Arundhathi Subramaniam
Why on earth would an Indian choose to write English poetry?
It’s a question I ask myself pretty often during those routine moments of despairing self-interrogation. But the question comes even more sharply and pointedly from other quarters. From that vast majority that can’t quite fathom why you aren’t choosing to hop on to that glamorous high-profile bandwagon of Great Indian Novelists. And much as one would like to believe the argument has been buried and entombed, the question is still implicit in the increasing spirit of cultural nativism sweeping across the country – a spirit that is convinced that the use of English is a reactionary throwback to an imperial past.
To be a poet today is, no doubt, to be an embattled entity in several cultures of the globe. Embattlement, however, does at least imply the recognition by the status quo of a potentially unsettling presence. It is consequently associated with a fragile sense of community among those at the margin, a fraught but growing sense of solidarity. However, what the Indian English poet has to contend with, more often than embattlement, is invisibility.
Indian poetry in English simply doesn’t count. Not to the general cultural establishment that still regards it as adolescent, arcane and self-referential. (Salman Rushdie hasn’t exactly helped matters with his dismissive comment, in his hotly debated introduction to the anthology of fifty years of Indian writing, about Indian poets in English not matching ‘the quality of their counterparts in prose’). Not to the mainstream Indian media that seems resolutely to have decided that food, fashion and film stars must be the staple national obsession of the new Indian young and privileged. And finally, and unforgivably, not to the mainline publishers in the country who seem to have entered into a tacit agreement with the media to sideline poetry entirely. (It is telling that the three much-publicised books of poetry, brought out recently by the country’s leading publishers, have been authored by a film star/model, a media juggernaut and the 21-year-old scion of India’s first political dynasty.)
There are two ways of dealing with invisibility. The first is to become invisible even to yourself – which translates in this case into shoving your manuscript into a drawer and forgetting about it until more congenial climes. The other is to come up with an inventive subterranean strategy of survival.
In Bombay – the city that probably gave the word ‘survival’ its dictionary definition – one such canny and enduring strategy has been the Poetry Circle. For the past fifteen years, a strange assortment of poets and poetry aficionados have been meeting on every alternate Saturday evening in the musty old ground floor room of the Theosophical Society building in south Bombay. This book-spattered, dust-spangled room (the long-standing headquarters of that grand old patriarch of Indian letters, Nissim Ezekiel) has been the site where lasting liaisons – literary and otherwise – have been forged, and some shattered. Where poems have been shared, enjoyed, anatomised, sometimes unjustly dismissed, and sometimes justly so. Where criteria have been tentatively formulated, only to be gently punctured, or sometimes redefined.
Personally, I believe that one of the strengths of the Circle has been the fact that its abiding collective passion for poetry hasn’t been colonised by a spirit of purely academic enterprise. Of course, there have been heated exchanges, saturated with ‘technico-jargonautics’ (that invaluable Shavian term!), and replete with bibliographical flourishes. But the more valuable contribution, I believe in retrospect, has been the ‘artisanal’ workshop criticism – the suggestions at the nuts-and-bolts level of praxis, to pare down a line, chisel an image, fine-tune a phrase, scrape the varnish off another.
The Poetry Circle has hobbled, coughed and wheezed along the way, but has managed to survive for the past fifteen years. There have been difficult moments certainly. It has had its share of aesthetic rifts, ideological factions, personal rivalries, incompatible chemistries, financial crunches, and above all, has had to contend with the perennial bugbear of negligible publishing resources. And, of course, not to be underestimated is the problem of the intimidating linear geography of Bombay city, which makes it a supreme triumph of mind over metropolis for anyone to journey all the way to the southern tip of the island every fortnight simply to listen to a little – sometimes indifferent -- verse!
The reason for the Circle’s survival, I believe, is its syncretism – born of expediency rather than idealism, perhaps. I often marvel at the bunch of ‘weirdos’ that groups at the cultural periphery always manage to attract! And yet, it is this haphazard but essential egalitarianism, this capacity to accommodate difference, that remains the Circle’s enduring strength. It has never sought to found an alternative canon, has never managed to arrive at a party-line (attempts to achieve that in the Indian polity have in any case almost always been doomed to failure!), and has managed with remarkable success to steer clear of dogmatism. Even if it isn’t quite a ‘community’ – except for some stray moments when it seems to achieve that condition waveringly – it is most definitely not a ‘coterie’. Moreover, the fact that it functions today with a fluid committee and the absence of any office-bearers is testimony to the fact that functional anarchies are feasible, at least at the micro-level.
The recent anthology issue of ‘Poiesis’ (the Poetry Circle journal) is, I believe, an important achievement in the Circle’s trajectory. Riddled though it is with printer’s devils, grammatical errors and factual oversights, it is still a brave work. Not merely because it yokes the diverse voices of those who have been associated with the Circle over the years, but also because it is, by implication, an indictment of the current situation – a situation where publishers have completely jettisoned their poetry agendas.
More recently other forums have burgeoned in the city that have extended and supplemented the Circle’s goals and activities in various ways. ‘Chauraha’, an interactive arts forum that I manage at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), has tried to incorporate regular poetry readings and discussions in its monthly programmes. Similarly, ‘Loquations’, an informal gathering, spearheaded by senior poet, Adil Jussawala, meets every Tuesday on the NCPA lawns to ‘talk poetry’.
At these sessions I never cease to be amazed by the number of people who still profess – despite the odds – to write poetry. Unfortunately, few of them seem to be reading it. Ventures like the Poetry Circle, ‘Chauraha’ and ‘Loquations’ may do their bit in helping bridge synapses between practitioners, but clearly cannot fulfil the function neglected by publishers in the country. The only way to get to know about other Indian English poets in the subcontinent today is through informal networks, beleaguered and infrequent journals limping along on limited resources, and, of course, through extensive trial-an-error on the internet.
Not an easy situation by any standards. And yet, there seems to be sufficient evidence of the fact that Indian poetry in English is alive and fermenting. It might not have found a place in that blazing equatorial patch of sun enjoyed by the Indian English novel, but it shows no signs of giving up. At least not just yet.