The New Life of English Poetry

A double page feature titled 'The New Life of English Poetry' in this Saturday's Mint Lounge which also features yours truly. 

I'm happy to be featured, of course. So it feels churlish to express the hope that (some time soon,) magazines would stop celebrating anglophone Indian poetry's resurgence and start devoting serious column inches to the examination of poets' works.

Put it down to a building head of steam that is flavoured with ill-temper. I should like to withdraw and write. This is why any evidence of my having occupied public space makes me twitchy and cross-grained.

My apologies therefore, to Mayank, whose piece is unexceptionable. The fault, dear Brutus.

Sundara Ramaswamy: No Longer At Ease

My essay on Sundara Ramaswamy appeared in Mint last week. All through the time I was reading Waves and Children, Women, Men, I made copious notes and wanted to include so much more than I was able to - even though it was rather a generous word count.

I wanted to quote entire passages from the the novel: Lacham play-acting an entire meal as head cook, conversations between people, observations made in passing. I wanted to talk about how Children, Women, Men is really historical fiction in the best way - in the detailing of a world that no longer exists but is so readily recognisable for someone of a particular age. Or the little nugget that SuRaa was derailed in the middle of writing the novel by a character who appears in it, who demands all his time so that he later becomes the protagonist of JJ: Some Jottings (Children, Women, Men was completed much later).

But alas, none of that was possible and I've done the best I could when I wanted to say much more than I could.

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Sukanya said that Sridaran often mentioned the word ‘modern’. What an attractive word! Dreams and visions swirled around it. ‘However hard we try and think, our brains won’t catch the sense of it exactly, Ramani. We must go and live in London to understand what it means,’ said Sukanya.

–       Children, Women, Men. Ch. 73.

Sundara Ramaswamy died in 2005, leaving behind him a body of work that included three novels, several short stories, some poems (written under the pen name ‘Pasuvayya’) and translations into Tamil of the work of Malayalam writer Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai. He also published and edited the Tamil literary journal Kalachuvadu that has carried the works of new and established writers over the years.

Su Raa, as he is popularly known, was greatly influenced by the work of the writer Pudumaipittan (whose collected works the Kalachuvadu Trusts edited and published in 2000). His early stories, such as ‘Heifer’ and ‘Sita Brand Soap Nut Powder’ had the kind of direct language and sharp observations about people and society that Pudumaipittan and other progressive writers of the early 20^th century thought necessary, in order to resuscitate Tamil literature from its excessive formality.

In time, Su Raa, as he was popularly known, distanced himself from the writers of the left and began to publish in some of the many little magazines that had sprung up in Tamil Nadu. The two books under review here give the reader a flavour of the range of Su Raa’s work: Waves is a selection of his stories and Children, Women, Men is his last published novel (1998).

Su Raa stories were written in two distinct phases: pre-1966 and after 1973. In her Introduction, Lakshmi Holmström, who has translated some of these stories, mentions this gap of six years in Su Raa’s story writing, but does not say why he wrote no stories in these years, what other writing those years were occupied with and why his stories are so remarkably different in the years after ’73.

In the absence of biographical context, it is up to the reader to plunge into the stories and experience them without the filter of literary exposition. This is not at all a bad thing: the difference in style and content between stories such as ‘Heifer’, ‘Sita Brand Soapnut Powder’ and ‘Prasadam’ on the one hand and ‘Essences’, ‘The Hollow’ and ‘Waves’ on the other, are self-evident. The earlier stories are sharply delineated studies of character and social situations, written with a characteristic humour and fondness for the people they represent. The later stories, on the other hand, are more surreal, allusive and dream-like. They often end abruptly and far away from they seemed to be headed. These stories are narratives of states of mind that one comprehends instantly and entirely but has to later reach to understand.

In Children, Women, Men, several characters experience a sense of unease and a loss of identity in the rapidly changing social milieu of pre-Independence Kottayam. SRS, the patriarch of the main family in the novel, refuses to attend the death anniversary – the ‘thivasam’ – of his father, seeing it as meaningless ritual. Other characters rebel in their own particular ways: Chellappa urges the widowed Anandam to come away with him; Sridaran wants to marry Valli, without regard to caste or generational taboos; Savitri is corrosively honest in her periods of ‘mental illness’; Balu, SRS’s son, is unable to rebel and develops a kind of fear that is best described by the German word angst.

Valli looks at her face in a cracked mirror and at once the sense of divided self that everyone experiences in their own ways is made literal. Such a dislocation is not just symbolic but also linguistic. Virudan Sankunni the postman says, ‘Once you learnt English, you never understood other people’s misfortunes.’ Balu, hiding in the store room, later watches Valli and Ramani return from their convent school and thinks, ‘They were laughing English laughter.’

None of these characters need to live in London to experience what modernity brings in its wake: as in post-WWI Europe, so in Travancore State in 1937-39.

The narrator of the short story ‘Crows’ wants desperately to belong to the world of crows:

Whenever I told the older crows, ‘I am a poet as well,’ they looked at me with a little smile. It seemed to me that they said, ‘That is really not very important to us.’ It struck me as perfectly fair that as long as I took no notice of the poetry of their world, they were at liberty to ignore the poetry of mine.

Bridging the language barrier often seems as arduous a task as understanding another species without the benefit of a common language or mode of thought. Su Raa was trilingual: in addition to English, he read and spoke Malayalam with ease and learnt to read and write Tamil when he was young (though, as a Tamil Brahmin he always spoke it). In his second novel, JJ: Some Jottings (Crea-A, 1981. Trans. A.R.Venkatachalapathy, Katha, 2004), Su Raa uses the life of a fictional writer, JJ, to write a post-modern satire of Tamil and Malayalam literary movements and debates. A character in JJ says, ‘We speak of Kafka. Of Simone de Beauvoir. Of Borges. But we do not know of Kuttikrishna Marar. We do not know of Gopalakrishna Adiga. How's that?’

It is a familiar complaint and not an unjustified one – it is true that a generation that is most comfortable speaking English, though it has not completely lost its ability to speak or write another Indian language, tends to be more familiar with writers from the west rather than writers of other Indian languages. Books such as Waves and Children, Women, Men help in tilting the scale towards a literature that ought to be more familiar than it is. Perhaps the riches these translations promise can even be an inducement to readers to begin reading in languages other than English.

Review: Wild Girls Wicked Words

This short review appeared in Mint last week. I've had massive power outages and connectivity problems, so haven't posted this until now.

I really should write or keep the longer versions of reviews to put on the blog. I had a lot more to say about this book, but I edited it down and didn't keep the longer review.

*

Wild Girls Wicked Words: Poems of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi & Sukirtharani

Edited & Translated by Lakshmi Holmström

Kalachuvadu Publications [Sangam House]. Rs. 295. Pp: 230

Every year, around 8 March the world sketches a tribute to women. Each year the gestures seem more hollow and meaningless, a gimmick to sell anything from facials and makeovers to health-checks and insurance. At least since the Delhi rape, it has become clear that far from achieving equality, women in India face even more challenges than the popular narrative would have us believe.

A whole decade ago in Tamil Nadu, there was widespread outrage in literary circles at the publication of Kutti Revathi’s book of poems, Mulaigal (Breasts). Around the same time, other women poets, Malathi Maithri, Salma and Sukirtharani were also publishing poems that spoke about the bodies and desires of women and about wanting a space to call their own. Whatever pious noises about violence against women we are hearing now, things were different in 2003. Back then, these women received death threats and, as Lakshmi Holmström recounts in the introduction to this volume, one film lyricist even said they “should be lined up on Mount Road in Chennai, doused with kerosene oil and burnt alive.”

Ah, that trusty debating strategy used by men in times of social upheaval: kerosene (See also: acid).

That these women continued to write undeterred by threats says much more for their individual courage and perseverance than it does for society as a whole. In the decade since, each of these four women have published more collections of poems and have continued to write about whatever they wanted to, regardless of the compulsions of their private or public lives.

Wild Girls Wicked Words, translated and edited by Holmström, ironically references the indignation of the literary establishment in Tamil Nadu. It is a bilingual collection of selected poems that, while still being appetisers, are substantial enough to give the reader an idea of the kind of poetry these women write, with biographical notes to provide context.

The poems are about the things you might expect – the bodies of women, the relationship of women with their lovers, their children; and about landscape, so intimately tied to the idea of poetry in Tamil literature since the earliest Sangam poetry. But the originality of the ideas and images and tonal variety give these poems depth and edge, making one pause often to absorb and re-read a line.

The first poem, ‘She who threads the skies’ by Malathi Maithri, begins thus: “As the sky fills/the empty shell/after a bird has hatched,/ so desire fills everything.”

These women are unafraid both of desire and of declaring it. “I watched over them in amazement”, Kutti Revathi says simply in her poem ‘Breasts’. In another poem about meeting her lover, she invokes one of Sangam poetry’s most famous lines: “red earth and pouring rain”.

Indeed, for all the contemporary cadences of their poetry, these poets are often in dialogue with the tradition of Tamil poetry; sometimes, as in Malathi’s or Sukirtharani’s poems, they are sardonic; but these poets see themselves as writers who are intimately tied to both place and language. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a portion of the poems in this collection are about Sri Lanka and more specifically about the civil war. These poems are poignant and anguished but are never mere harangues.

Sukirtharani’s poetry is perhaps the most stark and angry of the four, standing as it does at the intersection of Dalit and feminist writing. In her poem ‘Translating her’, she says:

They ask me what the song means/ prying, eager, as if checking out/ the sex of a newly born./ I translate her poverty/  the hunger she eats,/  the hunger she expels

Salma’s experiences as a Muslim, a woman writing in secret and wanting to explore both solitude and selfhood (thanimai/thanmai) are better known via her novel The Hour Past Midnight, which takes its title from the poem ‘A midnight tale’, collected here. Images of confinement act as counterpoint to the imagined peace of a simple solitude. But sitting at the edges of domesticity is a chilling truth:

In this universe/ there may be many creatures/ alone with their prey/ living amicably together/ leading pleasant lives. (‘An evening, another evening’)

‘Language must be redeemed from the grave of its own inadequacy’, declared Malathi Maithri in 2001. This collection demonstrates that this is being done, both with passion and craft.

'Something in me refuses to die': An Interview with Jayanta Mahapatra

This interview appeared in Mint last Saturday*. I'm putting up an earlier draft of the transcript, which contains a couple of questions we left out of even the web version; and  more lightly unedited answers.

*

Photo © Sridala Swami

If there is one thing Jayanta Mahapatra gives me, it is hope. Several years ago, as a person who scarcely dared to call herself a poet, I sent a bunch of poems to Chandrabhaga, the journal Mahapatra had edited for many years and recently revived. I was unused both to rejection and acceptance at that time. But I can safely say that the hand-written letter I got from him accepting all my poems, was crucial in helping me redefine myself as a poet.

Many hand-written letters were exchanged over the years that followed, but it wasn’t until 2010 that I felt an urgent, scarcely explicable need to visit Jayantada. Puzzled by my urgency, but nevertheless welcoming, he invited me stay. I had imagined that some at least, of our conversations would be about poetry, but I sensed a reluctance in Jayantada to talk about his work and found I could not ask him all the questions I’d imagined I would.

When he was in Hyderabad last year, he fell suddenly ill. I was worried, but relieved when his hand-written letters, the writing a little shaky, resumed. I was delighted when in November this year, an advance copy of Land, Jayantada’s 19^th collection of poetry in English, arrived in the post.

It seemed the right time to get Jayantada to speak about his poetry. Going on as we’d begun, I sent him the questions and he replied over seven closely-written sheets of paper, in a neat beautiful hand. Here are excerpts from that response. I would even call it a conversation.

Of his numerous awards – the Padma Shri, the Sahitya Akademi Award, among others – I need say nothing readers don’t already know. Land takes as its epigraph a line from Oscar Wilde: ‘The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide’. Counter-intuitively, this also gives me hope: as someone who, like Jayantada, started writing poetry very late in life, I look forward to the ‘slow suicide’ in which all of us, no matter what our age or when we begin, are engaged. 

*

Sridala Swami: Jayantada, you were 40 when your first collection of poems was published. Can you talk about when and why you started to write poetry?

Jayanta Mahapatra: That’s right. I came into poetry quite late, when I was about forty. Not the proper age to write love poems, is it? Perhaps a stage comes when one has to make choices, and in my case it was the writing of poetry.  I had spent all those forty years doing research in theoretical physics, in serious photography, and often at doing practically nothing but reading. Reading still brings me a kind of joy. I like to return to those passages that enlighten me. The way language carried the emotion in a good book attracted me, and I kept learning the subtleties of language. I made my choice with poetry then, and poetry stayed with me.

SS: You have lived all your life in Orissa and its presence in your poetry is very strong. Could you talk about place, language and landscape and how it affects your poetry?

JM: Look, it’s difficult to say expressly how place, language and landscape affect my poetry. I have lived here all my life, and this is the land of my ancestors. Isn’t it but natural that these should come into my poems? Can I forget “hunger” when my own grandfather almost died of starvation in the terrible famine that struck Odisha in 1866? Can I forget the starving millions who live in the remote hinterland and subsist on dried mango seeds and tubers they collect from the jungles? It is the place that has shaped me: its traditions, myths, and more importantly, its history. These make the arms of my poetry.

SS: For years you edited Chandrabhaga, one of the country’s most influential little magazines. It was where many poets first published their poems. What made you want to start Chandrabhaga.

JM: In the late seventies, there was no standard magazine for Indian poetry. Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry India had folded up and The Illustrated Weekly of India was becoming more politically directed, with Pritish Nandy as the editor. It was a disappointing scene. One had to send one’s poems abroad for publication, and that wasn’t easy. It was expensive too. So I thought I’d start this magazine, Chandrabhaga, for both established and new poets. The response was fairly good because we managed to send our issues abroad, to places like Harvard University and other graduate schools. The magazine was also sent as an exchange magazine to the USA. It was indexed in the PMLA and other directories, which brought me a quiet sense of pride. 

The essays were noticed, and reactions came in. One of my aims was to set standards for poetry, because any “poem” could be published in the poetry magazines in India, and that was terrible. It was sort of heartbreaking for me when I ceased publication.

SS: Much of your work was first published in journals in the US and elsewhere outside India. Did you correspond with poets from other countries? Will these letters be collected and published?

JM: Oh yes, there’s a lot of correspondence lying in old files and cartons. I haven’t been able to do anything about it. I was, for years, preserving these letters from poets and editors until a severe illness almost took my life in 2006. Then I simply left the letters as they were. You could say I abandoned them, realising the futility of such feelings. As a matter of fact, I destroyed a number of them after I recovered partly ... I asked myself: Do these letters measure your life in any way? And if they do, they will be just like passing faces you see when a train goes past you. I’d say there’s nothing to claim, nothing to own in them. I don’t think of them as a literary record, to be published at some time.

SS: In 2010, you were writing a weekly column in an Odia newspaper - your autobiography in serialised form. Has it now been collected and translated?

JM: The serialisation of my autobiography in Odia is still going on in the Bijoya, a literary monthly. It is finished and will soon be taken up for publication. I wanted to do an intimate and raw sort of thing, so I instinctively turned to Odia, not English. As to translating it into English, I have no idea if it’s going to be done.

SS: What poets do you like to read, whether contemporary or from an earlier time? Whose work has touched or moved you? 

JM: Fiction has been my first love all my life. My schooldays were spent with H. Rider Haggard, E. M. Ballantyne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. From there, my reading habits broadened and I went into the classics – Dickens, Conrad, Dostoievsky and Tolstoy. Today I read Saramago, LeClezio and Javier Marias. 

But it was only in the 1970s and ’80s that I turned to reading contemporary poetry. Even Eliot and Tagore were unknown to me at that time. My six months with writers at the International Writing Program in Iowa City, USA [1976-77] brought me face to face with their poetry. It was really enlightening; a sort of unknown world, vast, passionate and experimental opened out, and I could put my poetry beside theirs. 

I began to read Rimbaud and Baudelaire in English translation, then Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis, Vicente Aleixandre and [Salvatore] Quasimodo. It was wonderful, reading the lines of these master poets, and I felt myself slipping into the bodies of the greats, amazed and thoroughly humbled. In Australia for the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1978 I met Sapardi Djoko Damono of Indonesia, Margaret Atwood of Canada and Galway Kinell of the USA.

So much of the work of poets like Neruda has left me mute. Quasimodo too. And then, there are Sylvia Plath and Carolyn Forché, who have never ceased to move me. If I made a list, I wouldn’t know where to start and where to end. The beauty in these poets lies in the manner in which we comprehend their poetry and the silence in their lines that we must honour. 

But in the end, I always find something which moves me in every poet I read, almost every poet.

SS: You have lectured about poetry at Delhi University as a Poet in Residence and have conducted creative writing workshops in Baroda. How do you talk about poetry to young people? How do they respond? 

JM: I always try to impress upon the young poets that I am not the one they should emulate. I don’t belong to those great poets – to their company, I mean – that I could speak about poetry and how to go about writing a poem. My ignorance is there for all to see – in my training as a physicist, and also in the fact that I started writing poetry when I was forty. From my own experiences my poetry came, that’s the truth, and I tell younger people that. Also that a  poet is a poet by virtue of what he or she sees or hears, and that itself begins the mystifying process of the poem. 

You tell them that poetry writing isn’t an easy thing – a struggle for me, every time I sit down to write – and they understand. They understand that the passion for poetry also needs their flesh and blood, and is more about understanding the world they live in, and understanding their own selves.

SS: You taught Physics at Ravenshaw College for a number of years. How do you find science relates to your poetry?

JM: I am not sure whether you’d agree that poetry is a way of looking at the world, and when this world is looked at from the condition of the mind that questions, from the scientific mind and from the poetic mind, each object is seen (1) as it is, and (2) as a crucible that can hold a number of immeasurable secrets which questions could release. I am not very sure when I say that possibilities present themselves more as a question than an answer. And more or less physics and poetry point to the same thing. Maybe as one goes deeper and deeper into poetry, an objective analysis is evident, such as is found in physics, where successive schemes add up somehow into a single arrangement. 

My ignorance is there for all to see. But just as it is difficult to understand the intimate relation of poetry to the universe, it’s becoming more complex to see through the relationship of science, or physics, with the universe.

SS: How do you write poetry? What makes you keep writing it.

JM: There is something in me that refuses to die. It does not accept easy definition, and my physics cannot make an equation out of it. It’s there, somewhere deep inside me perhaps. And this is poetry.

But my experience, through my long life, has taught me that I loved to write poetry because I love life and cherish it. And there are risks in experience; so in poetry. And this is what’s significant: that because one loves life, one cherishes the poem, its utmost power that goes on to sustain us. But again, I wouldn’t know how I write poetry. I never intended to be a poet. But one looks at the world and is pained by the despair around and you find it hard to keep silent about it.

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*The photograph that accompanies the article - reproduced here - is mine. I'm sure Mint will eventually give me a photo credit for it. (Just sayin').

Interview with Jayanta Mahapatra in Mint

The web version of my interview with Jayanta Mahapatra is up on Mint; the paper version is, of necessity, slightly shorter.

For now, I'm just linking to Mint. Will put up the whole thing up here next week.

A Variety of Doms [full version]

A week ago, Mint carried a conversation between Ranjit Hoskote and me, mostly about Dom Moraes and the new Selected Poems that Hoskote has edited. That was, of necessity, a shorter version of the conversation we had. I thought I'd put up the longer version here.

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A Variety of Doms 

 Sridala:  I've just finished reading your Dom Moraes: Selected Poems, and it's a wonderful work: the Introduction and Notes, as well as the selection of poems. Tell me how the project began and what made you choose Dom Moraes.

 Ranjit: Sridala, thank you so much for your generous response to my Dom Moraes: Selected Poems. At least since 2006, I'd been mulling over the fact that we do not have a critical annotated edition for any Anglophone Indian poet. By that time, many of our first-generation and even some of our second-generation figures had passed on: Ramanujan, Nissim, Dom, Arun, Shahid among them. And, apart from Vinay Dharwadker's work on Ramanujan, the others were represented by various separate existing editions, collected volumes, and the posthumous publication of unpublished work.

So there was my preoccupation with the annotated critical edition as a form. It was given further impetus when I realised, with a shock, at a reading in an academic context that the poems of some of our older contemporaries would quite simply be undecipherable to teachers who were not inside of the subculture of poetry. Not because poets write deliberately in code, but because they dazzlingly reshape language and compress experiences and insights, and use references in elliptical ways. Every labyrinth needs a thread!

As to why Dom – it is because he, with Keki Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla and Agha Shahid Ali, are the poets I have felt closest to in the tradition of Anglophone Indian poetry. I have been endlessly fascinated by Dom’s poems ever since I first encountered them. Also, I share with him a fascination with classical mythology, with history, and also have shared his intense sense of being a nomad. I identify strongly with several of his key, formative experiences – my own career has not been unlike his, in terms of the editorial work, much international travel and research. And, like him, for political reasons of my own, I am critical of the nation-state as a constricting entity. Speaking of which, one of my stated objectives in framing this selection is to demonstrate very clearly the political Moraes, and the intimate connection between his poetry and his prose as he traversed the ground of the political in both practices.

SS: It's certainly true that there's very little scholarship on Anglophone Indian poetry. It's the reason I find your Introduction so interesting, because - as you yourself say - it comes close to literary biography. And that's a method of entering the work of any writer; a method that students of literature are familiar with. And yet, there's so little of the biographical approach to Anglophone poetry here, don't you think?

RH: I completely agree with you. Anglophone poetry in India has not been fortunate in the quality of criticism it has received. Much of it has emanated from ill-informed academics who have little understanding of poetry, or have ideological axes to grind. We have had to suffer several generations of mindless nativist critics, for instance. The finest criticism of Anglophone poetry in India has come from practitioners themselves.

As to biography, Ramachandra Guha has famously suggested, and demonstrated, that biography is not a genre at which South Asia excels. We oscillate between celebrity journalism at the low end and hagiography at the high end. Archival access is weak, hearsay rife, and the historian's tools of interpretation, analysis and contextualisation are not accorded the importance they deserve.

SS:  The thing about the biographical approach is that Dom makes it easy: with three autobiographies, later collected into one volume. I remember reading A Variety of Absences a few years ago and it was so engaging and showed Dom as a politically engaged person – as you so rightly point out – and far from the Anglophile dilettante he's often made out to be. This is not to, in any way, diminish the extent of your research and scholarship on Dom. I was talking to Adil Jussawalla about this in January at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, and he also talked about the lack of resources for research into the work of poets; and he especially mentioned Dom and asked where one would find his journalism if one wanted to look.

It seems to me that as Anglophone poets of the next generation, we have to work not only within a vacuum as far as primary material goes, but we also work as if it were the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: a permanent blank slate.

RH:  The availability of three memoirs by my subject was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, of course, it was fantastic primary material, and it helped me to map his poetic journeys in relation to those he made in his other careers as an international correspondent, a war reporter, a cultural diplomat, a freelance writer, and a maker of documentary films for television.

However – a big 'however' – Dom is not uniformly reliable in his memoirs. His account of both sides of his family can be misleading and inaccurate, and coloured by the circumstances of his difficult childhood. His recollection of events is sometimes significantly at variance with the recollections of others involved in those events. He can be elliptical or notational, or can telescope circumstances of space and time.

I had to develop a chart with various time-lines marked on it: one time-line for Anglophone poetry in India, another for post-World War II British poetry, yet another for political events around the world, yet another for India. In addition, I cross-checked Dom’s memoirs against the account of Ved Mehta, who shared some of Dom's early return journeys to India. Also, and very importantly, I was privileged to have several conversations with Dom's aunt, the wonderful Dr Teresa Albuquerque, who made family archives and her own work as an urban cultural historian available to me. Also, vitally, I sifted through the personal archive of Adil Jussawalla, and could develop contexts for the cuttings and invitations, the ephemera and the records and reportage that Adil has put together. The literary biographer is also a historian working with a jigsaw of material.

For instance, when I'd put together some of Dom's articles on the immigrant crisis in the UK in the late 1960s (from Adil's archive), I began to sketch out the context of that period. From another part of my life, there came back memories of Enoch Powell, whose obituary I had written in my role as one of The Times of India's leader-writers and one of its resident obituarists. And I began to link the dots between the immigration crisis and Dipak Nandy, who Dom included in his list of globally important thinkers when he compiled Voices for Life. ‘Why Nandy?’, I asked myself. Back to the salt mines of research – back to the debates of the late 1960s, and so back to old issues of the Labour Monthly, and Nandy's profoundly prescient writings on class and race, labour and resistance in late-1960s Britain.

 SS:  This is fascinating, your journey through Dom's work and his life. It's interesting that you say Dom is often unreliable – aren't all memoirists? Erica Jong called it 'inventing memory'.

RH:  Indeed, all memoirists are unreliable – that comes with the territory, and we go along because it can be such a delightful ride. And it is not entirely fabricated either! You have to balance the delight with sober factuality! That's why I've tried to cross-check every reference from Dom's memoirs with other extant accounts of those events, histories and assessments of the period or place. This is why so many other characters enter these pages – Gregory Corso, Lucian Freud, Hannah Arendt, Francis Bacon – to name only a few.

SS: Ranjit, you occupy a unique position in the canon, as it were, because though you belong to our generation, you've spent so much time with Nissim, Dom and all the others. You'd be the right person to talk about lineages, legacies and traditions, such as they are, in our poetry. What fascinates me about this question of legacy is that of erasure, which as an idea has begun to obsess me. What to leave out and what to leave for the world to see? Who claims legacy and how?

RH: Yes, I suppose I occupy a peculiar place in our unfolding history. I came of age, as the sorcerer’s apprentice, in close proximity to Nissim, Dom and Adil. And because my first book was published rather early, when I was 22, I belong to the publishing generation of 1989-1992, alongside some contemporaries who are nearly a decade older than I am. While I was still in my early 20s, I worked closely with Dilip Chitre on several editorial and translation projects. And Arun Kolatkar, in his quiet way, was a source of inspiration to me through my 20s and 30s. Arun very graciously designed the cover of my third book of poems, The Sleepwalker's Archive, this process involving conversations with him about everything from leaf venation through Amazonian musical instruments to the theories of Velikovsky. I’m not launching out in autobiographical vein here! This is just to point to the close, substantial, material associations that I’ve had the privilege of having with an older generation of practitioners. To me, that’s a strong, living definition of a legacy—living in, and carrying forward the impulses of, a community of practitioners, an experimental continuity, a gharana.

SS: It occurs to me that in creating a volume of Selected Poems, you will have done your own kind of erasure, if that's not too strong a word, on Dom's work. Could you talk about why Selected and not Collected?

RH: Dom already had two editions of Collected Poems -- the first was the 1987 edition, which marked his 'comeback', if you will. The second was the posthumous 2004 one, which appeared a few weeks after his death on 2 June 2004. So it was important for me to work with the 190 poems that he evidently wished to be represented by, at the very end of his life. Of these, I set myself the task of extracting what would be the absolutely non-negotiable, essential Moraes. It gave me the occasion to ask: what was the most important curve of evolution within Dom's poetry? I detail much of this in the Introduction -- but briefly, I decided to eliminate most of the early apprentice work, Dom in his Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite mode, and to focus on the compelling, finely worlded voice of experience through the 1980s, with some fine pieces from what turned out to be the last, very fertile period of his activity. So yes, it was very important for me to propose a shape for his career, as seen retrospectively. As a curator, I saw this as a task equivalent to planning a posthumous retrospective of a great artist's work.

A Variety of Doms in Mint

My chat with Ranjit Hoskote in today's Mint. Will post the whole thing later, but here's a taste:

Dom Moraes was the youngest poet and the only Indian to have won the Hawthornden Prize in 1958 for his first collection of poetry, A Beginning, but few today will have read the poems from that book. Anthologies, when they include Moraes’ work at all, tend to skim over his earlier work. A Penguin Modern Classics edition brings together, for the first time, selections from all of Moraes’ work. From the plaintive “I am in love, and long to be unhappy” of 'Sailing to England' to the merciless self-awareness of the last sonnets, this book gives us the essential Dom.
I asked poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote, who edited this volume, about his journey through Dom Moraes’ work. Edited excerpts from the conversation:

[further edited for this post]

Ranjit Hoskote: Dom, with Keki Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla and Agha Shahid Ali, are the poets I have felt closest to in the tradition of anglophone Indian poetry. I have been endlessly fascinated by Dom’s poems ever since I first encountered them. Also, I share with him a fascination with classical mythology, with history, and also have shared his intense sense of being a nomad. I identify strongly with several of his key, formative experiences—my own career has not been unlike his, in terms of the editorial work, much international travel and research. And, like him, for political reasons of my own, I am critical of the nation state as a constricting entity. Speaking of which, one of my stated objectives in framing this selection is to demonstrate very clearly the political Moraes, and the intimate connection between his poetry and his prose as he traversed the ground of the political in both practices.

Review: Gogu Shyamala's Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket, But...

My review of Gogu Shyamala's book in today's Mint.

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Here’s a provisional definition: A short story is a story you can tell in one sitting, perhaps in the time it takes to feed a circle of hungry children as they sit with hands held out for the next spoonful of food, and where food and story come to a simultaneous and satisfying end.

This oral quality, this sense that the story could change unexpectedly depending on the mood of the audience, could—and does—break into song or take diversions via social history, is the most striking thing about Gogu Shyamala’s first collection of short stories, Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket, But...

Shyamala is a senior fellow at the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies in Hyderabad and is a Dalit feminist working on creating biographies of Dalit women political leaders. These stories, translated from Telugu by several people, including her colleagues, have something of the autobiographical about them. Shyamala herself grew up in the Madiga quarter of the kind of Telangana village described in these stories. While the rest of her family worked, sometimes as bonded agricultural labourers, Shyamala was sent away to finish her higher education. The world these stories describe is not born of nostalgia; neither is it an imperfectly imagined idea of what village life must be like; this is Shyamala’s world and she knows it very well indeed, even if she no longer lives in the kind of village she describes.

Shyamala’s village is a site of many contradictions: the Mala, Madiga and Sabbanda communities have a close relationship with the land and its seasonal rhythms; their oral histories and identities are inseparable from the landscape and its stories. Yet it is impossible to escape the consequences of caste unless the village is left behind.

In Raw Wound, clearly the most autobiographical and powerful story in the collection, Syamamma is sent away to school in order to save her from becoming a “jogini” (a lower-caste woman who is declared the sexual property of the whole village). Her father leaves her at a school, and pleads with the warden of the hostel to keep his daughter safe. “This was the first time I had seen my father weep uncontrollably and I felt the village’s lake flooding with sorrow. I held fast to my father and could not help but cry myself,” Syamamma says.

Shyamala’s language is straightforward yet lyrical—the village lake flooding with sorrow elevates individual suffering into the entire community’s suffering. In another story, The Village Tank’s Lament, the tank itself speaks to a child. There are tonal shifts and changes in perspective that make each story a fresh experience: In one, a couple of visitors to the village watch some boys dive and swim in a village well; it’s an instance of straight reportage told as story.

Often, there is an overwhelming sense of suspense that is constantly confounded with an ending that, if not always happy, at least manages to avert the worst-case scenarios we expect; even though we know—with the 2006 Kherlanji massacre and other examples before us—how terrible the possibilities are. Many things can and do go wrong, but there are no burnings, killings, maimings and rape (though there are threats of, and attempts at, some of these things).

This is an interesting tactic because when stories end well—such as Braveheart Badeyya or Tataki Wins Again—the reader is forced to question her expectation of violence in fiction and ask what it means that the author refuses time and again to offer it. That Shyamala avoids a bleakness of tone while leaving alive the possibilities of violence is a tribute to her mastery over the short story form. Indeed, Shyamala’s greatest achievement is the note of humour and lightness that sounds through this collection.

If there is a striking absence in this book, it is that of the Communist movement in the Telangana region. The stories touch upon many of Shyamala’s own concerns, after all: land, agriculture, Dalit politics, feminism and oral history. It seems impossible that the Naxal movement, which has a long history in the region, should find absolutely no mention in these stories. After Shyamala’s own early involvement with the movement, and her subsequent departure from the political positions the Maoists hold, I read this absence as an act of power by a Madiga who, by such a deliberate erasure, reverses the classical Indian Communist’s blindness to caste.

When I began reading, I was struck by the title’s resemblance to Yasujiro Ozu’s film, I Was Born But... It occurs to me that this book shares other qualities with that particular film: a respect for the perspective of children as they negotiate the adult world, the ability to create their unique world without descending into nostalgia for one’s own childhood, and the hard-won lightness of an adult who has known bitterness and loss.