At one stage, his poetry dried up for seventeen years, belying the early promise of the sensitive, frighteningly bright youth who’d precociously won the Hawthornden. In 1982, Dom wrote the first ‘real’ poem after that long gap: ‘Absences’.
Last year, he released Typed With One Finger, a collection of poems; among the plenitude of book projects occupying his time was an idea for a new collection of poems. No writer could find the perfect word better, or faster, than Dom; no one could so accurately capture a moment, whether it concerned Sir Vidia throwing a fit at Neemrana (Dom disapproved, but gleefully captured every unspoken nuance in the situation) or Ginsberg discoursing on his vision of William Blake. ‘I inquired what Blake had worn to the interview. “Oh, like a toga, man,” Ginsberg said, “the kind of clothes all the people wore in those days.’’’
Dom was always in place, and always out of place: after so many long years in India and his travels around the world, he never learned to speak any language except English. But India was the country he kept coming back to; England, which sometimes had the greater claim on him, was never home. It didn’t seem to bother him; he had the calm assurance of an eternal passenger, the knowledge that he could put his bedroll down anywhere and find a space for himself.
There are as many Dom anecdotes as the man had friends and fellow travellers. One of the best comes from Jeet Thayil, now an immensely talented poet in his own right. He met Dom when he was a young poet, just starting out; Dom was in his late-forties. As he rose to leave, Dom took his hand, and told him about ‘the handshake’.
Jeet recalled Dom saying: ‘Well, this handshake goes all the way back to Shakespeare, the first poet. You see, just as you’re shaking my hand, I shook Eliot’s hand, he shook Yeats’ hand, Yeats shook Tennyson’s hand, Tennyson shook Keats’ hand . . .’
Dom Moraes passed it on, whatever it was that he had: sometimes it was kindness, sometimes stories, sometimes just a drink, sometimes his ability to remember uncomfortable things, sometimes the promise that other poets would come along who would share his gift, and shape it.
(Based on interviews with Dom Moraes between 1998 and 2004.)
2
Arun Kolatkar
(1932–2004)
Years ago, when I interviewed my first Indian poet, I thought longingly of Arun Kolatkar. The poet in question was a woman only too eager to expound on the meaning and beauty of her verse, which had little of either, unfortunately.
I’d just finished reading Jejuri, Kolatkar’s cycle of poems set in a temple town where the narrator finds moments of beauty among darkness and squalor, devotion not in the sanctum sanctorum, but an awareness that, as the poet would say in an interview, ‘wherever a bitch gives birth is probably a holy place’. To move from Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt to this was an epiphany.
And as the woman poet droned on and on, I thought of all the questions I wanted so desperately to ask Kolatkar about his poems, his images; questions that I and most ordinary readers would never be able to ask him, even by proxy, because of his contempt for and resistance to the whole process of mythmaking around poetry.
I can’t ask Kolatkar these questions any more—he died, it was cancer—but it doesn’t matter. His poems and writings, from Jejuri to the recently released Kala Ghoda poems and Sarpa Satra poems, were dismissive of questions and critical notes, intolerant of footnotes, contemptuous of explanatory essays. If you didn’t find what you were looking for in the poetry itself, you had no business reading it. He wasn’t quite as reclusive as reputation had it; resistant to intrusion, certainly, as his notorious refusal to install a telephone in his house demonstrated.
But his friends knew where to find him: the former adman (he worked at Lintas for a long while) had a favourite restaurant in Kala Ghoda, and no doubt, future devotees of his work will make pilgrimages there to go and genuflect at the tables. I imagine his ghost will look on sardonically.
My favourite Arun Kolatkar story concerns his response to an interviewer who asked him the standard question: ‘Who are your favourite poets and writers?’ The question infuriated Kolatkar, but then most questions did: he was the master of the freezing silence, the riposte in the form of another question, the non sequitur, the bland digression. This time, he let rip.
‘There are a lot of poets and writers I have liked. You want me to give you a list? Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Jynaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, Ramjoshi, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller . . . Gunter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdeo Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Balchandra Nemade, Durrenmatt, Aarp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning Hopkins, Andre Vajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy.’
I look at those names now, and I think, okay, that’s a poem right there. It speaks for all of us, for our hybrid heritage, our right to claim everything that comes from our ‘roots’, everything that comes from ‘elsewhere’ and to put the two together in one defiant, all-inclusive category.
Osip Mandelstam sculpts his protests against a repressive regime alongside Namdeo Dhasal, the defiant poet speaking for the downtrodden, the Dalits, in a language he claimed as his own, alongside Lenny Bruce’s anarchist humour and Laurel and Hardy’s equally anarchist pratfalls. It’s the only possible answer to the questions that would have bored Kolatkar silly, the ‘which-language-do-you-prefer-Marathi-or-English’ question, the ‘is-this-autobiographical’ question, the ‘what-were-your-influences’ question, the ‘how-do-we-understand-you’ question. To all of these he would have had one reply: read the work. Go back to the poems. I can’t help you.
I’m supposed to be a critic, but I can’t help you when it comes to explaining why Jejuri became, for many generations of Indians, the iconic set of modern poems. Perhaps I can do this another way, by tracing my memories of the ways in which I read Jejuri. The first time was within the bland pages of my English textbook, which was called something like ‘A Radiant Reader of English Poetry’ and introduced us, daringly, to Ramanujan and Ezekiel and Kolatkar while balancing them with Alfred Noyes’s preposterous ‘The Highwayman’ and Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’.
As we turned the pages, drowsing through ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ and chanting wearily ‘Lightly, o lightly we bear her along’, we came up against Kolatkar’s images of sunlight as a sawn-off shotgun with a shock that I can still feel today, so many decades later.
In college, someone had a battered cyclostyled copy of Jejuri, the print smudging blackly across the lines, Kolatkar’s words obscured by chai stains and flyspecks. Those were brushed off each time so that we could read the poems, but they always came back, so that we always read Kolatkar through a living prism of India.
Squashed samosas merged into type when we were well off; sweat stains splotched those pages in summer. Four years later, I’d graduated to a samizdat copy of Jejuri—it remained persistently either out of print, or when it did emerge briefly into print, it was out of the reach of my meagre funds.
This was wrapped within the folds of a calendar that featured a manically grinning Ma Durga whose face had the exaggerated pout of filmstar Sridevi, and whose body was draped in the kind of sari Mandakini would later make famous under a waterfall. Given Kolatkar’s views on religion, this seemed appropriate.
Jejuri is to be published within respectable covers this year, and the two books of poetry released a bare month before Kolatkar died bear no resemblance to the crumpled and life-stained palimpsests in which I met his poetry first.
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I don’t know whether I can handle the newness, the respectability; but then again, as I learned first from Arun Kolatkar, iconoclast, recluse, thinker, poet, it’s not the book that matters but the words.
(Written in 2004, after Arun Kolatkar’s death on 25 September.)
3
Jeet Thayil
The house in which we’re meeting is bare, the boxes of books still unpacked, two lonely chairs anchoring the emptiness of the room. Jeet Thayil and his wife will settle in soon, but this empty space is the perfect place to have a conversation about Indian poetry.
Fulcrum is an elegant little poetry magazine published from ‘a room in Boston’, already seen as one of the most significant of its kind. Jeet Thayil edited Fulcrum Number Four, which contains two sections: Poetry and Truth, and Indian Poetry in English. It’s an astounding collection—fifty-six poets, from places as far apart as Fiji, New York, Mumbai, Sheffield, Coorg, Berkeley, Bangalore, all, as Thayil says, connected only by language, English.
Some familiar names are here, from Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Eunice de Souza, Dom Moraes to Kamala Das, Ranjit Hoskote and Dilip Chitre. There are poets who aren’t as well known in India as they should be, from Aimee Nezhukumatathil to Mukta Sambrani and R. Parthasarathy. And there are a handful of ‘lost poets, the ones we forgot about’: Gopal Honnalgere, Srinivas Rayaprol, Lawrence Bantelman.
‘I think one very fine way to tell the development of a society is how it treats its poets, its gay people, and its women,’ says Jeet. ‘And in those three areas, we really are backward. I believe that two generations from today, there may be value placed on all of this. Young people today read poetry, they buy books, they read poetry on the Internet. The Internet has taken poetry out of that academic conversation, which has to happen if poetry’s going to live. Say “poetry” and there were a lot of people who were turned off already, who had forgotten that a poetry reading is just a man or a woman speaking to you. Poetry needs to resonate with you if it’s going to live. It’s human speech, and it’s the most beautiful speech, it’s elevated in a way we can’t have in our normal lives; it contains the best of us.’
What Jeet is trying to do with Indian poetry in English is an archaeologist’s job: to recover what was lost, to take scattered shards and isolated schools of poets and fit them together in a pattern. It was Fulcrum’s editor, Philip Nikolayev, who first broached the idea of a special issue of Indian poetry. It took Jeet nine months of concentrated work to put it together, and a revised version of this anthology, with sensitive portraits of several poets by photographer Madhu Kapparath, will be published by Penguin India later this year in 60 Indian Poets: 1952–2007. It’s one of the most ambitious, and most significant, anthologies of Indian poetry to emerge in recent times.
‘I don’t know why Indian poetry has been so clannish, so fragmented,’ says Jeet. Previous poetry anthologies have collected remarkable work, but have often, in his opinion, been bogged down by the need to categorize. ‘We’ve seen slivers of Indian poetry, tiny parts of the whole—women poets, the younger poets, post-Independence poets, diaspora poets; different “versions” of Indian poetry. It’s so fragmented, so clannish, and it’s only when you put it all together that you realize Indian poetry is an enormous thing. It can compare with the best in the world—with Latin American poetry, with European poetry.’
Amit Chaudhuri commented, after reading Fulcrum, that India’s poets were actually producing better work than India’s fiction writers; an observation that Pankaj Mishra had made almost a year ago. ‘Interesting that two novelists should say that the poetry is better than the fiction,’ Jeet says. In the introduction, he looks at the problems that poets face in India: ‘Unlike Indian novelists, poets receive no advances; their books are usually out of print; even the best known of them have trouble finding publishers and are virtually unknown outside India . . . That they continue to produce original work is nothing short of remarkable.’
When he began work, Jeet had the usual suspects on his list. He found a great many more, courtesy the legendary Adil Jussawala. ‘In Adil’s apartment in Mumbai, the manuscripts, the photocopies and the books have displaced the human beings. Adil gave me a couple of feet worth of books—it took me months to go through it. And there were all these guys whose work had been forgotten. Like Lawrence Bantelman, who wrote five books, went to Canada and vanished. It’s like a Rimbaud story, nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead.’
Both anthologies pay homage to the dead—as Jeet points out, we lost nine poets between 1993 and 2004: A.K. Ramanujan, Srinivas Rayaprol, G.S. Sharat Chandra, Agha Shahid Ali, Gopal Honnalgere, Reetika Vazairani, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar. In ‘Dirge’, Vijay Nambisan writes: ‘The poets die like flies . . . How well they wrote, those friends now fettered, how the Indo-Anglian tongue/Allowed them to be lovely-lettered, their lives lived when the world was young . . .’
That reference to the ‘Indo-Anglian tongue’ reminds us both that the debate over English is never going to go away. Jeet sees no reason why poets who write in English should be seen as somehow less Indian or less authentic than their counterparts, but he acknowledges that the argument refuses to die. I like Arundhati Subramaniam’s tart perspective in ‘To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’:
This business about language,
how much of it is mine,
how much yours,
. . . how much from the salon,
how much from the slum,
how I say verisimilitude,
how I say Brihadaranyaka,
how I say vaazhapazham —
it’s all yours to measure, the pathology of my breath . . .
For Jeet, the return to India has coincided with one of the most productive phases of his life. He spent his early years in Hong Kong, and became a poet in his twenties after coming to Bombay to do a BA. Dom, Nissim, Adil, Eunice and a dozen other poets eventually became friends and colleagues, but it was a rough apprenticeship. There was no space for poetry; he remembers that period as a time of isolation. He published a few collections of poetry over the next two decades, did an MFA in America, shifted to New York, and came back to Delhi after 9/11 to find his feet in a city newly hospitable, experimenting with tenuous new energies and conversations.
In addition to the anthology, Jeet has completed work on a book of new poems, his first collection after English: Poems, is putting together a special issue for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and has finished a work of non-fiction. ‘It’s called An Alien of Extraordinary Ability,’ he says of the last, ‘which was the category under which I was approved for a green card; it’s for writers, professors, filmmakers. The book is about a man who comes back to India after many years away, newly sober, and he sees the country and himself as if for the first time.’ (Alien . . . was never published, though some passages from this book worked their way in slow mutation into Thayil’s fiction.)
He was, he says, an alcoholic (as were many of the Bombay poets) and an addict for almost two decades: ‘I spent most of that time sitting in bars, getting very drunk, talking about writers and writing. And never writing. It was a colossal waste. In two years I’ve done more than I did in twenty years. I feel very fortunate that I got a second chance.’ These days, he says as we make our farewells, the only addictions he has are poetry, and coffee. ‘Coffee’s much easier to get than heroin.’
(Note: Jeet Thayil published These Errors Are Correct, a collection of new poems, in 2008, after the sudden and tragic death of his wife, Shakti Bhatt, from a brief illness. In 2011, he published a novel, Narcopolis, a Bombay-noir classic that was shortlisted for the Booker; and an opera, Babur in London, performed in England in 2011 and 2012.)
4
Agha Shahid Ali
(1949–2001)
Agha Shahid Ali was the only person on earth who could actually say, ‘Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day’ and make this sound completely normal.
He sa
id it to a passing waiter at the India International Centre (IIC), with an air of grave solemnity. Then he explained how to pronounce the word chortle: ‘Chortle, with a long “o”, and some reverberation on the “r”. Massage the “ch”: chooooorrrtle, chhhhorrrrrrrtttle. Like the charawk of an egg-laying hen.’
The waiter, unused to guests making egg-laying sounds, peered at Ali under his brows and left, his back radiating disapproval.
Kashmir’s best-loved and most quoted contemporary poet had his arms out like hen wings: ‘Chortle from your diaphragm! Imagine you’re a hen! Charawk!’
You couldn’t meet the man for more than three minutes without returning with a wealth of anecdotes, and recipes—Shahid loved to cook, and could recite the ingredients of a good roghan josh with the same flair he would give to a Ghalib ghazal. You couldn’t spend three hours with him without being added, with grand openheartedness, to the swelling ranks of his friends. Rukun Advani remembers him as an exotic among the dull array of Delhi University professors, a bird of extremely flamboyant feather and prodigious reading habits.
Kamila Shamsie recalls the bon mots that Shahid scattered with Wildean aplomb wherever he went. Old friends remember the warmth that Shahid brought with him. Kashmiri newspapers remember him with sadness, for the passing of this passionate chronicler of their bloodstained history: his words have become a talisman. ‘My memory gets in the way of your history,’ he wrote, speaking not just for Kashmiris, but for all those in occupied lands and all sorts of war zones—the real and those of the psyche as well.
When he spoke of exile, he didn’t stop with this century; his mind went back to Ovid, poet of the Metamorphoses, the first exile. He was not an exile, he said of his years away from Kashmir—in America, in Delhi—but an expatriate, able to return to the sights, the sounds, the sensibilities and the memories that he mined so carefully for his poems. The care with which he separated the two states came from a deep understanding of the difference between those who could go back, and those who would never buy a ticket for home, either because they were not allowed to, or because ‘home’ had been erased by history.
The Girl Who Ate Books Page 14