| September 2009:
Despite constantly rising inequality
and the violence of everyday life in the cities
and small towns of India, despite the fact that
it is now harder, more precarious and more painful
to be poor in India than ever before, the major
Indian newspapers and mass media appear to be
unshakably congratulatory as they track the triumphs
of not only Indians but "people of Indian origin"
(PIOs) across the world: "Famous astronaut of
Indian origin!"-"Famous porn star of Indian origin!"-"Two
Indians at CERN, without whom the new particle
accelerator would simply not have been possible!"-and
so on. Oddly-and this could provide an aspiring
cultural critic a career's worth of work-people
who might be construed as being of Pakistani or
Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan or Nepali origin are
not included in this celebration. The question
of how these writers come to be excluded or included
when they are no longer or have never been citizens
of any South Asian state is a fascinating one.
In 2007, the Man Booker Prize was presented in
the Indian newspapers as a standoff between an
"Indian"-Indra Sinha (whose novel Animal's
People is the most compelling, powerful and
insightful account of the still-unfolding 1984
Bhopal gas tragedy ever written) and a "Pakistani"-Mohsin
Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
As it happens, both writers are British nationals
and they met to issue a joint public statement
and put a stop to the nonsense.
Literature, rightly or wrongly, is considered by this national mass media to be one of the vanguard areas of achievement by the new India. There were "two Indians" on the Booker shortlist last year, Aravind Adiga and Amitav Ghosh. Interestingly, like all such supposed achievements on the world stage, this translates, in practical terms, to the frenetic cultivation of local consumption in India, which is where, as everyone knows, the real (potential) money lies, thanks to the sheer numbers. In New Delhi, the hub of national publishing, small publishers, trying to find the right mix in their catalogue between literature and self-help books, are starting up and shutting down at the heady pace of dotcoms. There is a distinction between Indian writers who are known in India and Indian writers who are first popular abroad, which raises interesting and complex questions.
Literary festivals are also
at the head of this (not quite yet) boom, especially
during India's more pleasant winter months-and
now they range from the sly mix of commercial
and literary value at the Jaipur Literary Festival,
to the cynical, slightly sleazy celebrity of the
British-Indian Kitab festivals, to the grassroots
enthusiasm of the Kala Ghoda Literary Festival
in Bombay, and to the attempted diversity of the
Prakriti Poetry Festival in Chennai. And more.
I work for an online literary journal, Almost
Island, which now also holds a yearly alternative
literary conference in Delhi, although we steer
intently clear of both "festival" and "celebrity,"
focusing instead on innovative literature and
long, detailed conversations, bringing together
international writers like Bei Dao, George Szirtes
and Claudio Magris with major Indian experimental
writers (who might not be on the international
celebrity circuits) like Allan Sealy, K. Satchidanandan
and Vinod Kumar Shukla.
The question some might ask is, "Where is poetry to be found in all of this?" In fact, there is something of a buzz around Indian poetry these days. Indian poets have been at all the festivals, and some have argued that what is happening in Indian poetry is more exciting than what is happening in Indian fiction. That may not be true overall, but it is certainly welcome as a corrective, since Indian poetry, with its own stubbornly surviving canons, traditions and fans, has so often been completely ignored at the expense of fiction. The sad truth is that the reputation of Indian poetry has always greatly exceeded its actual readership or availability. This situation is particularly acute (and still acute, though much less so today) for Indian poetry in English. Indian poets writing in English have been long reviled by writers writing in other languages for being inauthentic or unjustly famous, but in fact they have not been famous or rich at all, in India or elsewhere. Not one of the major publishing houses has an in-house poetry editor; if they decide to publish a book or two of poetry each year, they do it on the basis of reputation, and publish, equally, the execrable poetry of past and present Presidents and Prime Ministers of India (Penguin) or the current Minister of Information (Roli Books). Small publishers and publishing collectives try to keep a flame alive but never seem to last for very long. Perhaps the most significant, highly respected, high quality publisher of Indian poetry in English ever was the "Clearing House" collective of the 1970s-volumes that, ironically, are more easily available now in the South Asia collections at Berkeley or Chicago than anywhere in India, where they are passed around mostly as ever-fading photocopies by enthusiasts.
In this context, the unprecedented
anthology, 60 Indian Poets, edited by
Jeet Thayil, published in India by Penguin this
month and due very shortly for release in England,
in a slightly different version, as the Bloodaxe
Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, may turn
out to be something of a turning point. Charles
River Journal readers may be interested to know
that the anthology began life, in a mildly different
version, as the Indian poetry section of the fourth
issue of Fulcrum, published out of Cambridge,
Mass., which then had to be brought back to India
and shown to editors as evidence of the achievement
of Indian poetry in the world.
60 Indian Poets is
a very good anthology of poems, very worth reading,
but a problematic one. Its title is a little misleading,
since it contains only one poet not originally
writing in English (K. Satchidanandan) and "reclaims"
excellent writers who in many ways had been quite
distant from India, such as Vijay Seshadri, Srikanth
Reddy or Prageeta Sharma. It does not, regrettably,
contain any Pakistani writers writing in English,
but then perhaps it would have had to be inelegantly
called "South Asian." What this means is that
the book's power will derive not just from its
attempt to lobby en masse (which is what all anthologies
do) on behalf of a community called Indian poetry,
but also that it will constitute that community
in a new way. The long-term effects and developments
of this new constitution will be interesting to
follow. For now, readers of The Charles River
Journal should turn to that anthology in
any of its versions especially for a peek into
the work of the most important older originals
of English poetry who made their lives, sometimes
at great personal cost, in post-independence India:
Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawalla, Dilip Chitre,
Dom Moraes, Gopal Honnegere, for example-and,
especially, Arun Kolatkar.
Back
to Index of Despatches | Back to the Table of Contents for Number 2
About our Correspondent
Vivek Narayanan is Consulting Editor for the journal
Almost Island. He usually lives and works
in Delhi, India, but is in Chennai this year on
a sabbatical.
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