bhakti poets, Gieve Patel’s project on Akho, Anju Makhija’s work on Shah Abdul Latif, Vijay Nambisan’s volume on Narayana Bhattatiri and Puntanam Namboodiri, among others.

In an anthology of Bhakti poetry that I edited in 2016, I had the opportunity to commission translations, and found several poets willing to engage in an immersive process of exploration, often finding unexpected moments of literary kinship in the process. These ranged from Keki Daruwalla’s translations of Narsinh Mehta and Anand Thakore’s of Surdas to Mustansir Dalvi’s versions of Rahim, Prabhanjan Mishra’s of Salabega, and my own of Abhirami Bhattar.

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The above is a general reflection on a poetic climate, rather than a comprehensive catalogue of Anglophone Indian poets of the past twenty-five years. There have been several anthologies in recent times that have offered varied ways of mapping the scene: based on chronology, region, gender and theme. There is clearly room for more.

A recent anthology of poets below forty (edited by Nabina Das and Semeen Ali) brought to light a host of younger names, including Akhil Katyal, Jennifer Robertson, Rohan Chhetri, Goirick Brahmachari, to name just a few. Recent years have seen the publication of volumes of poetry from senior poets, such as Keki Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel, as well as the late Eunice de Souza, Kersy Katrak and Srinivas Rayaprol.

Looking back at my own formative years, it is time, I believe, for an anthology that compiles the work of that vibrant cluster of poets associated with Mumbai’s Poetry Circle, with which I was associated in the 1990s (along with Ranjit Hoskote, Jerry Pinto, Masud Taj, Menka Shivdasani, R. Raj Rao, T.R. Joy, Gayatri Majumdar, Anju Makhija, and Marilyn Noronha, among others).

In recent years, I have revisited work by poets who have emerged as strong and distinctive voices in the past decade, such as Sridala Swamy, Tishani Doshi, Sharanya Manivannan, Kala Krishnan Ramesh  and Mustansir Dalvi, as well as encountered interesting new voices, such as Sohini Basak, Sumana Roy, Urvashi Bahuguna, Rochelle Potkar, Arjun Rajendran, Ellen Kombiyil, Subhashini Kaligotla, Anupama Raju, Arun Sagar, Sabitha Satchi, Shobhana Kumar, Rohinton Daruwalla and Michael Creighton – all of which point to a scene of continued vibrancy.

There is also the advent of a popular global genre – Instapoetry – that suggests that poetry is morphing into avatars that would have seemed unthinkable less than a decade ago. While the literary merits of such work are the subject of heated debate, it is clear that  Instapoetry has touched a chord. The readership for the work seems to be a sizeable millennial segment, hungry for an accessible articulation of emotional issues ranging from cultural identity to personal trauma.

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One hopes that the exuberance in the contemporary poetry scene will also produce in time a generation of responsive and fine-tuned readers and listeners. For the most interesting poems compel the attentive reader to evolve a language of response that is strenuous and subtle.

Such a critical climate at times seems difficult to envision. The great technological efflorescence that has democratised articulation often seems to foster a culture of pat opinion and definitive conclusion, rather than one of nuanced dialogue and receptivity. The art of listening seems more beleaguered than ever before. And yet, one continues to hope that the clamour will make room with time for subtler and more considered responses. Above all, one looks forward to a more focused examination of the work of individual poets rather than the ‘clump’ approach that so often makes sweeping assertions about context and irons out specificity.

To return to the case of the poet who asked me the question about the ‘sales pitch’, let me say, no, I am not ecstatic about the state of Indian poetry in English. (But then I am not ecstatic about poetry; only, at times, about poems.) What I do know is that Indian poetry in English is alive. And like all things alive, it engages, it annoys, it provokes, it excites. On several occasions, it has given me the jolt of wonder for which I turn to poetry in the first place.

To allow oneself to be engaged, however, one also needs to work at being a certain kind of reader one who is rigorous but generous, exacting yet not mean-spirited, inclined to listen rather than impatient to legislate. Such readers, I believe, do invariably find much here to revisit and much to look forward to. ­­­­­­­­­

Sections of this essay are excerpted from Another Country: An Anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, published by the Sahitya Akademi, 2011, edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam

This is an updated version of the essay that appeared in Indian Literature :  “Introduction: Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 61, no. 1 (297), 2017, pp. 33–39.

Published with permission from the Sahitya Akademi and Arundhathi Subramaniam.