Welcome to Indian poetry - June 2006

January 18, 2006 Parikh’s poetry moves between the material and the metaphysical in a style that is incantatory and richly associative. His poems raise questions on matters ranging from personal to historical demons, from private unease to a spiritual climate of Weltschemerz, of things out of kilter. Time and again his poetry returns to a basic set of concerns: how to be prodigal and pilgrim; émigré and exile; how to reject and yet recover; how to doubt and still reclaim the faith; how to challenge and accept one’s finitude; how to reconcile in Mandelstam’s phrase (quoted by Parikh in his essay) the eternal paradox of ‘the dying body and the thinking eternal mouth’.

The poetry of Hindi poet, Anamika, is informed by a sensibility that is consciously female, and one that steers clear of those two perilous extremes: stridency and the self-pity of the endemically wronged. Anamika achieves a register capable of nostalgia, tenderness, humour, even irony. There is also an ability to reveal a large insight in the quirky and the whimsical. In ‘Snap button’, for instance, the passing of an entire world order is invoked in the sartorial study of the changing ways of buttoning a blouse. There is also the empowered voice of woman-poet-as-alchemist in the poem, ‘Translation’. This is a voice conscious of its creative and regenerative strength, its capacity to transform dirty linen into “the dialect of water”, to translate a house with its daily catalogue of chores into an entire new lexicon of self-possession and belonging.

For all their diversity, there is an interesting point of convergence in these poets’ wide-ranging concerns. Both acknowledge at different junctures the essentially incomplete nature of the creative enterprise, the necessarily unfinished text that they must leave behind. Alluding to the mystical poetry of the medieval saint poets of Maharashtra, the speaker in Anamika’s poem, ‘A Woman’s Place’, seeks a space free of the oppressive limitations of culture and history: “Let me be hummed/ like an abhang, unfinished.”

Parikh, for his part, seems to accept that engagement with the life of the mind – like the conversation in his untitled poem – is unlikely to ever reach a point of closure: “It is possible this conversation will remain incomplete.” And yet, in this great chorale of interrupted sentences, echoes and counter-echoes, there still twitch “tiny dew-laden possibilities”. In any case, the creative project, in his scheme of things, remains only a part of the larger yatra or pilgrimage, the long, arduous, possibly eternal journey back home.

Interestingly, both find refuge in the role of writer as explorer and treasure hunter. Anamika speaks of words as ‘serpent jewels’ in her evocative poem, ‘Knowing’. Parikh does something similar in his poem, ‘Treasure Hunt’. Weather-beaten, ravaged by storm and sea, the captain of “the game of dredging up castaway words”, still returns, aware of the humble but precious nature of his discovery:

The poet who reaches where no sun can reach laughs, the blighter, and says the fun was worth it.

Reading these two poets – seasoned trawlers of the lexical high seas – yields its own share of rewards.

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