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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-and-on-to-the-piccadilly-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.

Copyedited by Atul V. Nair.
Jul 31
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Suniti Namjoshi | Anandi Rao

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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.

Poems by Suniti Namjoshi
CardinalSycorax: Prologue
The author would like to thank Jhani Randhawa for their editorial support.
Copyedited by Atul V. Nair.
Jul 17
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Cardinal | Suniti Namjoshi

By Poetry No Comments 
The female cardinal became jealous of the male one. 'Why
can't I be bright red? When I fly by I want people to say,
"There goes a cardinal, the flashiest bird  west of the Indies."
Why can't I be the norm of the species?'

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

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

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

'Repetition works,' the cardinal told him.
Suniti Namjoshi. Sycorax: New Fables and Poems. Penguin Books, 2006, p. 49.
Published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
More by Suniti Namjoshi
Sycorax: Prologue
Jul 09
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Migrations | Keki N. Daruwalla

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

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

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

Mother used to ask, don’t you remember my mother?
You’d be in the kitchen all the time
and run with the fries she ladled out,
still sizzling on the plate.
Don’t you remember her at all?
Mother’s fallen face
would fall further
at my impassivity.
Now my dreams ask me
If I remember my mother
And I am not sure how I’ll handle that.
Migrating across years is also difficult.
From Collected Poems 1970-2005 by Keki N. Daruwalla
Published with permission from Penguin Random House India
Read more by Keki N Daruwalla
A Ghana Scholar Reflects on His Thesis
Jun 19
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“Language” by Sudeep Sen

By Poetry No Comments

LANGUAGE

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

 

My typewriter is multilingual,
its keys mysteriously calibrating

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

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

My tongue was born promiscuous —
speaking in many languages.

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

                          *

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

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

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

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

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

Published with the permission of the author. “Language” has previously appeared in Inkroci – Magazine of Culture and Cinema.
May 29
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Srilata K.

By Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
K., Srilata. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online, 29 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/srilata-k/ .

Chicago:
K., Srilata. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 29, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/srilata-k/ .

Q:  To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?

Srilata K.: Like most Indians, I grew up in a multi-lingual environment. My schooling, however, was largely in English and the poetry and fiction I read were mostly in English. Quite soon, it became the language I thought in – though I did revert to thinking in Tamil every now and then, depending on the circumstances. I was never self-conscious about that switch. So even now, while I write in English, that English is imbued with Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and a sprinkling of other Indian languages. I don’t think that question has the urgency it had in the 60s. Languages choose us depending on the paths that nation states forge for themselves. The important thing is to learn to use the language that has chosen us as well as we can in the writing of poetry.

 

Q: In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?

S.K.: I have been hugely influenced by AK Ramanujan’s translations of Sangam poetry. I tend to fall back on that register unconsciously – especially these dates in my own re-imagining of the Mahabharatha. Kamala Das too shaped me as a woman poet. I don’t think my poetry exists outside of this long tradition. I may or may not be conscious of where I am located vis a vis the tradition but that’s another question.

 

Q: What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic process?

S.K.: I don’t think of readership at all when I write. I think that anxiety could get in the way of composition. That said, I find that there is a lot of interest in younger people. In Chennai, for instance, there is an active slam poetry presence and so many young people write poetry. Poetry often thrives outside of English classrooms I think!

 

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

S.K.: I translate Tamil poetry into English. And as I said earlier, I think the tonality of Tamil and sometimes words, seep into my own poetry even though it is in English. I have actually written about this in my poems.

 

Q: Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?

S.K.: For close to two decades I taught a workshop course in Creative writing at IIT Madras. I continue to teach it Sai University, Chennai. A large part of the course consists of poetry. At first, students assume that they won’t get poetry. But I find they grow into it. Trying to write poetry I think helps them understand it better. As a teacher, I refrain from over-explaining the poem, letting the words take over.

 

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

S.K.: Let me just say I follow it all with great interest!

 

A poet, an author, a columnist, a translator, a writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, at Sangam house and at the Yeonhui Art Space in Seoul, Professor K. Srilata currently teaches English literature at Sai University and formerly at IIT-Madras. Her recent book is This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story (2022).

 

 

Header Image Courtesy: Srilata K.

 

Mar 19
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Meena Kandasamy

By Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Kandasamy, Meena. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online, 20 March 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/meena-kandasamy/

Chicago:
Kandasamy, Meena. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 20, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/meena-kandasamy/ .

Q. To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?

Meena Kandasamy: I wrote in English because of a really strange reason. My mother tongue was Tamil, but the closest government school near my home was a Kendriya Vidyalaya. I had two working parents, so they enrolled me there—and I ended up learning Hindi and English. In many ways I resent this happening in my life because I lost the special access to learning my own mother-tongue. So I started writing in English. I do not think that this question is relevant at all—there are a lot of people who are primarily using English as a mother-tongue, as their principal language. So, why not use it for poetry?

 

Q. In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?

M.K.: I have read the works of the 19th and 20th century poets which you mention but I won’t call them my influence. I however do consider Kamala Das a major inspiration and influence. AK Ramanujan is someone I likewise admire, more for his body of translations than for his own work. You are right—I do consider my work as something that belongs to this 200-year-old tradition of Indian writing in English.

 

Q. What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic process?

M.K.: I do think that there is a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English. I do not think that we can only look at book sales and decide that there’s a negligible audience. Because a lot of people don’t buy books, but read poems online, watch stuff on YouTube, read pdf files and such-like. I do not consider the audience, for me everyone is an audience, even people who do not read English because that poem can reach them eventually through a translation.

 

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

M.K.: Yes, I read and translate poetry from Tamil. I also write sometimes, but only for my friend, lover or myself. I’m not yet confident of sharing it with the outside world. I think Tamil as a language and as a literature has been influencing me for a really, really long time.

 

Q. Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?

M.K.: Yes, I’ve taught it in workshops. I too used to feel very anxious—thinking how can poetry be taught. But very fortunately, you often work with students who are poets in some rudimentary form—they are either readers or writers or someone who likes the feel of language, so it is a joy to teach poetry.

 

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

M.K.: I think a lot more people are writing poetry because of the proliferation of social media, and that can only be a good thing.

Meena Kandasamy describes herself as “an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist and translator.” She is the author of poetry collections such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010). She has also written three novels: The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019).
Mar 06
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Arundhathi Subramaniam

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

Q. To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query? 

Arundhathi Subramaniam: I use English because it is my language. It’s as simple as that. Deeply regrettable historical circumstances brought it into our lives many centuries ago. But it is now ours. We don’t use the language as passive inheritors but as confident collaborators. Rather than deny or purify or amputate our past, we can choose to critique, acknowledge and reinvent it. Critique doesn’t have to mean contempt; that wonderful Indian sacred poem, the ninda-stuti, in which poets quarrel with their gods without ever ceasing to love them, teaches us that. I do speak other Indian languages, and am grateful for the glorious multilingual inheritance of this subcontinent. But English today is as Indian as cricket, democracy, or green chillies, or sabudana. It is time to stop apologizing for it. And I hope the question will not have to be posed to another generation of Anglophone Indian poets. 

Q. In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition? 

A.S.: I was born and grew up in the city of Bombay, which was home to multiple Indian poets—Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla, Eunice de Souza, Gieve Patel, Dilip Chitre, Imtiaz Dharker, Dom Moraes and several others. Their work pervaded my life; and their poems are even today part of the heritage of echoes I carry around with me. As a practitioner of poetry in English, I’d certainly see myself as part of a tradition of Anglophone Indian poets. At the same time, I see myself as beneficiary of many traditions. I grew up reading TS Eliot, Basho, Omar Khayyam and Rilke, and studying British and American literature, but also listening to kritis by Tyagaraja, padams by Kshetrayya, Rabindra Sangeet (which my mother learnt, alongside Carnatic music) and movie songs by Majrooh Sultanpuri! By which I mean that mine was a complex inheritance, as it is for every Indian. It included influences from East and West, and a wonderfully messy amalgam of classical, traditional and popular elements.  Later in my life, I also reclaimed for myself another literary inheritance: the poetry of the Bhakti tradition, including the work of Akka Mahadevi, Tukaram, Nammalvar and Kabir, among others. I see them as an utterly integral part of my lineage as well.  

In short, while I am most certainly Indian, culturally and spiritually, in some deep and indefinable way, I see myself standing at the crossroads of multiple intersecting cultural tributaries. This is what it means to be Indian and alive today. Borges said, ‘Every poet creates his own precursors’. I’m still creating mine.  

Q. What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic process? 

A.S.: The readership exists, and is growing. The internet is clearly the most significant reason. It has made poetry much more widely available—to a small segment of the human population perhaps, but still a much wider global readership. The upsurge of national and international literary festivals has also played a vital role. Poetry is a portable medium; it travels well. The live nature of public readings also motivates listeners to return to a form they may otherwise have lost touch with.  

I am delighted when my work is read and appreciated, but at the same time, I’m glad to be practitioner of a quiet verbal art. And if that means a smaller readership, I’m fine with it. I keep the faith in the power of the word to pervade lives imperceptibly but profoundly. I value that, and I do believe that human life would be much poorer if we lost that muted sorcery of word and pause.

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

A.S.: I was for more than a decade the India editor of a website (the Poetry International Web) that was largely devoted to poetry in translation. I worked closely with translators of multiple languages, and also personally co-translated poems from Tamil and Gujarati (working with CS Lakshmi and Naushil Mehta respectively). For the Penguin anthology of Bhakti poetry I edited, I worked widely with translators, and did some translations of the Tamil poet Abhirami Bhattar myself. So, the work with translation has been a long-standing one. How did it influence me? Enormously. It allowed new breezes into my life; sharpened my awareness of parallel literary subcultures; honed my own art in many ways.

 And yet, long before these overt trysts with translation, I do believe growing up in this hectically polyglot culture had its impact on my life and poetic practice as well. It was inevitable. As Indians, we’re all multilingual in varying degrees, and we’re translating in our heads all the time. It can seem like cultural confusion to an outsider, but it makes for a hugely rich lived experience that is an enormous asset for anyone, and more so for an artist.

Q. Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught? 

A.S.: I’ve conducted poetry workshops (in universities, literary festivals and for cultural organizations) since the 1990s. The aim has always been to help people to become better listeners, which, in turn, I hope will help them in time to become better practitioners. More importantly, I hope it helps make them more responsive to life itself, and that’s the first step to enriching one’s life experience, isn’t it? 

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

A.S.: I’m not on FB or Instagram very often, but some of what I see looks like work that hasn’t been given a chance to ripen. I think the instantaneous nature of communication today is a great possibility, but it also takes away from the long hours of gestation that are necessary for anything to reach fruition. If you put a first draft into the public domain, you often end up doing it a great injustice. More rigour, more reflection, more revision, more reading, and above all, more living–these are also vital components of a writer’s life.

Arundhathi Subramaniam is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2020 for the poetry collection When God is a Traveller . Besides being well known for prose on Indian spirituality, she is also an arts critic, anthologist, performing arts curator and poetry editor. More information about her can be found in https://arundhathisubramaniamin.wordpress.com/
Feb 20
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Anjum Hasan

By Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' No Comments
Cite this Interview

MLA:
Hasan, Anjum. “Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art.’” Indian Writing In English Online, 20 Feb 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/anjum-hasan/ .

Chicago:
Hasan, Anjum. “Questions of the ‘State’ of the ‘Art.’” Indian Writing In English Online. Febbruary 20, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/anjum-hasan/.

Q. To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?

Anjum Hasan: English is a given and to go on doubting it is to obscure the more important question of how to judge what is being written in the language. So many decades of poetry in English later we still don’t have enough conversations about form, matter, style and value. Even the question about language is not really a deep question. I think it ought to be not why we write in English but how we write in English in a multi-lingual reality, often with more than one language in our heads and certainly in our environments.

Q. In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?

A.H: Yes of course. And also later poets such as Sujata Bhatt, Mamta Kalia, Tabish Khair, Robin Ngangom and so on.

Q. What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic process?

A.H: The readership is small but it’s there. My only collection of poems, Street on the Hill, published by the Sahitya Akademi in 2006, is still in print. A few copies sell every year.

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

A.H: I read a little poetry in Hindi and Urdu but most of my reading is in English. I think I have stayed with English for too long, and am just starting now to return as it were to reading more in my mother tongues.

Q. Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?

A.H: I do teach poetry on occasion. Most of the “teaching” involves reading good – or what I consider good – poems together as I find that many young or even older people interested in writing have read very little. But what surprises me every time is the receptivity to poetic language once one starts to unpack it.

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

A.H: I don’t read them often but there seems to be a difference between using these platforms to share published work and being encouraged by the ease of sharing to toss off poems for instant consumption and easy forgetting.

Anjum Hasan’s collection of poetry titled Street on the Hill was published by the Sahitya Akademi in 2006. She is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti, and Lunatic in My Head, and collections of short fiction A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures. Her work has appeared in publications such as  Granta, Paris Review, and Wasafiri. More information is available on her official website: https://www.anjumhasan.com/home
Feb 13
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Mamang Dai

Mamang Dai

By Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' No Comments
Cite this Interview

MLA:
Dai, Mamang. “Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art.’” Indian Writing In English Online, 13 Feb 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/mamang_dai/ .

Chicago:
Dai, Mamang. “Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art.’” Indian Writing In English Online. February 23, 2022. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/mamang_dai/ .

Q: To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?

M.D: What are the circumstances that led to writing poetry using English– I think the question is relevant (since it is still asked), or asked the other way round as to why we don’t write in our mother tongue. The answers are varied and continuing. There is, of course, the straight answer that many languages are non-script. The English language was the medium of instruction in schools and we use the language we learned to read and write in. Then there are exophonic writers, by choice. If a writer is comfortable using a different language why is mother tongue perceived to be more necessary to write in.

Q: In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th  century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th  century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?

M.D: I don’t know about feeling part of the two-hundred-year-old tradition!  I was reading Tagore quite a bit, and Kamala Das and Nissim Ezekiel. I just feel happy writing, and happy and inspired reading poetry from ancient times in ballads and sagas to modern times.

Q: What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic
process?

M.D: Sometimes you read something and almost jump up in joy or fall off the chair. Such a thing is poetry. I think there will always be need for poetry. There is this happiness angle, the consolation and connection that makes us feel part of a larger reality that comes through with the beauty and power poetry.

When writing I don’t think of readership. At the most I might think of some friends and how we might be meeting and talking about, and pondering on the way we are!

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

M.D: No.

Q: Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?

M.D:  No, never taught poetry.

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

M.D: Actually I am not active on social media and I don’t know much about poetry on social media platforms. But during the Covid pandemic lockdown online poetry festivals were a lifeline—just to see poets coming forward and reading was succour indeed.

Mamang Dai is a poet and novelist from Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh. A former journalist, Dai also worked with World Wide Fund for nature in the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspots programme.
In 2003 she received the state Verrier Elwin Award for her book Arunachal Pradesh, The Hidden Land featuring the culture, folklore and customs of Arunachal’s different communities. A Padma Shri awardee, Dai is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2017, for her novel The Black Hill, in English.
Dai lives in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh, India.
Read Mamang Dai on IWE Online
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