OXFORD INDIA PAPERBACKS he Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets Chosen and Edited by iNagutel Krishna MehrotraContents Ss PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION Nissim EZEKIEL A Poem of Dedication My Cat For Love’s Record Case Study Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher Paradise Flycatcher Two Images After Reading a Prediction JAYANTA MAHAPATRA A Rain of Rites I Hear My Fingers Sadly Touching an Ivory Key Hunger Hands The Moon Moments A Kind of Happiness The Door The Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore The Captive Air of Chandipur-on-Sea Of that Love The Vase Days Waiting A. K, Ramanujan The Striders Breaded Fish Looking for a Cousin on a Swing Portrait vii xiiiGONTENTS Anxiety Case History Love Poem for a Wife, 2 The Hindoo: the Only Risk Snakes and Ladders On the Death of a Poem Highway Stripper Moulting Chicago Zen ARUN KoLaTKAR Woman Suicide of Rama Trani Restaurant Bombay Crabs Biograph From Jejuri The Bus Heart of Ruin Chaitanya A Low Temple The Pattern The Horseshoe Shrine Manohar Chaitanya The Buttérfly A Scratch Ajamil and the Tigers Chaitanya Between Jejuri and the Railway Station The Railway Station Kexr N. Daruwa.ia Hawk The King Speaks to the Scribe The Unrest of Desire Wolf Fish are Speared by Night viii BIS SLRSBBWQARLLDPDP PresCONTENTS Chinar Night Fishing Dom Moraes Autobiography Words to a Boy ‘Two from Israel Prophet Key From Interludes vu. Library Sinbad From Steles 1, The word works. The world doesn’t rv. What is this adrift from Chile vi. On my stele, mark colours vu. She in her youth arose vim. Time and the river, aflame x. Floes creak out of the north Future Plans Die Cuirre | The Light of Birds Breaks the Lunatic’s Sleep From Travelling in a Cage 2. I came in the middle of my life to a 5. The door I was afraid to open 7. All I hear is the fraying of the wind 8. I woke up and looked at my empty white bed 19. Where can I hide now in this 21. O quick knives curving into the core Jn Limbo Pushing a Cart Of Garlic and Such The Felling of the Banyan Tree ] Father Returning Home Panhala Eunice pe Souza Feeding the Poor at Christmas ix 101 Jor 102 103 106 106 107 108 108 109 109 110 110 nr wt 112 113 14 016CONTENTS Sweet Sixteen Miss Louise Forgive Me, Mother For My Father, Dead Young de Souza Prabhu : Women in Dutch Painting She and I Eunice Advice to Women For Rita’s Daughter, Just Born From Five London Pieces ut. Meeting Poets ADIL JUSSAWALLA Land’s End Evening on a Mountain Halt X Bats From Missing Person 13 A "sa giggle now 1.6 Black vamps break out of hell 1.7 Ina brief clearing 19 He travels the way of devotion. 1.13 Less time for kicks m1 No Satan 1.2 His hands were slavish 1.5 Few either/ors Nine Poems on Arrival Freedom Song Connection Acua Suauip Aur Postcard from Kashmir Snowmen Cracked Portraits The Dacca Gauzes The Season of the Plains The Previous Occupant ng hy ng ng Ng Ng lay lay ly ly 1y w 4 yl # Uo 4 WWCONTENTS Vikram SETH Guest The Humble Administrator’s Garden Evening Wheat The Accountant’s House From an ‘East is Red’ Steamer Ceasing Upon the Midnight Unclaimed From The Golden Gate Soon MANonar SHETTY Fireflies Foreshadows Gifts Wounds Domestic Creatures Bats Departures Moving Out SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX OF TITLES INDEX OF FIRST LINES 148 151 151 152 152 153Preface I could not have edited this anthology without the co-operation of its poets. They sent me such books of theirs as I did not possess, and made available their scattered prose writings and interviews: my files are thick with newspaper clippings, offprints, photocopies. These became the basis of the introductory notes in which, as far as possible, I try and describe the work of each poet in his own words. The criticism of Indian poetry in English that has come out of our universities’ English Departments is both voluminous and of inferior quality, and is best left alone. The footnotes and select bibliography, however, do not indicate some other debts: to Madhusudan Prasad, for the loan of two books; to Vandana, my wife, for her patience; to my editors and printer for their editorial care; and to Sara Rai and Smita Agarwal for offering help when I needed it most, ArvinD KrisHNA MEHROTRA Allahabad, 1 February 1992Introduction I For the purposes of the Introduction I recently reread an old essay of mine, and white it was no surprise to find how little my views had changed in the ten years since it was written, one paragraph did make me wince.! In it I said that anthologies are graveyards, and the anthologist’s job is to see only the best corpses get in. I also called the title of one selection ‘misleading and cocky’ because it failed to in- dicate that the choice of Indian poets was restricted to those who write in English, I now wish I had found a less deathly metaphor for antho- logies and their compilers, and not dwelt on the misleading title at all. Indians have been writing verse in English at least since the 1820s and it goes under many ludicrous names—Indo-English, India- English, Indian English, Indo-Anglian, and even Anglo-Indian and Indo-Anglican. ‘Kill that nonsense term’, Adil Jussawalla said of Indo-Anglian, ‘and kill it quickly.” The term may not be easy to destroy, but much of the poetry it describes, especially that written between 1825 and 1945, is truly dead. Later poets have found no use for it, and a literary tradition is of no use to anyone else. The origins of modern Indian poetry in English go no further back than the poets in this anthology. But it would have been different, I think, if one poet in particular had shown as much taient as she did hospitality. Consider the following passage in Noel Stock’s Life of Ezra Pound (1970): During the second half of. 1913, at the home in London of the Bengali poctess, Sarojini Naidu, Pound met an American widow, Mrs Mary Fenollosa. After reading Pound’s.‘Contemporania’ and possibly other poems Mrs Fenollosa decided that he was the _one to whom she could entrust the literary remains of her late husband Ernest Fenollosa. How Pound famously transformed the Fenollosa notebooks into 4*The Emperor Has No Clothes’, Chandrabhdgd (Cuttack), No. 3 (Summer 1980), 17-22, and No. 7 (Summer 1982), 1-32+INTRI UCTION Cathay docs not concern us here, My interest in the Fecord in 1913 is to point out the opportunity missed, for amo, of thatg in ‘Contemporania’ were some of the finest example’ the Doe! verse; S of Inga Like a skein of loose thread blown a, 7 She walks by the railing of a ta wall Gardens... gai a Kensington (‘The Carden) ‘yond the Social fin t Would have bene write as before, as ic a t like being unking ie » ONCE saying in a Tete 'y- I have the vi ie Unfortunately Mrs Naidu never looked be modernism, and whereas the new movement work, she, undistracted by it, continued to nothing had changed. However, one doesn’ She knew her limitations only too well Arthur Symons, ‘I am not a poet reall + desire, but not the voice.”® Her last book was Published in ond thereafter, displaying a fine sense of ‘judgement, she wrot i The same, though, cannot be said of Aurobindo Gh, the last years of his life composing a worthless epic of 2, te litte poet, 108, Who spen 4,000 lines, IL ‘I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman— —Ezra Pound Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt, Aurobindo Ghose, and Sarojini Naidu were courageous and perhaps charming men and women, but no those with whom you could today do business, The poets of the pa Independence period had therefore to make their pacts elsewhert Some were made in their own backyard (with Kapilar, a Basavanna, Allama Prabhu, Kabir, Tukaram, Nirala, Fait) ¥ Some overseas (with Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, a liams, Stevens, Lowell, Ginsberg). The enterprise involve we risks, As Adil Jussawalla’s ‘two-bit hero’ Missing Peers i of the third world bourgeois intellectual—realizes in the aio short but violent life, the transactions with others, the tions of the self, do not always go off smoothly: pees ian Poets: Heo? * Quoted in K. R. Ramachandran Nair, Three Indo-Anglian Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, New Delhi, Sterling, 1983: 93: gi 2INTRODUCTION What bit-parts, what a fall for one we thought had gone proud to adventure— (‘Missing Person’, 11.6) In Jussawalla’s sequence, a missing person is not just what our hero becomes, it’s what he is, his very condition defined by absence, ‘the central absence of the Indo-Anglian psyche’.? Taking the prospect from a different angle, or maybe it’s a different prospect, A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, and Agha Shahid Ali see there a varied presence. Ramanujan darkly juggles with his selves, slipping into one and out the other, keeping several going at the same time. A state- ment of his is often quoted: English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give me my ‘outer’ forms—linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience; and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and fieldtrips, my personal and professional pre- occupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics and folklore give me my substance, my ‘inner’ forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where. A poem by Arun Kolatkar is a pattern cut in language, the grainy material without which there would be no self to speak of. What name we afterwards give the material makes little difference: anitat ater qa argaras eqs at atsH ?P wep Ta are wena Set Ae THIS AT & Par cH TAH ares P aera wet ATS, The poem is written in Bombay Hindi, published in Kolatkar’s book of Marathi poems, translated by him into American English, and, + Homi Bhabha, “Indo-Anglian Attitudes’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 February 1978, 136. “Quoted in Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets, ed. R. Parthasarathy, Delhi, 1976, 95.INTRODUCTION rightly, has been included in an anthology of Indian verge in Eno): allow me beautiful "lish. i said to my sister in law to step in my brother’s booties you had it coming said Tehman, a gun in his hand shoot me punk kill your brother i said for a bloody cunt (‘Three Cups Teas languages are Cf uage is not in ears to beliey, ouncing all but minimum, ang ‘Three Cups of Tea’ suggests the idea that all one language. It also makes you ask if lang superfluous to poetry. Kolatkar himself app for in matters linguistic he is a monk, ren essential words, keeping punctuation to a the excitement of the first person singular. Making a statement on his work, Agha Shahid Alj Spoke for man of his contemporaries when he said, y the eng © it is the most shunning I think we in the subcontinent have been Opportunity: to contribute to the English | British, the Americans, and the Australians, also the Canadians cannot, We can do things with the syntax that will bring the lan. guage alive in rich and strange ways, and though Poetry should have led the way, it isa novelist, Salman. Rushdie, who has shown the poets a way: he has, to quote an essay I read somewhere, chutnified English. And the confidence to do this could only have come in the post-Independence generation. The earlier generations followed the rules inflicted by the rulers so Strictly that it is almost embarrassing. They also followed models, especially the models of realism, in ways that imprisoned them. I think we can doa lot more. What I am looking forward to—to borrow another metaphor from food—is the biryanization (I'm chutnifying) of English. Behind my work, I hope, readers can sometimes hear the music of Urdu. Of, Course, all this has to do with an emotional identification on my part with north Indian Muslim culture, which is steeped " Urdu. I, as I have 8rown older, have felt the need to identify ie self as a north Indian Muslim (not in any sectarian sense a ae Cultural sense). And I do not feel that this culture is neces Contemporary Indian Po Peeradina, Bombay, ranted a rather Unique ‘anguage in ways that the Saleem try in English: An Assessment and Selection, € 1972, 44.INTRODUCTION province of the Muslims (after all, Firaq Gorakhpuri was a Hindu) and many non-Muslim Indians can also consider themselves culturally Muslim. I am not familiar with Saleem Peeradina’s work, but I think I am among the very few of the Indians writing in English who is identifying himself in these terms. However, I do not want in all cases to be straitjacketed by these remarks; I want this to be a prominent but not exclusive element in my work.‘ Ali’s metaphors from north Indian cuisine seem a long way off in- deed from R. Parthasarathy’s cry, ‘My tongue in English chains’, Mr With important exceptions, which in the present selection are the poems of Dom Moraes and Vikram Seth and the early poems of Adil Jussawalla, the native tongue, whether as Ramanujan’s ‘inner’ form, Kolatkar’s parallel text, or Ali’s ‘music of Urdu’, operates behind the English lines of several poets. However, we still know very little about the subject, and can make only conjectural models to show the organi- zation and interplay of languages in multilingual sensibilities. Accord- ing to one rather crude model, languages in the polyglot’s brain are arranged in layers, one above the other: the language we licked off our mothers’ teats in the first, those picked up from the neighbours in the second, and English, the language learnt at school—and the language that will happen for the rest of our lives, bright as a butter- fly’s wing or a piece of tin aimed at the throat, to paraphrase from Jussawalla’s ‘Missing Person’—in the topmost layer. A problem with this model is that it treats the Indian poet as someone who chiefly transports linguistic and cultural materials from the bottom to the surface, from Indian mother tongue to English, which is all very well except that it tends to narrowly equate Indian poetry with Indian- ness, A good poem is a good poem, and not because it matches the colour of the poet’s skin or passport. What Parthasarathy wrote in Ramanujan’s defence following the publication of an article mildly critical of him in Jayanta Mahapatra’s magazine, Chandrabhagd, is one example of the limiting view of poetry that follows on the ‘layer’ model. ‘It seems to me’, said Parthasarathy, that Ramanujan’s work offers the first indisputable evidence of the validity of Indian English verse. Both The Striders (1966) and * Letter to the editor from Agha Shahid Ali, 1988. 5INTRODUCTION Relations (971) are the heir of an anterior tradition, @ trag: very much of this subcontinent, the deposits of whieh 2,""#dlioy nada and Tamil, and which have been assimilated into Eq Ramanujan’s deepest roots are in the Tamil and Kann, nal, and he has repossessed that past, in fact made it availa @ Past, English language. I consider this a significant achieve, © in the ‘Prayers to Lord Murugan’ is, for instance, embed, ded et. arises from, a specific tradition. It is, in effect, the fret et, and establishing an indigenous tradition of Indian English weet By saying that ‘Prayers to Lord Murugan’ is embedded in i tradition which Ramanujan makes available to us, Par thas already reducing languages which are tissued in the mul ae sensibility to pictural shreds, to the framed surfaces of oleographs sn other tradition does not enter a poem by Ramanujan, Rott Ali in the guise of god, a river, a place, a cow named Gopi, or a or Sultan; nor as a poetic shell, a rubai, doha, vacana, or abhango, Ram nujan himself is ambiguous about the points at which native id i: interferes with English: ‘I no longer can tell what comes from ihe Instead of assigning languages fixed : positions in a hierarchical system, he sees them as territories with soft borders across which movementis unrestricted, and not just for literary forms and colourful gods, and not only in one direction. The movement is in his case from Kannada and Tamil into English and, as importantly, from English into Kannada. The languages Ramanujan writes in, those he translates from, and those he translates into are ‘continuous with each other’. Each poet’s ‘continuous’ language or idiolect is constituted differ: ently: Ramanujan’s is of English-Kannada-Tamil, Kolatkar’s and Chitre’s of English-Marathi, Ali’s of English-Urdu, Mahapatra’s of English-Oriya, and Jussawalla has in an interview spoken of aan languages crawling around inside [his] head’.® The continuity ie not always be with another Indian language. Eunice de Souza a hers continuous with a variety of English itself, a pidgin spoken o" in the suburbs of Bombay. Che bugger Pitu sas asli chick men is from an unpublished group of her poems titled ‘Quee! 7 ‘Letters’, Chandrabhagd (Cuttack), No. 2 (Winter 1919). ew path), No-35 * Peter Nazareth, ‘Adil Jussawalla Interviewed’, Vagar (April 1979), 5. 's English. 6 aON INTRODUCTION anujan’s ‘Chicago Zen’ treats of the multilingual Poet’s two- Ramer: ion, his interior spaces divided on the one hand and con. fold cone he other, and the mishaps, the falls and descents, thas joinet oe missing’ person’s—revelations: : . Watch your step. Sight may strike you blind in unexpected places. The traffic light turns orange on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble, you fall into a vision of forest fires, enter a frothing Himalayan river, rapid, silent. Iv Even after two hundred years, the Indian poet who writes in English is looked upon with suspicion by other Indian writers, as though he did not belong either to the subcontinent of his birth or its literature. The romantic idea that poetic expression is possible only in the mother tongue has led to several misconceptions about him, one of which is that he writes for a foreign audience, and his readers are not in Allahabad and Cuttack but Boston and London. An editorial in Frontier, a left-wing weekly of Calcutta, recently said: And it is not just a tryst with freak destiny that present-day Indian Poets writing in English, such as Gieve Patel, A. K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, P. Lal, Vikram Seth, Adil Jussawalla, Keshav Malik and Keki Daruwalla, who are well-known to Western countries and hog up literature columns in English dailies spewed out of | Indian mega cities, are treated as irrelevant by the vernacular academicians due to absence of nativity.® The delirious statement is not worthy even of denial, However, I should still like to think that provincial ignorance rather than intellec- Thated Causes it, for though many have heard the names of these ates Poets, few have read them, and even fewer know anything as ut the size and extent of the readership. For instance, how many Uuld know that during the seventies and eighties several important es Indian Poetry in English’, Frontier (Calcutta), 26 May 1990, 1+ 3INTRODUCTION collections of verse came out from small Presses? : © booke « Jayanta Mahapatra’s The False Start (1980), " Kent inclug (1976), Dilip Chitre’s Travelling in a Cage (1980), ieee Atkap, std Fix (1979) and Women in Dutch Painting pice Je (1988), agi 9 Sn” Missing Person (1976), and Manohar Shetty's A Gabi Ira and Borrowed Time (1988). The editions were small 7 Shace (agg, tion negligible, and some titles are now out of print. ip the dis ib. which anthologies become necessary. They may A a Situation Indian verse in English from being damned, but at iz Save "eden parts of it available to those who first wish ast they mak To edit an anthology is an °pportunity to Tevise the jj bring neglected works back in circulation, and shift the g, i 7 Map, certain poets to others. This has been done by omitt ™Phasis from and R. Parthasarathy (my objections to the latter oe essay referred to at the beginning of the Introduction) +b Out in the Kolatkar’s uncollected early poems and Chitre’s uence ce . in a Cage’; and by giving Ezekiel fewer lines than Mahapatra yeu nujan, and Kolatkar. I have wanted to reveal through a ae choice of poets and Poems the sharp-edged quality of Indian vene, is not its best-known aspect, and my introducto reflect both the moments when Tsuc when I was disappointed. TY Notes to the poets ceeded in di i There have been in the Past similar ani 'scovering it and those ‘by Saleem Peeradi: athy (1976), Keki N. Daruwalla (1980), Kaiser Haq (1990), accepted shape of available in it at to read it, thologies from the post: ina (1971), R. Parthasr Vilas Sarang (1990), and —but none of them made any difference to the Indian verse in English, and considering what's Present, this is not surprising. On the other hand, there certainly is room for a larger, more comprehensive selection, e that will include Poets like Fredoon Kabraji and Beram oe who are virtually unknown (their books were ee Ruskin vanity press in London that did Ezekiel’s first coletion), Rast Bond and L. P. Bantleman who are always overlooe Khair. In Poets like Menka Shivdasani, Vijay Nambisan, and fr young fact I have edited this anthology hoping these and ot a earlier strvgs! will find something to preserve in what was made by in the desert. , SsNissim Ezekiel jim Ezckiel was born in Bombay in 1924 of Jewish (Bene-Isracl) Nisin wand educated at Wilson College, Bombay, and Birkbeck Peet London. After working in journalism, advertising and ee he took up a teaching job in 1961, and at the time of, pairement was Professor of English at the University of Bombay. Tn ‘dition to eight volumes of poetry—4 Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1958), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), Latter-Day Psalms (1982), selected for the Sahitya Akademi Award of 1983, and Collected Poems (1989)—Ezekiel has written plays, art criticism, and reviews. He is at present the editor of The Indian P.E.N., and has in the past edited Quest, Imprint and Poetry India. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1988. My own appreciation of Ezekiel’s poetry has been slow in coming, and even now I cannot always read it without reservation. Often the writing seems purposeless (‘At twenty-seven or so /1 met the girl who’s now / my wife. As bride and groom / we went for what is usually called— / I don’t know why—a honeymoon.’); the language under no pressure (‘You arrived / with sari clinging / to your breast / and hips.’); and if one may shift the poetic reference from context to author, the man himself hopelessly priapic (‘Is this part of you?” she asks, / as she holds it, stares at it. / Then she laughs.’). Quite apart from being the first modern poet in the literature, Exckiel was himself a good poet once. He possessed a quick observant tye and could encompass a life in the space of a line, as when he says ofan old woman, ‘She lived on cornflakes, hate and sweetened milk’. His first book is called A Time to Change, and Ezekiel could not have vat Unaware of the aptness of the title, In the absence of a good iterary history, it is difficult to say what sustained this heir to Saro- aie Naidu’s mellifluous drivel when he started out as a young poct in the mid-forties. The espousal of the self in his work is perhaps one seseauence of the realization that he must: create his own life- treet system, There was nothing in the literature then, or even in *Fellowing decade, that could have sustained him. As ‘History’ puts 9