Photo credit: Sigrid Nama
By the time Postmarked India was published by HarperCollins, you had already polished and crafted you own poetic voice. You were awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in the UK and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA, which bears testimony to that fact. But somehow I detect that Louis MacNeice’s influence still lingered on.
I am not entirely sure whether I agree with that last comment; in fact, I don’t. Various critics have said various things. I believe, in this case, you are referring to the poet and literary critic Angus Calder, who compared me with Louis MacNeice in The Scotsman. It was an interesting comparison, but Calder perhaps was referring to the “variousness†in my writing, its range and latitude. I never thought that I was ever inspired by him or wrote like him.
Similarly, other people have written that they have found influences/similarities of T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Hugh MacDiarmid, and W. H. Auden in my poems. This could all be temporarily very flattering, but at the end it is completely up to the reader or the critic as to how and what they feel about a particular piece of my writing. I don’t think I have at all been influenced by any one of them, even though I admire their writing enormously.
No one poet has directly influenced me, and this is evident in the kinds of poetry I like, which tends to be rather varied and eclectic. I adore the poetry of Jibanananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, the French symbolists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine; Rilke, Neruda, Paz, Walcott, Heaney. It is too varied to list them all. Also the ticker-tape is so dissimilar and expansive that I can’t think of any one or two who could have possibly influenced me.
Again, if I have to find one source or fountainhead of influence, it would actually be Bengali culture that has affected me ultimately, directly and indirectly. For instance, my interest and sense of rhythm and rhyme comes from my very early childhood through my mother and grandmother. They used to recite stories or sing lullabies to me, and I regularly heard them chant their prayers with a typical Bengali rounded lilt. All these were very inherent rhythms which quietly slipped into my psychological system by a curious process of osmosis. So, these perhaps are my influences, very localized and genetic, completely spontaneous. However, the received and learned knowledge as well as the exposure they subsequently lent, what I was talking about earlier, is a very different sort of thing altogether.
Does emotion compel you to write? Or do you wait for the right mood to inspire you?
I think it is a combination of both. Being a writer is like being a strange kind of a beast. Writers tend to have invisible antennae on top of their head that pick up radar-signals, odd-things while you are looking at ordinary scenes, snatches of other conversations, a glimpse of something somewhere, so the ordinary everyday scenario acts as a rich well-spring of ideas for me. Even as I speak to you, I might be simultaneously processing an entirely different idea or thought that might have just struck me; it is a complex parallel process. These, of course, may be just fragments, or overheard figments, voices, or images. If it is something strong and compelling, I generally try and make an effort to write it down. I don’t necessarily carry a notebook, so it could be on the back of a bill, or on the palm of my hand. If I am in a restaurant I would write it down on a napkin, or find an excuse to get some toilet paper to scribble on.
So when I sit down to write, I have all these ideas and phrases in front of me. Sitting down and writing requires discipline because writing doesn’t just come from the middle of nowhere; that is just the inspiration, perhaps. But having had the inspiration you need time to put it all together and build the piece brick by brick. I sit down with poetry two or three hours every day, and it is not necessarily that I write a new poem every time, very often I don’t, but I could be revising poems that I have written before, or maybe reviewing a book of poetry, or simply just reading and enjoying a book of poetry. It’s my own quiet way of staying with poetry.
It is quite important to write things down when they first strike, because often I find that if I don’t do that and try to remember it later, it might altogether leave me, go away, or vanish. Sometimes, of course, it might happen at the oddest and most inconvenient time when I’m already in bed at four o’clock at night / morning; especially if it is winter, you really do not want to get out from under the duvet and go to the desk and write it down. Sometimes I feel lazy and postpone writing it down until the next day, and very often it has completely gone by then. It is always worth that extra effort to swiftly pen it down and keep it for later.
Does contemporary literary theory in any way come between you and your writing of poetry? Do theories influence your outlook?
I find intelligently argued theory interesting and worth a rigorous read, but a lot of what is churned out does not inspire me at all. In some odd way, I even dislike theory, especially when it is presented to a literate public making simple things overly complicated for no apparent reason. If theory has an intellectual, positive base, original and rigorous, then I’m keen on it, only then. But it certainly never influences my creative writing at all. In fact, it stays very far from it.
I’m constantly surprised when I read a review, critique, or an essay on my work, as to how much theory is being used these days, especially in the so-called postcolonial circuit. I am not impressed by writers who write polysyllabic jargon just for effect. Frankly, this sort of writing is of no interest to me.
But certainly you have theories of your own. Just because you don’t adhere to contemporary literary theories doesn’t mean that you don’t have a theory of your own. Certainly your responses to different stimuli are not passive.
You can’t be passive when responding to different stimuli, especially if you possess the invisible antennae I had mentioned before; if you are passive you can’t be writing at all. All the writing I have done over the past fifteen years is a response to various stimuli. The published results are in front of you—clearly, then, one is not passive.
But when it comes to literary and critical theory, of course I’m aware of what is going on around me. But I don’t let that tarnish or complicate my writing, because as I have said before they are completely separate categories and disciplines. Art should really exist independently on its own merit. Intelligent analysis and critique is surely exciting, but the two genres and purposes are entirely different.
In the end, what excites me is a piece of original writing that is well written, thought-provoking, intelligently argued. But ultimately it needs to move me, it needs to create quiet, indelible waves that constantly haunt me or change me in some slight, modest way. Otherwise, it is simply a cerebral exercise like playing and solving a Rubik’s Cube, which only has limited pleasures.
