Poets and Their Mothers

Curated by Sumana Roy

I have an ambivalent relationship with the archive – while I love its ability to keep the disappeared alive for us two-dimensionally, I find its neatness claustrophobic. Life is not arranged like that; or that it’s not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, as someone needed to remind us about a hundred years ago. And yet, when Priya Sarukkai Chabria asked me to guest-edit an issue of Poetry at Sangam, I immediately felt the desire to create an archive, however tiny, of Indian English Poetry, instead of a general volume. As both readers and researchers know, there are hardly any archives of our poets – not just their poems, which are often difficult to find, the books having gone out of print, or magazines and journals where they were published not being in publication anymore. My complaint – and even frustration – as a reader was how little we knew about the forces that had led to the birth of these poems, forces and energies personal, social and intellectual. Ideally I’d like to create – curate, if you must – an archive of poets that includes all these delicious details. But funds are, as always, lacking, particularly for poetry. No patronage, no publishers, no prizes – and yet it survives, as it has, our oldest voice, our oldest form.

With Priya’s kind and active encouragement, I decided to choose the subject of mothers. The reason, while it might seem outwardly sentimental, was emotional and intellectual. Even as a confused and ill-read university student many years ago, I’d been struck by poets and philosophers and thinkers writing about mothers, particularly after their death, in a way that, apart from being moving, gave us an insight into life itself. Nietzsche, Barthes, Buddhadeva Bose, among many others – writers across genres, writers across cultures. There was also the immediacy – that only emotion can produce – caused by watching many of our poets included here losing their mothers in the last few years.

Among all the editorial and curatorial work that I’ve done, this has been the most rewarding. The emails written to the poets, their responses, their kindness, the gift of these poems, and the photographs, most of them never revealed to the world before this. They bring to us the remembrance of a world that no longer exists – an India that is as much a loving surprise as the hairstyles of the poets and their mothers, a world as raw and unpolished as the human heart, a colour that has now been replaced by the light and gloss of capitalism and globalisation, a world that abets our imagination and desire, and love. Yes, these are indeed love poems, not just to the woman who brought our poets into sweetness and light, but love poems about the certainty of love, its existence and its hinterland.

Here it is, then – an archive of poems about the poet’s mother, mother who is both an archive and a secret, the oldest one we know.

A Poem for Mother by Robin S Ngangom

AGE by Sampurna Chattarji

AMMI by Tabish Khair

Art Lesson by Nandini Dhar

Begum by Maaz Bin Bilal

Falling, 1968 by Tishani Doshi

Helicopters and Lace by Margaret Mascarenhas

Mother by Amit Chaudhuri

Mother by Keki N Daruwalla

MOTHER OF MR S by Vivek Narayanan

My Mother Brings The Rains by Aruni Kashyap