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Contemporary Indian Poetry

Nov 28
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Jeet Thayil

By Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' 2 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?

J.T: It was a relevant question in the Sixties. Today, not so much, except among regional-language poets who will contend that those of us who write in English are somehow inauthentic. This is an obsolete notion. There’s a reason why this questionnaire is in English. It’s the only way Indians can communicate with each other. I don’t speak Hindi, or Malayalam, and hope I never have to.

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?

J.T: I am very much a part of the two-hundred-year-old tradition of Indian poetry written in English. I know there are poets who do not consider themselves part of this tradition, and I think it’s a pity. Even if your interest is the breaking of tradition you should know what it is, to break it better. I also consider myself part of the thirteen-hundred-year-old tradition that goes back to the first poem written in the English language, Beowulf. And there is a third tradition of which I am a part. I am an Indian poet, which makes me a modern embodiment of the tradition of Indian poetry that goes back some three thousand years to the Rig Veda,
the oldest poetic tradition of them all.

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?

J.T: I write for myself and the poets I admire, living and dead. Classrooms and audiences come into it later, when I take it  outside. If I want to be kind, I pick poems that might amuse, entertain or delight, always keeping in mind that there are readers who will resist delight with all their might.

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

J.T: I read, write, think and dream in only one language, the Indian language also known as English.

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?

J.T: I have taught in several countries and in various settings, from the classroom lecture to the graduate workshop to the online interactive course. I’ve learned a few things over the years. You can teach students how to read a poem. By this I mean the technical side, the number of syllables in a line, the way it scans and how to scan, the metrical foot and how to identify it, the paradoxical freedom of formal verse, the uses of rhyme, and so, infinitely, on. What you can’t teach is how to write a poem.

Born in Kerala, India, Jeet Thayil is a poet, novelist, librettist, and journalist. His first novel, Narcopolis (2012), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His poetry collections include Collected Poems (2015) and These Errors Are Correct (2008), which won the 2013 Poetry Award from the Sahitya Akademi. He recently edited The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (2022).
Read Jeet Thayil on IWE Online
How to Be a GirlThe Other Thing
Nov 18
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Emigrant | Ranjit Hoskote

By Poetry No Comments 
Leaving, he looks out of the window,
skirting the edge of the silver wing:
a tear widens in the quilt of clouds,
through which he sees (or thinks he can)

miles below, traffic lights blinking
their green and amber arrows
as rain smears the windscreens of cars
and soldiers jump down from dented tanks.

He clutches his passport. There's no room
for back numbers in his baggage.
The clouds stitch back the widening tear
but he gropes for a towel,

feeling the cabin temperature rise
as though, miles below,
the city of his birth were burning.
Ranjit Hoskote, “Emigrant.” Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2005, Penguin Books India, 2006, p. 166.
Published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
May 30
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Hoshang Merchant | Bhaskar Lama

By Critical Biography No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Lama, Bhaskar. “Hoshang Merchant.” Indian Writing In English Online, 30 May 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/hoshang-merchant-bhaskar-lama/ .

Chicago:
Lama, Bhaskar. “Hoshang Merchant.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 3, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/hoshang-merchant-bhaskar-lama/ .

Hoshang Merchant is a trendsetter in Indian poetry, dealing as he does with themes such as gay love and sexuality, which are unconventional for Indian poetry. He is open about his own sexuality, and much of his work revolves around his life experiences. Over the years, most of his poetry collections have been published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata. His poems cover a wide range of topics and themes: from spirituality to sexuality, life and death. They are about his love and longings, his dedication to the people who impacted his life, his travels and the places he has been in. Besides writing poetry, he has also edited anthologies, of which Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (1999) is best known. As a poet, he is of the opinion that “[a] nation’s history will be written not by its politicians but by its poets” (Forbidden Sex/Texts 121).

Born into a Parsi family in Bombay in 1947, Merchant was educated at St. Xavier’s College there, after which he pursued his MA in English from Occidental College, Los Angeles. He later went to the United States for further studies, acquiring a PhD in English Literature from Purdue University. Having completed his studies, he held a teaching position in Israel, and lived in Tehran and Jerusalem for a few years. Having returned to India, he secured a teaching position in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, where he offered courses such as “Gay Literature and Sexual Dissidence” at a time when these topics were the subject of occasional discussion in Indian universities. He taught at the University for more than twenty-five years and superannuated in 2012. He has published more than twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, and autobiographical fiction.

While pursuing his PhD at Purdue, Merchant wished to work on gay writers, but “there were no openly gay writers” (Rao 15). Finally, he decided to work on the author Anaїs Nin (1903-1977), as she was someone who “talked openly” about her sexuality and “her friendship with young gay men” (15). Merchant attributes his skills in poetry to her: “Ana[ї]s Nin also made me a poet—I learnt to write poetry from her, so to speak” (15). Some of Merchant’s poems are dedicated to her, and in some other poems, Anaїs Nin becomes the subject. For instance, in “Anaїs Nin Watches Uday Shankar Dance”, he writes:

It is 1931, the year of the Paris Exposition –

Artaud has just gone mad

Anaїs has just escaped his laudanum stained lips

She is in the front row

She feels wet around the eyes

and between the legs

(My Sunset Marriage 107)

In the Middle East, he witnessed violence, political turbulence, and killings on the streets, which left a significant mark on his mind. Merchant’s early writings are replete with references to the Iranian Revolution. The following poem, “Iran”, is an example:

Memory comes

as wave upon wave

of fire

Washes over me

Burns into my skin

Burnishes the paper I write on

The flagstones I tread on

In alley after alley after alley

Looking for the nursery

Where heroes birth and die

Birth and die

Cradle to grave

(Sufiana poems 28)

The poet shows the intensity of the horror, imprinted for a long time in his memory. In “Iranian Revolution”, he writes:

On TV three black-veiled women wailed

Like the three Fates

In the snow

With empty petrol cans –

All of the world’s petrol below

***

Now they dance in the moonlight

In the snow

All of the world’s petrol below

them

bursts into flame –

Women are the gates of Hell

Women will make the Revolution

The stars foretell

(My Sunset Marriage 152)

The poet shows that women had to bear the brunt of the Revolution – they “[burst] into flame”. He recounts many of these experiences in the collection Yusuf in Memphis (1991), where he also “evokes many traditions of homoerotic writing, including those of Greek love, modernist English poetry and the Persian-Urdu ghazal” (Vanita 349).

Throughout his career, he composed poems on overtly gay themes and sexuality, although the contexts have changed over time. In his collections from the mid-nineties, such as The Home, the Friend and the World (1995), Love’s Permission (1996), The Heart in Hiding (1996), The Birdless Cage (1997), the poems depict love as intersecting with spirituality and myth. For instance, in “Each Gopi Thinks Krishna Bathes with Her”, when Merchant writes, “My friends are all Krishna / One day I shall be Radha”, the male narrator imagines himself as a woman who invokes the myth of Radha and Krishna to sanctify his love for his beloved (My Sunset Marriage 76). Similarly, the blending of spirituality and love is palpable in “Ibadat”, in which Merchant writes: “God is Truth / All Friday we lay in bed / Our cupped hands were raised in prayer/to Love” (My Sunset Marriage 118).

Other poems reflect longing and desire. In “To an Absent Lover / No-one in Particular”, it is interesting to observe the longing of/for an absent lover when in a foreign land:

Milan without you

is like anything without you

tasteless: unsalted food

Wherever I dig

I dig up your history

our history

The history of mankind

Where are you?

(Bellagio Blues 26)

In another poem from Bellagio Blues entitled “Disappointment and Depression”, the poet speaks of being ignored by a lover who is present right before him but does not notice his gestures: “He avoided eye contact / I sank into a great chair / with a big whiskey glass” (17). Merchant writes about the pain entailed in love affairs, either due to unrequited love or the feelings of loneliness and longing.

Merchant candidly writes about his love and fantasy for his male lovers, for instance, in “12/4/1996” he writes:

This is a fever I’m writing

And the alphabet is of fire

of the djinns

My lover born of fire

fears fire

I, a fire-worshipper

douse him with my waters.

(My Sunset Marriage 120)

In “Dance of Siva”, Merchant depicts the act of love for his lover: “In my bed/ He [Siva] and I have become a pillar / kneeling at prayer / Difficult to separate god from supplicant / We have flowed into each other” (My Sunset Marriage 103). While Merchant is able to write about his feelings, he does not fail to mention the hardships that he had to undergo as a homosexual man. In his poem, “I at 19”, he writes that he “longed” to love and “wished to invent a soul”, whereas “The world broke in / Broke my body in two To make me whole” (Bombay, My Bombay 18). These lines depict the terror that homosexuals undergo as they seek to fulfil the aspirations of the heteronormative world, and the punishments that the world inflicts on them.

In Merchant’s poetry and essays, one can also discern the language of an activist. He has posed questions regarding the safety of homosexuals, sexual or otherwise, time and again. He writes in Yaraana, “Why do those who protest rape never talk of gay rape? Why this conspiracy of silence? The passive gay is subjected to the same humiliation while walking down a street as a woman is in India” (xv). He states that “A world is not given / But made” (The Man Who Would Be Queen 158), and one has to assert one’s existence. For instance, in “Marine ‘Conversation’” he writes: “Let us come up for breath because / We were forever immured behind sea-walls” as we cannot keep “confining ourselves from the World” (Bombay, My Bombay 14). Merchant believes that “intellectual freedom is finally inseparable from political freedom” (Yaraana xvii). He writes in “A Parsi: ‘Mea Culpa’” that life provides an option to leave “idle tears” and to live a “Life that survives on blood / Which has no tears” (Bombay, My Bombay 10). Even when Merchant broaches a political issue, he intertwines it with a love affair as he writes in “Dharamsala Canto”: “A 1,000 have died in Orissa in the heat / And I remember my boy” (Sufiana Poems 69). Merchant writes about the death of the poet Agha Shahid Ali, and the plight of Kashmir, equating them in his poem in “Death of a Poet: 1-1-2002”: “my poem shall burn / Shall burn like Kashmir” (Sufiana Poems 108).

Merchant repeatedly speaks of the deaths of his family members and lovers. He writes that he has understood life by observing death– “So I write to make sense of death” (The Man Who Would Be Queen 161). The following excerpt from “The River of the Golden Swimmer” shows the poet’s response to his sister’s death:

Last month

On the last day

At midnight

My sister died:

A neat end to a neat life

When a childhood playmate goes

The whole world goes

But the leaves are full of children…

(Sufiana Poems 8)

Here, Merchant nostalgically remembers his “childhood playmate”, his sister, after losing whom he feels “the whole world goes”. Merchant poignantly writes about her death in other poems as well, like, “My Dying Sister Writes a New Book”, “My Sister Takes a Long Time to Die” and “Poem for My Sister: The Garden Tomb.”

Though Merchant was not very fond of his father as his “father’s house is closed” to him, he writes that his “[d]eath is enormous as our sea” in “Death Poem in Three Parts” (My Sunset Marriage 52). His mother’s death deeply saddened him and he laments her death in “Mother”: “Dead Mother return to me / Tell me, if you know, something I must learn” (Sufiana Poems 84). He believes that his mother played a significant role in making him “complete”. While Merchant writes of the death of his beloved, he reveals the intersection of loss and longing. For instance, in “Death Poem in Three Parts”, he writes:

Every face appears his face to me

Every walk suddenly his to me.

How sweet once his house-water

Now his well seems unwell to me.

Like a slave struggling to be free

He appears bound in bed to me.

At every walk he appears sudden to me.

Only I had clothed my ghost

Now all flesh appears rotten to me…

Every face appears his face to me.

(My Sunset Marriage 52)

Travel is a central theme in Merchant’s poems, and some of his poetry collections are named after places he visited or lived in: Bellagio Blues (2004), Pondicherry Poems (2005), Bombay, My Bombay 1955-2005 (2006), Goa! (2007), and Shillong Suite (2010). Merchant documents a child-like curiosity and fascination for new places in his travel poems. For instance, in “The road to Pondicherry from Madras”, he writes:

I see the Sea

With a child’s eye

Though I have a wizened beard now

I’m still that child

Who longs to cut out his heart at sea…

(Pondicherry Poems 11)

The poet is captivated by small serendipities unfolding before him, and he observes them carefully. In “The Bells of Bellagio”, he writes:

 The bells of Bellagio

They go down and up

Down and up up up up

Ding-dong, sing-song gong

Mechanical sexton: A sex-

-ton goes up and down

up and down

(Bellagio Blues 7)

We note how he aligns the chiming of the bell (implying a religious act/moment) with sex,  and also plays on the word “sex-ton”.

In Merchant’s poems, the poet’s conspicuous presence ensures that the key images and themes revolve around him. For instance, in “An Old Bearded Poet Walks the City”, he writes:

Causing consternation

Among grown bachelors walking their mothers…

Rain clings to his long hair

his rabbit-fur beard.

Who does he think he is? – Leonardo! Durer! Aurobindo! Tagore!

(My Sunset Marriage 183)

The poet makes his own presence and appearance clear with comparisons made to other historical personalities. Even the city (Shillong), ostensibly the subject of the poem, is subsumed under his persona.

It is likely that Merchant undertakes a self-fashioning in order to deal with taboo themes and topics, and the only way he can do so is by connecting them with his life and experiences. In many poems, he orchestrates his love for the beloved, where he is the centrepiece of the poem. Merchant also projects a vulnerable self in love, one who is unacceptable to society, and thus leading to struggle and heartbreak, like in “Broken Love” and “To an Absent Lover/ No-one in Particular”. In “Pyassa/ Thirst” where the poet writes “I became that helpless girl in my bed” (Homage to Jibananda Das 6), and in “Each Gopi Thinks Krishna Bathes with Her” he writes, “One day I shall be Radha” – these lines show the poet’s desire to become a female beloved to his male lovers.

Merchant has also edited anthologies of prose and poetry. His Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (1999), considered the first gay anthology from India, brought him into the limelight. The main focus of the book, which includes some translated pieces, is India’s literary history of homosexuality. Merchant writes that  this book is more than personal: “it is also more than sociological and more than mere academic interest in a queer aspect of culture studies” (xi). Some of the important writings that appear in this volume are those of Ashok Row Kavi, Sultan Padamsee, Mahesh Dattani, R. Raj Rao, and others. A decade later, Merchant expanded the volume to Yaraana: Gay Writing from South Asia (2009). In this volume, the author has included writings of Shyam Selvadurai (an extract from his novel Funny Boy), Agha Shahid Ali, and Iftikhar Naseem, thereby expanding the scope of this volume to South Asia.

His book Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets (2009), “attempts to investigate Indian discourse on the ‘love that dares not speak its name’ to propose a historical dis/continuity” (xviii). It is divided into three sections: “Book of the Self – Introduction”, “Book of the World – Introduction”, and “Book of the Soul – Introduction”. In the first section — “Is Homosexuality Indian?”– the author tries to situate homosexuality ––. In the second section, he discusses literature written in different Indian languages, theatre, and films, and examines the theme of homosexuality in them. In the third section, he deals with other authors/poets and their writings, some of who include Sultan Padamsee, Jehangir Bhownagary, Adil Jussawalla, R. Raj Rao, Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram Seth, Suniti Namjoshi, and others. This book is significant as Merchant brings to the forefront the work of people who have played a vital role in bringing societal changes to the understanding of gender and sexuality.

In 2010, Merchant published Indian Homosexuality: Ancient India to Contemporary India, where he writes about the history of homosexuality before and after the arrival of the British in India. The book is divided into four sections: “Ancient India”, “Medieval India”, “Contemporary India: Vernaculars”, and “Contemporary India: Indian Writing in English”. The first section consists of the excerpts taken and paraphrased from ancient texts such as the Mahabharata and the Kama Sutra. In the second section, the author briefly talks about some of the works written during the Mughal rule by poets such as Amir Khusro and Ghalib. The third section consists of folktales and writings in Indian languages. In the fourth section, the author talks about the works of writers such as Sultan Padamsee, Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram Seth, and others. In the opening of the fourth section, Merchant writes on homosexuality in India:

Homosexuality as it is known in the West does not exist in India. Most men are bisexuals. Or, to put it another way, most homosexuals get married due to societal pressures. Some commit suicide. Most adjust to a double life, so do their wives. (103)

In The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions (2011), a collection of lyrical essays, Merchant writes about his life, his struggles, and what writing means to him. He calls it  “autobiographical fictions”. Thomas C. Spear writes that in autofiction “national identity intersects with a writer’s struggles for self-definition” (89), as “the individuated figure of autobiography is impossible without the collective” (104). Along these lines, Merchant writes about various factors, places, and people, who contributed, positively and negatively, in making him who he is/becomes. When Merchant talks of his life, the content is embellished with excerpts from authors, thinkers and spiritual/religious texts that inspired him. For instance, one can find numerous extracts from Nietzsche, Proust, Schiller, Han-shan, Auden, Lorca and others, and texts like Plato’s Symposium and The Upanishads.

Merchant  also unpacks the writer’s life in sections such as “How I Write”:

I write my poems on the streets, in buses, while shopping or teaching, in my head….Proust had his cork-lined room; Anaїs Nin her fireproof bunker. It is luxury to say poets write about nature. They do not. They write about culture. (The Man Who Would Be Queen 163)

His latest publications are Paradise isn’t Artificial (2021) and All My Masters: An East-West Encounter (2021).

Kazim Ali writes that Merchant has been treated unjustly by the literary world, and yet has garnered support:

Though he has been overlooked in many contemporary and defining anthologies of Indian Anglophone writing both in India and around the world, he has never lacked for an audience and his devotees have always known and understood deeply his achievement as a poet of the deepest ardour and his impeccable commitment to the craft of poetry. (18)

Other poets such as Pritish Nandy appreciate Merchant’s poems. In a letter to Merchant, Nandy writes, “Some of your poems are very powerful. I like them very much. It is time these poems saw print” (quoted in The Man Who Would Be Queen 101).

Merchant considers himself “India’s intellectual gay” (Forbidden Sex/Texts xix). He writes that the anti-colonialist, postmodernist European heroes Pasolini and Genet are his role models (Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant 157). He is comfortable in his own skin and refers to himself as “she”, as “both hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity of Indian society and films repel [him]” (Rao 17). Merchant writes that a guiltless life does not make the literary, and it is the same in the context of gay literature: “[T]o be without guilt is to be totally non-literary. Because gay guilt produces gay literature and it is literature that life imitates. No gay literature in India, no modern Indian gay” (Forbidden Sex/Texts 5). Merchant opines that it is not possible to theorise gay life in India on the lines of Western “Theory”. Instead, he “lives [his] life as an Indian gay in India, write[s] about it and then leave[s] it to NRI’s in the West to theorise about gay lives in India” (Forbidden Sex/Texts xix).

Merchant has left an indelible imprint in Indian English poetry by candidly writing on topics considered taboo, making a space for himself through his remarkably unconventional poems. His writings represent the causes and the concerns of homosexuals, be it his prose or poetry. As his works reveal, he has been very active as a homosexual voice – in writings as well as on the ground – it can be said that Merchant is a pioneering gay activist of India.

 

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank the reviewer and the coordinators of IWE Online Project for reviewing my write-up and providing feedback/comments.

 

Works Cited:

Ali, Kazim. “Introduction.” My Sunset Marriage, by Hoshang Merchant, Navayana, 2016.

Merchant, Hoshang. Bellagio Blues. Otherwise Books, Spark-India, 2004.

—, Bombay, My Bombay. Writers Workshop, 2006.

—, Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets. Routledge, 2009.

—, Goa! Writers Workshop, 2007.

—, The Home, the Friend and the World. Writers Workshop, 1995.

—, Indian Homosexuality: Ancient India to Contemporary India. Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2010.

—, Love’s Permission. Writers Workshop, 1996.

—, The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions. Penguin Books, 2011.

—, My Sunset Marriage. Selected and Introduced by Kazim Ali. Navayana, 2016.

—, Pondicherry Poems. Writers Workshop, 2005.

—, Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant, edited by Akshaya K. Rath, Oxford UP , 2016.

—, Shillong Suite. Writers Workshop, 2010.

—, Sufiana: Poems. New Delhi: HarperCollins. 2013.

—, editor. Yaraana: Gay Writing from India. Penguin Books, 1999.

—, editor. Yaraana: Gay Writing from South Asia. Penguin Books, 2009.

—, Yusuf in Memphis. Writers Workshop, 1991.

Rao, R. Raj. “An Interview with Hoshang Merchant.” Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-One Queer Interviews, edited by R. Raj Rao and Dibyajyoti Sarma, Sage, 2009, pp. 1-18.

Spear, Thomas C. “Autofiction and National Identity.” Contemporary French and Francophonic Studies, vol. 2, issue 1, 1998, pp. 89-105.

Vanita, Ruth. “Hoshang Merchant: Poems for Vivan (English)”. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 249-351.

 

PUBLICATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

Poetry

Flower to Flame. Rupa & Co., 1989.

Stone to Fruit. Writers Workshop, 1989.

Yusuf in Memphis. Writers Workshop, 1991.

Hotel Golkonda: Poems 1991. Writers Workshop, 1992.

The Home, the Friend and the World. Writers Workshop, 1995.

Jonah and the Whale. Writers Workshop, 1995.

Love’s Permission. Writers Workshop, 1996.

The Heart in Hiding. Writers Workshop, 1996.

The Birdless Cage. Writers Workshop, 1997.

Talking to the Djinns. Writers Workshop, 1997.

Selected Poems. Writers Workshop, 1999.

Bellagio Blues. Otherwise Books, Spark-India, 2004.

Homage to Jibanananda Das. Aark Arts, 2005.

Pondicherry Poems. Writers Workshop, 2005.

Bombay, My Bombay. Writers Workshop, 2006.

Juvenilia. Writers Workshop, 2006.

Alif/Alpha Poems for Ashfaque. Writers Workshop, 2006.

Goa! Writers Workshop, 2007.

Sufi Tree. New Allied Publishers, 2008.

Shillong Suite. Writers Workshop, 2010.

Collected Works, Volume 1: Hyderabad Quartet. Writers Workshop, 2011.

Collected Works, Volume 2: Jonah Quintet. Writers Workshop, 2012.

Sufiana: Poems. New Delhi: HarperCollins. 2013.

Collected Works, Volume 3: Place/Name: A Sextet. Writers Workshop, 2014.

My Sunset Marriage. Selected and Introduced by Kazim Ali. Navayana, 2016.

Collected Works Volume IV: The Book of Chapbooks. Edited by Akshaya K. Rath. Writers Workshop, 2018.

Paradise isn’t Artificial. Red River, 2021.

 

Anthologies, Edited Books and Others

In-Discretions: Anais Nin. Writers Workshop, 1990.

Yaraana: Gay Writing from India. Penguin Books, 1999. (Edited)

Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets. Routledge, 2009.

Yaraana: Gay Writing from South Asia. Penguin Books, 2009. (Edited)

Indian Homosexuality: Ancient India to Contemporary India. Allied Publishers, 2010.

The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions. Penguin Books, 2011.

Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant, edited by Akshaya K. Rath, Oxford UP , 2016.

All My Masters: An East-West Encounter. Queer Ink, 2021.

Read Hoshang Merchant on IWE Online
Lost Love: In RetrospectHouses
May 06
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A poet at their desk, fuelled by ideas inspired by the country, with words from Arundhathi Subramaniam's essay representing contemporary Indian poets, translators and critics all around.

Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English, by Arundhathi Subramaniam

By Poetry, Survey One Comment
Published on May 6, 2022
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Writing In English Online, 6 May 2022, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/beyond-the-hashtag-exploring-contemporary-indian-poetry-in-english-by-arundhathi-subramaniam/.

Chicago:
Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 6, 2022.  https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/beyond-the-hashtag-exploring-contemporary-indian-poetry-in-english-by-arundhathi-subramaniam/. .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A poet at their desk, fuelled by ideas inspired by the country, with words from Arundhathi Subramaniam's essay representing contemporary Indian poets, translators and critics all around.

“Contemporary Indian Poetry” illustrated by Guru G

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sections of this essay are excerpted from Another Country: An Anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, published by the Sahitya Akademi, 2011, edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam
This is an updated version of the essay that appeared in Indian Literature :  “Introduction: Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 61, no. 1 (297), 2017, pp. 33–39.
Published with permission from the Sahitya Akademi and Arundhathi Subramaniam.
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