Indian Poets Writing in English

Poetry volumes--especially books and publications of single poets, of new poets--now have become hard to market outside of libraries and literature classes. As editor Jeet Thayil (60 Indian Poets, Penguin India, 2008) observed ruefully in his introduction, "unlike Indian novelists, poets receive no advances; their books are usually out of print; even the best known among them have trouble finding publishers and are virtually unknown outside India." He could have been writing--excepting the very select few--about poets in general, anywhere. Poetry published today therefore tend to be anthologies, collections which cover all bases and are geared towards appealing to as broad a range of readers as possible. So it's not surprising to see that this poetry volume by Penguin India is an anthology: there are obviously market calculations that have been made. But let's not quibble: it's a welcome event to see a publisher put money and time into publishing a poetry volume.
Jeet Thayil, himself a poet, has put together an interesting, individual and eclectic assortment of Indian poets writing in English. Accompanying it is an introduction which unapologetically makes the case for such a selection. In it Jeet does stingingly engage with the "writers in the regional languages" (the "anti-English brigade" including among them Buddhadev Bose) who accuse Indians who write in English as "lacking authencity". Is that so, Jeet asks, noting that "Nirmal Verma, the distinguished Hindi novelist, said Indian writers in English were unable to link themselves to 'the culture of their region, its real life, its metaphors and images'. He compared them, unfavourably, to writers such as himself whose 'language links me to a tradition of 5000 years, to the medieval writers, the Bhakti poets, to the Sanskrit classics and also connects me to the philosophical texts of Indian culture'. This…is a large claim, impossible to substantiate. And Verma's own novels are fine character studies of not belonging anywhere: they mine not the arguable linear heritage of Indian literature, but the decade he spent in Prague in the sixties. Like Ashokamitran's, his books have been translated into English--for an Indian readership!"
The volume contains many poets that the average reader of Anglophone poets will not have heard of. Jeet's argument in favour of their inclusion is that Indian poets writing in English today "live not in Calcutta or Bombay, but throughout the world; what they have in common is English", that most such poetry anthologies "choose depth over breadth", with a resultant "claustrophobic" narrowness of the same poems by the same dozen poets. It was time for a "rethinking of the enterprise", a rethinking that obviously led Jeet Thayil to choose a wider community of sixty poets "separated by the sea" but linked by language and "my preference for craft".
So one gets, along with the standard anthology names such as Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, G.S. Sharat Chandra, Vikram Seth, Kamala Das and Arun Kolatkar, poets whose names are seldom seen in such collections: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mukta Sambrani, Mamang Dai, Anjum Hasan. Not the least of the enjoyments of this volume are the black-and-white photos of the 'senior' poets sprinkled throughout the pages as well as the inclusion of two essays, one by Bruce King on Ezekiel, Moraes and Kolatkar and the other A.K. Mehrotra's 'What Is An Indian Poem'.
Quite a few of the lesser-known poets are Americans of Indian origin. It lends to the volume a distinctly American air, and may be an indication of the future shape of Indian poetry in English to come, with a sizeable chunk of it produced by Indians residing, or born, in the United States, reflecting themes, forms, and rhythms influenced by American speech, preoccupations, temperament, and perhaps academia. While that particular air and general prospect may be off-putting to some readers, very few will deny that this anthology of poems makes for an invigorating, and bracingly different, reading.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.

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Manohar Shetty was born in 1953 in Bombay, a city he left for Goa. The Goa in his poems is not the one of tourist brochures, but a place of unchecked development, enduring ambivalence, corruption and fatigue. Much like the Bombay he left.

May

The gardens are agog
With bougainvillaea and buttercup.
Wild berries carpet the backyard.
Pepper vines blister round
Tree trunks, and pumpkins,
Fecund as eggs, fatten in the shade.
Incense in the frangipani.
Succulence in the cactus.
Dreadlocks of dates
Garland the wild palm
This, then, is your plot of heaven.
Or heaven's plot, his wry response.
Screenings from the quarry
Film the air; gas spirals
From refinery chimneys
Silvery as guided missiles.
The river is a shallow pond
Of foam-lipped buffaloes and belly-up fish.
Sugarcane, that tall grass,
Keels dryly over the paddy fields'
Brittle rectangles; starved millet
Is scarred by congress weed.
The cloudless sky is a taut mask.
Sweat drops from his eyelids.
In the far horizon, the highway
Glitters like tin.
Jeet Thayil was born in 1959 to a Syrian Christian family, and educated in Hong Kong, Bombay and New York. He has produced four books of poems in which a wide array of forms--ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, terza rima, rhymed syllabics, stealth rhymes--map a terrain of history and grief.

The Heroin Sestina

What was the point of it? The stoned
life, the chased, snorted, shot life. Some low
comedy with a cast of strangers. Time
squashed flat. The 1001 names of heroin
chewed like language. Nothing now to know
or remember but the dirty taste
of it, and the names: snuff, Death, a little taste,
H--pronounce it etch--, suger, brownstone,
scag, the SHIT, ghoda gaddi, #4 china, You-Know,
garad, god, the gear, junk, monkey blow,
the law, the habit, material, cheez, heroin.
The point? It was wasted time,
which comes back lovely sometimes,
A ghost sense say, say that hard ache taste
back in your throat, the warm heroin
drip, the hit, the rush, the whack, the stone.
You want it now, the way it lays you low,
flattens everything you know
to a thin white line. I'm saying, I know
the pull of it: the skull rings time
so beautiful, so low
you barely hear it. Itch this blind toad taste.
When you said, 'I mean it, we live like stones,'
you broke something in me only heroin
could fix. The thick sweet amaze of heroin,
helpless its love, its know-
ledge of the infinite. Why push the stone
back up the hill? Why not leave it with the time-
keep, asleep at the bar? Try a little taste
of something sweet that a sweet child will adore, low
in the hips where the aches all go. Allow
me in this one time and I'll give you heroin,
just a taste
to replace the useless stuff you know.
Some say it comes back, the time
to punish you with the time you killed, leave you stone
sober, unknowing, the happiness chemical blown
Ffom your taste stem, unable to hear the word heroin
without wanting its stone one last time.
Gopal Honnalgere (1942-2003) is a now mostly forgotten poet. Born in Karnataka, he taught art and writing at the Oasis School in Hyderabad. He published six books, all of which are out of print. He died in abject circumstances. An enigmatic figure who corresponded with major Western poets, he was once asked by Robert Lowell, 'If you use thoughts so violently to rejects thoughts, why do you write a poem using your head?'

How to Tame a New Pair of Chappals

don't leave them together
don't allow them to talk to each other
they may form a trade union
don't at anytime leave them near
a wall clock, law books, a calendar, the national flag,
gandhi's portrait, or a newspaper
they may hear about
independence, satyagraha,
holidays, working hours, minimum wages, corruption
don't take them to your temple
they may at once know you are weak
your god is false and they may bite you
don't let them near your dining table
they may ask for food
or cast their evil eyes on your dinner
first use them only for short walks
then gradually increase the distance
they should never know the amount of work they have to do
pull their tight straps loose
let them feel happiness
they are growing bigger
smear some old oil on the rough straps
let them feel they are anointed
now they are good subdued labourers
ready to work overtime
for your fat feet