Anjali Purohit

Anjali Purohit is a painter, writer, poet, translator and curator. She is the author of two books, Ragi Ragini: Chronicles from Aji’s Kitchen (Yoda Press, 2012) and Go Talk to the River: the Ovis of Bahinabai Choudhari (Yoda Press, 2019).
She is the founder and curator of The Cappuccino Adda, an initiative working to foster a literary café culture in Mumbai and to contribute towards building a vibrant writers’ community. She is presently working on her forthcoming book of poetry.

Translator’s Reflections

Kanhopatra’s life and works are moving and inspiring in many ways. She struggled at each step of her short life against established power relations in the society of that time (six hundred years ago) and to maintain the bond she made with her Vithoba by dedicating herself wholly to him even at the cost of her eventual tragic end. Her verses reflect her personal journey and her absolute faith, love and devotion to Vitthal.

The most attractive aspect of the poems of Kanhopatra, and, in general, other poets of the bhakti tradition is the passion and dedication that they show towards their lord and the entitlement to a direct, close and personal relation and access that they then presume to have with him. This gives them the liberty to question, challenge and make demands of him and this is reflected in their poems. What is also unique about Kanhopatra is that she was, perhaps, the only woman saint poet in the Varkari tradition who did not have any male Sant for a guru. I believe translation to be a labour of love. Love and admiration for such poetry moves one towards the act of translation.

Further, however, Kanhopatra’s words resonate in ways that make me feel they are true and relevant even today. Therefore I have chosen to adopt, in these translations, a form where I transpose my own words into her verses, attempt to merge our two voices, two eras in time, the past and the present in order to suggest a confluence where concerns can be seen to be shared. In Kanhopatra’s desperate appeal to her Devaraya to save her from the jaws of the tiger (the soldiers from Bidar), I see also the trauma and tragedy of an eight-year-old child in Kathua. In Kanhopatra’s despairing calls to Krishnai Kanhai to save her I hear the urgent call of birds, beasts and trees against the destruction of their habitat and eventually, their own death. This attempt then, of a hybrid poem, a mixing of two voices, is an attempt to reconcile poetic truths deeply felt across time periods and to suggest that poetry can resonate in ways that transcend these categories and can hold true in varying contexts. Words written as a deeply personal appeal could voice the distress of a much larger concern.

Poems by Kanhopatra translated by Anjali Purohit

Kanhopatra

Anjali Purohit on Keki N. Daruwalla’s Landfall

To Think the Universe was Moved by Love

Landfall*, Keki N. Daruwalla’s latest book of poems merits reading and then several re-reads so one may mine the many riches that it holds. The vast canvas that these hundred and twenty pages cover is a testament to the exquisite finesse with which Keki can deliver his words, his unchallenged mastery over the craft, his incisive perception of our world and his ability to convey this deeply felt understanding through his verse. The wide sweep of this set of poems begins its travel from the rain-soaked Western ghats, through Ladakh, Cyprus and Salamis, across Alaska to achieve landfall at Canto X, thereafter, again returning to bear witness to the Black Death as also plagues of a different sort that afflict us even today. Keki’s poems are soft, delicate, sensitive, often melancholy, layered with an underlying irreverent wry wit, yet unsparingly razor sharp and searing when they need to make a comment on the tyrannies of our times.

Keki’s poems hold a deep empathy for nature, animals and people that live in harmony with nature. He speaks to the falcon and bald eagle, lynx and beaver, caribou, wolf, bear, squirrel, barbet and marmot as they align themselves to the freeze and thaw of the tundra.

He walks with the mother bear as she hauls her cubs over ice and icy water across a river ‘…which has gentled/ and flattened itself for the salmon to spawn…’ until she finds the salmon waters where she ‘…jumps/on scuttling salmon and scurrying brook,/crashes with her paws till she nabs the fish/and tears half of it off and throws it to her young.’

In his poem On the Blue Jay God, where he speaks about a book on forest dwellers that he had begun fifty years ago but abandoned, he takes an imaginary trip to these forests where he finds ‘…their curiosity about my fountain pen amusing:/’Words should be spoken, isn’t it,/why write them?’. ‘The whole thing would have been a breeze,’ he continues, ‘…writing those pages which memory misplaced./ Time is unforgiving./Why did I abandon the novel/about people who had lived with dusk/but had never seen a streetlight?’

In Keki’s poems, the shepherds being driven out of Agamemnon’s tomb on the mountains by the men in suits wonder, ‘…‘Why does he need such a tall/building to live in death?’ The suits only shout ‘Out!’ and the shepherds must move!

The book concludes with a brilliant set of poems, The Night Attendant that was written in the Covid years during which Keki himself was infected with the virus.

In the last poem quoted hereunder, Keki says, ‘No large words, please, am done with them…’. So, without adding even more words, click here for seven poems from Landfall.

*(Landfall, Keki N. Daruwalla, Speaking Tiger, 2023)

Translations from the Marathi by Anjali Purohit

Note on Poetics and Translation

Whenever I see something beautiful, poignant, inspiring or significant, there is an immediate impulse to share it, especially with someone whom I know will also understand and appreciate it. Through this sharing I feel that experience is enhanced, and the joy of beholding beauty is multiplied. This perhaps is one of the reasons one turns to the arts: to express a thought or feeling, whether one chooses image, word, music or dance. In my case, it’s whether I sense the thought, feeling or experience can be best conveyed through painting or fiction or then through poetry. This, in many ways, parallels choosing (when expressing on the canvas) what medium (pastels, watercolours, charcoal, oils or acrylic) will be best suited to depict a subject. Most often in these past few years I found that I instinctively turn to poetry as a medium of expression and honestly, the pleasure of stringing words together, then working on the poem, sharpening, polishing, editing, to bring out the rhythm and the sound of words, phrases, as they place themselves beside each other – honing the poem word by word and line by line – all this is a hugely satisfying emotion that is almost visceral; it is imbued with a near physicality akin to eating very fine chocolate, or savoring that perfect glass of wine.

This feeling extends to completing a work of translation (in my case from Marathi to English). The process of translation, however, has the added impetus of the desire to share the love one feels for a certain poet’s work with a readership that does not understand that language.

Bahinabai Choudhari and Sant Eknath are the two poets I have had the pleasure of translating recently. Apart from the love I feel for the work of these poets, there were several reasons for choosing these particular texts. It will take a much longer exposition to give all of these reasons but the chief one for choosing Bahinabai was to bring her poetry to a much larger readership. I believe that she was perhaps the first poet in Marathi literature to beautifully and consistently compose poetry around a woman’s work (which is most often invisible), to recognize a woman’s work as a worthy subject of poetry – and I mean work both in the home and also as a peasant laboring in the fields.

I have begun translating a few verses of Sant Eknath because I feel that his poetry reflects an earthiness and an inclusive egalitarian approach towards society. He was the first saint-poet who chose to compose over three hundred verses in the folk performance form of the bharood. Sant Eknath used the colloquial ‘street’ language of villagers, employing metaphors and idioms that they could understand, in order to deliver to a wide section of people the philosophical, moral and spiritual teachings contained in religious texts, and to speak about what constituted ‘bhakti’. Today, when the juggernaut of intolerance, hate, greed, fanaticism and illiberality is upon us, I find it important to bring forth and emphasize the fine traditions of the bhakti movement that would have stood up against these inhuman tendencies. These translations are my small contribution in this direction.

Most important, however, I believe that the underlying bedrock for all creative activity and the reason why one turns to the arts – from prehistoric times when we left our handprints on the rocks in caves back in 40000 BCE – is that we have the urge to leave a part of us behind even after we are gone, a sign that we existed and, despite everything, felt wonder at the beauty of the world and the beauty that words and images were capable of creating…

In the words of the poet Shailendra writing for the film Do Bhiga Zameen –

‘…भाई रे
गंगा और जमुना की गहरी है धार
आगे या पीछे सबको जाना है पार…
…अपनी कहानी छोड़ जा, कुछ तो निशानी छोड़ जा
कौन कहे इस ओर, तू फिर आए न आए…’