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

The practice of poetry is often a solitary one. More so in India, where mentorship, workshops and creative writing programs can be challenging to find. What does being an Indian poet mean? What are its inherent challenges? In the process of publishing new and diverse voices from India and the Indian diaspora, The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective has been fortunate to have the support and guidance of advisors who are generous with their time and knowledge, who are deeply engaged with the art and craft of poetry, and who are committed to bringing poetry from the margins to center stage. In a flurry of e-mail exchanges and imaginary cups of chai and glasses of wine, The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective’s Shikha Malaviya sat down (virtually) with three of India’s finest poets (and part of The Collective’s sage counsel)—Meena Alexander, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Arundhathi Subramaniam— to delve into their poetic process and lives. This conversation is possibly the first of its kind in Indian poetry, a sangam of generations, geographies and styles. Meena Alexander is an Indo-American poet, whose vast body of work is largely one of migration and exile, while Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s poetic practice is one based in India, steeped in translation and curation, fusing the ancient with the global. In Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poetry, one finds an amalgamation of the everyday sacred and personal, where human and spiritual relationships are inextricably tangled in vulnerability and strength, often in urban landscapes. What all three poets have in common is the ability to take the numinous or ambiguous and bring it into focus. 

What does it mean to be an Indian poet in English? Is there a certain expectation or responsibility attached to it? Does a contemporary Indian poetry aesthetic exist in terms of theme, style or voice?

Meena Alexander: One searches for a way of being in language, a true way. Making another body with words. Words that reach into the heart’s truth. There are of course so many voices, how else would we live in this complicated world? Always of course there is pressure of the present weighing in on us. When I was in my early twenties and publishing my first books, little books with the Writers Workshop in Calcutta, the question of language weighed on me. I was bombarded, perhaps that is not too strong a word with the question, why write in English? That is where the music came to me. Malayalam lives in me too, the fragrant dream song that lives in all that I know.  But I grew up in India and abroad and my English is a river into which so many streams flow.  From Hyderabad I took a train to Cuttack to spend time with Jayanta Mahapatra . I learnt so much from him about silence and the speech of the poet.  Kamala Das became a dear friend and mentor and her lines gave me courage: “Let me speak/ in any language I like. The language I speak becomes/ mine…” Some time ago I published a poem called ‘Illiterate Heart’ about how as a child I wanted to run away from the cage of script, about muteness, about the many languages that live in me. And now with the pitch and pull of this globalized world, the language we write in is so surely ours. Still there is this truth that remains with me: the poem uses language to translate from a space without words, this makes for the music of the poem.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria:  I’ve always maintained I write in the English bhasha, with echoes of the Tamil that I ache for, Bambaiya street Hindi, a rough and ready Marathi, heard Sanskrit, two tightly clutched handfuls of Sindhi, and somewhat less from the Malayalam and Parsi Gujarati. (You’ll agree most Indians keep three or four languages.)  But how does this translate in my work? Perhaps as an underground river, unseen but constantly flowing and heard as voices, imaginations and literary forms, glimmering with promised adventures. I find it invigorating to work with classical subcontinental forms: war and love poems, dirges and such, remaking them in the English, in the now. For instance, I worked with the terse allusiveness of Prakrit love poems in  ‘In and Out: Imagined Translations’ (of poems that don’t exist).  Such explorations are a marker of my work but don’t need to hold for other Anglophone poets.

As editor of Poetry at Sangam, I receive poetry from all over India and the world and I know that varied voices, styles and themes flourish under this rubric. I think a more cohesive construction of modernist Indian sensibility was discernible in the work of the earlier generation.

Today, Indian poetry in English is impacted by globalization and the proliferation of net journals; often styles are similar to what’s being written elsewhere. It’s possibly more interesting to compare the writing of Indian poets who live here with those living abroad and notice say, how the grimy glitter of Mumbai life or the ravaged landscape of the North-East are worked in formal terms — as against the ache of remembrance of those living away that makes words in the mother tongue caress the skin of their poems. But contemplating our Anglophone poetic practices demands more than sighting coterminous locales or themes. It’s about the pathways of the imagination, concepts of time and philosophies, why the structures of sub-continental poetic narratives have evolved in the way they have (how far in time do we delve?) and how poets are using language today.

Yes, to responsibility, but to whom and what?  An emerging poet has a duty to place her work, must network, etc. and shape herself accordingly; my responsibility is primarily to myself. Have I sung what I sought as best possible? As the 17th century bhakti poet Tukaram sang, “Words are the only jewels I possess,/ words are the only clothes I wear,/ words are the only food that sustains my life, /words are the only wealth I distribute among people.” In the words we string together lies our responsibility to ourselves, to the world. No other constraints, please!  

Arundhathi Subramaniam:  It means you’re a bit of an oddball, that’s for certain! To choose to be an Anglophone poet in India rather than an Anglophone novelist is an unorthodox choice: the dice is so clearly loaded in favour of the latter — in terms of publishers, readership, money, visibility, fame, you name it. It’s a strange position. On the one hand, as a poet, you’re a shadowy figure and you don’t really count in public perception (which is not such a bad thing, really). On the other, there are several insidious and not-so-insidious expectations you have to negotiate, like proving your cultural credentials, your Indianness, your politics. It’s something of an anomaly.

Responsibility? I have a rant of a poem — ‘To the Welsh Critic who doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’ — meant precisely for those who prescribe to poets what their responsibilities should be! I think the business of every poet is simply to find their own way to a place where truth meets beauty. Not a convenient truth and not a mere decorative beauty. So, it’s a quest for a truth and beauty that aren’t readymade, but discovered and invented through a process of immersion and rigour each time a poem is fashioned. Or if you’re allergic to words like beauty, let me say that the poet’s job is to combine authenticity with artistry, passion with precision. That’s the only responsibility I can think of. But of course, your context — cultural, political, historical — will inform both your authenticity and your artistry.

There is no single contemporary Indian aesthetic I can see, and thank god for that! Perhaps some patterns will reveal themselves in time, but I’m in no hurry to uncover them, because the moment one does, cultural commentators will turn prescriptive. Observations will turn into blueprints.

Let me say, very provisionally, that I do see in several contemporary Anglophone Indian poets (whose work I feel a kinship with) an unapologetic enjoyment of language, a growing expansiveness, a capacity for playfulness, a capacity to combine celebration and critique. This is not the language of journalism or of sociology; it’s a quest for a newer, fresher, re-enchanted language, if you will. The sources of enchantment are varied, but I recognize that quest playing out in very different ways. But these are broad observations. There are several emerging voices, and so, presumably, several new directions.

I’ve always believed poetry is a means to document an alternate history. Considering Indian poetry in English grew in leaps and bounds after 1947, would it be safe to say Indian poetry in English tells the story of modern India? I’m thinking of poets such as Arun Kolatkar, whose poems are often an allegorical fusion of history, myth and daily life or Reetika Vazirani and Agha Shahid Ali, who both wrote of exile, longing and exploring notions of being at/away from home.         

Meena:  Yes, it makes sense what you say, but I do feel one can’t legislate about these things. A poem about a shadow on a door, is that also political? Does it tell the story of the present? Perhaps. Since you ask, it’s very simple. It’s the task of the poet to bear witness. Witness to what you might ask. That’s where it turns complicated, in a good way, tangling life and words and all our unutterable emotions. I do think that much that is erased, crossed out, torn away from our ordinary lives, enters into the poems we make and this is the very flesh and soul of our lives, what the public, so called authoritative scripts do not permit. And poetry has always had a part to play in times of difficulty, in times of violence. Think of the tiny pieces of paper on which imprisoned writers have written their lines, or the bits of toothpaste used on scraps of toilet paper that the prisoners in Guantanamo used to write poems. Poems often filled with great tenderness. It is the task of poetry to return us, in tenderness to the earth, particularly in times of difficulty. I remember how a poem of mine, ‘Prison Bars’, was censored during the Emergency and the journal that was to carry it, Democratic World, came out with a blank space the precise size and shape of the poem.  More recently in my book  ‘Atmospheric Embroidery’, I have a cycle of sonnets based on drawings by children from Darfur, done in the relief camps. A more capacious history, a history of the human, this is what poetry makes for us.

Priya:  Yours is one way of looking at it. To me, poetry sings from the margins.  We strew the borders with our core concerns of being and belonging, our words are like fireflies sporadically lighting the darkness to show its true colors.  But a fragmented archipelago of poetry has/is emerging along the boundaries of mainstream writing — by which I mean fiction and some wonderful non fiction as well; the next generation will better see the contours.  The Indian novel that’s congruent with the enterprise of nation building, the rise of capitalism and individualism, better ‘tells the story of modern India’.  I say this also as an occasional writer of speculative fiction and nonfiction, knowing the prizes and publicity, PhDs and financial support these genres receive. Poetry, by comparison, is ice melting in the Arctic, succumbing to environmental change. It’s also the sparkle in the dewdrop.

Arundhathi:  It tells the story of many modern Indias, I think, all of which collide and coexist. There’s AK Ramanujan’s inspired ability to uncover the palpable immediacy of philosophy and myth. There’s Arun Kolatkar’s ability to mythologize contemporary urban reality (‘Kala Ghoda Poems’) and to contemporize myth (‘Sarpa Satra’). There’s Eunice de Souza’s Catholic Goa vignettes, Anjum Hasan’s images of small-town India, Mamang Dai’s living forests and rivers of Arunachal Pradesh. There are poets like Agha Shahid Ali, Imtiaz Dharker, Reetika Vazirani, Sudesh Mishra, Vijay Seshadri, Tabish Khair, Melanie Silgardo, among others, who speak of cultural unbelonging as a form of belonging. There are poets closer home that explore outsiderness as belonging too: Gieve Patel has a poem about being Parsi in post-Independent India, for instance; Nissim Ezekiel’s ‘Irani Café Instructions’ is a quirky reminder of the way in which all forms of outsider speech are an integral part of our polyglottal inheritance in this subcontinent.

And there are so many snapshot moments, all of which form the kaleidoscope that is India: Keki Daruwalla’s ability to dream unapologetically not just of Benaras but also of ancient Greece and Persia; CP Surendran’s image of the dank interiors of a divorce court; Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s image of the bamboo trees watching in silence when the Prime Minister visits Shillong; Manohar Shetty’s image of a luxury home in Goa where the gleaming kitchen sink reflects “an oblong face with a triple chin”; Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s image of Kali as a goddess chewing on myth; EV Ramakrishnan’s image of that horrifying figure of “a man, frozen in fear, his hands folded” hounded by a mob with petrol bombs; Adil Jussawalla’s image of “an opened people” trying to re-knot and suture themselves together in the island of Mumbai; Ranjit Hoskote’s poems to painters, both Indian and Western; Mizo poet Mona Zote’s unsettling image of life on a reservation; Anand Thakore’s lyrical images of Mughal India; Ruth Vanita’s image of the fine, elastic garment of love in a tender poem about same-sex love. All these and many others are modern Indias — each as real as the other.

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.

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 ,”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.

When I was a young poet, a major fear was remaining unheard. But I do believe that’s changed. With the avalanche of blogs and social networking sites, that isn’t really the kind of terror it once was. The new media has democratized things hugely, and that’s great. But being heard is only one half of the story. The other half is being taken seriously. But if you want to be taken seriously, you also have to take your own history seriously. It’s also exciting to find you’re part of a much larger web than you’d ever imagined.

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.