G.S. Sharat Chandra (1935‒2000) was—in his own words—“born to prosperity” in the small village of Nanjangud [Nanjanagudu], in the southern state of Karnataka (Vasudeva and Bahri 9). His father was a criminal lawyer, and this affected his studies and career prospects. After attending law schools in Pune and Bengaluru, he reluctantly entered the legal profession, worked as probation officer in a detention home and trade union representative for tea and coffee plantations, while reading Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Sartre, Frost, Pound and other modernists, and “secretly planning to leave the country and pursue a literary life” (Vasudeva and Bahri 9). The pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps was strong, but the pull of poetry was stronger, although it would take a New World to gain the upper hand. In 1963 Chandra left India for the United States, officially to pursue advanced degrees in English and law, but secretly hoping for a literary career. There, he first pursued an M.S. in English from the State University of New York at Oswego, then moved to the Osgoode Hall Law School, in Toronto, where he earned an L.L.M. (with a specialisation in labour law) in 1966. Unable to secure a job as a corporate lawyer, after one year of teaching in a law school in Canada, Chandra applied and was admitted to the newly-established International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, eventually transferring to the Program in Creative Writing (commonly known as Iowa Writers’ Workshop), from which he graduated with an M.F.A. in poetry in 1968. Soon after, he joined the faculty at Iowa Wesleyan College (now Iowa Wesleyan University), where he launched the little magazine Kamadhenu; then moved to Washington State University in 1972, and eventually to the University of Missouri‒Kansas City, where he was a Professor of English until his premature death in 2000.
Chandra started writing while a student in India, publishing his first poems in a college magazine and local newspapers, but the content of his first volume of verse, published in Calcutta while he was living in Iowa, already reflects his equal distance from both his native and his adoptive country, while laying the foundations of that “Third Country” that he will build slowly, book after book and poem after poem, over the next three decades. With regard to his first and second country, Chandra’s concern as a poet is not to distance himself from either, but rather to gauge, define, negotiate, and appreciate the underlying distance, and in so doing to understand what this means for his multiple interdependent selves—as a creative writer and academic, son and father, husband and lover, Indian and American, alien and naturalised citizen.
In the case of India, this view from afar focuses on petty politicians and bureaucrats, poverty, superstition and corruption, an entire social system, and forms of belief that are antiquated yet deeply rooted and even effective in their own way. Its bitter realism is often sharpened by sarcasm, but of the type that reveals the ambiguous, dispassionate feelings of the expatriate rather than the immediate, first-hand concerns and frustrations of the resident. However, inside this “nation where death / Is a blessing to the dead and the living”—as he writes in “Matrudesh” (from Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems), one of his earliest and harshest “Indian poems”— family relations and familial affections represent a more private country, one that is much harder to keep at an emotional or intellectual distance. In such cases, remembrance and dream, irony or satire are better suited to overcome the sense of loss that separation—or distance in space or time—always inevitably evoke.
Irony, satire, and sarcasm dominate the poems that trace the expatriate’s or the immigrant’s progress in America (an experience he further explored in his short story collection Sari of the Gods). A men’s room in a filling station evokes a post-scarcity paradise, while a resort in Bermuda offers an illustrative catalog of racial inequality, in which whiteness in its different shades (pink beaches and skin, green waves and golf links) is counterpointed by the monochromatic presence of colored staff:“BLACK SHOESHINE BOY! / Black coach driver / Black pub waiter / Black doorman” (“The Visit”, Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems, 7) . Through his relocations from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and back to the Midwest, Chandra navigated and responded to the dispersive enigma of the American Province, a geographically diverse yet culturally and intellectually uniform landscape, as different from India as from New York or Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. This landscape and its typical locales and characters (bars, gas stations, motels, highways, summer camps, waitresses, young pacifists, partygoers, innocents abroad) represents a ground bass running throughout his poetry, with the occasional recurrence or repetition of emblematic figures or situations stressing the overwhelming identity and banality of the overall picture. An example of this approach is the short poem “At the Bar” (in Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems), which is reprinted (partially) in Aliens (1986) with the title “At a Bar in Tucson”, and then again in Family of Mirrors (1993) as “At an Iowa City Bar”—the location changes from one collection to the other, but the drunk who “hasn’t been as far east as detroit” yet “sits talking about zen / in his cool and detached style” remains the same, and his perdurance reveals a quasi-mythological tenacity of character.
More original and fascinating, perhaps, are the poems in which the anxiety of foreignness and assimilation, and the dilemmas of exile, expatriation and immigration, are expressed in elliptical and imaginative ways, as in two short poems that form a sort of diptych in Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems. In “hand”, a sheet of paper questions the intentions of the author who is about to insert “her” in the typewriter roller:
as I put my entire life under
you to be rolled spaced shifted
can i trust you with clear intent
are you certain that your inky fingers
will not grapple with me tear me apart?
can i be sure while you mark me
all over my white body
that you do not pause to get mad
and crush me into a ball?
Hints of violence, dominance and submission through mechanical or manual actions suggest a process of acculturation and subjection that operates, regularly and systematically, on a larger, indeed a collective, scale. In the more cheerful, optimistic, and almost cartoonish “2 Questions” (reprinted as “Questions” in April in Nanjagud), the once innocent and vulnerable sheet of paper has been turned into a typed page, “her” virginal white body not grappled by inky fingers but permanently marked by the blackness of inked type. A land has become a country—no longer an open space but a coveted destination—and a stage has been set for the action to take place (in the first half of the poem) and (in the second) for the two interrelated questions to be posed.
If words
Could get up
And walk away
From the page,
Would they
In their blackness
Find a shape?
And you, my dear page,
In your emptiness,
Would you sing?
In this case, issues of racial and cultural identity (represented by “blackness” and “shape”, respectively)–immigration, representation, and prosperity–are subtly yet eloquently intertwined. In fact, we could superimpose this poem on the previously quoted “The Visit” (in Bharata Natyam Dancer), and compare the “blackness” of the typed words with the black staff at the Bermuda resort (or with immigrants, aliens or persons of colour in general), and imagine how their disaffection and departure (if they “could get up and walk away”) would result in a significant loss, both quantitative (“in your emptiness”) and qualitative (“would you sing?”), for the impagination of the country.
With Offsprings of Servagna (1975), Chandra approached classical Kannada poetry as a source of inspiration rather than a matter of translation, literal or otherwise. Possibly inspired by A.K. Ramanujan’s Speaking of Śiva, published only two years before, it provides a vivid selection of vacanas (“sayings”), or “poems under the influence” of the 16th-century poet and philosopher Sarvajña, without the scholarly apparatus (and authority) of Ramanujan’s text, or the linguistically and culturally innovative approach showed by Arun Kolatkar, in his rendition of Marathi devotional poetry, or Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, in his versions of Prākrit love poetry and especially in his Songs of Kabir.
Eventually, Chandra’s American life rewarded him with a tenured professorship, a loving family, a house in the suburbs, and a solid reputation as an award-winning internationally published poet. But that is just one side of the picture. On the other, darkening over time, his poetry reflects the various and progressive stages of disillusionment, discontent, estrangement and eventually alienation. From the mid-1970s onward, the word “alien” appears repeatedly—often in combination with concerns about death and dying—in the text and titles of individual poems (“For All Aliens”, “If You Die Alien”, “Aliens”, “An Alien’s Day in Kansas”), as well as in the title of a chapbook consisting almost entirely of “American poems”. The only exception is “The Return of Gandhi”, a cameo portrait of the poet as a lapsed vegetarian who, after a Texan meal of roasted goat kid, “cooked beyond / all animal identity”, has a dream in which “Gandhi crouched inside my stomach / putting the goat back together”. “The Return of Gandhi” returns in the next collection, Immigrants of Loss (1993), where it concludes a brief, middle section of Indian poems. Here, a comparison between “Pavement Sleepers, Calcutta” and previous “poverty poems” such as “Beggar” (from Heirloom, 1982) and especially “Matrudesh” (from Chandra’s first collection), will show how the poet has toned down his approach, turning his accusatory finger to more atmospheric views. Yet India pops up, literally and unexpectedly, early on in the collection (outside the boundary of its dedicated section), in the form of a baby elephant sorting out rejection letters in the poet’s wastepaper basket.
If Chandra’s poetry (but also his correspondence with fellow poets in India) reveals an increasing sense of estrangement and alienation as an expatriate and an “alien”, these feelings further extended to his achievement as a poet, especially one whose popularity and success relied to a significant degree on his belonging to, and identification with, a specific genre or group. The South Asian label, indeed, provided a certain amount of recognition and currency, but in the long run it also nursed the frustrating realisation that an anglophone Indian poet in America is not exactly the same as—or not quite on the same level of—an American poet.
Acknowledgements:
I thank Jane Chandra and her Family for additional information and clarifications about G.S. Sharat Chandra’s biography, as well as for granting permission to quote from his work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry
Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968 & 1975.
Will This Forest. Milwaukee: Morgan Press, 1969.
April in Nanjagud. London: London Magazine Editions, 1971.
Reasons for Staying. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1971.
Once or Twice. Sutton, Surrey: Hippopotamus Press, 1974.
Offsprings of Servagna. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1975.
The Ghost of Meaning. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1978.
Heirloom. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Aliens. Safford, Arizona: Gila Review 6, Fall 1986.
Immigrants of Loss. Frome, Somerset: Hippopotamus Press, 1993.
Family of Mirrors. Kansas City, Missouri: BkMk Press, 1993.
Fiction
Sari of the Gods: Stories. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998.
References
Lawrence, Keith. “G.S. Sharat Chandra”. Asian-American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Guiyou Huang, Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 59-69.
Sturr, Robert D. “G.S. Sharat Chandra.” Asian American Short Story Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Guiyou Huang, Greenwood Press, 2003, pp. 39-44.
Vasudeva, Mary, and Deepika Bahri. “’Swallowing for Twenty Years / the American Mind and Body’: An Interview with G.S. Sharat Chandra.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (Fall 1997), pp.9–17.
