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Welcome to Indian Poetry - March 2007

1 februari 2007
With this edition we introduce our sixteenth language – Oriya – into the India domain.
While I’m aware that this domain will never do more than skim the surface of India’s incredibly plural linguistic heritage, a new language is always cause for some excitement. There’s the thrill of discovery, to be able to hear the cadence and flavour of another system of sound and sense, to add a new set of visual images to our scriptorium of poems in the original language. And it’s always a thrill, of course, to be able to tune into a particular voice, an idiolect, with its own timbre and tonality.

K.G. Sankara Pillai, Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Malayalam poet, and Basudev Sunani, important Dalit poet from Orissa, are from the southern and eastern parts of the country respectively. Generationally, they are at some remove, the first having been born in 1948 (a year after Indian Independence) and the second having been born almost fifteen years later. Not surprisingly, their regional, cultural and historical experiences vary widely.

However, they are both poets with a deeply internalized political consciousness. Sankara Pillai, as his translator points out, combines the modernist fascination with linguistic experimentation with 20th century Malayalam poetry’s abiding feature: social concern. His work responds passionately and critically to a transitional, rudderless world of attenuated values, desiccated ideologies and unbridled consumerism. He is particularly concerned, as his translator points out in an accompanying essay, ‘with the slow erosion of the secular and humanist ideals, painstakingly built during the progressive phase of social struggles. His poems warn that behind the glitter of the neon-lit cities are demons that can drag us back to an age of barbarism.’

Basudev Sunani is a poet who is acutely aware of his Dalit identity and the need to voice and archive the still glaring inequalities of a caste-bound society. Interestingly, I believe his experience as a vet (which he touches upon in the accompanying interview) has further sharpened this sensitivity towards the voiceless, those rendered mute either by biology or history. There is also an understanding of the many contradictions implicit in any process of social change: his poem, ‘Rain, Market and a Sick Mentality’, for instance, reflects on the connection between commerce and conjugal relations.

The need to speak for a collective does not, however, obscure an understanding of form. He recalls with genuine excitement, untouched by ideological rigidity, the bhajans, or devotional songs, that his father sang to him when he was a young boy. And his work reflects, apart from a sharp sense of satire, a poet’s ability to locate the intersections between the specific and the symbolic.

Sankara Pillai’s is no facile radicalism, either; it implicates the self as well as society; the world as well as the word; memory, marketplace and metaphor. There is a biting irony, a strong sense of image, an idiomatic dexterity that never allows these poems to lapse into sententiousness.

The translators in this edition are accomplished poets in their own right. Sankara Pillai has been translated by E.V. Ramakrishnan and K. Satchidanandan. E.V. Ramakrishnan (poet, critic and scholar) also provides an essay, previously unpublished, that offers an incisive assessment of Sankara Pillai’s contribution to Indian poetry.

Basudev Sunani has been translated by Rabindra Swain (poet, critic and Managing Editor of the literary journal, Chandrabhaga) who engaged the poet in a lively interview specifically for this edition.

Read on! Also On This Site:
Life becomes unbearable if you are fed and hated.
 Interview with Basudev Sunani by Rabindra Swain
Poetry as a Radical Discourse of Demystification
K.G. Sankara Pillai’s poetry unsettles idiom and ideology, combining self-doubt with social criticism, says E.V. Ramakrishnan.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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