Interview Excerpts
Eating Poetry — In Conversation with Arundhathi Subramaniam
Part I
Recently, we hosted two revered contemporary Indian poets, at TPC — Ranjit Hoskote and Arundhathi Subramaniam, engaging in conversations about poetry.
Last month, we hosted Arundhathi Subramaniam, poet, seeker, critic and curator. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently when God is a Traveller. Her prose works include the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic and yogi, Sadhguru — More than a life and The book of Buddha. As editor, her books include Pilgrims India, a book on sacred journeys, Another Country, an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry in English and Confronting Love, a co-edited volume of Indian love poems. She is India’s country editor of Poetry International Web, and has been a part of Poetry Circle — a diversely attended workshop which would meet fortnightly over more than 15 years for the purpose of ‘sharing, enjoying and anatomising’ poems.
The event was called ‘Eating Poetry’ based on her book, Eating God. We read out poetry on the theme of cities / spirituality, two of the dominant themes of Arundhathi’s poems. And then the rest of the evening, Arundhathi intricately knit a conversation inviting questions and opinions from everyone in the quaint and colourful Drawing Room of Smoke House Deli in Bandra. A lot of questions were answered, a lot of stories and opinions were shared, and it all led to a much wider and deeper understanding of poetry. We all at the end, went home all warm, fuzzy and beaming with poetry.
Below is an excerpt from the conversation that evening —
Audience — In conversations, we tend to mix a lot of words from different languages, but I’ve not come across that in any written form of poetry or prose. Have you come across that in any poetry or any other literary work?
Arundhathi — Our television does it a lot. In written form, there have been conscious attempts such as one kind of thing which Nissim Ezekiel does, is uses Indian intonation even when it is using English. Sujata Bhatt actually has poetry where it is interspersed with words in Gujarati. So it is done, but is it the only way of proving one is bilingual or multilingual as we are here? No. It is one valid way, I would say. There are many ways in which you can push the boundaries of language, wrestle with language without necessarily using another. It is good to try it only if you feel impelled to do it.
Kunal — Because I have never seen specimens of mixed language writing. It has never occurred to me that I can do it too.
Scherezade — One good example in prose would be Kuzhali Manickavel. She uses a lot of Hindi words, Tamil words. She uses specific Indian colloquial words.
Arundhathi — Find your way into it. If you enjoy her work - wonderful, something is working. But guard against one thing, make sure that you are not doing it for just effect. Make sure that those borrowings are happening because they need to, in that poem. Everyone as an Indian grows up multilingual.
I may be reasonably conversant with two — three languages but linguistic competence is one thing and literary competence is another.
To understand the literature, to negotiate with that, takes a lifetime. I am still figuring out English. I am still figuring out the lyric poem. I don’t see myself being able to figure it out in this lifetime. I am not saying don’t experiment. I am saying experiment but make sure it is experimentation coming out of a place of rigour. Ask yourself tough questions, is all I am saying.
Jai — Nissim Ezekiel has done it quite a bit.
Arundhathi — Nissim has done what he called his Indian English poems. Some people find it mildly condescending. I don’t think that’s true. I think they are affectionate poems actually. He has a poem called Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T. S.
Jai — There is one called “Soap”
Arundhathi — Soap. I love “The Railway Clerk.” Because this, the railway clerk talking and suddenly in the middle of his — my mundane life kind of thing- there is this lovely line “I wish I was bird”. This clerk needs to dream and that comes across beautifully. It is not about being funny or picking up intonations and hurling them at you, much more is going on.
Vivek — You spoke about the dangers of experimenting. You have a poem “Where the script ends” where opposing ideas have been used. It starts with
“His shirt is tangerine,
the sky Delft,
the sunshine daffodils.” moves on to
“All languages are honest here,
just none honest enough.” and then to
“because it still makes sense,
the old dream –”
There is another poem called “Leapfrog” where you use the phrase “Fierce tenderness”. For me these go beyond the obvious and I wouldn’t think about these ideas normally. How far does on go while experimenting? I see some people using “screeching silence”. It may not resonate with me and it may resonate with the poet.
Arundhathi — This is what seems like a space of such fuzziness. See if you can turn this space into a space of consciousness. When I say consciousness, you will never arrive at a space where she and I think think the same thing. There is no definitive notion.
Try and craft in every line, a line that startles you.
If there is no surprise for the writer, there is no surprise for the reader. I have not said this, Frost did. If you are startled and at the same time, you also know that you are startled into recognizing yourself, that makes it authentic. You are not just startled because it is sounding clever and someone may like it. I’d say, dig deep, every image on a single line, spend long enough with it. The image will lead you. It is my firm conviction that image leads you. If you trust your image, it will gradually lead you. It becomes a kind of magic archaeology that you are not capable of. It will take you to places you didn’t even know.
Poetry Readings — Arundhathi reads her poem ‘Where I Live’, on the beloved city of Mumbai. Watch it here — Where I Live, By Arundhathi
Vivek — So I was wondering whether we have entered a phase where revival has taken over. Books are being written on mythology, television is hijacked with these shows. Are we going through a phase where the society is preoccupied with these stories?
Aundhathi — A.K. Ramanujan says there was never a time when any of us (Indians) didn’t know the Mahabharata. It doesn’t mean that each of us is capable of saying, this means this and that means that. But we have always known the stories. I don’t even remember when we were told the story, I may have read it later on in life. But I don’t remember my grandmother saying sit down my child, let me tell you the stories of the great epics, this is our heritage. I just knew it.
There is such a difference between revivalism which is to say I will become the emissary of a culture. I don’t think I am an ambassador of Indian poetry. There was a post independence period which needed dancers to become an emissary of Indian culture. It is like using Star Wars, it is contemporary myth, isn't it? It is about how you use it. It is part of our folklore. I used myth particularly in this book to understand myself in two phases of my life. I saw Shakuntala as an archetype. Not this mythological character, she became me. Someone trying to make sense of life.
So people use myth differently. It would be a little unfortunate if we believe that everyone who uses myth is on a culture revival trip. It would be even more unfortunate if we threw out the baby with the bathwater. It took me a long time, for instance, to write a poem called “ Confession”. Only because I had spent so long saying, I do not want to be seen as a confessional poet. Finally, you say it is okay to use the word confession even if you don’t like it. Even if you think you can decode me from that poem, you won’t be able to.
Similarly, it also took me a long time to use the word Hindu in a poem.
We need to reclaim certain words that are otherwise appropriated by groups that we are very angry with. These words like Shakuntala, they are powerful myths, they are part of our collective inheritance. We do not want these words to be hijacked by groups that don’t know any better.
Ain — You said you don’t look at yourself as an ambassador of Indian culture. But as a writer, somebody who documents current happenings in some way or the other, if you write who you are, aren’t you an ambassador of Indian culture?
Arundhathi — An ambassador for yourself, yes. You are reclaiming your right to decide, so is it a part of the political statement? Part of my political statement is to retrieve Indian culture from capital letters and to make it definitively lower case, that is part of my agenda. In that sense, there is politics involved.
Vivek — You mentioned T. S. Eliot as a big inspiration?
Arundhathi — He was important to me at the age of 13. I discovered him and I didn’t know who he was. I discovered him at 13 when I was in my grandfather’s home in Madras on a very muggy Madras afternoon. I remember pulling down this book from a shelf not knowing who he was, man or woman, significant or insignificant. But knowing that I was in the presence of poetry. I use this example to talk about the fact that all of us recognize poetry even before we understand it. We may not know what each line means, but for me there was this exultant sense of homecoming. I felt this is where I want to be for the rest of my life. Here where there is sound and velocity, and moments of brilliance subsiding again into mystery, there is illumination, there is darkness, I want to be here. That feeling.
The recognition that I needed to remind myself about later because it was easy for me to begin to believe that poetry is essentially about its meaning. In school I was being encouraged to believe that because the question we were always being asked is “What is the poet trying to say?” The tyranny of that.
I think what happens is that the sensuousness of a poem, the excitement, the sense of high, your breath being caught in your throat when you are in the presence of really good poetry, you are not being encouraged to think about that. You are just being asked what he is trying to say.
Trupthi — Is there a problem with the question? Or is it just that there is a definitive answer?
Arundhathi — I would say there are two things. There is also a problem with the question because the question is not what is the poet saying, it is “What is he trying to say?”, the implication being that you in your superior wisdom know what this poor poet had intended to say but could only splutter. He could splutter whereas you can render it in flowing prose paragraphs. The poet is left behind and all that is left behind is the husk of a poem which is the form. The only think worth extracting, like raisins from the bun, is the content. And yes, the second thing, is the assumption that there is one definitive answer.
Part II of the interview excerpt is continued here — Part II Conversation with Arundhathi Subramaniam
