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Welcome to Indian Poetry — June 2008
4 mei 2008
Once in a while, an edition emerges as a result of serendipity rather than design. This is one of them.
I had hazy ideas about possible themes. But as the work of various poets began coming together with startling conjunctions, I decided to trust the kaleidoscopic pattern that seemed to be presenting itself. Before I knew it, a theme had emerged as well. Welcome to an edition that addresses one of the oldest preoccupations in literature: belonging.
Welcome also to an edition that features four strong acclaimed voices from different parts of the country. We have one of the country’s most distinguished writers, Sitanshu Yashaschandra (Gujarati); North-eastern India’s well-known lyric poet, Robin Ngangom (Manipuri); cutting-edge performance poet Jeet Thayil (English); and a fine diasporic Punjabi poet, Ajmer Rode (a particularly exciting discovery for me, since this was my first encounter with his work).
There are many ways of belonging presented here. Ngangom acknowledges the deep human need for “a map or even a tree or a stone,/ to mark a spot I could return to/ like a pissing animal/ even when there’s nothing to return for”. Yashaschandra speaks of home as both sanctuary and fortress. It is a domestic idyll, on the one hand, with a red tiled roof, a wooden door and a loved one at the earthen stove. But the perception of a hostile world is not so easily dismantled. The ancient binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘believer’ and ‘kafir’, ally and adversary, find insidious ways of enduring.
Rode explores the loss and bewilderment of cultural displacement. An old Punjabi lady in Canada, lost in dreams, suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that “she is in a small basement room, not in her wide open village home,/ where stray dogs, cats, mice/ and her own family had equal rights.” Thayil turns that very experience of displacement into an exultant paean, a credo: “I/leap years, avenues,/ financial/fashion/meatpacking districts, 23/ MTA buses parked end to/ end . . .”
But all these poets would acknowledge that poetry allows for multiple citizenships, for guerrilla strategies of being insider and outcaste, inhabitant and insurrectionist, inheritor and inventor, all at once. It takes courage, certainly, to embrace this dangerous way of belonging: “It costs to say Yes// in this land of yes-and-no”.
But saying ‘yes’ can also be exhilarating. For as Yashaschandra puts it: “The fun of living is to look for, and refuse to be shown.”
Welcome also to an edition that features four strong acclaimed voices from different parts of the country. We have one of the country’s most distinguished writers, Sitanshu Yashaschandra (Gujarati); North-eastern India’s well-known lyric poet, Robin Ngangom (Manipuri); cutting-edge performance poet Jeet Thayil (English); and a fine diasporic Punjabi poet, Ajmer Rode (a particularly exciting discovery for me, since this was my first encounter with his work).
There have been other happy coincidences as well. I discovered, for instance, that two of the poets — Thayil and Yashaschandra — have new books out this year. I discovered, for another, that two of the poets happen to be bilingual: Ngangom writes in Manipuri and English, and Rode in Punjabi and English. And given Thayil’s identity as a musician and performing poet, perhaps it would be fair to say that this issue features three poets who are comfortable with more than one ‘language’.
Another coincidence: two of them have poems in which they define the poet’s aspiration in exactly the same way. “To love and to live” is the aspiration of Magan, the enfant terrible of mainstream literature in Yashaschandra’s hilarious Gujarati poem, ‘Magan’s Insolence’. In another poem (not included in this edition), poet Ngangom says exactly the same thing. He adds one more aspiration to the list, however: to sing.There are many ways of belonging presented here. Ngangom acknowledges the deep human need for “a map or even a tree or a stone,/ to mark a spot I could return to/ like a pissing animal/ even when there’s nothing to return for”. Yashaschandra speaks of home as both sanctuary and fortress. It is a domestic idyll, on the one hand, with a red tiled roof, a wooden door and a loved one at the earthen stove. But the perception of a hostile world is not so easily dismantled. The ancient binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘believer’ and ‘kafir’, ally and adversary, find insidious ways of enduring.
Rode explores the loss and bewilderment of cultural displacement. An old Punjabi lady in Canada, lost in dreams, suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that “she is in a small basement room, not in her wide open village home,/ where stray dogs, cats, mice/ and her own family had equal rights.” Thayil turns that very experience of displacement into an exultant paean, a credo: “I/leap years, avenues,/ financial/fashion/meatpacking districts, 23/ MTA buses parked end to/ end . . .”
But all these poets would acknowledge that poetry allows for multiple citizenships, for guerrilla strategies of being insider and outcaste, inhabitant and insurrectionist, inheritor and inventor, all at once. It takes courage, certainly, to embrace this dangerous way of belonging: “It costs to say Yes// in this land of yes-and-no”.
But saying ‘yes’ can also be exhilarating. For as Yashaschandra puts it: “The fun of living is to look for, and refuse to be shown.”
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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