K SRILATA

A poet and fiction writer, K. Srilata is a Professor of English at IIT Madras. She was writer in residence at Sangam house, India, Yeonhui Art space, Seoul and the University of Stirling, Scotland.

Her poetry collections include The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans, Bookmarking the Oasis, Writing Octopus, Arriving Shortly and Seablue Child. Her novel Table for Four (Penguin, India) was long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize. Srilata was awarded the first prize in the All India Poetry Competition organized by the British Council and the Poetry Society, India in 1998, the Unisun-British council poetry Prize 2007 and the Gouri Majumdar Poetry Prize, 2001. She is the editor of the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, Short Fiction from South India (OUP), All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project Between India and Ireland (Yoda), Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamilnadu (Women Unlimited) and The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History (Zubaan). Her multi-genre anthology on the disability experience titled This Kind of Child: The Disability Story is forthcoming from Amazon/Westland later this year. Srilata is currently working on a series of poems inspired by the Mahabharata. Her social media handles are:

https://www.facebook.com/srilata.krishnan

https:// twitter.com/srilataKrishnan

Instagram: srilata_k_poetry

Note on Poetics

Attributed to Vyasa and often described as the longest poem ever written, the Mahabharata is really an infinite series of re-tellings, re-tellings that overturn any sense of an originary text, language or culture. In its longest version, the epic is a narrative pastiche made up prose passages and an impressive 100,000 shlokas – each shloka working like a couplet.

When the epic was composed or by whom and where it stands in relation to itihasa and religion are important questions that continue to fascinate scholars. What drew me to it, however, was the possibility of new stories that could be built on what remained unexamined or invisible within extant tellings. The six poems here, envisaged as part of a larger series, are really story poems shaped around the silences, often significant and explosive, in the epic.

As I dipped into the Mahabharata stories – each structured as a story within a story and masterfully told and re-told by writers and scholars – I was left holding in my heart a host of questions. Questions that felt like sharp thorns I had stepped on accidentally. Just what did Madhavi feel as Sage Galava bartered her body over and over to a series of kings in order to pay Vishwamitra his guru dakshina, I wondered. Why did Gandhari decide to blindfold her eyes? Was it an act of wifely devotion or did it come from some other place? Did she live to regret it? What was Sahadeva, the youngest of the Pandava brothers, really like? What does Arjuna’s one-point focus as an archer remind us of? What goes through Devayani’s mind when her faithless husband Yayati is cursed with old age? It is these questions which are foundational to the poems.

As I began working on the poems, certain forms – the dramatic monologue and the haibun, in particular – suggested themselves to me. The dramatic monologue with its silent listener – in this case, the figure of the sakhi or the heroine’s friend – was the form I adapted for the poems “Says Madhavi to her Friend”, “Says Gandhari to her Friend: Companion Poems” and “Says Devayani to her Friend”. The sakhi listens in silence as the heroine speaks. This, of course, is mandated by the form. But even as she remains in the shadows, the sakhi has a crucial role to perform. For the heroine to reveal herself fully, the latter’s presence is necessary. And it is in the revealing of this self, lost in the maze of patriarchy, that a feminist retelling becomes possible. It was happenstance that I have been experimenting with the haibun lately. This Japanese form which, like the Mahabharata, is a pastiche of poetry and prose, has seeped into the writing of these poems. For instance, while “Insight” does not formally qualify as a haibun, it carries the impress of one. The other poems open with a haiku or a senryu. You will notice that rather than using end notes, I have chosen to lead-in with prose tellings sourced partly from Irawati Karve’s Yuganta, C Rajagopalachari’s Mahabharata and Devadutt Pattanaik’s Jaya. The prose opening segues into the story poem, marking the moment of narrative departure.