From the Margins to Centre Stage: A Sangam (Confluence) of Three Indian Women Poets

I’ve often thought of poems by Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza and other Indian women poets as a poetic Indian feminist historiography of sorts, though they might not have intended it. For example, Meena, your poem ‘from Raw Meditations on Money, 1. She Speaks: School Teacher from South India’, so heartbreakingly questions the practice of dowry and its somber consequences. Or Priya, your translations of Andal, which celebrate spirituality and sensuality through a powerful woman’s voice from centuries ago. And Arundhathi, your poem, ‘5.46, Andheri Local’, which so beautifully captures the struggle and strengths of everyday Indian women who collectively morph into this all powerful Goddess while riding the train home.

Given all the social and cultural challenges Indian women face, how important is being an Indian woman in your own writing? Is it something you are conscious of? Any challenges or epiphanies you’d like to share?

Meena:  Of course it’s utterly important! All that I love and know comes to me through my body and its intricate sensorium. Otherwise I couldn’t write. Does this make me a feminist poet? That I don’t know. The poem you mention and also ‘Moksha’ from my new book ‘Atmospheric Embroidery’, the latter about the Nirbhaya rape, are very important to me. And yes, perhaps one could think of them as voicing another history, giving voice to what was crossed out. When I was younger, my mother, who was in Kerala then, felt anxious, perhaps that is the right word, about my choice to be a poet, fearful that it would reveal truths that might best be hidden behind the doors of the tarawad. So that too was part of the struggle, writing against what was permitted. My father, who was a scientist, supported me. “When I write a paper, I publish it,” he said. “When you write a poem you should publish it.” In New York, I have learnt so much from women poet friends — dear Adrienne Rich who is no longer with us, who always told me, “go where the fear is”, and Audre Lorde, who had the office next to me at Hunter College, who taught me so much about the cracks and crannies of power and where the woman of colour needs to stand. The poem for me is a free zone. It is the space for the soul to sing, and this is what I find in the work of the fierce and powerful women poets all around us, the young women poets one is inspired by.  We have learnt from Anna Akhmatova, from Claribel Alegría, just as we learnt from Arun Kolatkar, Jayanta Mahapatra, or Tchicaya U tam’si.

Priya:  We can read the work of these poets as building an Indian feminist sensibility;  it’s a  strong, throbbing vein. My concern as a poet is why we are the way we are as a species and how can we become more caring? Wise? Free? And the passage of time. For instance, how would one write a poem about microorganism that live inside a stone feel time as it heats during the day and cools at night? This may sound like an odd pursuit but it fascinates me — for how does one surrender to this otherness that lives alongside us?  This requires going beyond the site of a social, sexual, and historically positioned self — as well as seeking new forms of expression. That said, one writes from and with the body. Breath, brain and bile, pulse, phlegm and plasma; with the body’s cycles of rest and resilience, for it is vessel and vehicle for writing. One creates through the body’s tantra / beingness and this permeates the writing, sometimes unconsciously. Andal, passionate mystic and divine poet, was a teenager when she composed her luminous songs of sacred rapture. To translate her I began by remembering my fifteen-year-old body, its hunger and howls, its questing for something vaster than itself to surrender into, the moments of bliss when I felt enfolded by an encompassing love. Conscious of myself as a woman poet, I immersed myself in her corporality and spirituality. I went into freefall, into her, with no holding back.

Arundhathi:  Firstly, it’s quite remarkable, the number of young Indian women poets writing today. When I say ‘young’, I use the word in terms of publishing history — those who’ve been published in the past decade. There are many voices, some more seasoned, some still emerging, but each distinct in her own way: Karthika Nair, Anjum Hasan, Sridala Swami, Sampurna Chattarji, Tishani Doshi, Mona Zote, Meena Kandasamy, Sharanya Manivannan, Nabina Das, K Srilata, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Anupama Raju, Anindita Sengupta, Aditi Machado, Ellen Kombiyil, to name a random few.

Then there are others, like Mamang Dai, Reetika Vazirani, Menka Shivdasani, Marilyn Noronha, Tara Patel, Leela Gandhi, Mani Rao, Jane Bhandari, Gayatri Majumdar, Charmayne D’Souza, Anju Makhija — voices of an earlier generation, many of whom were my fellow travellers. Then there are those who were important presences when I was a young poet — Eunice de Souza, Imtiaz Dharker, Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt. Kamala Das was of even earlier vintage.

I’m speaking off-the-cuff here; this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list. But I want to mention all the names that occur to me at this point (almost like the sahasranaama or thousand names of the Goddess) because it still takes women time to stake their claim on literary history. They still experience the pain of cultural exclusion and trivialization in a very singular way, and their names just don’t get mentioned often enough. So let me also mention some voices to watch out for in the future: Jennifer Robertson and Rochelle Potkar are among them. There are those I haven’t read much of, but hope to at some point: Minal Hajratwala, Anjali Purohit, Usha Akella, Srividya Sivakumar, Gopika Jadeja, and you, Shikha. Let me just say that I think some of the most interesting Indian poetry today is being authored by women.

But to come to your question, I’m not squeamish about being called a woman poet. Feminism for me is not a state of having arrived (I definitely haven’t), but as a wonderful tool — a way to understand the many ways in which gender is constructed. That makes my feminism a journey rather than a destination. And that journey is far from over. Invariably, that journey spills over into the poetry – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. In poems like ‘5.46 Andheri Local’, ‘Vigil’, ‘No’, and several others, the journey is overt; in the rest, it’s more subtle. I may not always choose to underscore my politics, but it probably permeates the poetry in its own way. It certainly permeates the love poems, and all the poems addressed to sisters, mothers, grandmothers, teachers (of which I have many), as well as poems addressed to mythic archetypes like Shakuntala (who becomes a woman questor archetype in my poem cycle).

Looking back, I see recurrent themes in my work: marginality as vantage-point, travel as homecoming. But I also see it as seeking to reclaim our right to be simultaneously material and spiritual beings. I say ‘reclamation’, because the word ‘spiritual’ has become, in some ways, a kind of modern heresy. So, personally, it has meant walking a fine line — not reinforcing clichéd ideas of the spiritual Orient, not regurgitating revivalist rhetoric, and not giving up on the right (hard-won by women) to have a body of flesh, blood, hormones and desires. To invoke the spiritual as a way through life, not a way out of it — this is probably what my poetic journey has been about. Being female, being Indian, haven’t been incidental to this.

Challenges and epiphanies? I’d say the most recent was the case of the Shakuntala poems in the new book, ‘When God is a Traveller’. I started out by seeing Shakuntala as a ‘mixed-up kid’, a recipe for disaster with her contrary parentage (sage and apsara) and contrary longings for nature and culture, nirvana and samsara, hermitage and court, etcetera. But towards the end of the cycle, a shift occurred. It took me by surprise when I gradually began to see Shakuntala not as a doomed figure, but as a unique possibility — capable of inhabiting multiple realities all at once. This wasn’t intended to be a feminist rewriting of the Shakuntala story, but in its own way it changed the way I viewed the path of the female questor — not as passive heir to a piecemeal inheritance, but dynamic integrator of diverse impulses. Not compelled to choose either, but free to embrace both.

When recently asked what advice to give young poets, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said, “In most cases, poetry is like a virus that works its way through the body and dies a natural death, like the common cold. So, the young need not worry about seeking advice.”

Coming from one of India’s finest poets, this comment really disturbed me. Why do you think he said this and how can we get people to take poetry more seriously?

Meena:  Perhaps Arvind was speaking somewhat tongue in cheek here, with a wry humour. And perhaps indeed poetry is like a fever that possesses you. To a young poet I would say, take heart, don’t give up, hold tight to the truth of what comes to you and work at perfecting the language. I remember once going to a reading that Joseph Brodsky gave and he said something that took my breath away. He said something like: “my friends who are novelists sell their work, as I poet I send a poem out, it comes back to me, I send it out again, it comes back to me, I keep going…” I took away from it the need for terrible persistence in the life of a poet, the need to hang in there to keep going. For what, you might ask? For love, nothing else. Yes, a strange kind of love that succours us.  Love of the dancing words on the page that reveal truth, a mottled, scrappy truth; words that lead us to a precarious clarity.

Priya:  I think Arvind meant it as a comment on the difficult life of poets of his generation —  of keeping an unbendable faith in the  practice of poetry without a publisher in sight and is contrasting this with the impatience of some younger poets for quick acclaim. Maybe he’s calling attention to the passage of time as a process of natural selection. How many who write poetry in school continue to do so four decades on? Perhaps Arvind was also speaking of how poetry is used and discarded: everyone ‘becomes’ a poet when in love, but most soon abandon it. This kills me too.

Arundhathi:  I’m not sure of the tone or spirit in which this was said, Shikha. On one level, Arvind’s right, isn’t he? Most people do write poetry at 16, and stash it away at the back of their cupboards by 19, and move on to forms that count — like fiction and journalism! They’ve exorcised the virus pretty effectively by then. In any case, I’m not sure young people are really asking for advice. Most are asking for publishers!

And it’s okay really. I’m not sure I wanted advice when I was young either. What I did want was a measure of guidance, but above all, encouragement. I was consumed with self-doubt, and I wasn’t looking for uncritical endorsement, just basic affirmation, someone who’d say, “keep writing, you obviously need to, and you’re fully capable of turning out a halfway decent poem some day.” Poets like Nissim initially did that for me, and later, the Poetry Circle of Bombay, where a bunch of fellow-poets took each other’s work seriously. So, a community of poets can help enormously to keep the engagement with poetry alive. The challenge is not to allow a community to turn into a clique.

What I do find amusing is those who brandish manuscripts in your face, but show no indication that they’ve ever bothered to read your work. This indicates the absence of something vital — an ability to simply listen, a prerequisite for any poet. For those, perhaps Arvind’s common cold metaphor is best. One hopes they will be cured of the virus rapidly and move on to places where their self-absorption and pugnacity will be more effectively rewarded! Then there’s an amazing instrumentality of some interactions: the crude ‘you-review-my-book-and-I’ll-invite-you-to-a-conference’ level of transaction. But the less said about that the better.

To return to your question: how can we get people to take poetry more seriously? I think, by reminding them at every possible opportunity that poetry is pleasure. A very real and accessible pleasure. Schoolteachers can remind us of it too. Instead of urging us to paraphrase poems, it would help if more of them reminded us that poetry is the oldest form of literary enchantment on the planet, because we’re all capable of responding to it. It’s in our DNA. We’re hard-wired to love poetry — it’s as simple as that. Unfortunately, we’re encouraged to forget.