Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume X | Issue 5
Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Founding Editor
Though I had appreciated Akhil Katyal’s work earlier, I first heard him read in person this January at the writer’s residency, Sangam House, as the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellow, to a packed house. I was smitten by his presentation of poetry, his own and translations. So were the others. We experienced the poet’s intensity, clarity of thought and the thrilling crafted beauty of his work and that rare quality, gentleness, in his approach to poetry and his audience. What does gentleness comprise of, I wondered again. Again the answer returned: practice of alertness and caring for a world that is collapsing on many fronts; caring which permits various viewpoints to root into being and voice protest, along with solitude held close. I find these qualities in his poetry, borne by his splendid imagination and felicity with forms, with rhyme and wit embedded in love for language. In an interview Akhil stated that Agha Shahid Ali ‘wrote Urdu in English. I’m a sucker for such felicitous meeting of tongues….’ You’ll discover this in his translations as well, from the Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. When Akhil Katyal accepted to be our Guest Editor I was delighted. Titled ‘New Indian English Poetry’ this issue indeed blazes with new voices that we – Mrinalini Harchandrai and I – welcome and are happy to share. Go on. Treat yourself.
CONTINUITIES
New Indian English Poetry
In his little poem ‘Crossing the road’ in this issue, the writer and teacher from Jharkhand and Delhi, Chanchal Kumar creates a vivid scene. “A little girl and her mother are trying” to cross the road. A “black horned cow” interrupts their way. The girl stops, perhaps afraid, stupefied, unable to move. The “black horned cow” has both the concreteness of the actual thing – snorting, hulky, adamantine in the middle of the damn road – but also has a peculiar amenability to metaphor, where it stands in for the trials that may dot our way. In his poem, Chanchal gives his little protagonist a way out of this stupefaction. “Her mother comes by and offers her hand”. This is relief, this is a way to move again, a way to find one’s feet on a tarmac of fears. “The girl takes her hand and the two / navigate the path together”.
When we build ‘new’ worlds, we do it on the back of various continuities. With the help of various people who have come by and offered their hand. A host of figures allow us, as they pass the baton, a will to create the world together, a building on older promises, and crucially, a figuring out on what needs to be shed in order to forge the genuinely ‘new’. Latin continuus means ‘uninterrupted’, made up of moments of continere which means a holding together, con as ‘together’, tenere as an unmistakable gesture of holding. Many kinds of people offer us their hands, allow up this hold, this grasp on our worlds. These could be teachers, whose manners of knowing the world have left an imprint on us, these could be writers, whose capacity to shape words marks the horizon of what we do with ours, it could be parents (a small, anodyne word, but, remember, always a part of, and an iteration of the much grander ‘ancestors’), who with necessary frictions, often shape the tiniest of our instincts and the most far-reaching of our visions, or it could be public figures – intellectuals, philosophers, social reformers, saints, fathers of constitutions, or the sacred beings to whom the scriptures were revealed, civilizational game-changers, each one of them – that animate the ways we make sense of the world and our capacity to seek transformation in it.
This small special issue on ‘New Indian English Poetry’ builds on this idea of the ‘new’ that is predicated on and builds from various gestures of continuities. In a startling and serendipitous parallel to Chanchal’s poem, the Bangalore-based poet and graphic artist Aparna Chivukula meets an unlikely figure on the street in her poem ‘The Crossing’. The poet-persona is a diligent crafter of words; even though, she has “two bags a shoulder, / slipping to the elbows, hands grazing / the edge of a scooter, eyes snaking / to the sidewalk”, her “mind [is] already / at a desk, writing away”. “This is how” she crosses a road, all along conceiving and editing a poem in the thick of reckless traffic. The stanza jumps and we are in the ‘years later’, and the poet is “flattening between vans again”, dazed with the day’s tasks, and suddenly notes that “crossing the road” along with her is Eunice de Souza (1940-2017). That formidable high-priestess of the razor-sharp line, that patron saint of wit, parrots and the city of Bombay. In Aparna’s poem, de Souza is “peering into every car as she / crosses”. The poet-persona begins, “Excuse me, are…” and “the you in Eunice [is] stuck in” her throat, as de Souza’s eyes “cut past” her. The poet deliberately builds this form of continuity, it is not some weight to carry on one’s shoulders, it is the apparitions we wilfully let materialize in front of our eyes, those we purposely reincarnate in our effort of building the world together. For Aparna, her gesture brings back to life, however transiently, a poet-teacher.
Such figures allow us scaffoldings and steppingstones. They give us frameworks to which we add the flesh of our ideas, the skin of our intensities. The poet from Bhopal and Delhi, Iqra Khan, who writes powerfully of the disenfranchisement of the contemporary Indian Muslim (“Lost / is a transitive. / We, the citizens of / a transitive…”), wields a necessary resourcefulness, an electric intertextuality citing both the history of letters of her cities, and the verses from her faith, that allow her to build a response, an entire architecture of lines, that are commensurate to the scale of onslaught on her community. Iqra, who navigates seamlessly between English, Urdu and Hindi, and is familiar with Arabic and Persian, then draws on the continuities these languages offer, her poems will cite and translate Ghalib (1797-1869), as citation, as epigraph, (“na thā kuchh to ḳhudā thā kuchh na hotā to ḳhudā hotā / duboyā mujh ko hone ne na hotā maiñ to kyā hotā”, they will rely on the fortitude and protection of the Ayat al Kursi and the adamantine solace of the Istirja, and they will hold in their hands the spectacular promise of Maya Angelou’s (1928-2014) ‘Still I Rise’.
The ‘new’ draws courage from such threads of continuity, it holds them stronger in its grasp, it twists them carefully into different formations for a world that has changed shape, that has reached their doorstep as violence, as an undermining, but also as hope, and celebration, however fitful. The ‘new’ wields such continuities to rhetorically build a larger arc of history in which the difficulty of the present is placed, understood, and hoped to be overcome. In Chanchal Kumar’s poems, at the head of his arc of history, lies the towering figure of Babasaheb, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), whose stamp on the history of the subcontinent is watershed, lasting, truly transformative in every sense of the word. In the eponymous poem ‘Babasaheb’, Chanchal contemplates a ‘new start’; “our lives”, he says, “are greater than their newspaper articles”. He foreshadows an end to “the inter-generational burden of trauma” that passes “from family to family”, and such a passage is realizable, he writes, in the necessary, the defiant and the joyous “slogan of our Babasaheb”, that teacher par excellence. That world-builder. That progenitor of the genuinely new. It is little wonder then that Chanchal’s last poem in this issue is a tribute to another teacher, Dr. Hany Babu, the linguistics scholar, an Ambedkarite educator and social activist, who taught him (and years ago, me) in the Department of English at Delhi University, and who is now wrongfully incarcerated in the ongoing Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case. In Chanchal’s poem ‘To my Professor jailed on trumped up charges’, Dr. Hany Babu offers to all of us, and to Chanchal, the gift of imagination, and a hand to help lay the bricks of promise of a “brighter future”.
It must be said that we also give new lives, in whatever little way, to the voices we rely on. They live through these new iterations, the stream of their ideas is ever so slightly altered by folks who step into it. Nowhere is ‘continuity’ and ‘newness’ more adjacent, more formally linked, more explicitly put into a spirited relationship of a shared making, than in the act of translation. Behind the work of Abdur Rehman Khan, the poet and translator from Moradabad who writes and teaches in a school in the NCR, and who has contributed both translations and original work to this issue, are hovering the charismatic signs of two poets, who left us in the 80s. This is the Bhojpuri and Hindi poet Gorakh Pandey (1945-1989), from Devariya jila and Benaras of U.P., and from that precious and now increasingly contested space of JNU, in Delhi. Along with him, it is the Urdu and Punjabi poet Sara Shagufta (1954-1984), from Karachi, whose intrepid free verse, had called another of her translators, before Abdur, the Lahore based Asad Alvi, to translate her work “sitting beside her grave in Karachi” or on the platform at the Drigh Road railway station, in east Karachi, where Shagufta died, hit by a train, on her body, still, a copy of Qurratulain Hyder’s Sheeshay Kay Ghar and a packet of agarbattis. Abdur’s own verse, which navigates, among others, the communal vortex of contemporary U.P., whereby in his lines, the poet-persona would “pluck their eyes, let them see; make them dream [of freedom]” is animated by the aesthetic and political world-making by Pandey and Shagufta, his literary forebears.
In the work of Urooj, the poet and visual artist from Delhi, the forebears are much nearer, and the most powerful instance of it is embodied in the figure of the poet’s mother. In their poems, sometimes they are a child helping their parents cook, “following your mother with a clean spoon, or cutting into onions”, or “that one awful time” when a rat nibbled on their toes, and the mother finally “shooed it away”, or the time when they wrapped themselves “in the curtains”, sad, and the mother had to “worry the truth out of” them, slowly. This figure is the lodestar of their poems. In a remarkably moving poem, ‘My mother cuts her hair”, which is both a lyric moment and a biography-through-hair, we see the poet closely seeing their mother “no longer the young girl who once sat / at her mother’s feet, hair wet in the evening, / patiently awaiting the scissor’s snip.” When she was twenty-three, the mother’s hair curled “over her small shoulders” and when she was thirty-three, they were “shorn to her ears and airy short”. Now “they are greying”, “slipping / off of her scalp like thread come loose”. The hair is at once object and talisman, waste and family heirloom. In the last image of the poem, we see the poet slowly, tenderly collect these hair “in the mornings when I clean, / turning the tips of my fingers in circles, drawing / them in from the corners, dropping them; / brittle, thin and sparse / in a small brown bin.” We see ‘continuity’ both in this tender conservation of memory, in such gentlest of discardings, and in the forever hauntedness of the new by that which is leaving.
The figure of parents assume monumental proportions in the poems of Ramesh Karthik Nayak, the writer from Telangana, whose poems are dedicated acts of building life-worlds of his Banjara community. Here, the sign of ‘parents’ becomes the grander line of ancestors, lineage, community, holding in its hands, historical continuities and its warnings. Ramesh builds on sayings, aphorisms, lullabies, and the words of prayer and caution sent into the sky by “old folks”, who are suspicious, who know “the world is full of hunters” against whom lives have to be protected and allowed to breathe and grow. The parents are not simply those who give birth, but a wider community of elders, and ancestors who saw violent histories of criminalization by the colonial government, and indeed, the “good and bad spirits / of the forest” that have to be attended to, which grant people their relationship to that which always exceeds them. We find Ramesh listening, observing, recording, not letting anything disappear, not “the fingers / of our mothers and grandmothers”, not the “bird’s nest” of “our Tanda”, no matter how much of a “broken refuge” it might be. In this careful listening, in this attention to continuities, little and large, Ramesh’s ‘I’ allows itself the range, ambition and the purpose of a ‘We’. “We, the wanderers, move with the wind / on the universal shape of baati / as pollen dust.”
And here we are, Chanchal, Urooj, Ramesh, Iqra, Aparna and Abdur. What can a small issue of ‘New Indian English Poetry’, which works with only six voices to read, to think with, allow us, except this maddeningly luminescent web of continuities that each of them has made. Read these poets to see how they concatenate with what has passed before and alongside them, and how they use those relationships, to enter into acts of a building together, a shared making, that which is in the root of poet, poiein, the act of creating. Their ‘new’ is painstakingly built, upon foundations that are sometimes inherited, and at other times, actively realized. That are sometimes menacing, haunting, but also offer windows to that which is profoundly life-changing. These poets hold in their hands, illuminated threads of such continuities, and have spun them into shapes that are startling. Read them closely. Some of those threads may enter your hands.
Akhil Katyal
Founding Editor: Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Deputy Editor: Mrinalini Harchandrai
Guest Editor: Akhil Katyal
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