The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed)
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna (ed);
The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets
Oxford University Press 1993, 182 pages
ISBN 0195628675
topics: | poetry | anthology | india | english
contains 130 poems by twelve indian english poets: nissim ezekiel, jayanta mahapatra, a.k. ramanujan, arun kolatkar, keki n. daruwalla, dom moraes, dilip chitre, eunice de souza, adil jussawalla,, agha shahid ali vikram seth, and manohar shetty.
both the selections, and also the individual introductions, are superlative. this volume definitely sets the standard for poetry anthologies in india.
having said that, let's begin with my quibbles on the selection.
kamala das?
kamala das is, in my view, the most prominent indian poet who should have belonged here. clearly, mehrotra has his issues with her.. personally though, dom moraes or ezekiel or jussawalla don't excite me as much as das - but then each man to his own poetry...
and as his acerbic introductions reveal, mehrotra is going for the subjective. he can castrate even the poets he anthologizes, (see ezekiel intro below). still, one wonders about what mehrotra (and a few others) don't like in kamala das - is she considered "inelegant", her voice to loud and screeching? perhaps her vividness is considered loud in some circles? certainly her poetry is a world apart from that of jayanta mahapatra, say. but we relate to her! keep her in!!
maybe this is an issue of form over substance; i err toward substance - poetry should strike a chord...
when i open any of dozens of das poems, they touch me more viscerally than many on this list. my list has her right up there, along with agha and ramanujan and kolatkar.
another thought - could it be that those who have met her don't like her poetry as much? to me it is only the text, which speaks, but i know it can be otherwise. surely those who lived through the publication of das' contentious autobiography, 'my story', would wonder about her motives for publishing certain things... one wonders about the politics of liking poetry... also, mehrotra omits himself... now that is surely modesty, for he certainly belongs in any list of top twelve.
arvind mehrotra; (image: winterline center for arts)
links:
wiki | outlook magazine |
nominated for oxford poetry professor (lost to Ruth Padel)
a search for new voices?
finally, both these omissions may be because both Das and Mehrotra have
already been anthologized. several times. every anthologist feels a
tension between presenting new works, new voices, and that of presenting
what will stand the ravages of time. r. parthasarathy 1976 anthology,
ten 20th c. indian poets, includes both das and mehrotra.
but then there are five who are repeated- only omitted are: shiv k kumar, gieve patel and
parthasarathy...
Number of books with author name in title
but my thinking is that perhaps mehrotra doesn't include das because she is
"common" - everyone knows of her. as of today, she is by far the most
written about indian poet; here is my research on books written about our
poets, where their name appears not as author but in the title
(research based on google-books advanced search jan2012) kamala das : 42 nissim ezekiel : 32 vikram seth : 32 (mostly in his novelist hat) a k ramanujan : 25 jayanta mahapatra : 15 dilip chitre : 12 arun kolatkar : 7 r parthasarathy : 7 (incl at least 2 books by other r parthasarathy's) keki n daruwalla : 6 shiv k kumar : 6 (incl 2 edited defoe works) agha shahid ali : 5 gieve patel: 5 (all abt his paintings) sujata bhatt: 2 arvind mehrotra : 1 adil jussawalla : 1 eunice de souza : 0 i am sure there are books about other poets that i have not looked up, but it's clear that das is the champ. partly, of course, because she is also a major malayalam author. at the same time, she does not have the glamour of translation legend ramanujan or even the pioneering ezekiel - nor the rebel voice of chitre or the officialdom of daruwalla - but then critics will say it is her godforsaken publicity-greedy ways, not just the magic of her words ... well - but i think time will vindicate me on this.
Introduction: Arvind K Mehrotra
The intro by AKM provides an excellent overview of the conflicts facing the
Indian English poets.
"anthologies are graveyards" - 1
"Kill that nonsense term," Adil Jussawalla said of Indo-Anglian, "and
kill it quickly." p.1
[mostly, "Indo-Anglian" -> poetry between 1825 and 1945, this lit is truly
dead; AKM doesn't consider Sarojini Naidu and Aurobindo to have been poets]
AK Ramanujan: "I no longer can tell what comes from where."
The languages AKR writes in, those he translates from, and those he
translates into are 'continuous with each other'.
English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give me my 'outer'
forms -- linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping
experience; and my first thirty years in Inda, my freq visits and
fieldtrips, my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada,
Tamil, the classica snd folkloregive me my substance, my 'inner' forms,
images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and I no longer
can tell what comes from where. [Quoted in parthasarathy-1976-ten-20th-century.html|, ed. R
Parthasarathy, Delhi 1976, 95-] 3
A poem by Arun Kolatkar is a pattern cut in language, the grainy material without
which there would be no self to speak of. What name we afterwards give the
material makes little difference:
main bhAbhiko bolA
kya bhAisAbke dyuTipe main A jAu?
bhaRak gayi sAlI
rahmAn bolA golI chalAungA
mai bolA ek raNDIke wAste?
chalao golI gaNDu
The poem is written in Bombay Hindi, publ in Kolatkar's book of Marathi
poems, transl by him into American English, and, rightly, has been included
in an anthology of Indian verse in English:
allow me beautiful
i said to my sister in law
to step in my brother's booties
you had it coming said rehman
a gun in his hand
shoot me punk
kill your brother i said
for a bloody cunt ('Three cups of Tea')
[in Saleem Peeradina, Contemp Indian Poetry in English, 1972]
'Three cups of Tea suggests the idea that all languages are perhaps one
language. It also makes you ask if language is not in the end superfluous
to poetry. Kolatkar himself appears to believe so, for in matters
linguistic he is a monk, renouncing all but the most essential words,
keeping punctuation to a minimum, and shunning the excitement of the first
person singular.
Writing in English
Making a statement on his work, Agha Shahid Ali spoke for many
contemporaries:
I think we in the subcontinent have been granted a rather unique
opportunity: to contribute to the Engl language in ways that Brit,Am,Aus,Can
cannot. We can do things with the syntax that will bring the language
alive in rich and strange ways, and though poetry should have led the
way, it is a novelist, Salman Rushdie, who has shown the poets a way: he
has, to quote an essay I read somewhere, chutnified English. And the
confidence to do this could only have come in the post-Independence
generation. The earlier gens followed the rules inflicted by the rulers
so strictly that it is almost embarrassing. They also followed models,
esp the models of realism, in ways that imprisoned them. I think we can
do a lot more. What I am looking forward to -- to borrow another
metaphor from food - is the biryanization (I'm chutnifying) of English.
Behind my work, I hope, readers can sometimes hear the music of Urdu. Of
course all this has to do with an emoptional identification on my part
with north Indian muslim culture, which is steeped in Urdu. I, as I have
grown older, have felt the need to idenitfy myself as a north Indian
Muslim (not in any sectarian sense but in a cultural sense). And I do
not feel that this culture is necessarily the province of the Muslims
(after all, Firaq Gorakhpuri was a Hindu) and many non-Muslim Indians can
also consider themselves culturally Muslim. I am not familiar with
Saleem Peeradina's work, but I think I am among the very few Indians
writing in English identifying myself in these terms. [Letter to AKM
1988]
The native tongue behind English lines
With important exceptions [Dom Moraes, V Seth, early poems of Adil Juss]
the native tongue operates behind the lines of the Engl poets... the
language we licked off our mother's teats is the first layer, then those we
picked up from nbrs, and lastly, English, that we learned at school -- and
the language that will happen for the rest of our lives, bright as a
butterfly's wing or a piece of tin aimed at the throat, to paraphrase from
Adil J's 'Missing Person' - is the topmost layer.
However, an Indian poet is not just someone who transports linguistic and
cultural materials from the inner layers to the surface, from Indian mother
tongue to Engl... A good poem is a good poem, and not because it matches the
colour of one's skin or passport.
What Parthasarathy wrote in Ramanujan's defence following the publication
of an article mildly critical of him in Jayanta Mahapatra's magazine
ChandrabhAgA_:
that Ramanujan's work offers the first indisputable evidence of the
validity of Indian Engl verse. Both The Striders_ (1966) and
Relations (1971) are the heir of an anterior tradition, a tradition
very much of this subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada
and Tamil, and which have been assimilated into English. Ramanujan's
deepest roots are in the Tamil and Kannada past, and he has repossessed
that past, in fact made it avlaible in the English language. 'Prayers
to Lord Murugan' is, for instance, embedded in, and arises from, a
specific tradition. It is, in effect, the first step towards
establishing an indigenous tradition of Indian English verse. [Letters,
ChandrabhAgA_, Cuttack, No.2 (Winter 1979), p.66]
Ramanujan's Chicago Zen - multilingual poets 2-fold condition - interior
spaces divided on the one hand and conjoined in the other: 7
Watch your step. Sight may strike you
blind in unexpected places.
The traffic light turns orange
on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble,
you fall into a vision of forest fires,
enter a frothing Himalayan river,
rapid, silent.
Is writing in English irrelevant to India?
Even after 200 years, the Indian poet who writes in Engl is looked upon with suspicion by other Ind writers, as though he did not belong either to the subcontinent of his birth or its lit. misconceptions... that he writes for a foreign audience, and his readers are not in Allahabad and Cuttack but in Boston and London. Editorial in Frontier, left-wing weekly from Calcutta, May 1990: [Ind Engl poets] are treated as irrelevant by the vernacular academicians due to absence of nativity. 7 Engl poetry from small presses: JM's The False start 1980, Kolatkar's Jejuri 1976, Chitre's Travelling in a cage 80, Eunice de Souza's Fix 79, Women in Dutch painting (1988), Adil J's Missing P (1976), and Manohar Shetty's A guarded space (1980), Borrowed time (1988). The editions were small and the distribn negligible ==> why anthologies become necessary. 8 revive neglected works [omitting Kamala Das and R. Parthasarathy] - reveal the "sharp-edged quality of Indian verse"... (poem excerrpts appear after contents)
Contents
(with links to longer extracts)
Introduction 1
ONE : NISSIM EZEKIEL
A Poem of Dedication 13
My Cat 14
For Love's Record 14
Case Study 15
Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher 16
Paradise Flycatcher 17
Two Images 18
After Reading a Prediction 18
TWO : JAYANTA MAHAPATRA
A Rain of Rites 23
I Hear my Fingers Sadly Touching an Ivory Key 23
Hunger 24
Hands 24
The Moon Moments 25
A Kind of Happiness 26
The Door 27
The Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore 27
The Captive Air of Chandipur-on-Sea 29
Of that Love 29
The Vase 30
Days 31
Waiting 32
THREE : A.K.RAMANUJAN
The Striders 38
Breaded Fish 38
Looking for a Cousin on a Swing 39
Self-Portrait 40
Anxiety 40
Case History 40
Love Poem for a Wife. 2 41
The Hindoo: the Only Risk 44
Snakes and Ladders 44
On the Death of a Poem 45
Highway Stripper 45
Moulting 49
Chicago Zen 49
FOUR : ARUN KOLATKAR
Woman 56
Suicide of Rama 56
Irani Restaurant Bombay 57
Crabs 58
Biograph 60
From Jejuri
The Bus 62
Heart of Ruin 63
Chaitanya 64
A Low Temple 64
The Pattern 65
The Horseshoe Shrine 65
Manohar 66
Chaitanya 66
The Butterfly 66
A Scratch 67
Ajamil and the Tigers 68
Chaitanya 70
Between Jejuri and the Railway Station 71
The Railway Station 72
FIVE : KEKI N.DARUWALLA
Hawk 80
The King Speak to the Scribe 82
The Unrest of Desire 84
wolf 85
Fish are Speared by Night 86
Chinar 87
Night Fishing 87
SIX : DOM MORAES
Autobiography 92
Words to a Boy 93
Two from Israel 93
Prophet 96
Key 96
From Interludes
VII. Library 97
Sinbad 98
From Steles
I. The work works. The world doesn't 98
IV. What is this adrift from Chile 99
VI. On my stele, mark colours 100
VII. She in her youth arose 100
VIII. Time and the river, aflame 101
X. Floes creak out of the north 101
Future Plans 102
SEVEN : DILIP CHITRE
The Light of Birds Breaks the Lunatic's Sleep 106
From Travelling in a Cage
2. I came in the middle of my life to a 106
5. The door I was afraid to open 107
7. All I hear is the fraying of the wind 108
8. I woke up and looked at my empty white bed 108
19. Where can I hide now in this 109
21. O quick knives curving into the core 109
In Limbo 110
Pushing a Cart 110
Of Garlic and Such 111
The Felling of the Banyan Tree 111
Father Returning Home 112
Panhala 113
EIGHT : EUNICE DE SOUZA
Feeding the Poor at Christmas 116
Sweet Sixteen 116
Miss Louise 117
Forgive Me, Mother 118
For My Father, Dead Young 118
de Souza Prabhu 119
Women in Dutch Painting 119
She and I 120
Eunice 120
Advice to Women 121
For Rita's Daughter, Just Born 121
From Five London Pieces
III. Meeting Poets 122
NINE : ADIL JUSSAWALLA
Land's End 128
Evening on a Mountain 129
Halt X 129
Bats 130
From Missing Person
1.3 A___ ___'s a giggle now 131
1.6 Black vamps break out of hell 132
1.7 In a brief clearing 132
1.9 He travels the way of devotion 133
1.13 Less time for kicks 133
II.1 No Satan 134
II.2 His hands were slavish 134
II.5 Few either/ors 135
Nine Poems on Arrival 136
Freedom Song 137
Connection 138
TEN : AGHA SHAHID ALI
Postcard from Kashmir 141
Snowmen 141
Cracked Portraits 142
The Dacca Gauzes 144
The Season of the Plains 145
The Previous Occupant 147
ELEVEN : VIKRAM SETH
Guest 151
The Humble Administrator's Garden 151
Evening Wheat 152
The Accountant's House 152
From an 'East is Red' Steamer 153
Ceasing Upon the Midnight 153
Unclaimed 155
From The Golden Gate 156
Soon 160
TWELVE : MANOHAR SHETTY
Fireflies 163
Foreshadows 163
Gifts 164
Wounds 164
Domestic Creatures 166
Bats 167
Departure 168
Moving Out 169
nissim ezekiel jayanta mahapatra a k ramanujan arun kolatkar
NISSIM EZEKIEL
from Intro by Mehrotra
even now I cannot read Ezekiel without reservation. Often the writing seems purposeless At twenty-seven or so I met the girl who's now my wife... the language is under no pressure You arrived with sari clinging to your breast and hips... and if one may shift the poetic reference from context to author, the man himself hopelessly priapic "Is this part of you?" she asks, as she holds it, stares at it. Then she laughs." Apart from being the first modern poet in the literature, Ezekiel was himself a good poet once. 9
My Cat: Nissim Ezekiel p.14
My cat, unlike Verlaine's or Baudelaire's
Is neither diabolic nor a sphinx.
Though equally at home on laps or chairs,
She will not be caressed, nor plays the minx.
She has a single mood, she's merely bored,
Yawns and walks away, retires to sleep.
Has never sniffed at where the fish is stored
Nor known to relish milk; less cat than sheep.
She does not condescend to chase a rat
Or play with balls of wool or show her claws
To teasing guests, but in my basement flat
Defies all animal and human laws
Of love and hate.
One night I'll drown this cat.
FOR LOVE'S RECORD: Nissim Ezekiel p.16
I watched the woman walk away with him. And now I think of her as bold and kind, Who gathered men as shells and put them by, No matter how they loved she put them by I found no evil in her searching eyes. Such love as hers could bearn no common code. Vibrating woman in her nights of joy, Who gathered men as shells and put them by With her I kept my distance (not too far) But heard the music of her quickened breath. Laughing sorcerress to harlequins, Who gathered men as shells and put them by Against my will but somehow reconciled, I let her go who gave but would not bind. She grew in love abandoning her ties, No matter how they loved she put them by
Paradise Flycatcher: Nissim Ezekiel : 17
(An entry in a bird-watcher's diary relates how, while dozing in his garden, he noticed the long, white streamers of a paradise flycatcher moving against the green of a casurina tree. He is delighted for a moment, then remembers sadly how the previous bird he had seen of the same species had been shot down while he was admiring it.) White streamers moving briskly on the green Casurina, rouse the sleepy watcher From a dream of rarest birds To this reality. A grating sound Is all the language of the bird, Spelling death to flies and moths Who go this way to Paradise. Its mask of black, with tints of green, Exactly as described in books on Indian birds, Is legend come alive to the dreamer Whose eyes are fixed on it in glad surprise. So many years ago, its predecessor Came — it was an afternoon like this— And clung with shaking streamers To the same casurina, catching flies; But Fate that day, not the dreamer only, Fixed his eyes on it and shot it down. It lay with red and red upon its white, Uncommon bird no longer, in the mud. The live one flashes at the watcher Chestnut wings; the dead is buried in his mind.
Jayanta Mahapatra
A RAIN OF RITES: Jayanta Mahapatra p.23
Sometims a rain comes slowly across the sky, that turns upon its grey cloud, breaking away into light before it reaches its objective. The rain I have known and traded all this life is thrown like kelp on the beach. Like some shape of conscience I cannot look at, a malignant purpose is a nun's eye. Who was the last man on earth, to whom the cold cloud brought the blood to his face? [?] Numbly I climb to the mountain-tops of ours where my own soul quivers on the edge of answers. Which still, stale air sits on an angel's wings? What holds my rain so it's hard to overcome?
I HEAR MY FINGERS SADLY TOUCHING AN IVORY KEY: Jayanta Mahapatra p.23
Swans sink wordlessly to the carpet miles of polished floors reach out for the glass of voices There are gulls crying everywhere and glazed green grass in the park with the swans folding their cold throats.
HUNGER : Jayanta Mahapatra p.24
It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back. The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly, trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself. I saw his white bone thrash his eyes. I followed him across the sprawling sands, my mind thumping in the flesh's sling. Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in. Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth his old nets had only dragged up from the seas. In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound. The wind was I, and the days and nights before. Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls. Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind. I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen... Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine. The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile. Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber. She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there, the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
OF THAT LOVE (p.29) : Jayanta Mahapatra
Of that love, of that mile walked together in the rain, only a weariness remains. I am that stranger now my mirror holds to me; the moment's silence hardly moves across the glass I pity myself in another's guise. And no one's back here, no one I can recognize, and from my side I see nothing. Years have passed since I sat with you, watching the sky grow lonelier with cloudlessness waiting for your body to make it lived in.
A. K. Ramanujan
Self-Portrait: AK Ramanujan
I resemble everyone but myself, and sometimes see in shop-windows, despite the well-known laws of optics, the portrait of a stranger, date unknowns, often signed in a corner by my father.
On the death of a poem : A. K. Ramanujan p.45
Images consult one another, a conscience- stricken jury, and come slowly to a sentence.
Chicago Zen : A. K. Ramanujan
from Second Sight (1986)
i
Now tidy your house,
dust especially your living room
and do not forget to name
all your children.
ii
Watch your step. Sight may strike you
blind in unexpected places.
The traffic light turns orange
on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble,
you fall into a vision of forest fires,
enter a frothing Himalayan river,
rapid, silent.
On the 14th floor,
Lake Michigan crawls and crawls
in the window. Your thumbnail
cracks a lobster louse on the windowpane
from your daughter's hair
and you drown, eyes open,
towards the Indies, the antipodes.
And you, always so perfectly sane.
iii
Now you know what you always knew:
the country cannot be reached
by jet. Nor by boat on jungle river,
hashish behind the Monkey-temple,
nor moonshot to the cratered Sea
of Tranquillity, slim circus girls
on a tightrope between tree and tree
with white parasols, or the one
and only blue guitar.
Nor by any
other means of transport,
migrating with a clean valid passport,
no, not even by transmigrating
without any passport at all,
but only by answering ordinary
black telephones, questions
walls and small children ask,
and answering all calls of nature.
iv
Watch your step, watch it, I say,
especially at the first high
threshold,
and the sudden low
one near the end
of the flight
of stairs,
and watch
for the last
step that's never there.
["Chicago Zen" exemplifies the theme of
transnationalism, and might be an attempt to imagine himself as
another hybrid image. :
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Ramanujan.html ]
Woman: Arun Kolatkar
a woman may collect cats read thrillers her insomnia may seep through the great walls of history a lizard may paralyze her a sewing machine may bend her moonlight may intercept the bangle circling her wrist a woman my name her cats the circulating library may lend her new thrillers a spiked man may impale her a woman may add a new recipe to her scrapbook judiciously distilling her whimper the city lights may declare it null and void in a prodigious weather above a darkling woman surgeons may shoot up and explode in a weather fraught with forceps woman may damn man a woman may shave her legs regularly a woman may take up landscape painting a woman may poison twenty three cockroaches
Irani Restaurant Bombay : Arun Kolatkar 57
the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake decompose carefully in the cracked showcase; distracted only by a fly on the make as it finds in a loafer' s wrist an operational base. dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat breeze, the crooked swan begs pardon if it distuib the pond; the road neat as a needle points at a lovely cottage with a garden. the thirsty loafer sees the stylised perfection of such a landscape in a glass of water wobble a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table an instant of mirrors turns the tables on space. while promoting darkness under the chair, the cat in its two timing sleep dreams evenly and knows dreaming as an administrative problem, his cigarette lit, the loafer, affecting the exactitude of a pedagogue places the match in the tea circle and sees it rise: as when to identify a corpse one visits a morgue and politely the corpse rises from a block of ice the burnt match with the tea circle makes a rude compass, the heretic needle jabs a black star. tables, chairs, mirrors are night that needs to be sewed and cashier is where at seams it comes apart.
keki daruwalla dom moraes dilip chitre
Keki N. Daruwalla
Hawk: Keki N. Daruwalla
1 I saw the wild hawk-king this morning riding an ascending wind as he drilled sky. The land beneath him was filmed with salt: grass-seed, insect, bird nothing could thrive here. But he was lost in the momentum of his own gyre, a frustrated parricide on the kill. The fuse of his hate was burning still. But in the evening he hovered above the groves, a speck of barbed passion. Crow, mynah and pigeon roosted here while parakeets flew raucously by. And then he ran amuck, a rapist in the harem of the sky. As he went up with a pigeon skewered to his heel-talon he scanned the other birds, marking out their fate, the ones he would scoop up next, those black dregs in the cup of his hate! 2 The tamed one is worse, for he is touched by man. When snared in the woods his eyelids are sewn with silk as he is broken to the hood. He is momentarily blinded, starved. Then the scar over his vision is perforated. Morsels of vision are fed to his eyes as he is unblinded stitch by relenting stitch. Slowly the world re-forms: mud walls, trees burgeon. His eye travels like the eye of the storm. Discovering his eye and the earth and sky with it, he leaps from earth to ether. Now the sky is his eyrie. He ferocious floats on splayed wings; then plummets like a flare, smoking, and a gust of feathers proclaims that he has struck. The tamed one is worse, for he is touched by man Hawking is turned to a ritual, the predator's passion honed to an art; as they feed the hawk by carving the breast Of the quarry bird and gouging out his heart 3 They have flushed him out of the tall grasses, the hare, hunted now in pairs by mother hawk and son. They can't kill him in one fell swoop. But each time the talons cart away a patch of ripped fur. He diminishes, one talon-morsel at a time. He is stunned by the squall of wings above. His heart is a burning stable packed with whinnying horses. His blood writes stories on the scuffed grass! His movements are a scribble on the page of death. 4 I wouldn't know when I was stolen from the eyrie I can't remember when I was ensnared. I only know the leather disc which blots out the world and the eyelids which burn with thwarted vision Then the perforations, and yet the blue iris of heaven does not come through. I can think of a patch of blue sky when shown a blue slide. But I am learning how to spot the ones crying for the right to dream, the right to flesh, the right to sleep with their own wives I have placed them. I am sniffing the air currents, deciding when to pounce. I will hover like a black prophesy weaving its moth-soft cocoon of death. I shall drive down with the compulsive thrust of gravity, trained for havoc, my eyes focused on them like the sights of a gun. During the big drought which is surely going to come the doves will look up for clouds, and it will rain hawks.
Dilip Chitre (1938- )
from mehrotra's intro: In a 1989 speech, Chitre says: [An Indian English poet's Englishness] is as questioned as are his claims to English. ... his enemies argue that only a living Indian language can give a poet access to uniquely Indian experience. In the same vein they argue that since English is hadly a living Indian language, the Indian English poet's lg is always dated or stilted or overstylized or is unnatural in other ways. These two major limitations stifle his self-expression ... and his freedom as an artist. These arguments are based on profound misconceptions about both the role of a native culture in literary art and the role of language in poetry. First, native cultures [if not dead, are not] closed and static... All surviving cultures in our increasingly global civilization have to create their own future in a global space and time... Art generates new information within such an open system which contains [a] vast memory. Linguistic spaces intersect one another, and where they fuse or split there are strange twilight areas. Since no country speaks a poet's language, a poet's language itself becomes his landscape and his time... The potential strength of Indian English poetry is going to be derived from native Indian literatures and not without them. The ability to transform non-Anglo-Saxon cultural and poetic traditions into the global mainstream of English literature will give Indian English poetry its sustenance in the coming decades, provided Indian English poets discover the nourishing activity of poetic translation as a major aspect of [their] creativity. p. 103-4 Just as Rimbaud associated vowels with colours, Chitre associates literary forms with modes of death: Murders are lyrics Genocide is epic But the greatest of all forms is suicide. (Travelling in a cage, section 18)
Travelling in a Cage: Dilip Chitre
2. I came in the middle of my life p.106
I came in the middle of my life to a Furnished apartment. By now my pubic hair Was already greying. And I could see the dirty Old man under my own skin. It was not the Absolute end but the beginning of it. The air Smelt of dead rats and I was reaching the age of forty. In the manner one reaches an empty shelf. Where Are all of you, my dear departed bald ones? Angels wearing wigs, gods cleaning dentures? I began to sit at the typewriter hurriedly hitting Nails in the logs of silence. The ashtrays were full. The tea grew cold before I remembered to drink it. Words. More and more words.. Clear as a city street At midday. I will leave behind a more garbled version Of the same world.. The richer for my own noise. [...]
5. The door I was afraid to open p.107
The door I was afraid to open was autumn The door I was afraid to open Was autumn One luminous month of remembering Nothing The dark smell of rotting leaves in her voice While the sensuous shadows of trees burned in the river I became an insect of solitude in the grass Sitting at the very edge of the season And in the yellow darkness of the bar I inhaled another country's noise and perishable warmth Looked in astonishment at her lips Finely injured by a smile And tried to guess the bitter taste of gin and tonic As the rim of her glass shone directly in my eyes Later we traggered home and undressed Before i turned the light off i saw her skinny shoulders What kind of wind was making love to leafless tres Outside the door i was always afraid to open
7. All i hear is the fraying of the wind
All i hear is the fraying of the wind among splayed tres The ailing voice of the sea in my mind's own distance And her breasts shivering in the grey rain of my fingers The skin has no memory and the memory has no skin Hoy can i claim to have known the wetness of her mouth A dog howled while we made love And the window-pane was White as Winter Now that i have switched off lights it is only a sheet The smell of roasted meat still lingers in the room And she is a charp grain of salt to my unforgetting tongue Tomorrow the hair of my poem will suddenly turn grey The wind will have fallen when i enter The sad space of the bathroom with its questioning mirrors
8. I woke up and looked
I woke up and looked at my empty white bed Wondered if it looked slept in at all I looked at the walls of my room and out the window Wondered what the meaning of the word space was I opened the faucets and watched the rushing miracle Wondered what water really was and why it had to be wet Then i looked into the mirror wich was deep and clear Wondered if the reverse of me was equally true Then I opened a book of Ghalib's poems In which he also wondered What the cure of this disease was What grass comes out of and what really is the air.
Dilip Chitre : Pushing a Cart 110
Pushing a cart through the brilliant Interior of an American supermarket It occurs to me that my private but hired refrigerator Cannot contain all the hunger of India What meats can I store in my mind What fruits and cheeses can I hope to make permanent These fat and insomniac mothers pushing their Infants and groceries over these wide floors Say nothing to a man temporarily exiled Into affluence and freedom Silently and not without envy I warn the sexy undergraduate next to me Watch your cholesterol, honey, Who are you fattening yourself for, anyway?
Dilip Chitre : Of garlic and such 111
praise the garlic for its tight integration of cloves and its white concealment of unbearable astringence. praise the onion for keeping its eye-opening secret under so many identical skins. praise woman for her genderless passion hidden in a familiar body the rippling enigma of her inner form. then damn yourself lord of nothing sheathe your murderous sword.
eunice de souza adil jussawala
Eunice de Souza
Meeting Poets p.120
Meeting poets I am disconcerted sometimes by the colour of their socks the suspicion of a wig the wasp in the voice and an air, sometimes, of dankness. Best to meet in poems: cool speckled shells in which one hears a sad but distant sea.
She and I p.120
Perhaps he never died. We mourned him separately, in silence, she and I. Suddenly at seventy-eight she tells me his jokes, his stories, the names of paintings he loved, and of some forgotten place where blue flowers fell. I am afraid for her, for myself, but can say nothing.
Halt X : Adil Jussawalla 129
I
I do not know what station this is, or why
We broke our journey; checked, here in Derbyshire,
One senses danger, disquietude only.
Pieces of smoke litter the huddled town-
Card collage on felt; no pattering movement
On roads of sliding newspaper, sidling dog.
No alighting or descending the steps of its drizzling doors.
II
Rain fell like a drizzle of fine slag
On an anonymous town in smudged Derbyshire.
I counted sixty chimneys in a quarter
The size of a burgher's courtyard, wondered at smoke
Sliding edgeways through the dawn's widening slats.
A flock of pigeons dissolved in the viscid air
Like a piece of mud in a current; 5 o'clock.
A streetlamp craned its neck for the spreading frogs.
Nine Poems on Arrival: Adil Jussawalla : 136
Spiders infest the sky.
They are palms, you say,
hung in a web of light.
Gingerly, thinking of concealed
springs and traps, I step off the plane,
expect take-off on landing.
Garlands beheading the body
and everyone dressed in white.
Who are we ghosts of?
You. You. You.
Shaking hands. And you.
Cold hands. Cold feet. I thought
the sun would be lower here
to wash my neck in.
Contact. We talk a language of beads
along well-established wires.
The beads slide, they open, they
devour each other.
Some were important.
Is that one,
as deep and dead as the horizon?
Upset like water
I dive for my favourite tree
which is no longer there
though they've let its roots remain.
Dry clods of earth
tighten their tiny faces
in an effort to cry. Back
where I was born,
I may yet observe my own birth.
agha shahid ali vikram seth manohar shetty
Agha Shahid Ali
from Intro by AKM:
[b Delhi 1949, grew up in Srinagar. MA from U. Delhi, where he was
teaching befoore leaving for the US in 1976. PhD Penn State 1984, and
MFA U. Arizona 1985. Now on the faculty of Hamilton College, NY. ]
Poems here are all from Hal-Inch Himalayas, his first mature
collection. Previous to it he published Bone-Sculpture (1972), and
In memory of Begum Akhtar (1979). Also the author of
T.S. Eliot as Editor and A walk through the yellow pages (1987), a
poetry chapbook. The Rebel's Silhouette_ (1991) consists of poems
translated from the Urdu of Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
Ali's poems seem to be whispered to himself, and to read them is as if to
overhear. ...
Though Ali has made exile his permanent condition, it is not what he
writes about. Exile offers him unconfined and unpeopled space into
which, one at a time, he introduces human figures...
The language is always urbane, with individual lines and stanzas seldom
calling attention to themselves. If anything, they tend to keep out of
sight, making memorability a characteristic of the whole poem - each like
a length of Dacca gauze -- rather than its separate parts.
Postcard from Kashmir : Agha Shahid Ali : 141
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox, my home a near four by six inches. I always loved neatness. Now I hold the half-inch Himalayas in my hand. This is home. And this is the closest I'll ever be to home. When I return, the colors wn't be so brilliant. the Jhelum's waters so clean, so ultramarine. My love so overexposed. And my memory will be a little out of focus, in it a giant negative, black and white, still undeveloped.
The Dacca gauzes : Agha Shahid Ali
...for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes. -- Oscar Wilde /The Picture of Dorian Gray Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. 'No one now knows,' my grandmother says, 'what it was to wear or touch that cloth.' She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a ring. Years later when it tore, many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys were distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law. Those too now lost. In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced, and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England. History of little use to her, my grandmother just says how the muslins of today seem so coarse and that only in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again. One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring.
Vikram Seth
The humble administrator's garden : Vikram Seth : 151
A plump gold carp nudges a lily pad
And shakes the raindrops off like mercury,
And Mr Wang walks round. 'Not bad, not bad.'
He eyes the Fragrant Chamber dreamily.
He eyes the Rainbow Bridge. He may have got
The means by somewhat dubious means, but now
This is the loveliest of all gardens. What
Do scruples know of beauty anyhow?
The Humble Administrator admires a bee
Poised on a lotus, walks through the bamboo wood,
Strips half a dozen loquats off a tree
And looks about and sees that it is good.
He leans against a willow with a dish
And throws a dumpling to a passing fish.
Note: the Humble Administrator's Garden is a classical garden in Suzhou,
an ancient capital town not far from Shanghai. The garden was built by
the scholar-poet Wang Xiancheng from 1510-1526, after he was forced to leave
the imperial service due to political wrangling.
Gardens in china are akin to painting or poetry, where the artist attempts to
lead the viewer through a seires of views constructed with water, rock,
plants and architecture. The Humble Administrator's Garden (Zhuōzhèng Yuán,
拙政园) is is one of four great Chinese gardens. The name is from a stanza
from Pan Yue, "I enjoy a carefree life by planting trees and building my own
house...I irrigate my garden and grow vegetables for me to eat...such a life
suits a retired official like me well."
Evening wheat : Vikram Seth : 152
Evening is the best time for wheat Toads croak. Children ride buffaloes home for supper. The last loads are shoulder-borne. Squares light up And the wheat sags with a late gold. There on the other side of the raised path Is the untransplanted emerald rice. But it is the wheat I watch, the still dark gold With maybe a pig that has strayed from the brigade enjoying a few soft ears.
Unclaimed : Vikram Seth : 155
To make love with a stranger is the best.
There is no riddle and there is no test. --
To lie and love, not aching to make sense
Of this night in the mesh of reference.
To touch, unclaimed by fear of imminent day,
And understand, as only strangers may.
To feel the beat of foreign heart to heart
Preferring neither to prolong nor part.
To rest within the unknown arms and know
That this is all there is; that this is so.
Manohar Shetty
Foreshadows : Manohar Shetty
Waiting for the shy click of heels on the stairs, I watch a deep forest rise from my hand : On the green glowing wall my looped thumb and fingers transfer a pensive fawn Two flat palms part and a bored crocodile yawns Wild cats roll and purr when my fingers convert to ears Giant buggerflies dip and disappear as the door-bell rings like a shrill bird. A faint smell of musk enters as I lope across the wall My mouuth exposes hungry tusks and hands reach out like paws...
Gifts : Manohar Shetty p.164
You unfold, like starfish On a beach, your touch Stills the rumpled sea, Hair plastered seaweed. I come from the labyrinths: Traffic lights park in my eyes Before I cross, highways fork And stream like veins in my hand. You hunger for a blade of grass In the welter of concrete, I step on softening sand Suspiciously. Together We trace a bridge: you pick A shell translucent as neon, And I a tribal earring Reflected in plate glass. [about the writing of this poem, Shetty says how it was written for V, an ineffably beautiful Goan Catholic, who was a colleague at a Mumbai newspaper with offices above a fish market. The stench of rotting fish seeped into the newspapers, our clothes, the stationery, even the tea and the galleys. but the relationship blossomed, and Shetty "did what any smitten young man does: write a love poem." eventually, he marries V, and moves to goa, where he wrote the poem "Moving Out" (next). - http://asia-major.com/Reviews/manoharshetty/hightide3.html ]
Moving Out : Manohar Shetty p.169
After the packing the leavetaking. The rooms were hollow cartons. The gecko listened stilly— An old custom — for the heartbeat Of the family clock. After the springcleanings Now the drawing of curtains. I thought of the years between These grey walls, these walls Which are more than tympanic. There remained much, dead and living, Uncleared, unchecked: dust mottled Into shreds under loaded bookshelves; The fine twine of a cobweb Shone in the veranda sunlight. All this I brushed aside along With the silverfish in flaking tomes, The stains on marble and tile Scoured with acid; but the ghosts Loomed like windstruck drapes; Like the rectangle left by A picture frame: below a nail Hooked into a questionmark, A faint corona, A contrasting shade.
Domestic Creatures : Manohar Shetty : 166
LIZARD
Tense, wizened,
Wrinkled neck twisting,
She clears
The air of small
Aberrations
With a snapping tongue,
A long tongue.
PIGEON
Swaddled cosily, he
Settles by the window,
Burping softly;
Eyelids half-closed,
Head sinking
In a fluffy
Embroidered pillow.
SPIDER
The swollen-headed spider
Spins yarns from her corner.
Tenuous threads of her tales
Glitter like rays
From the fingertips of a saint.
She weaves on, plays along,
Hangs from a hoary strand,
Rolls, unrolls: a yoyo,
A jiggling asterisk: a footnote:
Little characters transfixed
In the clutches of her folds.
COCKROACH
Open the lid, he tumbles out
Like a family secret;
Scuttles back into darkness;
Reappears, feelers like
Miniature periscopes,
Questioning the air;
Leaves tell-tale traces:
Wings flaky as withered
Onion skin, fresh
Specks scurrying
In old crevices.
Also on Book Excerptise:
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's The absent traveller:
Prakrit love poetry from the gAthAsaptashati of sAtavAhana hAla (translations).
Other Indian English Anthologies:
(most recent to older)
1. WritingLove by Ashmi Ahluwalia (ed) (2010)
2. We speak in changing languages: Indian women poets 1990-2007 by E. V. Ramakrishnan and Anju Makhija (2009)
3. 60 Indian poets by Jeet Thayil (ed.) (2008)
Frost streamed the air. Our blood pulsed thin and shrill.
...
4. Confronting Love : Poems by Jerry Pinto and Arundhathi Subramaniam (eds) (2005)
The selections here are definitely on the fresher side. Even for the known
poets, the poems chosen, (Kolatkar's Lice, Ramanujan's Love 10) are among
the lesser known. Many poets are being anthologized for the first time, so
...
5. Indian love poems by Meena Alexander (ed.) (2005)
Her lips are like leaves. Mine are full-blown coral.
Don't bite too hard.
...
6. Anthology Of Indian Poetry In English by Paranjape Makarand (2000)
7. The tree of tongues: An anthology of modern Indian poetry
by E. V. Ramakrishnan (1999) [translations from Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Marathi]
8. Nine Indian women poets: an anthology by Eunice DeSouza (ed.) (1997)
9. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry by Vinay (ed.) Dharwadker and A.K. Ramanujan (ed.) (1994)
My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light.
...
10. Modern Indian Poetry in English by Ayyappa K Paniker (1991)
11. Indian English poetry since 1950:an anthology by Vilas Sarang (1990)
12. Contemporary Indian poetry by Kaiser Haq (ed) (1990)
The white of the negro maid's eyeballs
is the only clean thing here,
...
13. Twenty Indian Poems by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed.) (1990)
14. Anthology Of Indian English Poetry by Singh and Prasad (1989)
15. Indian poetry in English today by Pritish Nandy (1981)
16. Hundred Indian Poets: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Pranab Bandyopadhyay (ed.) (1977)
17. Ten 20th Century Indian Poets by R. Parthasarathy (1976)
18. strangertime: an anthology of Indian Poetry in English by Pritish Nandy (ed) (1977)
The anthology is therefore not defensive. It celebrates our success. It
attempts to capture the drama, the intensity, and the sheer vitality of the
...
19. An anthology of Indian Love poetry, by Subhash Saha (ed.) (1976)
20. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English by Saleem Peeradina (1972)
21. The golden treasury of Indo-Anglian poetry by Vinayak Krishna Gokak (ed.) (1970)
22. Indian love poems by Tambimuttu and John Piper (ill) (1967)
bookexcerptise is maintained by a small group of editors. get in touch with us! bookexcerptise [at] gmail [dot] .com. This review by Amit Mukerjee was last updated on : 2015 Jul 22