Article
A celebration of the Indian city
Editorial: 15 November 2011
November 11, 2011
Far too often, critical discourse on ‘city poets’ characterises the city as an alienating space and the poets as ahistorical, rootless, angst-ridden zombies, sequestered from grim social realities and divorced from their cultural moorings. What’s often overlooked is the spectrum of tones and modes adopted by these poets when writing of the city. The city that emerges from these multiple word pictures is far from monochromatic.
And so you hear the voice of the lusty romantic in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s ‘Neera’ poem (evocatively translated by Amit Chaudhuri), in which elegy meets paean. As the poet speaks of the kadamba tree on Hari Ghosh street, the clock that once fell silent in Sealdah, a lover standing on Dakshineshwar bridge, the fierce energy of a student rally, what comes across in each detail is love for a great city – a love large and battered enough to accommodate its paradoxes, its compromised values, its betrayed dreams. A very different tone is heard in Tamil Dalit poet Adhavan Deetchanya’s ‘Real Estate Problem’ – one of quiet bitterness – as he speaks of a world that, for all the ostensible social levelling ushered in by urbanisation, never quite manages to shed its caste.
The cadence turns ruminative as Hindi poet Kamlesh evokes the gaps, the empty wordless spaces that punctuate our memories of cities, in ‘Inability’. In counterpoint to his poetry of lyrical refection is a robust English praise poem by K. Srilata that proclaims her allegiance to her “middle class”, “west Mambalam”, “very Madras” roots. A tone of black humour enters the picture in Sampurna Chattarji’s surreal portrait of Bombay/ Mumbai, that hyper-city where it is perfectly normal for five dogs to rush into a building and six to leave.
And while you prepare for this breakneck ride through the cities of India, you can enjoy several other fleeting place perspectives as well. For this edition also includes some recent inclusions by previously featured poets. There is Dilip Chitre’s English poem ‘The View from Chinchpokli’, a savage anthem-dirge to a city where “mice scurry among my metaphysics, mosquitoes sing among my lyrics”. (Do visit his other Marathi poem on the city, ‘At Midnight in the Bakery at The Corner’ as well.) There is an unexpected meditation on “truth and beauty” amid the heat and sensory assault of a city station in Gieve Patel’s poem, ‘From Bombay Central’. There’s also Hindi poet Kunwar Narain’s affirmation of a timeless and ‘mapless’ moment, that brings together Kafka’s Prague, the Habsburg palaces and modern-day Delhi ( ‘The Qutab’s Precinct’), as well as an affectionate reminiscence about the city of Lucknow, its affectations and contradictions, “city of connoisseurs and alas of bores” ‘Silhouette’; see also the previously published ‘Approaching Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay’ on Mumbai); Marathi poet Sachin Kethar’s view of Surat, a city unsure of where her shops end and her homes begin ( ‘The City Which Doesn’t Go Anywhere’); Anjum Hasan on the “ghee light” of Bangalore on a mellow summer morning in her lovely, previously unpublished ‘Late Summer and Mornings’; Hemant Divate’s picture of bourgeois Maharashtrian family life in a Mumbai apartment ( ‘When I Check Email’) and his droll urban view of butterflies ( ‘Butterflies’); and my response to a predatory city that suddenly seemed like a fellow-fugitive after November 26, 2008 ( ‘The City and I’; see also ‘Where I Live’ and ‘Madras’).
Do take our archive tour and visit some of the older city poems in this domain as well. There’s Malayalam poet K.G. Sankara Pillai’s ‘The Trees of Cochin’; Punjabi poet Nirupama Dutt’s ‘Moving City’; Tamil poet Manushya Puthiran’s ‘Tamil Life’; Hindi poet Giriraj Kiradoo’s ‘Panchbatti Circle and Rajmandir Cinema’; Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s English poem, ‘Bharati Bhavan Library, Chowk, Allahabad’; Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh’s ‘The Highest Place’; and Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘At the Lahore Karhai’.
Welcome then to a celebration of the Indian city — a great, messy polyphonous celebration, but not an uncritical one. Gird your loins, tighten your seatbelts, pull on your gas masks, and take the plunge.
This issue of PIW is a minor carnival, a mini Indian ‘mela’. It features five new poets of varied generations. It also features four languages – Bengali, Hindi, Tamil and English. And above all, it includes a hectic assortment of new poems, urging you to revisit many poets featured previously on the PIW India domain.
There is an excuse for this embarrassment of riches. And that’s the theme of this issue: the city. The very word evokes a maze of associations – excess, density, voltage, vibrancy, liminality, risk. In the Indian context, all the associations hold true, but only when raised to the power of a hundred, or maybe more. Like some of the great gods and goddesses of this subcontinent, the Indian city wears many faces, sports multiple heads and waves countless arms. Like every deity, it also often has more than one name (with devotees warring, as devotees are wont to do, over each one’s appropriateness). In short, it is a poet’s delight.Far too often, critical discourse on ‘city poets’ characterises the city as an alienating space and the poets as ahistorical, rootless, angst-ridden zombies, sequestered from grim social realities and divorced from their cultural moorings. What’s often overlooked is the spectrum of tones and modes adopted by these poets when writing of the city. The city that emerges from these multiple word pictures is far from monochromatic.
And so you hear the voice of the lusty romantic in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s ‘Neera’ poem (evocatively translated by Amit Chaudhuri), in which elegy meets paean. As the poet speaks of the kadamba tree on Hari Ghosh street, the clock that once fell silent in Sealdah, a lover standing on Dakshineshwar bridge, the fierce energy of a student rally, what comes across in each detail is love for a great city – a love large and battered enough to accommodate its paradoxes, its compromised values, its betrayed dreams. A very different tone is heard in Tamil Dalit poet Adhavan Deetchanya’s ‘Real Estate Problem’ – one of quiet bitterness – as he speaks of a world that, for all the ostensible social levelling ushered in by urbanisation, never quite manages to shed its caste.
The cadence turns ruminative as Hindi poet Kamlesh evokes the gaps, the empty wordless spaces that punctuate our memories of cities, in ‘Inability’. In counterpoint to his poetry of lyrical refection is a robust English praise poem by K. Srilata that proclaims her allegiance to her “middle class”, “west Mambalam”, “very Madras” roots. A tone of black humour enters the picture in Sampurna Chattarji’s surreal portrait of Bombay/ Mumbai, that hyper-city where it is perfectly normal for five dogs to rush into a building and six to leave.
And while you prepare for this breakneck ride through the cities of India, you can enjoy several other fleeting place perspectives as well. For this edition also includes some recent inclusions by previously featured poets. There is Dilip Chitre’s English poem ‘The View from Chinchpokli’, a savage anthem-dirge to a city where “mice scurry among my metaphysics, mosquitoes sing among my lyrics”. (Do visit his other Marathi poem on the city, ‘At Midnight in the Bakery at The Corner’ as well.) There is an unexpected meditation on “truth and beauty” amid the heat and sensory assault of a city station in Gieve Patel’s poem, ‘From Bombay Central’. There’s also Hindi poet Kunwar Narain’s affirmation of a timeless and ‘mapless’ moment, that brings together Kafka’s Prague, the Habsburg palaces and modern-day Delhi ( ‘The Qutab’s Precinct’), as well as an affectionate reminiscence about the city of Lucknow, its affectations and contradictions, “city of connoisseurs and alas of bores” ‘Silhouette’; see also the previously published ‘Approaching Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay’ on Mumbai); Marathi poet Sachin Kethar’s view of Surat, a city unsure of where her shops end and her homes begin ( ‘The City Which Doesn’t Go Anywhere’); Anjum Hasan on the “ghee light” of Bangalore on a mellow summer morning in her lovely, previously unpublished ‘Late Summer and Mornings’; Hemant Divate’s picture of bourgeois Maharashtrian family life in a Mumbai apartment ( ‘When I Check Email’) and his droll urban view of butterflies ( ‘Butterflies’); and my response to a predatory city that suddenly seemed like a fellow-fugitive after November 26, 2008 ( ‘The City and I’; see also ‘Where I Live’ and ‘Madras’).
Do take our archive tour and visit some of the older city poems in this domain as well. There’s Malayalam poet K.G. Sankara Pillai’s ‘The Trees of Cochin’; Punjabi poet Nirupama Dutt’s ‘Moving City’; Tamil poet Manushya Puthiran’s ‘Tamil Life’; Hindi poet Giriraj Kiradoo’s ‘Panchbatti Circle and Rajmandir Cinema’; Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s English poem, ‘Bharati Bhavan Library, Chowk, Allahabad’; Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh’s ‘The Highest Place’; and Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘At the Lahore Karhai’.
Welcome then to a celebration of the Indian city — a great, messy polyphonous celebration, but not an uncritical one. Gird your loins, tighten your seatbelts, pull on your gas masks, and take the plunge.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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