Article
Welcome to Indian poetry - June 2005
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January 18, 2006
On first reading, they seem to conform to several distinctions associated with gender: the women artists seeming to affirm the affective and the male poet the cerebral. The women poets reject excessive artifice and oppressive ceremony of inherited role-play to reclaim that deeply liberating realm of the unmediated, the personal, the untenanted interior. The male poet revels in the notion of art as a play of veils. He seems less tyrannised by these veils and less beleaguered by the archetypes on which he draws, associated as they are in his case more with choice than with compulsion.
Some of the differences hold. And yet, on rereading their poetry you realise that there are more convergences than you initially intuited. The first convergence is craft. Both Prathibha and Tarannum, like Ranjit, acknowledge its vital role in their poetic process. They are not merely recording a personal truth; they are ‘making’ their truth in the process of writing it. The act of revealing is also an act of composition. And there’s more. Ranjit acknowledges that he has moved from his early preoccupation with the epic sweep of history to a greater concern with the intimate, the subversive biography, within the framework of history. He is fascinated by opaque curtains, but also with diaphanous veils. And so the act of obscuring becomes an act of revealing as well.
Not so very different, after all.
And yet, always themselves. Rivetingly themselves: Tarannum Riyaz, Prathibha Nandakumar and Ranjit Hoskote.
It’s not just the timbre of their voices. It’s not just the language or register, tone or cadence, context or generation that distinguishes the three poets featured in this edition from each other (though these vary considerably as well). It is, above all, the way they define their respective poetic enterprises.
For Prathibha Nandakumar, a Bangalore-based Kannada woman poet, poetry is about becoming progressively honest, about growing transparency, about making oneself vulnerable. For Tarannum Riyaz, Delhi-based Kashmiri woman poet who writes in Urdu, poetry is about arriving at a condensed utterance of the heart, a small taut pungent crafted utterance of the soul. For Ranjit Hoskote, Mumbai-based male poet who writes in English, poetry is about an act of creative espionage: it is about being double agent and spy, insider and outsider. On first reading, they seem to conform to several distinctions associated with gender: the women artists seeming to affirm the affective and the male poet the cerebral. The women poets reject excessive artifice and oppressive ceremony of inherited role-play to reclaim that deeply liberating realm of the unmediated, the personal, the untenanted interior. The male poet revels in the notion of art as a play of veils. He seems less tyrannised by these veils and less beleaguered by the archetypes on which he draws, associated as they are in his case more with choice than with compulsion.
Some of the differences hold. And yet, on rereading their poetry you realise that there are more convergences than you initially intuited. The first convergence is craft. Both Prathibha and Tarannum, like Ranjit, acknowledge its vital role in their poetic process. They are not merely recording a personal truth; they are ‘making’ their truth in the process of writing it. The act of revealing is also an act of composition. And there’s more. Ranjit acknowledges that he has moved from his early preoccupation with the epic sweep of history to a greater concern with the intimate, the subversive biography, within the framework of history. He is fascinated by opaque curtains, but also with diaphanous veils. And so the act of obscuring becomes an act of revealing as well.
Not so very different, after all.
And yet, always themselves. Rivetingly themselves: Tarannum Riyaz, Prathibha Nandakumar and Ranjit Hoskote.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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