Welcome to Indian poetry - March 2005

January 18, 2006 Maps, after all, are unpredictable things. They shrink and bulge, contract and bloat, according to the caprices of political weather. Emotions, of course, are unpredictable things too. Nationalist frenzies and patriotic surges of sentiment can be whipped up into foaming lathers by statesmen and admen – even by batsmen (as the Indian subcontinent knows only too well).

And yet, for all my scepticism, I must confess to a genuine thrill of excitement when I read the work of the four poets featured in this edition. It is primarily a response – old fashioned perhaps – to the cultural complexity and diversity of this country. A Kokborok poet alongside a Kannada one, an Assamese writer alongside an English one, implicates not merely diverse languages, but markedly divergent cultural and literary histories. It is a reminder that there are truly an infinite number of ways of inheriting and inventing, of experiencing and rediscovering a literary heritage.

Chandrakanta Murasingh writes in Kokborok and Nilmani Phookan in Assamese. It would be easy to simply categorise them as Northeast Indian poets and regard them as inheritors of a reasonably uniform tradition. And yet, their respective histories are substantially different. Murasingh is from the state of Tripura and writes in a much-marginalised tribal language that has comparatively recently been accorded the status of a state language. Phookan is from Assam and writes in a less embattled tongue. But both have to negotiate a culture of growing extremism and militarism in their regions. And both certainly have to deal with the homogenising tag of ‘North-eastern writer’ that the rest of the country bestows upon them.

Compare the great bardic sweep of Phookan’s verse to the quiet imagism of Jayant Kaikini’s Kannnada poetry. Or consider the biting satire of Murasingh’s poetry alongside the cerebral rigour and bravura of Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s poetry in English. You realise pretty soon that the diversity at work here is much more than merely linguistic.

Poetry is an art that flourishes when language is interrogated, says writer-publisher Michael Schmidt. These are surely poets who grapple with the resources of their languages in strenuous ways. While Kaikini creates a register distinct from the social conscience literature and the high modernism of his Kannada precursors, Nair works towards an agile aesthetic that explores what so many of us aim for: passions of the mind and politics of the gut. While Murasingh seeks a voice that can speak for an individual and a beleaguered people, Phookan extends the ambit of Assamese modernism to create a poetry that can speak of battlefields and butterflies and “the terrible din of peace”.

The critical voices in this edition remain varied as well. Accompanying the poems is an essay on Northeastern poetry and interviews with Phookan and Murasingh by guest editor Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih (a Khasi poet, critic, anthologist and Deputy Director of the Publication Cell at North-eastern Hill University, Shillong). The edition also includes a review of Nair’s latest book, Yellow Hibiscus, by Anjum Hasan, a Bangalore-based poet who writes in English.

There are poems of great anguish here, of injustice, of bitterness, of loss. But there are also playful poems and poems of quiet hard-won hope. In ‘Proximity’, a poem about an anonymous old man, Kaikini reassures us that “The breath from his heaving chest/ Is enough to keep the world warm.”

The line is a reminder of a deep collective need for the kind of warmth that only poetry can offer. It makes one eager to believe him.