Artikel
Welcome to Indian poetry - August 2004
18 januari 2006
Indeed, trying to represent a country with over twenty languages and a breathtakingly complex variety of constituencies in terms of caste, region, class, generation and gender, can be a daunting proposition. Even a downright paralysing one.
The only creative response in such a context is to define one’s role strictly as editor rather than cultural emissary, to view one’s role as exploratory rather than definitive, one’s strategy as fluid and dynamic rather than canonical. The process of selection, then, suddenly becomes an exciting one of discovery, instead of one of magisterial appointment and exclusion.
The voices we tune into in our second edition stand in counterpoint to each other in more ways than one. First, they are all from different parts of the country: Kedarnath Singh (Hindi) is from the north; K. Satchidanandan (Malayalam) is Delhi-based but belongs to the southern state of Kerala; and Imtiaz Dharker (English) embodies a complex geographical predicament: born in Pakistan, raised in Scotland, and now based in India and the U.K.
They also represent some measure of generational diversity. Consider that Singh published his first book in 1960, Satchidanandan in 1971, while Dharker’s first book was published as recently as 1980.
And in terms of poetic practice, of course, they occupy vastly diverse positions. For Singh, the challenge is to express the tension between urban and rural realities, to find a universal voice in intense cultural particularity. For Satchidanandan, the challenge is to explore regional identity without turning parochial, to explore spiritual questions without turning revivalist. For Dharker, oppressive veils of nationhood, prescriptive faith and gender must be peeled off in order to find a triumphant place for oneself in the margins, from where one can declare allegiance to a counter-cultural identity – “another country”, as it were.
What they all share, however, is a commitment to poetry as an art that empowers, that humanises, that speaks to the habitually relegated sections of society. Singh’s poetry is imbued with a fierce spirit of self-interrogation, evident, for instance, in the way it asks pointed questions about Noor Mian, one of the many who vanished mysteriously from India during the cataclysmic Partition of 1947 (when half a million were killed and a million left homeless). While Satchidanandan validates ‘stammering’ – ambiguity, tentativeness, uncertainty – as the poet’s and God’s own language, Dharker celebrates her artistic, political and cultural non-conformity as a more authentic kind of belonging.
To do justice to the breadth of their artistic concerns and achievements, this issue includes a great deal of allied material: interviews with Singh, Satchidanandan and Dharker, as well as a long essay by Satchidanandan on the challenges that confront contemporary Indian poetry.
Their styles are obviously diverse, but what each of these voices offers is that “sharp, piercing parallel language” (to borrow Satchidanandan’s phrase) that is the art of poetry itself.
Happy reading!
Vast, varied, unruly, obstinately unmappable. That’s how the inaugural issue described the poetry landscape in India.
“I was born a foreigner/ I carried on from there/ to become a foreigner everywhere” says Imtiaz Dharker, one of the poets featured in this edition, underscoring how complex the whole business of cultural identity can be. Indeed, trying to represent a country with over twenty languages and a breathtakingly complex variety of constituencies in terms of caste, region, class, generation and gender, can be a daunting proposition. Even a downright paralysing one.
The only creative response in such a context is to define one’s role strictly as editor rather than cultural emissary, to view one’s role as exploratory rather than definitive, one’s strategy as fluid and dynamic rather than canonical. The process of selection, then, suddenly becomes an exciting one of discovery, instead of one of magisterial appointment and exclusion.
The voices we tune into in our second edition stand in counterpoint to each other in more ways than one. First, they are all from different parts of the country: Kedarnath Singh (Hindi) is from the north; K. Satchidanandan (Malayalam) is Delhi-based but belongs to the southern state of Kerala; and Imtiaz Dharker (English) embodies a complex geographical predicament: born in Pakistan, raised in Scotland, and now based in India and the U.K.
They also represent some measure of generational diversity. Consider that Singh published his first book in 1960, Satchidanandan in 1971, while Dharker’s first book was published as recently as 1980.
And in terms of poetic practice, of course, they occupy vastly diverse positions. For Singh, the challenge is to express the tension between urban and rural realities, to find a universal voice in intense cultural particularity. For Satchidanandan, the challenge is to explore regional identity without turning parochial, to explore spiritual questions without turning revivalist. For Dharker, oppressive veils of nationhood, prescriptive faith and gender must be peeled off in order to find a triumphant place for oneself in the margins, from where one can declare allegiance to a counter-cultural identity – “another country”, as it were.
What they all share, however, is a commitment to poetry as an art that empowers, that humanises, that speaks to the habitually relegated sections of society. Singh’s poetry is imbued with a fierce spirit of self-interrogation, evident, for instance, in the way it asks pointed questions about Noor Mian, one of the many who vanished mysteriously from India during the cataclysmic Partition of 1947 (when half a million were killed and a million left homeless). While Satchidanandan validates ‘stammering’ – ambiguity, tentativeness, uncertainty – as the poet’s and God’s own language, Dharker celebrates her artistic, political and cultural non-conformity as a more authentic kind of belonging.
To do justice to the breadth of their artistic concerns and achievements, this issue includes a great deal of allied material: interviews with Singh, Satchidanandan and Dharker, as well as a long essay by Satchidanandan on the challenges that confront contemporary Indian poetry.
Their styles are obviously diverse, but what each of these voices offers is that “sharp, piercing parallel language” (to borrow Satchidanandan’s phrase) that is the art of poetry itself.
Happy reading!
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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