Nitoo Das

Writes Meena Kandasamy:

A friend introduced me to the poetry of Nitoo Das early this year (2008) and since then, I have returned to it again and again. I love her critical, caricaturist eye because it shocks me in the most unexpected places. Sometimes she playfully populates her poems with insects and bugs; sometimes she escapes after getting one stuck in a multiplicity of interpretations.

Many of her poems appeal to me because they are about the secret life of everyday things – umbrellas, pencils, razors, scissors and safety-pins. That make-believe, that anthropomorphism might belong to the realm of the fable, but Das pulls it off brilliantly within a short poem. And because I am an activist obsessed about social ostracisation, I am moved by her poems about people whom society has trouble accepting: Pandita Ramabai . . .  or a dreaded forest-brigand\'s daughter . . .

Her poetry raids the reserves of memory, so panic rises “like steam like heat like / Flashbacks of quick childhood slaps”. In the hands of Das, stanzas become embodiments of rebellion: “They could not / kill me. I erupted out / of the soil wailing / at the sun and pulling / at my hair. The earth / could not hold / my ankles.” She writes a lot about sexuality and gender, and her women-oriented poems, as in the ‘Street Series’, can be as brutal as they are beautiful: “The street grows / lewd hands / and sneering eyes / and slaps me until I shrink to a zero”

I admire her work because of its versatility, its ability takes on various voices while experimenting with the form of the dramatic monologue. She is by turns intuitive (‘The Water-Strider’, ‘Conjoined’) and seductive (‘Guwahati May’), fiery (‘Murder: An Experiment in Perspective’) and earthy ( ‘how to cut a fish’). And then, when her poems grow moody, she takes shelter in nostalgia (‘April is a remote place’, ‘School Sonnet’).

Perhaps because she is a visual artist, she is able to re-imag(e)ine every poetic cliché and so we are informed that “The sun jumped / headlong / into the river and killed himself / everyday by / the ghost trees.” She makes her poems stark and short, and within that space, she shakes her fist at a status-quoist society. I love her poems because they speak to me with a star-burst of spontaneity. Like a river in first flood.