How important is knowing one’s poetic history? Even now, when one mentions Indian poetry in English, most people think of Rabindranath Tagore. Brilliant contemporary poets like Arun Kolatkar and Gopal Honnalgere, who lived and died in relative obscurity, are only now getting recognition. How do we bridge this gap and create an accessible poetic legacy for everyone to inherit and learn from?
Meena: This is an excellent question you ask and a task that I am very glad to see you have raised to the light. We have a history, an intricate, complicated history. I remember the rush of excitement I had when I first read Toru Dutt, a name that is perhaps quite forgotten now, and her painful ways of translating her young life, Sarojini Naidu who gave up her poetry for the political realm. I wrote about them in my book, ‘Shock of Arrival’. One learns of freedom through the terrible constraints of the past. When poets a hundred years from now read us, what will they see? A poet writing in English, who also draws so much from the rich web of writing in bhasha languages and from world languages. I love the lines from Marina Tsvetayeva that Arun Kolatkar copied down in his notebook: “No language is the mother tongue… Orpheus exploded and broke up the nationalities…†Yet we also live through the idea of the nation, this too is part of what history pens us into. Perhaps through such talks, conversations, the making of a shared history of the Indian poem in English will emerge, a powerful, messy, often contradictory history.
Priya: Incidentally, Arun was already a legend when alive. We have 200 years of Indian poetry in English and millennia of poetic traditions that I cherish and draw from. As Ayyappa Paniker, a wonderful scholar and poet pointed out, an esemplastic imagination, meandering sense of time and narrative, acceptance of pluralities, etc., have nuanced Indian writing — most of this, historically, was kavya, poetry.
Bridge the gap? I don’t have ready answers. There’s a lot to read online. Poets are practical people; we work with ingenuity from the small spaces we inhabit. Perhaps we should more effectively co-opt the I-me-myself drive to get folks to read — if only for inspiration. And support such sites, but not stop here. T(G)IPC is doing its bit. For over a decade Arundhathi, through the Poetry International Web, has been doing excellent work by bringing to our notice Anglophone poets and those from our other bhashas most of us wouldn’t have read otherwise. The Four Quarters Journal from the Northeast too persists in difficult circumstances. For decades, Adil Jussawalla, sardonic, humorous and gentle, has created a poetry community through discussions, reading manuscripts, writing, co-founding the legendary publishing unit Clearing House, by being helpful to younger poets because he knew how bleak the scene was. At Poetry at Sangam, we publish emerging poets alongside established ones and translations from different centuries, languages and traditions, so that readers who wish to submit are tempted to read poetry they wouldn’t otherwise search for. But the cliché ,â€You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink†is, alas, true. Which doesn’t mean you don’t make it more easily accessible.
Arundhathi: That’s a good question. Honnalgere is another matter, but Kolatkar didn’t languish in obscurity; he was always known to those who knew Indian poetry; the problem is not many knew about Indian poetry, or wanted to know about it. It’s only in these past few years that people have evinced an interest in it. This is due to many reasons: the rising tide of poetry conferences and festivals, our growing connection with a global literary scene (made possible by the cyber-boom and India’s increasing importance in international perception). Consequently, we’ve woken up to the need to archive our history — and managed to convince publishers of that importance as well. It’s wonderful that there’s an upsurge of interest in documenting certain moments and figures in modern Indian verse. Several projects are underway, which is heartening, from doctoral projects on certain poets to books on certain pivotal decades in Indian poetry, by Jerry Pinto, Laetitia Zechhini, and others.
The India domain of the Poetry International Web that I began editing in 2004 was one step in the direction of building up a web-archive of modern Indian poetry. There are other websites, like Muse India, Poetry at Sangam, to name a few; journals like Kavya Bharati or Pratilipi, as well as anthologies, edited by Arvind Mehrotra, Jeet Thayil, Sudeep Sen, Ranjit Hoskote, Eunice de Souza, EV Ramakrishnan and Anju Makhija, myself and others. Maps will gradually form — contested maps, piecemeal maps perhaps, but it’s through a jumble of maps that geographies and histories gradually get constructed.
Do you think freedom of speech is under threat in India? With the senseless murders of writers like M.M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar, and the banning of books by Wendy Doniger and Perumal Murugan, how afraid should we be of being silenced? What can we, as poets and writers, do to voice our protest and offer support?
Meena: I think poets and writers have a very important role to play in time of difficulty, voicing our freedom to write and speak. I wrote a piece called ‘Silenced Writer’ that came out in The Statesman. The Indian Writers Forum that I am a part of is important here, a shared online space for many voices of dissent. But the poem? The poem is free, it does not belong to any party or ideology, any creed or over arching authority. This is its danger, the danger and glory of desire itself. This is what leads it to the horizon the mystics celebrated, the space without words.
Priya: I don’t think one needs to be afraid, but certainly there’s no need to provoke. The path, according to me, lies elsewhere, in constant work. We’d be better off dropping a teleological approach to poetry that expects it to be either entertaining or revolutionary; these aren’t its ends. Poetry, as Auden reminded us, doesn’t make things happen. Rather it’s “a way of happening, a mouth.†Take poetry out with readings, slam events, etc. Build an international community of poets. Sign the petitions. Above all, promote translations that speak of our human-ness, not otherness, and more translations of sacred verses from all traditions, all faiths. Don’t cede this earth. Even these times will pass. Meanwhile, be the change you want to see.
Arundhathi: The cases you mention, and several others in the past, are disturbing. And the murders are tragic and utterly senseless. Cultural freedoms have definitely been under siege in this country. But I believe there’s a deeper malaise. Our capacity to deal with contradiction, with ambiguity, with nuance — this, at core, is imperiled. We’ve turned into a society that wants certainty at any cost. We’re willing to settle for slogans and catchphrases, whether religious or political, sacred or secular, and in this we aren’t unlike many other societies in the world. In a time of rapid transition, it’s not surprising. At the same time, it’s disquieting when we shut out room for exploration and resort to cultural policing. Even conversation is an endangered art, because the scene has grown so polarized. People are actually talking slogans at each other. This alarms me, irrespective of whether I agree with the politics or not. There are deep anxieties surfacing; to address them with religious or political jingoism is like putting Band-Aids on a deep wound or bone fracture.
There are many ways in which writers can play a role, and I believe they have. Many poets have openly condemned forces that gag free speech at public readings; others have written about it. But in addition to all this, let’s not forget that poetry is, and has always been, the art of uttering multiple truths in a single line. It’s a celebration of plurality, of contradiction. A poet, by definition, is a contrarian. As a form that embraces hyphens, ellipses, question marks, poetry also compels us to confront uncertainty. That makes it the very antithesis of the fundamentalist impulse. Yes, it’s true the world doesn’t listen as closely to poets as we’d perhaps like. But it’s also true that if we, as poets, trusted our art a lot more, others might begin to trust it as well.
