Published on 11 July 2022.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Krätli, Graziano “R. Parthasarathy.” Indian Writing In English Online, 11 July 2022, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-parthasarathy/ .
Chicago:
Krätli, Graziano “R. Parthasarathy.” Indian Writing In English Online. July 11, 2022. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-parthasarathy/.
Rajagopal Parthasarathy (b. 1934), better known as R. Parthasarathy, was born in Thirupparaithurai, a village in the Tiruchirappalli district of Tamil Nadu, and educated at Don Bosco High School and Siddarth College, both in Bombay (now Mumbai), where he subsequently taught at various colleges. In 1962, as a member of Mithibai College’s English Department (headed by Nissim Ezekiel), he was part of a small group of Indian poets who met Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gary Snyder during their visit to India, attended a reading of their poetry, read their own in front of them, and mulled over the Beats’ notoriously dismissive reactions (i.e., Orlovsky’s statement, “If we were gangster poets, we’d shoot you,” and Ginsberg’s remarks on Indian writing in English as being “literary and derivative”). In 1963-64 he was a British Council scholar at the University of Leeds, at the time a vibrant poetry scene with John Glover, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Redgrove, Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, and Jeffrey Wainwright among its main protagonists (Smith and Wainwright would be included in one of Parthasarathy’s first publications, the five-poet, sixteen-page booklet Poetry from Leeds, co-edited with J.J. Healy and published by Writers Workshop in 1968). Nevertheless, the year spent in England was an eye-opener. As it happened to other Indians before (and after) him, the direct experience of English society, English life, even English weather, proved a traumatic corrective to the largely literary and colonial education he had received in India.
Upon his return to India with a postgraduate degree in English Studies, Parthasarathy held more teaching jobs before joining Oxford University Press, for which he worked as literary editor, first in Madras (now Chennai) (1971-82) and then in Delhi (1978-82). During this time, he was also a participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (1978-79), and a member of the advisory board for English at the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters (1978-82).
While in Madras, Parthasarathy published the two books that would grant him a place in the canon of Indian poetry in English: the anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) and the long poem Rough Passage (1977). In 1982 he joined the English department at the University of Texas at Austin, working as assistant instructor in English (1982-86) while pursuing a doctoral degree. There he found a mentor and a friend in the novelist Raja Rao (1908-2006), one of the authors he had edited at Oxford University Press, who was teaching in the Philosophy department. Parthasarathy then spent his entire academic career, from 1986 until his retirement in 2009, at Skidmore College, a private liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he taught courses on poetry and translation, focusing on Non-Western literatures and the South Asian region, and was director of the program in Asian Studies (1994-98). In 1993 he published a translation of the Tamil epic The Tale of an Anklet: The Cilappatikāram of Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ, which he had started at the University of Texas and for which he was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Citation (1994) and the first A. K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation (1996), established by the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies to recognise the work of the late poet, folklorist, and translator. Over the years, his own poetry as well as his translations of classical and contemporary poetry in Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu have appeared in literary periodicals in India and the United States, including the Chicago Review, Indian Literature (Delhi), Poetry (Chicago), Salmagundi, and World Literature Today. More recently he edited and translated a selection of Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit (2017) and contributed translations to The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (2020). As for the publications that have been repeatedly announced as forthcoming (a new collection of poems, a book of essays, and translations of the sixth-century Tamil epic Maṇimēkalai, and of modern Tamil poetry), none of them has appeared at the time of this writing (2022).
Parthasarathy’s relationship with India’s former colonial ruler went through the familiar (and, to some extent, predictable) phases of anglophilia, cultural shock, and disenchantment. What turned his juvenile enthusiasm into critical disillusionment was primarily his direct experience of English life and society during the year he spent in Leeds, as mentioned above. He voiced such a change of heart (and the corresponding change of attitude towards India, from “hypercritical” to receptive and empathetic) in the poems that would form his debut collection, published more than a decade after his return to India and on the eve of another departure and a more permanent residence abroad. Rough Passage is a long poem divided into three parts and thirty seven shorter poems in three-line stanzas. The three parts represent the successive stages of expatriation (“Exile”), estrangement (“Trial”), and repatriation (“Homecoming”), while the triadic arrangement allows for short phrasal units and sharp, staccato statements:
Through holes in a wall, as it were,
lamps burned in the fog.
In a basement flat, conversation, etc.
(“Exile 2”)
We live our lives forever taking leave.
Our world, love, moves within
the familiar poles of eye, hand,
is eclipsed by the word.
(“Trial 11”)
I see him now sitting at his desk.
The door is open. It is evening.
On the lawns the children play.
(“Homecoming 12”)
Chronologically, the book covers ten years of the poet’s life, starting almost programmatically– “As a man approaches thirty he may / take stock of himself.” (“Exile 1”)–and ending on a much more subdued statement: “Later, I watched my forty years / swim effortlessly ashore in a glass of beer.” (“Homecoming 13”). At both ends of this minor existential spectrum, the poet is scrutinising himself–self-consciously and rather affectedly–as he balances the mixed bag of past achievement against the low expectations of an uncommitted future: “Hereafter, I should be content, / I think, to go through life / with the small change of uncertainties.” (“Homecoming 14”). All too often, however, this supposed self-analysis is spoiled by such platitudes as “Experience doesn’t always make for knowledge” (“Exile 1”), “There is something to be said for exile: // you learn roots are deep,” and, a few lines later, “the most assuring thing // about the past is that it happened” (“Exile 2”). Perhaps the most famous and enduring of these “gnomic utterances” (as the scholar Homi Bhabha called them in his review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement of February 3, 1978) are the two couplets, placed at the beginning and the end of the book, that are meant to encapsulate the poet’s experience of cultural idolatry and subjugation. Over the years, they have been quoted often enough to become emblematic of the modern anglophone Indian’s divided identity. Parthasarathy used the first one, “He had spent his youth whoring / after English gods” (forming the beginning of the third stanza of “Exile 2”), as the title of a semi-autobiographical account originally published in 1970 and reprinted in 1982. “Whoring after English Gods” traces the evolution of Parthasarathy’s attitude towards England and the English language–from his first introduction in high school until his actual encounter with England–which, he would realise, “existed nowhere, except in my mind” (“Whoring after English Gods,” 66). According to this account, it was this realisation that prompted him to write the poem with the “whoring couplet” in early 1964. At the same time, if living in England helped the once obsessive anglophile to get England “out of [his] system once and for all,” it also gave him “a new understanding” of himself and his once deprecated native country, so that, when he finally returned to India, he felt “strangely at home” (”Whoring”, 70). The latter is a more revealing expression than Parthasarathy perhaps realised, as it seems to conflate the titles of two works in which another Indian English poet, Dom Moraes (1938-2004), addressed his own relationship with India: the 1970 television episode Return as a Stranger, and the third volume of his autobiography, Never at Home. Disenchantment with England also meant realising that “English will always remain a foreign language to us,” and consequently, that “I could never function as a poet in English” (67). For someone who had been “exposed … to English ideas and attitudes” (66), had read English literature in college, and even before going to England had seen one of his poems published in the Times Literary Supplement, such a realisation must have been difficult to accept. Nevertheless Parthasarthy, borrowing the old ‘mistress versus wife’ metaphor, was eager to state that “The affair with the English language had been prolonged and tempestuous. It is over now, and I have, as the phrase goes, settled down with Tamil. She is still a shy, obstinate bride; but, like all brides, she will, I am sure, come round. The relationship will then, perhaps, mature into love” (71). The bride’s shy and obstinate behavior refers presumably to the fact that Parthasarthy did not learn Tamil until after his English interlude, as he mentions earlier in the same essay (65). Read in this context, the second signature couplet, “My tongue in English chains, / I return, after a generation, to you” (which opens “Homecoming 1”), describes the poet’s linguistic repatriation, while hinting at the bride’s potential for freeing the poet’s tongue from English chains, or at least loosening them enough to allow him to be “at home in two languages” (71). As Parthasarathy explains in the next paragraph,
Ever since I moved to Madras in 1971, my poems have become, increasingly, a sort of overture made with the aim of starting a dialogue between myself and my Tamil past. Though written in English, they are closer in style and content to Tamil verse…. (72)
However,
The problem of the Tamil poet today is to invent afresh an idiom free from the stylistic and prosodic conventions of a language with a two-thousand-year-old literary history (72).
By calling “My tongue in English chains” a “theoretical statement of this problem” (72), Parthasarathy hints at the possibility that these chains may be inevitable, at least for the time being, and to the extent that his proficiency in English provides him with a more effective tool to voice his “emotional, psychic make-up” (73), whose roots lie deep in Tamil language and culture. This leaves him poetically in a limbo, of which the third part of Rough Passage, “Homecoming,” represents an exploration of sorts. If “Exile”–allegedly written “over four years between 1963 and 1966” (70), that is, during Parthasarathy’s stay in England and immediately after–charts the author’s disenchantment with India and his own unfulfilled self, and “Trial” explores the resulting ennui through the opaque and distorting lens of love (and the metaphoric mesh of ancient and medieval Indian poetry), in “Homecoming” Parthasarathy confronts his own predicament as man and poet. The section begins with “My tongue in English chains” followed by a seemingly programmatic statement:“How long can foreign poets // provide the staple for your lines? / Turn inward. Scrape the bottom of your past. Ransack the cupboard // for skeletons of your Brahmin childhood,” (“Homecoming 2”); proceeds through a taut fabric of familial and cultural landscapes; then ends with a crumbling self-portrait at forty—deflated, disillusioned, and dejected.
The second half of “Whoring after English Gods” is an appreciation of the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, culminating in the statement
Ramanujan’s repossession, through his poetry, of the past of his family, and of his sense of himself as a distillation of the past, is to me a signal achievement, and one that was to be of value to other poets who were looking for a kind of poetry to teach them the use of their own voice. I know of poems which, if I had not come across The Striders or Relations, I should perhaps have written differently. (78)
Rough Passage provides a few examples of such poems, most notably “Homecoming 6,” where the alienating experience of facing a mirror in the bath (“Silent, / eyes saccadic, I stare at himself. // Often confront a stranger / in the scratched glass, older perhaps, who resembles my father”) is a direct reference to Ramanujan’s “Self Portrait” in The Striders (1966). Other, unacknowledged (and possibly unconscious) references are to the poetry of Srinivas Rayaprol (1925-1998), notably in a line like “We live our lives forever taking leave” (from “Trial 11”), which paraphrases, in a concise, more “poetic” form, the dispiritedness of Rayaprol’s “the impotent / Excitement / Of our normal lives / Lies in seeking / Them elsewhere” (from “Les Saltimbanques,” in the 1968 collection Bones and Distances), as well as in the somber self-assessment that concludes “Homecoming,” which is remindful of Rayaprol’s pessimistic Weltanschauung in Married Love and Other Poems (1972).
In the absence of a further collection, Parthasarathy’s poetry since Rough Passage is represented by contributions to various literary periodicals and anthologies, both in India and the United States. If they show a natural and predictable evolution of the themes explored in his debut collection–especially the “dialogue between himself and [his] Tamil past,” (“Whoring,” 72)– these poems also reflect the developments that have shaped Parthasarathy’s life and creative work since the late 1980s, particularly his relocation to the United States, where a successful academic career allowed him to bury his “English gods” without actually freeing his tongue from “English chains.” Instead, these chains were repurposed for broader creative ends. “For me, translating a poem is as much a creative act as writing an original poem”: such a statement, made in a 2003 lecture on “The Politics and Poetics of Translation” (175), was both supported and justified by Parthasarathy’s teaching as well as by his scholarly and creative work since the early 1990s, which had focused increasingly on Indian literature in translation and, in the years following his monumental engagement with the Cilappatikāram, had produced English versions of Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu poetry, as well as articles on Tamil literature and the practice of translation.
This creative shift is reflected in Parthasarathy’s own poetry from the early 1990s on, which fed on his parallel work as translator (“Kannaki” and Kannagi” are both poems inspired by the heroine of the Cilappatikāram), or wrestled with its ambiguous condition (“Your country is not a suitcase: / you are not a traveler shuffling, with tongue in cheek, // the loose change of words. / For twenty years you have tried / to pry this book open,” from “The Attar of Tamil”), or meanders into the poet’s—and India’s—“divided house” (“Srirangam,” “At Ghalib’s Tomb,” “Remembered Village”) from a suburban backyard in Upstate New York (“Snow Country,” “Salem Drive”).
At the same time, the emphasis on translation distinguishes Parthasarathy’s two editorial selections of contemporary Indian poetry. Although three decades separate the anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) from the “Indian Poetry Portfolio” he guest-edited for Poetry magazine in 2007, the difference between them is not only chronological or typological, but also, more significantly, one of content, which signals a substantial change in the editor’s perspective on his subject.
Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) was one of the first six titles in the New Poetry in India series, which Oxford University Press launched in 1976-77 with Parthasarathy’s editorial input (the other five were individual collections by Keki Daruwalla, Nissim Ezekiel, Shiv K. Kumar, A.K. Ramunajan, and Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage). Over the years, it became one of the most successful and widely read anthologies of its kind. Featuring fifty odd poems by only ten poets (the most exclusive selection to date), it is representative of the canonical status of Indian poetry in English at the time of its publication (except for the glaring absence of Adil Jussawalla; apparently, Ezekiel had recommended to include Jussawalla, but Parthasarathy, for unexplained reasons, decided not to). The introduction is an attempt to account for the “phenomenon of Indian verse in English,” which paradoxically “did not seriously begin to exist till after the withdrawal of the British from India” (3) and apparently is affected by two interdependent problems. One is the “quality of experience” that a poet “would like to express in English,” but from which he or she is alienated by the language itself as both communication tool and symbol/legacy of historical circumstances. The other is the lack of any “special Indian-English idiom”,i.e., compared to “the liveliness and idiosyncrasy of usage one finds in African or West Indian writing” (3), that would enable such a poet to express the quality of Indian experience in a culturally distinct if not unique way. Unlike “two outstanding exceptions in fiction” (7), namely Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) and G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948), Indian poets have been mostly unable to “extend the resources of the English language or even to Indianize it” (7). The few who “have been successful” (but only to some extent) are supposedly featured in the selection.
Less canonical and contemporary than the anthology, the “Indian Poetry Portfolio” features a personal selection of thirteen poems by thirteen poets in “thirteen of the twenty-four languages … recognized by India’s National Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi)” (407), namely Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Parthasarathy’s own contribution consists of one English-language poem and five translations or co-translations from the Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu ad Urdu. Linguistically, the 2007 portfolio matches almost entirely Poetry’s 1959 “Indian Issue,” edited by the expatriate Tamil poet M.J.T. Tambimuttu and featuring thirty-eight poems, thirty of which translated from twelve regional languages. In an afterword entitled “Indian Poetry Today” (a puzzling choice, given the scope of its content and the fact that it draws largely from a 1994 article on “Tamil Literature”), Parthasarathy laments the fact that
Bogged down in tradition, Indian poetry has not been successful in reinventing the past. Nor have there been systematic attempts to translate, over a period of time, poetry from other countries that might have offered new directions to poetry in the Indian languages. Even within the country, attempts to translate the great body of poetry in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil into the modern Indian languages have been infrequent. On the other hand, English poetry … has served as a model to be imitated, often with unhappy results. (“Indian Poetry Today”, 407)
With this statement (arguable and partly outdated), and especially with his “position portfolio,” Partharathy seems to indicate translation as a way—perhaps the only possible way—of “reinventing the [Indian] past” by creating a “robust, contemporary English idiom” (407), thus finally breaking the impasse created by historical circumstances and their problematic legacy (i.e., the iconic English chains). In fact, translation has often contributed, and continues to contribute, to linguistic modernisation and poetic renewal around the world. What Parthasarathy does not seem to realise (or prefers to neglect) is that anglophone poetry in post-Independence India has found its voice—or one of its many voices—in and through translation from both Indian and non-Indian languages, but also, most subtly and significantly, from British and American English. This creative process was started by such canonical figures as Dilip Chitre, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, A.K. Ramanujan and others, and continues with the work of younger poets writing in India as well as in the many charted and uncharted territories of the Indian diaspora.
Today, it is difficult to see how any of these younger Indian poets would consider Parthasarathy an influence, quote his work (as they often do with some of the poets mentioned above), or refer to either of his catchphrases to describe their experience as Indians writing in English. If, after the publication of Rough Passage, “My tongue in English chains” became a familiar line, its popularity and resilience say more about the state of Indian literary criticism at the time than they do about Parthasarathy’s role within the canon of postcolonial Indian poetry. Many of the poems in Rough Passage were originally published in anthologies of “Commonwealth poetry” and “New Poetry from India,” and their relevance and value are defined by the brighter lights of a bygone era.
Bibliography
POETRY
Rough Passage. New Poetry in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977.
TRANSLATION
The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India – The Cilappatikāram of Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Edited anthologies
Poetry from Leeds [Ken Smith, D.W. Debby, Jeffrey Wainwright, Sheila Mann, John Comer]. Edited by J.J. Healy and R. Parthasarathy. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968.
Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. New Poetry in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976.
“Indian Poetry Portfolio.” Poetry (Chicago) 190, no. 5 (September 2007): 389-418.
Articles
“Meeting Allen Ginsberg.” Writers Workshop Miscellany 11 (1968): 65-66.
“Whoring After English Gods.” In Perspectives: A Collection of Essays by the staff of the SIES College of Arts and Science. Edited by Amritlal B. Shah and S.P. Bhagwat (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1970), 43-60.
“The Chessmaster and His Moves: The Novel as Metaphysics.” World Literature Today 62, no. 4, Raja Rao: 1988 Neustadt Laureate (Autumn,1988): 561-566.
“The Exile as Writer: On Being an Indian Writer in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24, no. 1 (1989): 1-11.
“Tamil Literature.” World Literature Today 68, no. 2, Indian Literatures: In the Fifth Decade of Independence (Spring 1994): 253-259.
“Writing Between the Lines: The Politics and Poetics of Translation.” Indian Literature 51, no. 1 (237) (January February 2007): 168-186. Originally delivered as the 2002-2003 Edwin M. Moseley Lecture at Skidmore College.
“Indian Poetry Today.” Poetry (Chicago) 190, no. 5 (Sep., 2007): 407-418.
