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Welcome to Indian poetry - March 2006

June 07, 2006
What do a 57 year-old Manipuri author, a 41 year-old Khasi poet and a 31 year-old Tamil author have in common? At first glance, nothing really. And this variety is what makes for interesting reading. But look closer and you find that what they do in fact share, in varying degrees and on very different grounds, is the experience of relegation. For whether it is by design or circumstance, these three poets have had to negotiate various insidious and not-so-insidious forms of marginalisation.
What they also share is the view of the poet as chronicler and witness. Accompanying this is a deep conviction in the inherently seditious nature of language.

The Indian Northeast remains – for many Indians and non-Indians alike – a remote and shadowy province, banished to the periphery of mainstream cultural consciousness. As critic and poet Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih pointed out in an earlier essay, it is convenient for cultural commentators to simply regard this as a homogeneous province, sensationalised in cryptic headlines such as ‘Poetry in the Time of Terror’ and ‘Poetry from the Troubled Zone’.

In an attempt to avoid perpetuating the same brand of cultural colonialism, the India domain published the work of two strikingly individual voices in an earlier edition: Nilmani Phookan from Assam and Chandrakanta Murasingh from Tripura. In this edition, we continue our effort at unravelling the diverse skeins of creative experiment in this region. Two more voices from the states of Manipur and Meghalaya join the polyphony: Thangjam Ibopishak Singh from Imphal and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih from Shillong.

Thangjam Ibopishak Singh is a Sahitya Akademi award-winner and one of Manipur’s foremost poets. The mainsprings of his poetry, he acknowledges, are his land, its people and their concerns. While he believes in celebrating the vibrant cultural heritage of the region, there is no naïve triumphalism in this poetry. His work is a scathing exposé of an area in a state of chronic neglect and simmering catastrophe, ravaged by insurgency, corruption, ethnic conflict and state militarism. His poem, ‘The Land of the Half-Humans,’ is not merely unsentimental, but lacerating in its satire – a dominant mode in contemporary literature from the Northeast.

Kynpham Sing Ibopishak is a Shillong-based poet who writes in both Khasi and English. He views his bilingualism as a conscious political choice: if the first language is rooted in his native soil, the latter is the means by which he connects with other cultural topographies. He believes his poetry must address his tribe, but must equally connect with literatures across the world. He describes how “scribbled pieces in Khasi are simultaneously translated into English and the Khasi thoughts sometimes directly transformed into English compositions. And so, driven by circumstance and supported by literary ambidexterity, the creation of every one of my poems becomes essentially the birth of twins.”

If these poets believe it is incumbent upon them to play the role of bard and conscience-keeper, Tamil feminist poet, Kutti Revathi regards herself as a committed raconteur of another kind. Her terrain is clearly defined: the Tamil female body and its unrecorded biographies, its silenced histories, its unexplored idiolects.

Her poetry has aroused the ire of the moral police in the Tamil cultural establishment. It has been denounced on the grounds of vulgarity and obscenity. But Kutti Revathi remains unapologetically committed to a view of language as a radical means of interrogation and exploration. She believes in the explosive and volatile nature of the image – its power to dismantle comfortable hegemonies and uncover uncomfortable home-truths.

“Strange sounds are crowding this town./ Like the rooster, I too, seem/ to have become obsolete” writes Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih in his poem, ‘Hiraeth’.

Obsolete? Not quite. Despite the odds, these three poets seem to have found, in very distinct ways, their own rooster-like strategies to combat the tyranny of an imposed obsolescence. Also see this article:
{id="2695" title="The Poet As Chronicler: An Overview of Contemporary Poetry in Northeast India"}
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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