Articles

Bhakti Poetry Is Much More Than Bedtime Prayer For Sacred Love,
OUTLOOK, February 11, 2024

If teddy bears and chocolate were the landscape of love, life would, of course, be gloriously simple. Also, a trifle vapid, but that’s another matter. The fact is that love is, and has always been, a sticky business. And not just vanilla sticky. Sticky in a bloody, snotty way. A living-and-dying kind of way. The problem is no one tells us so.

If the darker side of fairytales help prepare children for existential issues, ranging from terrors of abandonment to sibling rivalries, where are the adult almanacks for human love? Is greeting-card verse meant to do the trick? Is a movie like Animal meant to prepare us for the lurching cardiogram of romantic love? How do we understand what turns moonlight and roses into toxicity, betrayal and rejection? And what eventually enables love to ripen into wisdom?

Stories offer insight. But poems, I believe, go deeper. Poems offer insight more directly, swiftly and profoundly than stories ever can. Many years ago, when I began reading Indian sacred poetry, I found, to my amazement, that there was a wealth of insight here about how to navigate the darker tides of love. Why was this such a well-kept secret? Why had I grown up believing that our bhakti literature was all about pious saints looking rapturously heavenward? Why did I never hear the ferocity, the desperation, the erotic tensions, the yowl and ecstatic cry in their voices? Why had I believed that devotion was all about meek service at the lotus feet of despotic gurus and capricious deities? Why had I never been encouraged to hear the risk, the terror, the longing, the sheer sensual appetite for union and dissolution?

Here below is a roadmap by poets who remind us that romantic and spiritual love are not so different, after all.

First comes the danger. Almost every poet who has known sacred love warns us that it is not bland longing. Instead, it is a roaring, passionate appetite for ‘something more’. ‘Don’t you take [it] on,’ says Basavanna. ‘Nobody who goes in every comes back,’ says Tukaram. The divine is a panther who rips human hearts to shreds, says Salabega. The signs are clear. Bhakti is not bedtime prayer in some safe enclave of the heart. It is a crazy longing that rips apart pretention, breaks closets, shatters ceilings, rages against fences of every kind. This is not dewy-eyed infatuation. This is a scorching, all-consuming desire that cauterizes, purifies and eventually illuminates every crevice of human consciousness.

Second comes the disease. Once you’re bitten, you prepare for rabid infection. This is not a fever that can be treated, and certainly not by candle-light and roses. This is the initiatory sickness familiar to shamans everywhere. It is the body being purged to receive the new. It is cleansing, maddening, hellish. ‘A lover bit my hand like a snake/ and the venom bursts through/ and I’m dying,’ says Mira. ‘Moonlight has turned hot, my friend,/ I am agitated like a tax collector/ doing the rounds in town,’ says Akka Mahadevi ‘My body’s fruit/ [is] slashed open/ acid-scrubbed by separation,’ says Andal.

This is love as cataclysm. The old architecture of life falls apart. The world is no longer the way we knew it. The things that were once attractive seem strangely devoid of appeal. ‘My hair’s/ come loose/ I dance/ like a madwoman,’ sings Mira. ‘O brothers/ why do you talk/ to this woman,/ hair loose/ face withered/ body shrunk?/…She [has] lost the world/ lost power of will’ says Akka Mahadevi. ‘When He comes/ out of the blue,/ a meteorite/ shattering your home,/ be sure/ god is visiting you,’ says Tukaram, reminding us that every catastrophe is a blessing in mufti, a calling card from the divine.

And now comes the hardest phase: the waiting. As the fever rages, as the longing intensifies, something subterranean is afoot. In the deep clay vessel of the heart, love cooks. But it can only cook on a slow-fire. Bhakti is a resolutely dum-pukht business. For ‘eternity’, as contemporary Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi reminds us, ‘takes time’. It must simmer in its own juices.

Interestingly, the experts at the business of waiting are typically female protagonists. The poetry of this land is suffused with lovelorn nayikas, tempest-tossed by yearning. The emotionally unavailable men for whom they wait are evidently metaphors for the elusive nature of the divine. Personally, this seemingly one-sided devotion annoyed me intensely for many years. Exasperated, I wondered why on earth the nayikas couldn’t find more affectionate love interests, until I found the living truth that still crackles beneath the tired clichés of calendar art: this is no ordinary vigil. This is not passive waiting. This is a dynamic state of alertness, a warrior’s keen readiness. Eighteenth-century mystic Dayabai calls herself the ‘acrobat-girl’ who seeks ‘balance upon the thread of [her] own deep breath’. She exults in her own audacity: ‘Watch her leap and fall and leap again/ capering from moment to moment/ across the vaults of the sky.’

The women in the work of male poets, from Jayadeva and Vidyapati to Chandidas and Shah Abdul Latif, slip stealthily out of their homes in the dead of night to meet forbidden paramours. They are willing to sacrifice respectability, court social disgrace and flout cultural gatekeepers, as long as it brings them closer to the objects of their love. There is nothing coy about this passion. These are women of agency — fiery, sassy, feral.

Moreover, as soon as women protagonists enter the verse of male poets, the relationship between the human and the divine stops being a battle. It becomes a celebration. The heroine brings with her a spirit of adventure, eroticism, an awareness of her own desirability. She also brings in the magic of shape-shifting. As the heat of impending intimacy grows more intense, every identity and hierarchy begins to melt into irrelevance. The woman seeker can describe god as her boss and her slave all at once. She can tie his arms to the bedpost (as the gopi does in Narsinh Mehta’s poem), or even banish him from bed (as Radha does in Salabega’s poem). Every transgressive act is permissible because this is a game of mutuality. The divine needs the human, and Krishna needs his Radha, as much as the other way around. As the poet Uddhabadas cries in sheer incredulity, ‘Who can tell/ who is the man/ and who the woman/ in this ecstasy?’

It is not the object of love that transforms, the bhakti poets remind us. It is the experience of love itself. Once she has known the seasons of yearning and union, the woman emerges into a new state of self-possession. She no longer appeases the divine; she embodies the sacred. Hers is now the voice of female power and self-reclamation. She is a goddess of wisdom in her own right. ‘I have not bowed. I never will…/ The one who listens is resplendent within me/ That is worship. That’s what I do,’ declares the seventeenth-century Kashmiri woman mystic, Rupa Bhavani, in a poem that still reverberates down the centuries.

This, then, is what time does to human love: it turns infatuation into inclusiveness; erotic flirtation into an expansive embrace. Consider how tenth-century Tamil mystic Nammalvar’s heroine is alchemized from yearning to wisdom and wholeness. Her bewildered mother exclaims: ‘My little girl says,/ ‘I’ve no relatives here/ and everyone here is my relative.’ And again, ‘My girl, who’s just learning to speak, says/ ‘I’m beyond all learning…/ I’m the cause of all learning/ I end all learning.’’ This is no longer the little girl lost in adolescent dreams. This is no longer the seeker as pining nayika. This is the woman as sage—strong, complete, lacking for nothing.

Sacred love, like romantic love, isn’t always pretty. It isn’t ornamental. It certainly isn’t tame. And it most definitely isn’t for the faint of heart. One prepares to lose, and be lost. But once we realize, like Lal Ded, Tukaram, and so many others before, that the dance of finding and losing is just the self playing hide-and-seek with the self, we exhale. We have come home. We now sit back, quietly assured in the knowledge that whatever happens on this wild ride, we emerge, one way or the other, the winners.

When Bhakt And Bhakti Had A Different Connotation,
OUTLOOK, JANUARY 11, 2023

‘He’s just another bhakt,’ I overheard someone say recently in the course of a heated political debate. I will admit the oft-repeated phrase still makes me wince. I know what she meant, of course. I know that it was her way of describing an uncritical groupie, someone who kowtowed to the politics of the far Right.

In my day, we called such a person, quite simply, a chamcha—a servile wretch who oozed blandishment because he lacked the spine to be his own person. A chamcha is a lackey, an acolyte, a people-pleaser. A fine, serviceable word. Chamcha has, however, been replaced by bhakt in local parlance. And, to my mind, it is a deeply unsatisfactory synonym.

Why?

Quite simply, because a bhakt, or a bhakta (as the non-Hindi speakers amongst us would say), is not a chamcha. A bhakta is, in fact, a person of nerve, of spine, of spirit. A passionate, robust, wise being who has discovered the power and potential of the path of the heart.

Redefining the word, bhakti, or ‘devotion’ is, I believe, a matter of urgency.

Growing up, I was no different from those who viewed devotees as simpleminded, often sanctimonious. I believed devotion was for those who walked around with constipated smiles, offering vanilla cliches about God being Love. I thought it was about ringing bells, spouting scriptural bromides, and diving at the feet of gurus. About simple hierarchies between the leader and the led.

As my preoccupation with sacred journeys deepened, however, I rediscovered the Bhakti poets of India, and found many of my assumptions punctured. Where I expected a bunch of obsequious songsters, I found a community of feisty iconoclasts. I found poets whose work overturned hierarchies. Questioned power equations. Chose spirited dialogue over meek obedience. Poets who refused to worship their gods, but sought instead to consume them. To embody them. To become them. Those who would settle for nothing else.

In short, I found my tribe.

Here are some of the insights the devotional poets of this subcontinent have offered me.

Most importantly, they tell me that devotion does not mean enslavement. Bhakti is not a feudal relationship between zamindar and serf. The deity is not a dictator. The bhakta is not a slave. Even when bhaktas sound slavish, it is only surrender to love, never to authority. There is nothing sycophantic about devotion.

What’s more, these poets quarrel with their gods with impunity. Namdev, the 13^th century Marathi saint, adorns his precious god with a garland of cuss words: ‘Shame on you! You have no pedigree!’ Tukaram, the 17^th century mystic, describes his god as a fellow-grocer, dismissing his mercantile abilities: ‘The whole transaction is a fraud./ I will have nothing more to do with you…/ Look! I am a grocer by profession./ You can’t cheat me at a bargain.’ The 18^th century Bengali poet, Ramprasad Sen, tells his Kali quite plainly: ‘Either you eat me or I eat you,/ We must decide on one’. Kamalakanta Bhattacharya taunts his naked Maa Kali for her disgraceful dress sense: ‘Are you going to rescue Kamalakanta/ in this outfit?’

These poets are free to fight with their gods for one simple reason: they love them. Love makes every disagreement a family squabble, not a war between good and evil. In an age where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric has taken on near-religious overtones even in political discourse, the Bhakti poets are a wonderful reminder that in the realm of the spirit, there is no distinction between the believer and infidel, the insider and outsider. The bhakta is both lover and sceptic, ardent paramour and argumentative friend, all at once.

Most importantly, these poets tell us that it is perfectly legitimate to doubt. They frequently wonder if their gods really exist, or if they are merely figments of their own imagination. ‘Love, says Surdas ‘is an awkward thing./ It ripples the mind with waves.’ ‘She’s thinking so much about him, and missing him/ that when he comes to her door…/ she doesn’t hear,’ writes the 15^th century poet Annamacharya. Faith, for the bhaktas, is a journey potholed by doubt. Blind obedience is emphatically not their thing.

Which brings me to my third misconception. I’d believed that the devotional poets were somewhat challenged on the cerebral front. They seemed too crazy, too volatile to enter the club of tranquil meditators (which is what I aspired to gain entry). But then I began to realize there was nothing spiritually juvenile about these poems. Instead, these were sharply intelligent voices that consciously plunged into the dangerous dance of duality between the human and the divine. ‘Don’t you take on this thing called bhakti,’ warns the 12^th century poet, Basavanna. ‘Only someone struck by it/ knows the pain,’ echoes Kabir three centuries later.

‘Isn’t it funny/ that though she’s mother of the universe/ we warble/ about her lotus-bud breasts?’ asks the 19^th century goddess devotee, Abhirami Bhattar. It is clear that these poets address an embodied god not because of the jingoism of their spiritual orientations, but because they know that falling in love with an embodied ‘other’ is often the most pleasurable and direct route to their truest selves. What’s more, they know that the divine can be perceived in any form they choose. ‘If you look for a tree,/ he’s a tree…./ If you look for empty space,/ he appears as space…/ God is what you have in your mind,’ says Annamacharya.

Finally, I discovered that bhakti is emphatically not anti-flesh either. The best poets sing unapologetically of bodily appetite and instinct: Nammalvar speaks of ‘eating god’, Soyarabai speaks of the life-giving nature of menstrual blood, while a host of others speak of making love to the divine. Intimacy is the basis of bhakti. The god of Bhakti poetry pines for the love of the devotee. And the devotee knows that god, for all his magnificence, is still incomplete without her. This assumed reciprocity empowers bhaktas to rebuke their gods, woo them, make love to them, and even, on occasion, dismiss them.

Intimacy has its own politics. The bhakta is not unaware of this. ‘Unless I want it myself, it doesn’t count as love,’ the female speaker pertly reminds her god in an Annamacharya poem. The implication is clear: love must be mutual. If it is one-sided, it is unacceptable. When he is deeply engaged in his work, the cobbler, Dhoolaiah, is empowered to tell even his beloved Shiva to come back when he’s less busy! Likewise, the prostitute devotee, Sule Sankavva, asks her god to return later because she’s busy with a client. Nothing is out of bounds in this heartfelt dialogue, because its basis is love. What’s more, god is not the stainless absolute, but the stained ally—soiled and human, without ceasing for a moment to be sublime. This is a deeply endearing divinity.

We live in a world that is divided on the basis of multiple variable, whether of caste, class, race, gender, ideology or faith. Even as we fight injustice on one front, we often find reverse hierarchies staining our gaze. As we oscillate between judgements of superiority and inferiority, between acts of indulgence and repression, we experience the simultaneous pain of tyranny and victimhood. At the heart of the problem is the fact that we are encouraged to see some emotional states as respectable and others as shameful.

This is where the Kannada poet, Sule Sankavva’s glorious definition of the divine as “Nirlajjeshwara”, One Without Shame, becomes inspirational. When the divine is without shame, how can there be room for human guilt? By inviting us to journey into every dark closet of the heart, the Bhakti poets remind us that every demon, and indeed every deity, is simply our own face looking out at ourselves. Devotion, they know, can transform the density of pain, rage, fear, doubt, jealousy and power politics into luminosity, through the sheer alchemy of non-judgmental attention.

We inhabit a world that often mistakes fanaticism for faith. But devotion, these poets tell us, is not fundamentalism. It is instead a single-pointed commitment to self-discovery over self-definition. Even at the end of their journeys, these poets do not offer us certitudes or commandments. Instead, they tell us it is possible to live spiritedly, joyfully, and even serenely, in states of uncertainty.

In a memorable ‘breakthrough’ poem, the poet Tukaram does not speak of finding god. Instead, he speaks of an even more profound discovery: a way to abide in himself. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘God is dead…/ I shall speak of him no more…/ We have slain each other…/ Now I would like to sit still.’

Remembering Gieve Patel: Poet, painter, playwright, translator, doctor,
THE INDIAN EXPRESS, NOVEMBER 9, 2023

I first encountered Gieve Patel’s poem, ‘On Killing a Tree’, in Class Nine, and paused at the matter-of-fact brutality with which it described how to butcher a tree.

The much-anthologized poem comes to mind, as the tree of Anglophone Indian poetry witnesses its second great severance this year. After Jayanta Mahapatra in August, Indian poetry loses yet another stalwart with Gieve’s passing last week.

When his closest poet friends, Nissim Ezekiel and AK Ramanujan, died, Gieve told me he lost the motivation to write poetry, because his primary readers no longer existed. We were at our Udupi haunt in Nariman Point, quaffing filter coffee, when he mentioned this. I wondered about that. Did poets write only for each other?

Today, I begin to see what he meant. Gieve and I weren’t united by the same poetics. But I knew he was that rare thing—an artist with an unfaltering nose for the authentic, a fiercely independent traveler, resistant to hopping on easy cultural bandwagons. In the literary world with its share of power-play and cliquism, Gieve was his own person. As long as there were people like him around, it felt all was not rotten in the state of Denmark. When he died last Friday, it felt like one was suddenly plunged into a world of opaque street signs, without anyone to approach for directions.

Poet, painter, playwright, translator, doctor, Gieve was never a flashy collector of identities. He preferred to find his versatile habitat in verbs, not nouns. My earliest memory of him is of hearing him read his poetry in my classroom. Little did I know then that I would write the preface to his Collected Poems decades later. As a young collegian, I watched his play, Savaksa, directed by Pearl Padamsee, and was fascinated by the festering complexity of its characters. Later, as a young poet myself, I met him. Our relationship deepened over time. Today, I have an audio file in my head of the distinct timbre of his poetic voice, its determinedly staccato non-lyrical rhythms, its muscularity. And then there is the Gieve guffaw. As inimitable as the broad smile and the clear-eyed gaze.

Born in 1940, Gieve’s first book of poems was published in 1966. There were subsequent gaps, the longest between his third volume in 1991 and his Collected twenty-seven years later. The hiatuses were filled with much else: an active life as a painter; a bustling medical practice (until 2005); the writing of three plays; and his immersive translation project of the Gujarati mystic poets, Akho and Vasto.

Gieve was the quintessential Mumbai artist. He walked the city’s seething streets, inhaled its contaminated odours, and relished, with an affectionate ethnographer’s delight, the diverse patients who turned up at his Bombay Central clinic. His poetry also valued this sense of being ‘interpenetrated/ with the world’. Perhaps even death, he wrote, was welcome if it happened on Indian Railways ‘in a third-class carriage/ with open windows’. His daughter tells me that the cubicle in the Pune palliative-care centre in which he died felt like a railway compartment—self-contained, yet connected to the world. That sounded deeply appropriate.

He often described himself as ‘bedeviled’. Certainly, his plays and poetry, from Poems to How Do You Withstand, Body?, were fevered, dark, haunted by questions around body, mortality, injustice, unredeemed pain, unhealed inner demons. And yet, there was nothing bedeviled about the man I grew to know. His third book, Mirrored Mirroring, suggested that some of ‘that difficult baggage’ might have been resolved. There was an embarrassed wondering here about how we got ‘caught up/ in God’s effort/ to understand Himself’. Gieve’s imagined God was something like himself—passionately curious about the besieged body, ‘embroiled in detail’, and ‘puzzled, puzzled’. In later years, that curiosity deepened. Our recent meetings invariably revolved around subjects of karma, meditation, death.

This April, I asked him if he felt he had any unfinished creative business. Only the translations, he said. There was no point suggesting that he hurry. Gieve approached his work like Akho, the goldsmith-poet he loved. He polished, crafted, dusted unceasingly, and worked only when he was seized by ‘inner necessity’ (a Kandinsky phrase he liked). Churning out a book to retain the cultural badge of ‘poet’ was unthinkable.

In his last days, it was drawing that consumed him. A year ago, he sent me a sketch of a tree—a serrated explosion of lines and gnarly wrinkles. It resembled a wild tree from his recent poem, ‘All Night’. Unlike Gieve’s earlier tree, this new counterpart is not mutilated or massacred by external forces. Instead, the tree itself yearns for oblivion, an ecstatic uprooting.

Was the poem prescient? Did it indicate something that Gieve unconsciously knew, or desired? We will never know.

No, the body does not withstand, friend. But the trees of this city are not so easily felled. Your many branches live on in your work, green-leaved and fiercely radiant.

Monsoon Magic: Time To Sing, Recite And Listen
OUTLOOK, July 5, 2022

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When my British pen-friend visited me in Mumbai years ago, I was embarrassed. What a din our incorrigible Radhabai made when washing the dishes, and why on earth did my neighbours holler on the phone?

And then the monsoons arrived. And I saw why we were incapable of being as whispery and decorous as I’d have liked. We took our cue from the bipolar weather gods! The Monsoons were our Ms Manners. This wasn’t mercy that ‘droppeth as gentle rain from heaven’. This was life. And it was big. ‘We’re pagan,’ I told Brian, jauntily. ‘Nothing faint-hearted about us.’

And yet, for all their joyous heathenism and love of profanity, the Indian monsoons are versatile. Their vocals range from murmur to howl, their percussion from castanet to nagara. And they’re multilingual. They switch dialects all the time. Which explains the torrent of onomatopoeia in our song. There’s rimjhim, of course. But I’ve also heard the memorable chatta-chada-chatta-chada-datta. And many in between. (Tip-tip, jhir-jhir, kila-kila, ghanana- ghanana, among others.)

The problem is we live in a subcontinent whose poets have been warbling about the monsoons since the dawn of time. How then can a contemporary poet not be paralyzed by the anxiety of influence? If you look out at a blurry horizon and think of sky mating with earth, you realize an ancient Tamil Sangam poet got there a few hundred years before the Common Era: ‘…our hearts are as red earth and pouring rain: mingled beyond parting.’

If a rain-glazed window evokes intense pangs of yearning, you know Kalidasa’s already been there, done that. (The Meghaduta image of a cloud messenger despatched by an exiled lover to his beloved still haunts our collective consciousness over 1500 years later). What’s more, the Sanskrit poets described clouds in such inventive ways, it’s difficult to keep track: a damp buffalo’s belly, the breasts of a new mother, raging drunkards, celestial elephants, emeralds in a pearl necklace, fresh mud, heaped collyrium. And that’s just skimming the surface of all the metaphorical lushness.

When a rain-glazed window induces a lingering melancholy, you know you’re experiencing a much more modest version of what Valmiki’s Rama went through when he spent an anguished monsoon away from Sita. If the wild soundtrack of a south-western storm sounds like the voice of the divine, you realise that the 17^th century mystic poet, Bahinabai, thought so too. ‘In my heart, God spoke in thunder.’ And if there’s a surge of voluptuous longing, it’s difficult not to think of all those brazen nayikas who headed out to meet illicit lovers on tempestuous nights. The 15^th century poet Vidyapati writes: ‘Like a vine of lightning,/ As I chained the dark one,/ I felt a river flooding my heart…./ I devoured that liquid face….In my storming breath/ I could hear my ankle bells.’ This is a thunderclap climax—sexual and existential all at once. Difficult to better it.

And then, there’s Bollywood. Whether it’s ‘O Sajnaa’, ‘Ek Ladki bheegi-bhaagi si’ or ‘Rimjhim gire saavan’, the fact is they’ve all got there before us—Shailendra, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Yogesh (with the added blessings of those music composers and vocalists who made them unforgettable).

The truth is, every Indian poet writes a rain poem. There’s no escaping it. It’s a rite of passage. We know the embarrassment of cliché. We know the risk of mediocrity. We know the risk of ending up as poachers and plagiarists.

And yet, how can we not? Years after our first experience of them, the monsoons still turn us from horizontal to vertical beings. There we are, full of self-important plans and carefully-constructed identities, busily going about our lives. And suddenly, we’re Proper Nouns no longer; just very soggy beings, gasping, laughing, scrabbling for shelter. The rains make us denizens of this moment. Inhabitants of the same planet. They’re levelers. They destabilize us democratically—you, me, ‘the ficus/… knocked off the ledge’ and ‘the little moths/ with speckled wings’, as a young poet Kuhu Joshi puts it.

A summer world is prose. A monsoon shower is a lyric poem. The former is stuffy, respectable, linear. The latter is a slap of wet surprise. Once you’ve been ambushed by a really good poem, you’re drenched for life. Your inner weather is never quite the same again. Being ambushed by an Indian monsoon is quite the same. ‘Even people seem to become taller in the rain,’ says Gulzar.

There’s ecstasy in the air. And it has to do with a kind of irrepressible fecundity. And the promise that even devastation can, somehow, be a kind of greenness. As you mourn the fallen gulmohur down the road, the rain’s hypnotic murmur reminds you it isn’t the end of the story. ‘But sure as the turning days/ There will be other trees/ Wet with rain…/Leaves born with new/ Lines on their palms’, writes Manohar Shetty.

The rains remind us of a less complicated world. A bit like a childhood we all dimly remember, even if we never experienced. An imagined innocence? Perhaps. But I love it all the same, the sense of belonging to a time ‘when the skies were crazier,/ love purer,/ life simpler,/ when the heart was Malabar,/ the spirit Arabian,/ desire Coromandel,/ laughter more Gene Kelly,/ and words like baarish/ and mazhai/ were headier, truer’.

There are the rituals too. Comforting ones, like adrak chai. And there’s the comfort of turning archetypal ourselves. When we walk the streets hand-in-hand, we know we’re enacting the old lover archetype (think Raj Kapoor-Nargis and ‘Pyaar hua ikraar hua’). When we decide it’s time for bhajiyas, we know there are thousands of households nursing the very same intention. Boundaries blur. Hierarchies fall away. When we look at a solemn schoolboy trudging down the lane, we’re there with him, lost in the magic of a world turned aquarium. (And then Elizabeth Coatsworth’s exuberant rhyme returns from some dim recess of the mind: ‘a thunderstorm/ a dunder storm/ a blunder storm…a plunder storm/ a wonder storm’!)

Indian rains are leakier than most. And they invite us to spring a leak too. They drop us from our heads into our bodies. And they remind us of what pleasure that leakage can be! They remind us that we are capable of thinking with every singing cell and yodeling pore of our rain-sodden beings; that human intelligence is deeply, happily visceral. ‘There is no better season in which/ to weave the body’s history,’ writes the Tamil poet Kutti Revathi.

It is not all soft-focus romance and pakoras, of course. There’s room for lament and critique too. ‘Why did we think it was trivial/ that it would rain every summer…?’ asks Mamang Dai in an elegiac poem about northeastern India. For the world changes, and suddenly one day, there’s a new menace in the air: ‘the footfall of soldiers’ begins to grow, even as ‘weapons are multiplying in the forest’. For all their foreverness, the rains can also abscond, as Nabina Das’ poem reminds us: ‘Tell me where trees go to rot, rivers migrate, farmers commit suicide for lack of forever-rain?’

And still, the rains always manage to stay original. Little surprise that so many spiritual initiations in yogic, tantric and shamanic traditions, involve water. Or that Christian baptism and Islamic purification rituals employ it. Rainwater, in particular, seems potent, catalytic. It washes off grimy irrelevance; it even seems to alter chemistry. In a savage poem about a traumatized world, EV Ramakrishnan turns to the rain for revelation and clarity: ‘You long,’ he writes ‘for the script of the slanted rain on the plain/ to tell you the difference between a prayer/ and a false affidavit.’

It’s possible to turn blasé about other seasons. We can ignore them. Increase fan-speeds and air-cooling in the summer. Grab an extra sweater in January. But the rains compel us to become listeners. No umbrella, raincoat or waterproof paint will keep them out. And somewhere, we recognize that to banish them would be folly. Vladimir Nabokov said, ‘Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.’ But do we really want it to? Here’s one season we can’t browbeat, and we have a hunch that’s a good thing. The Hindi poet Mangalesh Dabral writes: ‘outside a breeze was blowing,/ there was a little light,/ a bicycle stood in the rain,/ a child was coming home/ I wrote a poem,/ which had no breeze, no light/ no bicycle, no child/ and/ no door’. Keeping out the rain is to keep the doors shut. Our lives, we know, will be the poorer for it. Much poorer.

Yes, it’s the Bad Hair Season. The E.coli Season. The Season of Bread-Mould and Wobbly WIFI. And yet, it is indefinably more. It it is the season to be unmade, to allow plans to melt away. Time to be stilled. Time to be liquefied. Time to allow the heart to sing, and time to listen to its song. Time to ‘rub rain into every pore’, as poet Sarabjeet Garcha writes, ‘…so there’s nothing between you and the sleep of trees.’

India@75, Looking at 100: A country capable of diversity sans discrimination
THE INDIAN EXPRESS, DECEMBER 7, 2022

The Language of Sorrow
THE INDIAN EXPRESS, JUNE 20, 2021

Song Sung Blue: The End As A New Beginning
OUTLOOK, January 2, 2022

‘This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper,’ the poet T.S. Eliot wrote a century ago. Two centuries before him, Alexander Pope spoke of the world ending with a ‘yawn’ – after a long pandemic of dullness.

If those are doomsday symptoms, we can happily conclude we’re far from it. The phantasmagoria we’re seeing today was surely dreamt up by a more reptilian brain. What else could have conjured up such a cocktail of doom, with every ingredient associated with retribution and celestial wrath ─ pestilence, death, floods, cyclones, earthquakes and locusts alongside burning forests, clinical depressions, scorched relationships and combusted jobs?

One thing is clear: for the breath-rationed and the bereaved, this isn’t the time of the whimper. Or the yawn. The Covid era is one of the gasp.

And so, we reach the end of yet another year – at the end of which we probably know more about the Greek alphabet than the virus. I have lost several dear to me. Some haven’t. But we’ve all had our share of thoughts about endings. I read the Sartre play decades ago. But when the doors slammed shut, and we were left with the mind-numbing chatter of our minds, the phrase that rang catatonically through my days was ‘No Exit’. Energetically, this was stasis. Scripturally, this was pralaya. Experientially, this was the dead-end.

Witnesses no longer, we were participants – perpetrators, victims, agents, colluders, confronted by the finite rhythms of our breath, and the grim consequences of collective irresponsibility. No hands were unsoiled. No gaze was innocent.

Blame games and conspiracy theories have abounded. But shifts have happened too. Almost everyone, irrespective of age or cultural background, has done some brand of life audit. ‘I am dying,’ a terminally-ill woman once told a Tibetan monk. ‘So are we all,’ he replied, and because he spoke from daily experience, not fridge-magnet wisdom, she instantly trusted him to guide her through her death process. Mortality has always looked us in the face. But it’s not just the Tibetan monk of the anecdote who knows it today; we are all far more sharply aware that the cadaver’s face could be our own. And Shiva’s tandava is the dance of freedom we might be capable of if we knew how to be present at our own cremations. In short, if we knew how to be responsible for our own lives — and deaths.

With the imminence of death, the experience of life grows sharper. I know an octogenarian who suddenly found herself writing poetry fast and furiously these past two years. Friends seem to be picking up long-forgotten musical instruments, tennis rackets and reading lists, trying to heal festering rifts in relationships, changing the ground rules of their work lives, calling forgotten friends, gardening, making time for meditation, moving out of big cities, walking the beach.

And what has become of viraha – that knife-edge of separation, celebrated by so much secular and sacred literature? I have found myself thinking recurrently about Meghaduta, that classic lyric love poem by Kalidasa, in which an exiled lover asks a passing cloud to deliver a love message to his wife. But the Cloud has taken on an entirely new meaning for us today. And with the everydayness of Zoom and WhatsApp, we have all turned, matter-of-factly, into time travelers. Even while our physical doors were shut, our digital windows have been open to the world. A radical shift has been embraced with staggering ease.

As barriers of space and time have been tossed neatly out of the window, the human imagination will surely never be the same again. Was it the spiritual teacher, Mooji, who said that learning to live apart in time is learning to live together in eternity? I’m beginning to suspect we might have had a foretaste of that eternity.

What also interests me is how many people seem to be talking of listening to the heart and healing inner wounds. What was seen as mere escapism, the resort of dilettantes and New Agers, is now gradually part of an urgent process of self-recovery. What’s more, in attending to the gangrenous pain of psychological issues and spiritual bottlenecks, something could well be shifting. In the alchemy of attention, the heart rejoices. Wounds can turn magical, even sacred. ‘The wound is the place where the Light enters you,’ Rumi said (in what is now a much-recycled WhatsApp message). If a finger on a button can annihilate the world, perhaps one finger can save it? If we retrieved all the life energy that we kept frozen in pockets of pain, hurt and mistrust, perhaps that finger could be ours? That could well be the power of the sovereign human being, no longer willing to outsource agency and responsibility for her life.

Yes, we hear the word ‘apocalypse’ everywhere around us. But the thing about being Indian is that we don’t believe in endings, do we? We don’t really believe in anything so conveniently terminal. The Tibetan idea of the bardo – as an interval, a state of in-betweenness not just between lifetimes, but between breaths – has always resonated deeply with me. And as seeker and poet, I have long been fascinated by commas rather than full stops.

I have no doubt that caterpillar dreams turn apocalyptic when they dissolve into green mush in their cocoons. It must be a bit like turning from observer to subject. Or from dynamic alchemist to the swirling contents in a conical flask. Or to use a Biblical image, the belly of the whale. A nightmare, yes. But is it the end, or the interregnum, the reboot, the bardo?

The Sanskrit dramatists tell us life has its tragic moments, but no tragic endings. We aren’t the land of King Lear and Oedipus, because we have always known that fallen heroes get a chance to rewrite their scripts – even if it is in another lifetime. Scholar Bihani Sarkar points out that classical Sanskrit playwrights invariably have ‘tragic middles’ in their plays. These are the moments of rupture when everything falls apart – identities are questioned, ethical systems turn turtle, existential questions raise their heads, every nightmare of abandonment, separation, loss and despair is played out. But it is still the middle. The pause. The other half of the play is still to unfold.

And it does – ensuring that separation is healed by union, spiritual barrenness by love and resolution. But it is not a simply ‘happily ever after’ ending either. For it is not merely circumstances that have altered. After the ‘tragic middle’, we are irrevocably altered too.

Perhaps the Covid moment, then, is our bardo. The moment when we see — upfront and un-photoshopped — the grimy consequences of living with fragmented gazes. We’d like to blame our gods, our ancestors, our parents, our politicians, each other. But for how long? Until we ‘all fall down’, as the old nursery rhyme goes? Perhaps it is time to abandon the playground politics? Time to embrace a new way of engaging with the world, rooted in the knowledge that the fundamental problem is our own divided, hierarchical minds?

The apocalyptic future is for those who live in the past. For those who live in memory. ‘We wake daily to yesterday’, I wrote in a recent poem, a fragment of which I reproduce here — a memo to myself I turn to when I find myself gnashing my teeth over current affairs:

We wake daily to yesterday….

And the apocalypse is where it always was:

in the tiger-infested, guerrilla-stalked heart

we’ve carried around forever

and even the dictator’s face

is a cartoon

we drew one night,

drunk

and wildly unoriginal,

and kept meaning to erase,

except that we somehow got

busy.

(How did we get so busy?)

Upside-downnness, we are told, is a sign of the quickening of the spirit. Mystic poets down the ages have used the language of absurdity and opaque paradox – ulatbaasi or sandhyabhasha, twilight language — to speak of this. ‘A tree with its branches in the earth,/ Its roots in the sky,’ says Kabir. ‘An ant flew into the sky/ She swallowed the sun,’ says Muktabai. ‘The deer with the tiger’s head,/ the tiger with the deer’s head,’ says Allama Prabhu, in a line reminiscent of the Isaiah image: ‘The wolf shall live with the lamb.’ The seventeenth century mystic Tukaram says: ‘When he comes out of the blue/ a meteorite/ shattering your home/ be sure/ god is visiting you.’

If ‘god’ is a loaded word, we could try ‘life’ instead. The weather is cyclonic. Imagine the planet lurching and pitching in a galactic storm. Pots and pans, furniture and microwaves, loved ones and livelihoods are flying around the room. When they settle, the map of our lives will look different. What’s more, we will bedifferent. No one’s the same after a tempest.

But there’s some consolation in knowing that for the great goddess, Life, it’s just another day in Her crazy laboratory.

Bhakti Poetry Is Much More Than Bedtime Prayer For Sacred Love, OUTLOOK, February 11, 2024

Here below is a roadmap by poets who remind us that romantic and spiritual love are not so different, after all.

This, then, is what time does to human love: it turns infatuation into inclusiveness; erotic flirtation into an expansive embrace. Consider how tenth-century Tamil mystic Nammalvar’s heroine is alchemized from yearning to wisdom and wholeness. Her bewildered mother exclaims: ‘My little girl says,/ ‘I’ve no relatives here/ and everyone here is my relative.’ And again, ‘My girl, who’s just learning to speak, says/”I’m beyond all learning…/ I’m the cause of all learning/ I end all learning.’’ This is no longer the little girl lost in adolescent dreams. This is no longer the seeker as pining nayika. This is the woman as sage—strong, complete, lacking for nothing.

‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’, said Emily Dickinson. On 20 May, when I heard of the Urdu poet Tarannum Riyaz’s death, I realized there was indeed a strangely formal composure in the chill of aftershock, even as lines from Riyaz’s poem replayed themselves in the mind: ‘One should keep phoning friends./ If one loses touch… the friend himself may no longer be around.’

The Hindi poet Mangalesh Dabral, who died last December, also had a poem on telephones: ‘This Number Does Not Exist’. An ironic symmetry. It helped to think of symmetry in verse, given that there seemed little evidence of it elsewhere. The other line that kept looping back was, unsurprisingly, from Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem: ‘What passing bells for those who die as cattle?’

The problem with grief in these times is its arrhythmia: the randomness, the absence of dignity, ceremony, closure, the isolation that allows for no shared cycles of mourning. Then there’s the volume: scarcely has one cremated one memory, shoveled the earth over one gaping crater, when another appears.

My personal coping strategies have been eclectic, mainly because what works one day simply doesn’t work the next. In a recent poem, I wrote: ‘Meaning won’t help us (never has)/ but rhythms will’. As I look for new daily strategies for equipoise, I try to keep the faith in rhythms, hoping their mix of inevitability and surprise will offer some anchorage.

My first, utterly unoriginal consolation has been the vegetal world. Something about the green poise of plants, the stoic composure of trees, can remind you that love is not just about the stickiness of human affection, but a vaster, more impersonal knowledge of self. Trees seem to know something that I can wrap my heart around only fleetingly: that separation is a myth; that twig, in some very real way, is forest.

Poems help, too. You read them, I realise, to be haunted. So that they can bleed into your marrow and hum in your veins when you’re under the bedcovers, looking for a reason to climb out. You read poems in the faith that their fevered rhythms of repetition will rescue you when other rhythms fail.

In her ‘Transcendental Etude’, the American poet Adrienne Rich writes of the importance of taking off sometimes from ‘the argument and jargon in a room’. This makes deep sense to me now. When grief is raw, it is easy to reach for readymade language: blame games, morality tales, medieval archetypes of villainy and heroism. Rage – a wonderful source of clarity and courage – can give way to a foaming reactivity, so often mistaken for moral vigilance and political commitment. But a visionary activism emerges from a deeper place of what I think of as ‘spinefulness’ – one that allows for critique without contempt, spirited resistance without hatred.

Honouring one’s grief sometimes means being inarticulate – at least for a time. It entails stammering. (The Malayalam poet K Satchidanandan has a memorable anthem to this). It entails turning hoarse. But quiet is not quietism. Grief is not defeatism. To be in a hurry to turn pain into blame is to apply band-aid on a festering abscess. Sometimes one has to fall into that ‘rift in the Great Nebula’, says Rich, to find ‘a severer listening’. One lets go of old liturgies, less fluent truths, to arrive at a deeper, less fragmented, more inclusive understanding of self, community and world. And as one is ‘cleansed/ of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments…’, one begins to hear one’s own clarity. One’s own voice. One’s own serrated muteness.

And of course, honoring grief is also about remembering. Nourished though I am by the Buddha’s counsel on impermanence, it helps me to think of those I have lost, in all their blazing singularity — the timbre of a laugh, the angle of slippers outside a bathroom door, the spectacles by the bedside. In that unfinishedness, there is the knife-edge of pain. But there is also the jaunty imprint of personhood. Life in luminous suspended animation. The obstinate ‘only-this-ness’ of human love.

And finally, it helps to take a conscious break from language. The word ‘meditation’ can seem a dauntingly solemn business at times. Call it daydreaming, ‘sitting around, doing nothing’, or what you will, but a daily non-verbal practice can help lay to rest that ancient muddle of grudge, wounded ancestral memory, frozenness and mistrust that one mistakes for oneself. The break from social media platforms, cellphones, laptops, even conversations, offers a way to walk a path between the high-decibel hum of mass consciousness and the cavernous dark into which all love and meaning seem to vanish. It is a way to recover a flickering sovereignty.

Grief has its own language – of damp, of chill, of shadow. It is not the language of daytime reasoning. Grief is a thing with a soft body and calcareous shell. A mollusk. It takes underwater diving to hear its language. But when you pay it homage, you begin to emerge into an altered daylight — a sunlit emptiness, cautious, but less rigid, willing to be startled, if not seduced, by springtime again.

For the ‘hour of lead’ does not last forever. Even in the glacial numbness of shock, says Dickinson, ‘Recollect the snow,/ First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go.’

I see India at hundred as confident, joyous, secure in its composite cultural identity. Aware that diversity is to be prized, not policed. Aware that plurality is to be embraced, rather than erased. Aware that Indianness is an inheritance that is falsified as soon as it is rigidly defined.

A dream? Perhaps. But I am poet enough to believe in the alchemical power of dream.

A way to celebrate our roots without turning parochial. A way to become world citizens without compromising our cultural signature. A way to become conduits rather than territorial custodians, collaborators rather than passive inheritors. Instead of waving flags, these poets tell us there is another way to reclaim our spine.

At the close of the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira finds every moral certainty shattered. The poet Vyasa offers us a vision of a many-sided truth—one that lies beyond polarities of dark and light, virtue and vice. A faithful dog offers a flickering insight that an unreasonable love might be the only way to navigate a world ravaged by absolutist binaries. This is not mere ethical relativism; it is an ability to see the power of the ‘and’, rather than ‘either’ and ‘or’. It is a reminder that ‘only the complicated, ambiguous victories are worth having’ (in contemporary poet Vijay Seshadri’s words). The originality of this insight could well be one of India’s greatest gifts to the world.

Consider, too, the Bhakti poets. There are many reasons to celebrate these free-spirited questors. For one, they are proud upstarts, not card-carrying gatekeepers; their spirituality is based on achievement, not ascription. They hail from varied caste, class, gender, language and sectarian backgrounds, reminding us of the plural and inclusive aspects of our spiritual genealogy.

Moreover, they remind us of the power of the reclaimed heart and the examined life. They journey into every inconvenient crevice in their psyches, aware that all darkness can be transformed by the act of acknowledgement and inclusion. This makes them inspirational for any culture seeking to heal its wounds and move forward, without getting mired in rage, rancor or recrimination.

Thirdly, their finest poems do not present easy hierarchies between flesh and spirit. While Basavanna declares that the body is ‘the moving temple’, Chandidas proclaims that ‘man is the greatest Truth of all’. The women dreamers are equally outspoken. Janabai asserts, ‘I eat god, I drink god, I sleep on god’, while Soyarabai affirms that the divine is not bloodless: ‘If menstrual blood makes me impure/ tell me who was not born of that blood.’ Collectively, they offer us a less divided gaze, reminding us that we are dual citizens of earth and sky, body and mind, the immanent and the transcendent. The path to wholeness is not in amputation, but in integration.

Above all, these poets remind us that dissent is never disloyalty. They are not meek worshippers; they are radical improvisers who question every hierarchy—including the one between the human and the divine. The ninda stuti, a tantrum in verse, is a wonderful poetic genre where the seeker has the license to argue freely with god. Janabai speaks of a god who does the dishes and washes her hair. ‘He’s the master,’ says the poet, Annamacharya, but adds with irrefutable logic: ‘He’s my slave.’ God here is not boss; he’s birthright.

The Bhakti poets quarrel with their gods, swear at them, cannibalize them, make love to them, and sometimes even dispense with them. Nothing is taboo, nothing sacrilegious, because the underlying premise is simple: the self and other are cannot be kept apart. The union is simply a matter of time. Here is a matchless legacy of spiritual freedom and egalitarianism—one that could well a trailblazing offering to the world.

And yet, the bhaktas’ rage stems from love, not ridicule. Even while they disagree with their gods, they never stop loving them. In a world where we are prone to despise those with whom we disagree, these poets offer us a vision unstained by derision. Intimacy is the basis of their vision. For them, critique is never contempt—yet another vital contribution to a planet besieged by a creaky paradigm of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. For the bhakti poet, there is no ‘versus’, because there is no ‘them’. There is no outsider, no adversary, because there is, indeed, no ‘other’. God is simply treated as disobedient member of one’s own family!

Ours is a living civilizational legacy, not a fossilized one. Our ecstatic and contemplative spiritual traditions are alive and well; our holistic healing systems and our traditional arts remain vibrant; our capacity to honour the divine feminine (and not just the ‘sky gods’) endures; and our linguistic and cultural diversity lives not in museums but on streets, in homes, in hearts. Much is already in place. What remains is the need to stop flattening our indefinable unity into an unimaginative uniformity; to stop turning difference into discrimination; and to stop vilifying any group in order to speak our multidimensional truth.

I envision India at hundred as not merely a politically independent nation, but one that has outgrown an adolescent trauma of shame, guilt and finger-pointing. That offers the world its radiant template of spiritual freedom and cultural democracy. That holds colliding perspectives in harmony. That refuses to demonize an imagined ‘other’, knowing that intimacy is the basis of human life—more than ever in the new global village.

It would be a tragedy to reduce the grandeur of this vision to slogan and bumper sticker. It is time to embody it.

The Language of Sorrow
THE INDIAN EXPRESS, JUNE 20, 2021

For the ‘hour of lead’ does not last forever. Even in the glacial numbness of shock, says Dickinson, ‘Recollect the snow,/ First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go.’

Older Articles

Why Poetry? in Man’s World, 2005

Indianness in The Hindu, 2003

Babble-gum in The Times of India

Ladies Special: Three Columns from Time Out, Mumbai

Poetry and Craft in The Times of India, 2005

© Arundhathi Subramaniam

Why Poetry?

Man’s World, 2005

“You write poetry? How nice. Now when are you going to publish your first novel?” I’ve heard the question more often than I can remember. The real question is: why poetry? Why on earth poetry?

My response is to grin sheepishly and mumble something about not really being a fiction person, about believing that poetry offers more challenges than I can negotiate in a lifetime, about being wary of the horizontal seductions of narrative. But it’s too late. By that time my questioner has invariably lost interest and has moved on to what s(h)e considers less fluffy matters (like the Sensex, the cricket scores, ICICI bonds, Kurdish refugees), and I humbly lapse into silence (or into poetry, which to my questioner is the same thing anyway).

A couple of months ago, a senior colleague at the cultural centre I work in actually looked at me with compassion and said, “But you really should try your hand at the novel, my dear. I’d like to see you do something with your life.” The implication was loud and clear: devote a lifetime to poetry? What a loser!

Perhaps she isn’t far from the truth. After all, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to write poetry. It doesn’t improve the rabi crop yield or the GNP or the quality of people’s sex lives. Recent American researchers claim that poets actually die sooner than other species of writers. (Terminal invisibility has a way of doing that.) And then, of course, everyone stays clear of you: readers and publishers in particular. You rarely see a royalty cheque. If you crave for fame, you’ve got to be willing to do something truly spectacular — like die a picturesque death with a bitter entry in your journal about preferring death to mediocrity. After that, if you’re lucky, some folk will leaf desultorily through your work (lucky you – posthumous or prehumous, you’re actually getting read), shake their heads sadly, and say, “Good poets die young”. But woe betide you if you live past the age of 33. There’s nothing as vulgar as a live middle-aged poet.

You get the picture. Basically, you’re a bit of a dowd and the sooner you accept it the better. Once you realise that anonymity has its advantages, you might actually start enjoying yourself.

How did we get here? When did poetry become passe? Why did we decide poetry was adolescent activity and fiction the adult genre? Good questions. Here’s why (or so I believe).

1. Because everyone endlessly paraphrased ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ in school exams till they began to associate daffodils with dyspepsia. 2. Because few believe any poetry has been written since the 19^th century. 3. Because those who do believe in the existence of 20th century poetry think it’s esoteric and difficult. 4. Because most folk believe that poetry without rhyme is no fun. 5. Because most believe that free verse is self-indulgent stuff that anyone can do without much effort.

No, it’s not my mission to evangelise. I’m not going to say poetry is good for the soul to those who prefer to take chicken soup for that kind of thing. But yes, I do think American poet Randall Jarrell had a point when he pointed out that it’s not that people have stopped reading poetry because they find it difficult, just that people find poetry difficult because they’ve stopped reading it.

Of course, there’s plenty of bad poetry – as there are bad movies and lousy Thai restaurants. But if we aren’t put off cinema and Thai cuisine forever, why on earth have we sworn a lifetime of abstinence from poetry?

I’d like to share an unsettling hunch that has been with me for a while. I believe that one of the foremost reasons for poetry being unfashionable is the fact that we live in an age when it is increasingly difficult to hear oneself. An age that prioritises stridency over tentativeness, certainty over doubt, statement over question, certainty over ambiguity, self-projection over self-exploration, function over form. In the age of the megaphone, it’s easy to forget the need for a murmur. Poetry is a form for intimate spaces – for galleries and coffee shops, rather than the stadium and the auditorium. It is a form that, almost by definition, must speak softly. If it is to increase its volume, it distorts its own reality. Tone is its raison d’etre — if its minute shifts of register are ironed out, it runs the risk of losing its integrity.

Unlike prose that lives exclusively on paper, poetry is still a form meant for the spoken voice – but emphatically not for the raised voice. Poetry connects with our interiority, but not through the jingoistic reiteration strategies of advertising and propaganda. Poetry relies on an older magic. Its guile lies in taking you unawares – either by seeping insidiously into your pores, or by giving you that sharp sudden jolt of surprised recognition. Its effects are rarely visible, almost never quantifiable. And yet, it is capable of creating major shifts along your internal fault lines.

The culture of utilitarianism has taken over our lives more comprehensively than we realise. We live by irreconcilable dichotomies: work and play, day and night, weekdays and weekends, truth and beauty, precision and passion, ethics and entertainment, science and art, fact and fiction, prose and poetry, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Poetry disrupts these smug oppositional categories. It’s about allowing lunar concerns into your day. About bringing question marks rather than full stops into your life.

And if that makes life difficult for the reader, let me add that it isn’t easy for the poet either. I believe that those with some amount of verbal dexterity have a particularly important responsibility towards themselves. The responsibility not to allow their gift to turn into glibness. Not to allow that capacity to illuminate and clarify through language to turn into a love of their own voices. Not to allow the impulse to explore a world of word, rhythm and sound to turn into a self-aggrandising desire to impress, to conquer.

Words don’t come easy. And when they do, they’re meant to be watched, not censoriously, but with caution. Which explains why all writers are word-watchers before they are wordsmiths. They know that old secret only too well – that we don’t merely use language; we are also used by it.

Words are a means of making ourselves vulnerable – frequently to each other, but also to ourselves. For far too long we have used them as weapons, as armours, as territorial markers. And with every verbal parry and thrust, with every dogmatic full stop, we move further away from the possibility of opening ourselves to growth. To surprise. To the startling confrontation of self with self.

Which is what poetry – when it works – is all about.

Why write poetry? That’s why.

Indianness

‘The Hindu’, April 2003

It was Thomas a Kempis who said he’d rather experience contrition than know how to define it. It is a sentiment I’m beginning to feel more and more deeply about particularly in relation to the whole question of ‘Indianness’.

There have always been self-appointed experts on the subject, of course. State propaganda, films, television soaps and advertisements have been doling out prescriptions for a long time. To uncritically applaud the country’s nuclear muscle seems to be one way of being Indian. To metamorphose from miniskirts to saris seems to be the popular media’s strategy of shedding Western contamination and becoming the real McCoy Indian woman. Local political parties believe Indianness can be acquired by banning Valentine’s Day and renaming the Prince of Wales Museum the ‘Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya’.

Then, of course, there are the myriad provincial strands of the cultural establishment. There are the local ‘back to our roots’ obscurantists who want classical dancers and musicians to be emissaries of a ‘pure untainted’ Indian culture. Or those who believe Indian theatre must draw on traditional indigenous idioms if it is to be meaningful and anchored.

And finally, there is the nativist litarary bastion. My generation may like to believe that the whole question of English being an Indian language is old hat. We may believe it’s been proved that English is as Indian as cricket or democracy. And yet, the same argument reinvents itself time and again in all sorts of insidious avatars. There’s a virtual knee-jerk reaction to English poetry in India in some circles, for instance, evinced in the impulse to instantly deem it precious, self-conscious, esoteric, navel-gazing — and, of course, nowhere as earthy, throbbing and vital (read ‘as Indian’) as poetry in other Indian languages.

If the Indian writer in English has the local linguistic reactionaries to contend with, she also has to negotiate another brand of ‘Indianness’ expert – a certain species of Western cultural commentator. An Italian friend tells me that an academic journal in Milan recently bemoaned the ‘new-Victorian’ hangover of Indian poetry in English, its inability to come of age, the absence of a strong representative voice (as exemplified by Rushdie in the novel). And just last year, a similar view was endorsed by a reviewer in ‘Poetry Wales’ who lamented the lack of an identifiably ‘Indian’ element in English poetry in India, so unlike the robust patois of Caribbean poetry. These are not isolated instances; they are part of a ‘not-quite-Indian enough’ chorus that has been around quite a long while. The trope of the simpering slavishly mimicking Peter Sellers brand of Western Oriental Gentleman reinvents itself in all these arguments. It will evidently take time for a certain kind of Western reader to accept that ‘the literatures of the world are not’, as Adil Jussawalla puts it (in his introduction to ‘New Writing in India’), ‘colonies in his empire of taste’.

I believe it is important to periodically reassert one’s resistance to this quest for the ‘identifiably Indian’ – a quest that tells us more about the seeker than the sought. Underlying it, clearly, is another guise of colonialism, based on the premise that there is a core Indianness that can and should be identified, labelled, itemised and brandished like a visa (to what might seem like Destination Literary Paradise but is actually a literary ghetto). Not so very different, after all, from the fundamentalists back home who are forever devising Procrustean means to arrive at unitary cultural identities.

What this kind of criticism ends up doing frequently is to reduce the role of the Indian artist to that of a vendor of exotica, ‘an alterity-manufacturing machine’. Will roughening our cadences and splitting our infinitives establish our distance from our colonial history? Do we still secretly believe that we must write about earthquakes in Bhuj, wars in Kargil, yogis in the Himalayas and pot-bellied children on pavements to prove our credentials as authentic Indians? Do we have to arrive at a cleverly packaged Orientalist formula to be artistically kosher, to prove that we belong? Are we in fact back to the stage of having to prove that English is our language? That we have the right to speak it the way we want? That each one of us – whether our idioms are mandarin or demotic – are as much part of the same bhel-puri that typifies the complexity of the Indian cultural experience?

I remember a conversation a couple of years ago with a group of Germans interested in finding out about ‘cutting edge’ work in the Indian arts. I realised then all over again just how vexed this whole business of Indianness actually is. I also realised just how long it would take an outsider to any culture to understand the complex negotiations that its people make with their cultural inheritance. For what might seem boldly transgressive to the outside eye could well be a shallow or derivative artistic endeavour within a certain context. Likewise, what may seem conservative to the outside observer may well represent a significant moment in a particular milieu.

A Hindi film in a grittily realist mode, for instance, is likely to be regarded as far more audacious in India than the flamboyant kitschy musical film that the West now regards as bold Bollywood pastiche. Why, given the complexity of the Indian cultural scene, we know that a Gujarati playwright writing a social realist play is clearly exercising a choice quite different from a Marathi playwright doing the same. An Indian poet in English employing an idiom that seems a trifle formal or self-conscious to a Western reader may actually be negotiating her way around the eroded linguistic terrain of the popular media and political propaganda. She may also be trying to walk that perennially challenging tightrope between what Adrienne Rich calls the ‘non-referential’ and the ‘paraphrasable’.

In his deeply insightful introduction to his book, ‘Lives of the Poets’, publisher and writer Michael Schmidt says that poetry is an art that flourishes when language itself is interrogated. And one may add that there’s no telling how many conceivable ways there might be of interrogating language. Schmidt also says that ‘the greatest reader in the world has a primary task: ‘to set a poem free’. For this to be accomplished, he says, ‘the reader must hear it fully’. To hear a poem fully, of course, one has to listen to the poem itself, not to some pat mantras and preconceived notions about poetic practice that one applies routinely to every work one encounters.

If becoming an artist is a process of growing into oneself, then there is, of course, never a question of arriving. As a writer, I believe finding my voice is part of a journey of endlessly deferred discovery. Yes, I do hope that in the process my voice does get more honest, more supple, more creative, more ‘me’.

And in this deeper quest for authenticity – of a very different kind from the kind discussed earlier – I’ve always felt empowered by Borges’ remark in his Harvard Lectures. None of us need feel anxious about trying to be contemporary, he assures us, because none of us has yet figured out the magic formula of living in the past or the future. And applying the same logic to cultural identity, I’ve decided Indianness is one of those things I needn’t worry about. I simply am – whether I like it or not – as Indian as they come.

Babble-gum

The Times of India

‘Love poems, he says, are not easy to write/ because they’ve all been written before,’ wrote the poet, A K Ramanujan, and promptly proceeded to write one himself.

It’s a paradox that poets – and mystics – are familiar with. Everything that needs to be said has been said before. (Pundits tell us India said it all before anywhere else, so the historical burden’s redoubled.) And it’s always been said better than you could ever say it. So why add your discordant quaver to the symphony?

Good question. But one designed to silence you. Poets say the same things time and again, like the rest of humanity, because they need to. And what’s life without a little live birdsong?

The challenge, of course, is to make birdsong sound new – or at least, immediate – each time round. ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,’ wrote Shakespeare in a line that

remains unforgettable because that’s not the way mistress’ eyes are conventionally supposed to look. ‘It’s all one skin and bone,/ one piss and shit,/ one blood, one meat./ From one drop, a universe,’ wrote Kabir and you remember that too because you don’t expect such violent diction from a saint-poet.

The business of making things sound like they’ve never been said before requires faith. Why? Because the scenario is pretty apocalyptic: language hardening into cliché all around you, thoughts turning into truisms even before they’re out of your head, conversations sounding like replays of eighties’ sitcoms, every moment a surrender to habit, to the crushing tyranny of history.

To believe that the same banal dank substance called language is capable of putting forth something green and unexpected an act of faith. It’s about accepting the miracle of the lotus in the mud marsh (except that image is too eroded to surprise us anymore!) It’s about believing you can recover the taste of cinnamon in a much-champed, molar-ravaged pellet of ‘babble-gum’.

It also requires guile. Reinventing love poetry, for instance, takes not just linguistic techno-savvy, but the cunning to find space for your utterance where none seems to exist. And so poet C P Surendran offers us the startling image of the heart as a grenade, Dinyar Godrej likens love to kiwi fruit, and Arun Kolatkar turns an amorous streetside scene of lice-removal into pure music: ‘her fairy fingers run through his hair/ producing arpeggios of lice/ and harmonics of nits’.

Faith, guile, and not least, innocence. To see the same ‘thing’ as everyone else, but to see it transfigured, requires innocence – or at least the willingness to be surprised. When Malayalam poet K Satchidanandan envisions a new world, he doesn’t churn out trite phrases about ‘critiquing fundamentalism’ and ‘rejecting illiberalism’. He gives us, instead, the arresting metaphor of the ‘stammer’: ‘Stammer is the silence that falls/ between the word and its meaning…./ God too must have stammered/ when He created Man./ That is why all the words of man/ carry different meanings.’

Poetry doesn’t merely change the way we look at language, but the way we look at the world. In a stroke Satchidanandan transforms the stammer from a speech defect into a paradigm for our times, a more generous and inclusive way of living on this planet.

It’s a reminder of the triumph of the fine-tuned image over the blunted implements of ideology, of poetry over propaganda. Birdsong over babble.

Ladies’ Special

Time Out Column 22

What’s it about – this business of ‘finding your voice’ as a writer? For ages, it sounded pretentious to me. Joan-of-Arcish. Do we all babble in tongues until we suddenly find one that sounds like our own?

The answer to that, I admit, is yes. It took me aeons to realize that I’ve sleepwalked so long that I’ve spent a good part of my life in an unconscious séance. Other voices spoke through me for decades. They still do in unwary moments. I’m just a little more alert to them now. Whose voices? The dead white men of the literary canon? Well, yes. But also other voices of authority – teachers, parents, thinkers, writers, columnists, hairdressers… All the censorious voices that tell you how to be yourself.

From your first waking moment to your last, all you negotiate is opinion. How do you stop listening to that melee of privileged wisdom and find out how you sound? The answer is, with difficulty. You can never be as pristine as asli ghee or the Noble Savage. But the effort’s worth it.

I know that it personally took me a long time to accept that it wasn’t unfeminine to enjoy intellectual rigour in poetry, and it wasn’t anti-modern to want emotion in it either. Sounds pretty basic. But it sometimes takes that long to realize that you’ve internalized a divisive either-or aesthetic that’s eating up your innards!

As poetry editor, I keep discovering voices that go against the grain of their times, and are the richer for it. Quirky, even unfashionable voices, and memorable for that very reason. I think of Tamil poet Manushya Puthiran’s hushed poetics that records the silences of middle-class homes. Or environmental Malayalam poet Veerankutty who writes a quiet, ‘gently persuasive’ political poetry to puncture the bombast of our public life. Or Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan who spent two years in solitary confinement for his Maoist Naxalite politics. His poetry speaks of his mother’s laughter, the clang of the village school bell, the sound of prison gates. But it’s shot through with a deep silence – an abiding sense of the unspoken, perhaps the unspeakable.

There will always be writers who surprise us – who sing when we expect them to weep, murmur when we expect them to rant, speak when it would be wiser to hold their tongues. And none of those choices came easy.

A couple of caveats. After much unearthing, you could well find your ‘discovered’ voice sounds uncannily like someone else’s! That’s surely what Borges meant when he said writers invent their own precursors. But so what? Invented precursors are always preferable to inherited ones.

And truth be told, it’s an endlessly deferred treasure-hunt. You get ‘warm’ and ‘warmer’, only to discover something they should have taught you in kindergarten: it takes forever and a day – and a little more – to grow into yourself.

The rest is laryngitis…

Ladies Special

Time Out Column

My friend says he’d always seen himself as a scholar. Then he discovered an even more primary identity – father. “Now I just want to hang around my kids,” he says. “Learning is still important. It’s just that I’m learning differently.”

Self-definitions are tricky things. They’ve tripped me up too. My primary definition, I believed (since Class Three), was ‘poet’. The rest of my life was about waiting for others to recognize the fact.

By the time some did, that self-definition had been derailed. There was something far more urgent, more basic about being me. By age 29, I’d fallen headlong into the spaces between words – dark, silent, terrifyingly wordless spaces. My encounter with those craters made me realize I don’t just hang around words. I hang around silences too.

I realized then that my fundamental self-definition is ‘seeker’, not ‘poet’. What’s more, the poetry is – and has always been – part of the seeking. Oddly, that wasn’t really a new discovery. More a rediscovery.

That brings me to my current preoccupation – the great deception perpetuated by so many systems of learning. What a laughable scam it is! Why does no one ever tell us that learning is, for the most part, not about acquisition, but about recognition? Not about foraging, but hanging around?

When I was thirteen, I stumbled upon a book by someone called T.S. Eliot. I had no clue who he was. But I found I couldn’t put the book down. And as I drank in that strange, dense, opaque text, I was exultantly aware of being in the presence of poetry. Did I understand it? No. And I couldn’t have paraphrased it if I tried. But recognize it I did.

It happened again when I read American poet Wallace Stevens. It was like meeting a relative – someone who spoke a language I knew, but had forgotten. That was when I began to dimly realize that metaphor – the magical ability to make abstraction crunchy and thinginess intangible – isn’t just about beauty. It’s about truth. And it doesn’t matter that one can’t memorise, decode or write an essay on it. It’s enough to recognize it.

Which probably explains the emphasis on ‘smaran’ or ‘dhikr’– remembrance – in so many spiritual traditions. Whether it’s chanting a mantra or working your beads, you’re only trying to find your way back home, not make a new one.

‘Seeker’ has to be dropped too, of course. I know it’s a comfort label, a useful replacement noun. Noun-collection is for hunter-gatherers. It’s those of us naïve enough to believe we are our bio-datas. Hellishly hard to give up, though.

And yet, when you look up after one long exhilarating moment of writing and find three hours of clock-time have vanished, you realize suddenly that those nouns have always been a myth. You’re no poet or scholar then, just verb – writing, seeking, remembering, hanging around.

And learning, relearning, re-re-learning the long way home.

Ladies’ Special

Time Out Column

“So I hear you’ve turned Seeker….?” said a theatre friend the other day. He was referring, be both knew, to my recent stints at a Coimbatore yoga ashram.

The air crackled with embarrassment. His and mine. I was tempted to say something about Harry Potter’s field position in Quidditch. I think I ended up saying I’d been a Seeker since my feverish discussions in college about Art, Metaphysics and Who to Romance at the TYBA Social.

Flip but true.

We’d just emerged from a discussion on Art as a Source of Consciousness. Not that we needed any convincing. We were all allies out there. No Consciousness Tricksters in sight.

But what if we were accosted by one of those diehard utilitarian types? One of those who says, “Why theatre? Why poetry? They don’t change lives.” My friend and I would have sighed and offered the usual barrage of arguments: about art as the realm of the non-quantifiable, ambiguous, paradoxical, revelatory, healing, transformational and true.

It isn’t kosher, we’d say, to talk at a seminar about the wild sex you had last night, or to discuss Nagarjuna’s theory of shoonya at a friend’s wedding. But it’s possible in art to talk about both. Death, love, loss, quest, God – this is the blood and marrow of art. No artificial divides between mind and body and emotion here. That’s why the Mahabharata satisfies you in a way the Collins Thesaurus cannot, we’d say.

Or if we were impatient, we’d simply remark infuriatingly, “Art changes you subtly, even though you don’t know it.”

Justifying a spiritual search to a rationalist is a bit like defending art to a pragmatist.

The arguments are about the same too. About silences being subtle, life-changing, cathartic and potentially revelatory. If art is a deep knowing, structured meditation can be deeper. It can take you on a quiet, non-glamorous journey from compulsion toward choice.

Nothing in the least pious about it. I’ve found myself wondering about Koffee with Karan on a yoga retreat as often as I’ve contemplated the meaning of life at a wine-and-cheese literary soiree.

So why the embarrassment about ‘seeking’? Because there’s an unspoken agreement among those of us who ‘think’ that Art and Ideas ought to satisfy all our thirsts. The result: we’ve relegated the word ‘spiritual’ to the domain of tea-leaf readers and godmen in limos. We’ve othered it, trivialised it.

And that’s as unfortunate as allowing vested interests to equate ‘secular’ with ‘pseudo-secular’. Or art with self-indulgence. Or the intellectual life with navel-gazing.

‘Seeking’ is for those uncomfortable with artificial divides. Those who dislike the word, ‘ought’. Those who habitually spill out and unbelong. Those who want to make space for trivia and transcendence, Karan and Konsciousness, and more…

That covers quite a few people I know.

But yes, it sometimes does seem simpler to remark, “Spirituality changes you subtly, even though you don’t know it.”

**Poetry and Craft in The Times of India, 2005**

“Why must modern poetry be so difficult?” is the plaintive query that still surfaces at poetry readings.

At this point, the poet takes a deep breath and points out that simplicity and complexity needn’t be valourised for their own sake. That simplicity can be banality as often as complexity can be turgidity. That Randall Jarrell observed that people could well find modern poetry difficult because they’ve stopped reading it. That the poetic craft has to tread a fine line…

Another interruption. “Craft? But isn’t poetry a spontaneous overflow…?” Another deep breath. But before the poet launches into another speech, the interlocutor (who’s also a poet, of course; who isn’t?) shrugs, “At least, my poems just write themselves.”

Now battle lines are drawn. As a poet, one has become almost as allergic to the words, ‘spontaneity’ and ‘simplicity’ as the interlocutor has to ‘craft’ and ‘difficulty’.

Some perceptions don’t change: poetry is a happening; prose involves event management. Poetry is malarial, nocturnal, involuntary, an attack of verbal incontinence; prose is what you hammer out on your keyboard for five hours daily. Poetry is cosmic, prose terrestrial. One step away is the inevitable conclusion: poetry is fluff; prose, dependable stuff.

Clearly, ‘difficult’ has become the easiest escape route there is for the reader in a hurry. In an age that extols the virtues of five-step manuals for decoding the universe – from the secrets of your laptop to your deepest existential dilemmas – poetry that doesn’t yield its ‘kernel’ at a single reading is regarded as suspect. At a recent reading, the poets were instructed on the tastes of the ‘common man’ — a mysterious construct that seemed to dig literature that could be cooked, eaten and evacuated with minimum participation (scarcely even a grunt) on his part. And words like ‘crafty’ and ‘self-conscious’ are increasingly used to describe all writing that shows any formal concern whatsoever.

My problem, however, is with all that is lost in the rant of overstatement and the braggadocio of polemic. One is invariably tempted to greet a gasp with a sneer. To deflate the votaries of simplicity by becoming a rabid defender of obscurity. To counter the spontaneous overflowers and cosmic shudderers with a grim, no-nonsense technical tirade. Poetry is hard work, one says sternly, it’s about endless revisions, much rigour and a great deal of perspiration.

But this fetishising of craft isn’t the whole truth either. The fact is that the artisan poet’s work isn’t entirely terrestrial. Much of the activity is subterranean, even seismic — and guess what, there are those secret broomstick sojourns into mystical zones.

Yes, there are rigorous drafts, revisions and counter-revisions. But that’s only half the story. Artisans, like gardeners and parents, have always known that their subjects also need a break from their ferociously solicitous gaze. Poems – like plants, children, kettles on the hob, graffiti on urinal walls and Bukhara-carpets-in-progress – need the right amount of inattention as well.

It isn’t about a bleak grit-toothed wrestling with technique either. Poets do live in a flurry of word-shavings, but their art isn’t all about conscious construction. It’s also about some inspired eavesdropping. There’s, in fact, plenty of rasa in the toil of the technician and plenty of riyaz in the epiphanist’s art. Manual labour happens, certainly, but so does magic. And the two are frequently simultaneous.

Can we put an end to the simple/spontaneous versus difficult/ crafty debate once and for all, and live in a more inclusive universe?