Unsettling beauty – Hindustan Times

As a genre, poetry owes no special debt to the rationality of the European Enlightenment or the narrative realism enabled by that rationality, even though the experiential interiority that it made possible through Romanticism changed poetry forever. Romanticism, of course, has had a range of different traditions in different parts of the world, and yet for Indian poets writing in English, similar limits of bourgeois experience have returned time and again. Too many poets and writers have had similar lives and preoccupations: a certain kind of education, including time spent in the West, a shared cultural modernity energised by certain moments of travel, often a scattered, diasporic life divided between the West and India.

But both emotion and technique in Jonaki Roy’s poetry reveal a simultaneous firmness and honesty that infuses freshness in these very experiences. Lack of belonging in a foreign land, homesickness, racial otherness, change of accent, loss of family – all of it is delivered in delicate diction and fine metrical music. Any of us who’s been there will feel the pull of empathy: “Loneliness mantles the shelves of the mind until/its practice eases into homecoming.”

In India, bourgeois experience touches a strange limit in the presence of domestic caregivers, particularly those from childhood. The unforgettable character of Parboti Ma, “front teeth missing/back teeth always chewing betel nut”, draws a long breath and a deep pause from the reader, most memorably in the last stanza of the poem: “Parboti Ma, refugee from Bihar,/ worker in Kolkata, resident of Delhi/saying, ‘Stay still, just like the teeter-totter/in the playground,/and one day,/balance will come in your life.’”

Good poetry melts the distance between the self and the other that social reality usually freezes into norms; memorable art is that delicate play of the alien and the familiar – close enough to claim kinship and yet far enough to shock. If Parboti Ma is that strange-familiar figure for Roy, in the greater abstraction of the poems of Aishwarya Iyer, we get less of a narrative arc than the forever disappearing blue-grey tinge of a painting: “Beside the half-drawn curtains/with your beady eyes and stick-limbs/you grow grotesque./In the fading light I void/-ed my thoughts, while you/came closer: a child/greeted me with soft, stubby fingers./ how I hated you and instantly then/became your mother, as if/like a she-kangaroo resolving/to carry you in my stomach pouch.”

Space and time are marked far less clearly in Iyer’s poetry, and yet their relative abstraction is sensually punctured by scraps of reality. For me, the eruption of the concrete quotidian were the most rewarding moments: “All day long struggling with flotsam and jetsam/Telephone calls, bathroom visits, the anxiety of lunch/A posse of objects keeps you from drowning”. Such is how an inescapable awareness of the earth and the sky, the atmosphere that holds us, makes its way into her poetry, as intimate as exhausted lovers: “We must find use for this scaly skin/Depleted of the water of truths;/ To be thrown out of your name,/To touch the ground is not so bad/But the sky must be found here.”

Strangely, some of the most powerful moments when Indian-English poetry is able to transcend its imaginative limits is when it embraces the literary influences that make up the legacy of bourgeois education. Deepankar Khiwani celebrates the enthusiasm with which his deceased mother introduced Victorian poetry to him – the dedication of his poem, “Ispahan” is suffused with a melancholy wit: “for my Mother, who taught me the poem by Browning,/but was terrified I’d learn too much”. But the poem, true to its title, comes alive in a spurt of visceral colours, in the daring act of slicing a watermelon: “What will one do if one sees the flesh rotting inside – /Excise the rot surgically, or throw all away?/For all is God’s award./Sometimes of course, one needs to throw away the good.” The cost of such a slicing is not merely moral but bodily: “And when it’s steady, just cut./There must then be no going back,/No looking at the blood.”

For Khiwani, who died in 2019 at the age of 47, literary echoes can be as subtle as they can be direct, just as childlike as they are erudite. The directness of the title “Nursery Rhyme” does an ironic justice to the youthful limpidity of the poem that masks the fatally corrosive: “I’m a teapot/Tall and thin –/Barely holding/What’s within./When inside it’s boiling/Do hear me as I shout:/I scald all that is near me,/So hurry up, run out.”

English poetry that sprouts from life experience far beyond the reaches of the urban middle class is a far greater rarity in India. Which is why it is exciting to get the collection Chakmak from Ramesh Karthik Nayak, a young poet from the Banjara tribe, an indigenous nomadic community originally from Rajasthan but now spread all over India. Beautifully produced by Red River, this slim volume has striking artwork by Ramavath Sreenivas Nayak, capturing scenes from rural and nomadic life. The poems reveal a continuity with the life of the land, beyond the human and even beyond the animate, which remains unnoticed but for the idiosyncrasy of a budding poetic sensibility. The continuity can border on the spectral: “Bats and owls/ransack the night/in search of remnants/of memory hidden/by human beings.” But it is a sensibility that never corrupts the landscape and the treescape with a conscious eye, retaining the visceral soul of all creatures that swim through it: “Corpses of birds drench/the summer air./Clots of blood flow through the veins/from heart to beak.”

Sometimes, Nayak’s craft feels like something that is still growing, not quite yet of the finish of these other poets I read alongside him. But is that a lack? Or even a becoming? Perhaps those of us who write in English in this country – and perhaps prose writers most of all – are too irrevocably committed to the notion of a craft that is Romantic in nature, mortgaged to a perfection shaped by Western modernity. Cast in English, corpses of strange bats and owls look just a little reined in, just a little out of place. There is unsettling beauty in that wilderness.

***

Collections discussed: Jonaki Roy, Firefly Memories (Copper Coin, 2023), Aishwarya Iyer, The Grasp of Things (Copper Coin, 2023), Ramesh Karthik Nayak, Chakmak (Red River, 2023), Deepankar Khiwani, De Kooning’s Smile: Collected Poems (Copper Coin, 2023)

Saikat Majumdar’s novels include The Firebird, The Scent of God, and The Middle Finger.

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The identifiable experience of the educated bourgeoisie has often set a representational limit for Indian writing in English. English from certain other corners of the world – particularly those that have emerged through Black or creolized identities – have created moments of grounded, sensory writing both on the level of dialect and worldview that Indian-English writing has rarely attained even through regional modification and bhasha twists, the achievements of which are of a different nature altogether. But what’s wrong with bourgeois reality? A novelist may ask. Wasn’t realism, the defining mode of the great age of the European novel in the 19th century, rooted in the dependable solidity of bourgeois Protestant life? But for English-language novelists from India, that tradition of bourgeois realism has long outlived its pervasive utility, if indeed it was ever as central to our fictional traditions as it had been in Europe. The magic realism of the 1980’s and the 1990’s was but one of the many aesthetic modes that have inspired those of us writing fiction in English to variously disrupt this realist worldview. Our poets have shared this problem, and yet the latter has altered its contours radically in their hands.

As a genre, poetry owes no special debt to the rationality of the European Enlightenment or the narrative realism enabled by that rationality, even though the experiential interiority that it made possible through Romanticism changed poetry forever. Romanticism, of course, has had a range of different traditions in different parts of the world, and yet for Indian poets writing in English, similar limits of bourgeois experience have returned time and again. Too many poets and writers have had similar lives and preoccupations: a certain kind of education, including time spent in the West, a shared cultural modernity energised by certain moments of travel, often a scattered, diasporic life divided between the West and India.

But both emotion and technique in Jonaki Roy’s poetry reveal a simultaneous firmness and honesty that infuses freshness in these very experiences. Lack of belonging in a foreign land, homesickness, racial otherness, change of accent, loss of family – all of it is delivered in delicate diction and fine metrical music. Any of us who’s been there will feel the pull of empathy: “Loneliness mantles the shelves of the mind until/its practice eases into homecoming.”

In India, bourgeois experience touches a strange limit in the presence of domestic caregivers, particularly those from childhood. The unforgettable character of Parboti Ma, “front teeth missing/back teeth always chewing betel nut”, draws a long breath and a deep pause from the reader, most memorably in the last stanza of the poem: “Parboti Ma, refugee from Bihar,/ worker in Kolkata, resident of Delhi/saying, ‘Stay still, just like the teeter-totter/in the playground,/and one day,/balance will come in your life.’”

Good poetry melts the distance between the self and the other that social reality usually freezes into norms; memorable art is that delicate play of the alien and the familiar – close enough to claim kinship and yet far enough to shock. If Parboti Ma is that strange-familiar figure for Roy, in the greater abstraction of the poems of Aishwarya Iyer, we get less of a narrative arc than the forever disappearing blue-grey tinge of a painting: “Beside the half-drawn curtains/with your beady eyes and stick-limbs/you grow grotesque./In the fading light I void/-ed my thoughts, while you/came closer: a child/greeted me with soft, stubby fingers./ how I hated you and instantly then/became your mother, as if/like a she-kangaroo resolving/to carry you in my stomach pouch.”

Space and time are marked far less clearly in Iyer’s poetry, and yet their relative abstraction is sensually punctured by scraps of reality. For me, the eruption of the concrete quotidian were the most rewarding moments: “All day long struggling with flotsam and jetsam/Telephone calls, bathroom visits, the anxiety of lunch/A posse of objects keeps you from drowning”. Such is how an inescapable awareness of the earth and the sky, the atmosphere that holds us, makes its way into her poetry, as intimate as exhausted lovers: “We must find use for this scaly skin/Depleted of the water of truths;/ To be thrown out of your name,/To touch the ground is not so bad/But the sky must be found here.”

Strangely, some of the most powerful moments when Indian-English poetry is able to transcend its imaginative limits is when it embraces the literary influences that make up the legacy of bourgeois education. Deepankar Khiwani celebrates the enthusiasm with which his deceased mother introduced Victorian poetry to him – the dedication of his poem, “Ispahan” is suffused with a melancholy wit: “for my Mother, who taught me the poem by Browning,/but was terrified I’d learn too much”. But the poem, true to its title, comes alive in a spurt of visceral colours, in the daring act of slicing a watermelon: “What will one do if one sees the flesh rotting inside – /Excise the rot surgically, or throw all away?/For all is God’s award./Sometimes of course, one needs to throw away the good.” The cost of such a slicing is not merely moral but bodily: “And when it’s steady, just cut./There must then be no going back,/No looking at the blood.”

For Khiwani, who died in 2019 at the age of 47, literary echoes can be as subtle as they can be direct, just as childlike as they are erudite. The directness of the title “Nursery Rhyme” does an ironic justice to the youthful limpidity of the poem that masks the fatally corrosive: “I’m a teapot/Tall and thin –/Barely holding/What’s within./When inside it’s boiling/Do hear me as I shout:/I scald all that is near me,/So hurry up, run out.”

English poetry that sprouts from life experience far beyond the reaches of the urban middle class is a far greater rarity in India. Which is why it is exciting to get the collection Chakmak from Ramesh Karthik Nayak, a young poet from the Banjara tribe, an indigenous nomadic community originally from Rajasthan but now spread all over India. Beautifully produced by Red River, this slim volume has striking artwork by Ramavath Sreenivas Nayak, capturing scenes from rural and nomadic life. The poems reveal a continuity with the life of the land, beyond the human and even beyond the animate, which remains unnoticed but for the idiosyncrasy of a budding poetic sensibility. The continuity can border on the spectral: “Bats and owls/ransack the night/in search of remnants/of memory hidden/by human beings.” But it is a sensibility that never corrupts the landscape and the treescape with a conscious eye, retaining the visceral soul of all creatures that swim through it: “Corpses of birds drench/the summer air./Clots of blood flow through the veins/from heart to beak.”

Sometimes, Nayak’s craft feels like something that is still growing, not quite yet of the finish of these other poets I read alongside him. But is that a lack? Or even a becoming? Perhaps those of us who write in English in this country – and perhaps prose writers most of all – are too irrevocably committed to the notion of a craft that is Romantic in nature, mortgaged to a perfection shaped by Western modernity. Cast in English, corpses of strange bats and owls look just a little reined in, just a little out of place. There is unsettling beauty in that wilderness.

***

Collections discussed: Jonaki Roy, Firefly Memories (Copper Coin, 2023), Aishwarya Iyer, The Grasp of Things (Copper Coin, 2023), Ramesh Karthik Nayak, Chakmak (Red River, 2023), Deepankar Khiwani, De Kooning’s Smile: Collected Poems (Copper Coin, 2023)

Saikat Majumdar’s novels include The Firebird, The Scent of God, and The Middle Finger.

“Exciting news! Hindustan Times is now on WhatsApp Channels Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!” Click here!