Prayer Flag is an unusual CD-sized book with your photography, poetry, translations of your poems in Bengali, an audio CD with reading by you, and music.
Prayer Flag was a really enjoyable project to put together. I have been seriously taking photographs for many years, and many have been published individually and as sequences on book covers, magazines, online, etc. My fine art photography has been part of international and national art fairs, private collections, and I have had several solo and group shows as well. This is the first time that some of them have been put together officially in book form along with my poetry and audio reading by me and my translator. The photographs are meant to stand on their own and do not illustrate the text; rather, they show different sides of my work—text and design, words and the visual, orality and musicality.
You edited the landmark anthology, The HarperCollins Book of English Poems [by Indians]. Tell us more about the book and the project.
Contemporary English fiction by Indians is now well known and widely established as part of the mainstream national and international literature thanks to authors like V S Naipaul, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Vikram Chandra, Aravind Adiga, and many others. They have won a range of prestigious prizes and awards including the Nobel, Booker, Commonwealth, Pulitzer, Sahitya Akademi, among others.
“Indian poetry in English has a longer and more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English,†asserts Pankaj Mishra in the TLS. A British publisher, in a catalogue item states, “Many Indian poets were mining the rich vein of ‘chutnified’ (Salman Rushdie’s word) Indian English long before novelists like Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee started using it in their fiction.†Both these observations may well be true, but the ground reality of the story of Indian poetry in English is completely different. In the wider cultural arena, very little is known about Indian poetry and poets, within and more so outside India. Only a handful of contemporary English-language Indian poets command an international and national status. And the others who are visible happen to be known within very tight and narrow confines of the poetry circles and university reading circuits. Beyond the initiated groups, not many follow or read contemporary English poetry, though ironically a great number write it.
There are not enough discerning anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry published in India and even less abroad — and the few that exist [and not very easily available] have tended to be rather narrow, inward-looking, and unsatisfactory. Anthologies of new writing serve as perfect vehicles and repository that showcase and highlight the best in current literatures. They also capture the pulse of literary culture, and act as good sources for archival material for future generations. Many fine single-author individual volumes by Indian poets have appeared in India and elsewhere, but their scattered appearances (and the aforementioned lack of a worthy library of comprehensive poetry anthologies) do not add up to what one would think of as a body of contemporary works that reflects a movement in new English poetry by Indians. My recent anthology as an editor, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry [by Indians], hopes to redress some of the shortfall or near absence.
A unique feature of this anthology is the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the poems are new and unpublished in individual author volumes. The range of style, preoccupation, technique, is vast, various and impressive. The poets represented in the book live in India and the broader Indian diasporas — the United States and Canada, United Kingdom and Europe, Africa and Asia, Australia and the Pacific. This diversity and multicultural representation allows the poets to have an internal dialogue between themselves and the varied topographical cultural spaces they come from or are influenced by. Therefore the poems create an inherent syntactical and historical tension — one that ultimately celebrates the written word, imagination, artistry, intellect, and humanity.
I have arranged the poets alphabetically using their first names so that there is a further sense of intimacy and a community-feel among fellow poets. This would hopefully break traditional barriers that come with formal arrangements when using last names or age as hierarchical arcs. What matters in this book are the well-crafted passionately-felt poems themselves and their unique, intelligent and artistic qualities — and not reputation of the poets’ perse. So you will find the stars and established poets sharing the same platform with relatively newer promising writers in a large room without walls where both individual and collective echoes are equally eloquent and important.
The subject matter of the poems and their poetic concerns are staggeringly large and wide-ranging. There is introspection and gregariousness, politics and pedagogy, history and science, illness and fantasy, love and erotica, sex and death — the list is centrifugal, efferent, and expansive. There is free verse and an astonishing penchant for formal verse — so you are likely to encounter a pantoum next to an acrostic poem, a triolet juxtaposed against a ghazal, lyric narratives and prose poetry, Sapphic fragments and Bhartrhari-style shataka, mosaic pastiché, ekphrastic verse, sonnet, rubai, poem songs, prayer chants, documentary feeds, rap, reggae, creole, canzone, tritina, sestina, ottava rima, rime royale and variations on waka: haiku, tanka, katauta, choka, bussokusekika, sedoka — the Indian poets are in full flight.
Taking into consideration the quality of the contents in this recent anthology, I would provocatively assert that the best English poetry written by Indians in the contemporary national and international literary arena is perhaps as good or superior to Indian fiction in English as a whole. There is bravura, experimentation, risk-taking, innovation, erudition, and delightfully uninhibited and fine use of language by the poets here. And for the best of them, this book is just a mere show window displaying only a small slice of the authors’ individual oeuvre that is wide-ranging and impressive. The generous selection spread over nearly 550 pages — significantly shifts, expands, remaps, and realigns the existing topography and tenor of contemporary English poetry by Indians.
Ladakh brings together remarkable new work from two leading international artists — Sudeep Sen, a leading Indian poet, and Janet Pierce, an established Irish painter. The text of the first two sections is landscaped in Ladakh and the high Himalayas; and the third and fourth sections follow the Irish terrain both topographically and in spirit. Both their works have similar resonances, inspired by similar landscapes, and there runs a shared thread of introverted meditation in their creative pieces.
Quietude does not just mean starkness; it includes in its fold vibrancy of colour and passion as well. Janet’s abstract works use watercolour, pastel and chalk that often have embossed gold and silver leaf from Old Delhi’s Chandi Chowk embedded as a common motif. This geometric textured metallic luminosity matched the sparkle of the quiet philosophical centre of my words. Precious metals have a noble unannounced ring to them.
Ladakh has been curated and arranged as a symphony — the text and images are not intended to directly illustrate each other but are meant to act as antithetical paired constructs to evoke a new vibrant dynamic, an on going conversation that disparate cultures share through the medium of common artistic practice and aesthetics. Synergy, serendipity, politics, poetry, music, art — all have their divine intervention in their familial and artistic relationship.
What about other artistic collaborations—with musicians and dancers, theatre and film actors?
Rain, too, has had many musical collaborators—a young fusion group, Advaita, led by Abhishek Mathur and some members of the Artists Unlimited band led by Annette Phillips, came together in a live concert at the British Council. While the actor Tom Alter and I read the original text from my book, they provided a wonderfully intricate and understated soundscape they had specially composed for Rain. In fact, half a dozen of my earlier poems were sung out loud by Abhishek and Annette in styles as varied and reminiscent as Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, in rhythm and blues, rock, pop, and minimalist modes.
Further collaborations saw jazz flautist Rajeev Raja join Tom Alter and me at the India International Centre in New Delhi and The Times of India Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Bombay; the same duo performed in Ahmedabad at Sarabhai’s Natarani Amphitheatre with the classical flautist Keyur Balkrushna; and also in Hyderabad, the Charminar Jazz Collective collaborated with me in a wonderfully improvised live concert.
At the India International Centre’s prestigious annual international Festival of the Arts, I presented “Wo|Man: Desire, Divinity, Denouement,†collaborating with the wonderful classical voice of Vidya Rao and classical bamboo flautist Srinibas Satapathy, accompanied by the young Odissi dancer Moumita Ghosh, a disciple of legendary Madhavi Mudgal.
At the same festival in 2012, dancers of the Centre for Mohiniyattam, Padmashri Bharati Shivaji and Vijayalakshmi, presented a dance drama version of Rain. Original composed music by a multi-Grammy Los Angeles based composer, Mac Quayle, provided astonishing soundtrack to the visual feast. Elements of both classical South and East Indian dance, as well as Carnatic and Hindustani classical music added the rich texture.
The Spanish edition of Rain (translated by M. Dolores Herrero under the title Lluvia) recently appeared from University of Zaragoza in Spain. Inspired by this book, a concert-length score was composed by the Javier Coble Quartet in Spain, and the resultant CD is forthcoming soon. The world-premiere concert in Jaca (Spain) with Javier Coble and Kepa Oses as musicians, and M Dolores Herrero as Spanish reader and I in English, went down extremely well. Since then, we have had invitations from various organizations and festival directors. Plans are afoot for a national multicity tour in India, venues in the UK and USA, and more in Spain.
I have always been interested in the other arts, so collaborating with outstanding world and Indian artists is a real treat, pleasure, and a satisfying experience for me.
