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Magazine
Poet's nightmare
RANJIT HOSKOTE
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'The real problem with Indian poetry in English is its precarious relationship with its own acknowledged audience.'
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THE poet has a recurrent nightmare: he has been invited to give a reading; the appointed evening comes round; and 15 minutes into the session, he finds himself in a room where he is reader, moderator and audience all in one. The organisers flit in and out, hoping that listeners will materialise on the strength of eleventh-hour prayer; at length, a feature writer representing the Sunday pages of a daily shows up, quietly pleased to see that the customary notice about the death of poetry stands unchallenged. He thinks up a jaunty obituary and leaves for more entertaining pastures.
The poet has other nightmares too: he has just finished reading a sequence of poems, when a well-practised hand is raised, and someone in the audience asks why his poems are always set in distant landscapes, earlier periods, and why they do not address the anxieties of the present. The patient exposition of obliquity, the approach indirect, has no remedial effect. Must poetry always be difficult to understand, asks another querulous voice; the poet's response, to the effect that poetry is a sort of sculpture carved from the stone of language, falls upon deafness.
And just as the poet believes he has escaped the clutches of popular reaction, the academics join the commission of inquiry. An imperious hand rises, carrying with it a voice that demands apology: Is the poet not aware of the gender nuances of some of his phrases? How does the poet locate his productions, when they do not refer to the popular disquietudes of the moment, or even to the parameters of place? Yet another inquisitorial voice seeks clarification: Does the poet identify himself as a post-colonial subject or not? This nightmare repeats itself through the years, poet after poet, and reading after reading: in the quest for generalities, abstract categories that purport to explain the poetic task gain prominence in discussion, while the specific textures and gravities of particular poems are lost to view.
As is evident, I am thinking mainly of the Indian poet who writes in English, who seems more vulnerable to such questioning than his confreres in the other languages of the subcontinent; I will not list that most recurrent of his nightmares, when he is asked why he does not write in an Indian language, and has to answer, for only the three-hundredth time in his life: "But indeed I do. I write in English." Perhaps it might help to identify this English of our subcontinental writing as Angrezi to render it more palatable, the "chutnified" tongue of Rushdie's description, the "biryanised" one of Agha Shahid Ali's. But I digress; the real problem with the reception of Indian poetry in English is no longer the need for a coherent defence against nativist opinion (after all, the nativist shoots himself in the foot by denying us the right to write, simply because he disapproves of our chosen or inherited language: undeniably an act of cultural fascism).
The real problem with Indian poetry in English is its precarious relationship with its own acknowledged audience. Unlike the audiences that sustain the Hindi and Marathi kavi sammelan or the Urdu mehfil, to name only three of the vital interfaces between poets and audiences in India, the audience for English in India does not truly bring a shared and consensual understanding to bear on the poetry it receives. The commonalty that binds it together — its shared knowledge of English — is nominal and presumptive; in fact, this audience is greatly divided, fragmented and distributed as it is over a variety of class, educational, ethnic and regional positions. But even here, it is impolite to draw attention to the degree, intensity and depth that every individual in this audience brings to his or her relationship to the language; to draw attention to awkwardness in speech or incompetence in reading, in this fraught socio-linguistic context, is to commit the unforgivable political sin of snobbery. The writer may be attacked on a wide variety of counts, and is even treated as a natural target; but the reader, who is seen as a reluctant consumer and potential victim of literary assault, is sacrosanct.
And literary criticism, which could have served as a common ground for the construction of a shared literary culture, also fails the Indian poet in English: the terrain is divided between a highly theoretical discourse which is its own idiosyncratic art form, and an often (though by no means always) irresponsible and ill-informed popular reviewing style that regards literary criticism as a blood sport. And this is a problem faced by Indian literary artists across genres and languages. Very few critics or reviewers choose to attend to the sometimes ambivalent interweave of imagistic or narrative impulses and communicative difficulties, of aesthetic pleasure and political preoccupation in the writing that emanates from the subcontinent; instead, the texts on offer are cut to shreds with the scissors of ideology, whether of the old-fashioned variety that views writers as helots to social issues, who ought to take dictation from activism, or of the new-fangled variety that views them as bearers of a desire at once subliminal and overt, but, at any rate, susceptible to imaginative misreading.
Nonetheless, hardly any aspect of this debate is reflected in the mainstream media, from which the great majority of readers derive their active sense of the lifeworld they inhabit: the exigencies of column-space determine a pattern of news that is focused on the deeds of the rich, the powerful, the glamorous and the controversial. This is why fine writing, which is regarded as a superfluity, enters the mainstream media only when it can be translated into the prevailing terms. At its best, this means that we can still hear, in a mainstream media otherwise blithely free of interest in history or poetry, of Ramachandra Guha, because his exhilarating history of Indian cricket can be mapped onto the success of "Lagaan"; or of Harivanshrai Bachchan and Kaifi Azmi, whose passing is commemorated, not only because they were eminent litterateurs, but because they were also fortunate to have celebrity progeny.
At its worst, this trend ensures that we have to put up — as we have done this last fortnight — with headlines that describe a purveyor of jingoistic propaganda as a poet (or, thanks to sub-editors who have not yet been sensitised to gender nuance, as a "poetess"). The media's insatiable investigation into the versifier's murder, it would appear, has also involved the murder of careful distinctions. Perhaps "poetaster" is the description that our intrepid reporters should have been looking for. But why burden the poor reader with difficult words, when "poet" or "poetess" will do just as well? Same difference!
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