Article
Welcome to Indian poetry - November 2004
January 18, 2006
It’s difficult to live in an Indian city and not think frequently about noise – and sheer scale: the visual noise of the titanic film poster and ad hoarding; the culture of the megaphone that amplifies politics, religion and popular culture to unimaginable proportions.
I find it interesting to think about the strategies poets adopt to make their art audible against this overwhelming urban landscape of noise. If the subtle patterning of sound and silence is what makes the poetic art so challenging, it surely grows even more demanding when it has to negotiate the deafening clamour of ‘a world of consequence running its own course’.
The five poets in this edition live in vast and bustling Indian metropolises. Debarati Mitra (Bengali) and Mallika Sengupta (Bengali) are from Kolkata (Calcutta), that legendary first city of eastern India. Manushya Puthiran (Tamil) lives in Chennai (formerly Madras), the busy entrepôt and gateway to the culture of the south. Nitin Mehta (Gujarati) and Adil Jussawalla (English) are from Mumbai (Bombay), the insomniac harbour city of the west.
Nitin Mehta writes a meditative surrealist poetry to evoke the casual insanities, the daily pathologies of the third world metropolis. It is a poetry that is capable of evoking moments of remarkable stillness in the midst of the synaesthetic hysteria of urban life. Adil Jussawalla, for his part, creates an art of great density and progressive fragmentation in response to the frenzied and incoherent demands of a world ‘nourished on decay’ and in a perpetual state of crisis.
The two Bengali poets make for a fascinating study in contrast. While Debarati Mitra writes a refined muted poetry, implicating a savage and unforgiving world obliquely and evocatively, Mallika Sengupta turns up the volume to write a definitive poetry of social protest against a globalised patriarchal bourgeois establishment.
The quietest voice in this issue is that of Tamil poet Manushya Puthiran. Often domestic and intimate in scale, this is a poetry that consciously chooses the murmured voice to probe the unrecorded silences of middle-class urban existence. It is a hushed, pared-down poetry that compels the reader to listen closely and attentively. A critique of an entire culture is implicit in a mere choice of cadence.
Our translators – from Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil – have contributed in no small way to the quality and diversity of material in each edition on this site. They are all distinguished literary critics and frequently well-known poets in their own right. In this edition, our contributors offer plenty of contextual material on the five selected poets. We have an essay on the poetry and literary milieu of Nitin Mehta by Abhay Sardesai; excerpts from a presentation on the poetic journey of Adil Jussawalla by Anand Thakore; an interview with Mallika Sengupta by Sanjukta Dasgupta; and an email conversation with Manushya Puthiran, translated by C.S. Lakshmi.
“ . . . touch me only as far/ As the parted psyche can stand. Divided city, combine,/ And I shall return and pass beyond your storm,” is Jussawalla’s invocation to the Devi in ‘A Letter for Bombay’, a poem where he pleads with the goddess to ‘give my chaos form’.
Read on to discover how five contemporary urban poets evolve form and wrest meaning from their fissured, fraught, volatile but unfailingly vibrant contexts.
Five poets living within the uproar and stimulation of metropolitan Indian life – Debarati Mitra, Mallika Sengupta, Manushya Puthiran, Nitin Mehta and Adil Jussawalla – write in distinct and divergent voices to make themselves heard above the hubbub.
The city of Mumbai is celebrating the ten-day Ganapati festival as I write this. Every few minutes the windowpanes shudder with an explosion of fervid devotional music as yet another procession passes by.It’s difficult to live in an Indian city and not think frequently about noise – and sheer scale: the visual noise of the titanic film poster and ad hoarding; the culture of the megaphone that amplifies politics, religion and popular culture to unimaginable proportions.
I find it interesting to think about the strategies poets adopt to make their art audible against this overwhelming urban landscape of noise. If the subtle patterning of sound and silence is what makes the poetic art so challenging, it surely grows even more demanding when it has to negotiate the deafening clamour of ‘a world of consequence running its own course’.
The five poets in this edition live in vast and bustling Indian metropolises. Debarati Mitra (Bengali) and Mallika Sengupta (Bengali) are from Kolkata (Calcutta), that legendary first city of eastern India. Manushya Puthiran (Tamil) lives in Chennai (formerly Madras), the busy entrepôt and gateway to the culture of the south. Nitin Mehta (Gujarati) and Adil Jussawalla (English) are from Mumbai (Bombay), the insomniac harbour city of the west.
Nitin Mehta writes a meditative surrealist poetry to evoke the casual insanities, the daily pathologies of the third world metropolis. It is a poetry that is capable of evoking moments of remarkable stillness in the midst of the synaesthetic hysteria of urban life. Adil Jussawalla, for his part, creates an art of great density and progressive fragmentation in response to the frenzied and incoherent demands of a world ‘nourished on decay’ and in a perpetual state of crisis.
The two Bengali poets make for a fascinating study in contrast. While Debarati Mitra writes a refined muted poetry, implicating a savage and unforgiving world obliquely and evocatively, Mallika Sengupta turns up the volume to write a definitive poetry of social protest against a globalised patriarchal bourgeois establishment.
The quietest voice in this issue is that of Tamil poet Manushya Puthiran. Often domestic and intimate in scale, this is a poetry that consciously chooses the murmured voice to probe the unrecorded silences of middle-class urban existence. It is a hushed, pared-down poetry that compels the reader to listen closely and attentively. A critique of an entire culture is implicit in a mere choice of cadence.
Our translators – from Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil – have contributed in no small way to the quality and diversity of material in each edition on this site. They are all distinguished literary critics and frequently well-known poets in their own right. In this edition, our contributors offer plenty of contextual material on the five selected poets. We have an essay on the poetry and literary milieu of Nitin Mehta by Abhay Sardesai; excerpts from a presentation on the poetic journey of Adil Jussawalla by Anand Thakore; an interview with Mallika Sengupta by Sanjukta Dasgupta; and an email conversation with Manushya Puthiran, translated by C.S. Lakshmi.
“ . . . touch me only as far/ As the parted psyche can stand. Divided city, combine,/ And I shall return and pass beyond your storm,” is Jussawalla’s invocation to the Devi in ‘A Letter for Bombay’, a poem where he pleads with the goddess to ‘give my chaos form’.
Read on to discover how five contemporary urban poets evolve form and wrest meaning from their fissured, fraught, volatile but unfailingly vibrant contexts.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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