Welcome to Indian Poetry - September 2006

31 juli 2006

Writing poetry, someone said, is like throwing a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo. Bleak, but true. And yet, what seems to have kept the petal-throwers going throughout history is the fact that echoes do sometimes occur. They’re often a long time coming; they’re sometimes so subtle that one needs a preternatural aural ability to detect them but it’s the possibility of those reverberations that continues to sustain poets. When I first encountered the work of Punjabi and Nepali poets, Nirupama Dutt and Rajendra Bhandari, I found it interesting to see how two voices from such markedly varied language contexts could call up those echoes in me as a reader.

Dutt has clearly confronted her share of challenges in order to be accepted as a woman writer of credibility on the Punjabi literary scene. Determined to write down the truth as she sees it, she believes there is no point in aspiring to belong to a mainstream without first an informed critique of its biases. But when one adheres to one’s own vision, and “if the poems have power,” she maintains, “the mainstream will come to you. And if it doesn’t in your lifetime, never mind. For literature is a long process. The most important thing is that it be written.”

Nepali poet Rajendra Bhandari is also conscious of writing in a marginal tongue. Discussing the Nepali poetry scene, he speaks of the Gorkha anguish at never being considered ‘Indian’ enough (despite a long history of participation in the nation-building process), as well as the deeply fraught identity politics that have fractured Darjeeling, the place of his birth.

But despite the specificity of their works – or perhaps because of it – these two voices are instantly recognizable. Impassioned yet ironic, deeply personal and yet embodying an identifiably contemporary and cosmopolitan female sensibility, Dutt’s voice is a reminder of just how trans-cultural the culture-specific can be. Even her poem of yearning, ‘Where have the boats gone’ (based on the specific context of post-Partition Punjab and the regional love legend of Heer-Ranjha), strikes a chord as an elegy for the passing of a more innocent, more complete world.

Rajendra Bhandari’s poetry strikes a chord of another kind. The first time I read his poetry, it was a reminder of just how connected Gangtok can be to the rest of the globe. As he mulls over the relationship between the Prime Ministers’s digestive system and the nation’s future, a bank pass book and blood pressure, a nation’s constitution and facial wrinkles, you hear the voice of the modern poet, grappling with not just a very local cultural politics, but with familiar existential issues of displacement, incoherence and fragmenting reality.

Modern science informs us that the rustle of a butterfly's wing in Beijing can affect storm systems in New York. By that logic, there seems to be no reason why these two poets can’t stir their own share of ripples in the mainstream of Indian poetry – and the poetry of the world.

Links:
Rajendra Bhandari
Nirupama Dutt
Global in Gangtok
'Successor of Manjit, Daughter of Amrita'