A Poetry Of Urban Psychopathologies

18 januari 2006 1.

Nitin Mehta believes in privileging the act of quiet observation and the practice of silent contemplation over striking a pose of stylishly self-indulgent angst in his poetry. This is not to suggest that Mehta leads his poetic persona to assume the fashionable and sometimes convenient role of the counter-monumental Other: that of the heroic underdog. Giving the quotidian its due, his poetic persona believes in being alert to the various psychopathologies that lie under the surface of all that is familiarly mundane and routine.

Moreover, Mehta’s presence in most of his poems is almost always that of a participant-commentator, simultaneously detached from and involved in the great urban contest – that between being a member of a hopelessly anonymous collective and being an individual at one and the same time. The unusual and the extraordinary, accommodated within the realm of the everyday and the ordinary in Mehta’s poetry, offer us clues about how the real and the unreal, the natural and the unnatural are not always mutually exclusive categories – how they are, in fact, more often than not, intersecting sub-sets of each other. Mehta unerringly records scene upon scene of Bombay life and, dwelling on the nature of the city’s experiential substance, seeks a moment of intervention – where the poet responds to the overwhelming revelation of the city with a tellingly perspicacious revelation about himself.

There is no mockery in Mehta’s tone: the sense of detachment he cultivates can never be mistaken for apathy. In the best tradition of those writers in Marathi and Gujarati (prose-writers like P.L. Deshpande and Bhupen Khakhar amongst them) who have empathically captured middle-class denizens’ lives and ways of finding a home in the world of the city, Mehta uses simple narrative devices to engage with the multiplying ironies of urban existence, the bite of which can only be softened when tempered by the lightness of humour. It is the surreal flourish that Mehta takes recourse to, in many of his explicitly meditative poems (which still remain provocatively urban) that seek to explore the existential anguish involved in acts of self-discovery and recognition: losing one’s self, reclaiming it partially, and getting progressively alienated by and in the transaction, seems to be Mehta’s chosen mode of reflecting on the perverse exigencies of urban life.

2.

Mehta has been a Bombaywala ever since he can remember. Born in Junagadh in 1944, he did his schooling at the Gopalji Hemraj High School in Borivali and went to the Mithibai and Bhavan’s Colleges. After finishing post-graduate studies in 1971 at the University of Bombay, he completed his PhD from M. S. University, Baroda in 1982. The Gujarati literary scene in the ’60s and’70s resembled a battleground of sorts, where, amongst others, two major influences could be found pitted against each other. An experimental and formalistically oriented literary culture had been ushered in, (mainly by Suresh Joshi, a pioneer figure in post-’60s Gujarati literature), which drew inspiration from European Modernism as well as from indigenous Indian literary traditions. (Joshi was an indefatigable translator and introduced a large swathe of the Gujarati-speaking world to major voices from the West). This had, however, not succeeded in completely displacing the dominance of a large body of ‘value-based’ literature developed by stalwarts like Umashankar Joshi and Sundaram, who drew on Gandhian moral ideals, nationalistic enthusiasms and traditions of bourgeois literary realism.

This was the time when little magazines brought alive the excitement of forging an avant-garde which cocked a snook at the orthodoxies of the literary establishment. They provided a much-needed platform for young writers to express themselves using rebellious modes and forms which carried implicit critiques of literary cultures and productions that refused to reinvent themselves. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Mehta along with Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Kanti Patel, Bharat Naik and Mangal Rathod launched Yahom, a little magazine that devoted itself to cutting-edge creative writing, much in the same way as the earlier Sandarbh, launched by Labhshankar Thakar, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Prabodh Parikh, Chinu Modi, Adil Mansuri and others. The accent in these creditable ventures was always on publishing new translations, poetry and prose. (Mention must be made here of Suresh Joshi’s Falguni, Manisha, Uhapoh, the pre-eminent Kshitij and the still-extant, 160-issues-old Etad, which through the decades, separately and together, helped develop a new generation of writers such as Madhu Rye, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Sitanshu Yashaschandra.)

Mehta had then just begun teaching part-time at three different colleges in Bombay. In ’73, he began what was to be a thirteen-year stint at the Maniben Nanavati Women’s College in Vile-Parle (West) – his first full-time job. He joined the M. S. University in 1984: while a lecturer in Gujarati there, he collaborated with other men of letters to translate poets from Kannada as well as from Marathi (Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Narayan Surve and Namdeo Dhasal were translated for Setu with Ganesh Devy, for instance) into Gujarati.

For his PhD, Mehta had worked with Suresh Joshi as his academic guide on the evolution of distinct varieties of ‘Poetic Diction’ in modern Gujarati poetry. His critical writings over the years have included essays on medieval Gujarati literature, modernism, post-modernism and critical and social theory. In 1988, Nirvan, his first collection of poems, was brought out by Chandramauli Prakashan, Ahmedabad. It was hailed as an important anthology to appear on the Gujarati literary scene and went on to win the Sandhan Critic’s Award. In ’90, Mehta became the Head of the Department of Gujarati at the University of Bombay and continued at the helm for the next fourteen years.

3.

Retirement from this institutional position early this year has not meant giving up teacherly duties: Mehta continues as visiting faculty at the University. Teaching as an interventionist activity is an ideal he has always taken quite seriously. Currently, he is also at work on assembling a comprehensive survey of modern Gujarati literature that addresses the idea and experience of the city.

“Language fascinates me,” says Mehta. “I have immense faith in it. Contrary to all that our doomsayers foretell, language will keep on re-invigorating itself to meet the demands and compulsions of the digital age,” he adds.

“The city as an intricately interwoven complex will always produce poetry of great psychological and emotional import – it will continue to tell us things about ourselves that we were never aware of,” he resolutely maintains.