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The introduction to this anthology
is an apology in poor taste. Yet another self-defeating
intervention on part of the critic inside the poet, who is
forever eager to usurp both the role of the academic critic and
the reader’s freedom to experience, judge and/or evaluate. An
introduction should, at best, be a friendly overture to the
reader, not a way of ‘colonising’ his mind. And least of
all, by a self-proclaimed post-colonial poet/editor! Whatever
his reasons, it’s difficult to sympathise with Ranjit Hoskote’s
irrepressible impulse to ‘teach,’ rather sermonise the
reader, which, of course, he does with aplomb, using a good deal
of entirely unnecessary academic claptrap.
The 1990s have
seen as many as five anthologies of Indian English poetry,
bearing imprints as well-known as OUP, Rupa and Orient Longman.
Does it mean that the Renaissance of Indian English poetry?
Hardly.
Only if one
were to cast a hard look beyond the mere surface gloss of the
frontispieces, one would discover that the same names are being
rotated with almost ritualistic regularity, of course, with a
few, much needed though arbitrary additions or subtractions here
or there. Some novelty and newness this is! Perhaps, a decade is
too short a period for the newness and novelty to make its
presence felt. And in certain cases, as the selection in this
particular anthology testifies, some poets such as Vijay
Nambisan, C.P. Surendran, Jerry Pinto, Smita Agarwal and
Arundhati Subramaniam have already been canonised though each is
barely ‘one-book old.’ With the exception of Jeet Thayil,
Tabish Khair, Ranjit Hoskote and Rukhmini Bhaya Nair, all of
whom have two or more than two collections of poems under their
belt, others such as Vivek Narayanan, Gavin Barrett, Anjum Hasan
and H. Masud Taj are still testing the waters. This inevitably
puts a question mark over the criterion for selection, bringing
to the fore the inevitable politics of inclusion and/or
exclusion.
And had it not
been for the uneven quality of the poems, one could even afford
to leave this politics alone. What really creates a poetic
arrhythmia in an otherwise confident and self-assured selection
is the insistence of occasional naivete to pass off as audacious
wit or the poetic diffidence dressing up as churlishness. In Magritte’s
Dreams, H. Masud Taj’s efforts at being argumentative
appear strained, even pretentious when he starts off in his
characteristic manner, The horsehead is a door/The clock is
wind/ The jug is a bird/ The suitcase is a valise. Even his
other poems are in no different a mould. Consider Yellow
with its adolescent, banal cliches such as Light would not be
as yellow/If the shadows were not as black or the nursery
rhyme-like incantations of Medina Highway such as Lord
of those who stop to fill/Lord of those who take the exit lane.
If this is poetry, it certainly couldn’t have been shallower
or fluffier! The superficial architectonic quality that informs
Taj’s poetry is not so much a tribute to his poetic talent as
it’s to his training as an architect.
If this is not
enough, then do reflect on some of the ‘poetic outpourings’
of Vivek Narayanan, especially in MGR Meets God in Person.
Giving up all pretentiousness to poetic language and
conventions, he happily surrenders himself to the ineluctable
charms of his English prose, reeling off wisecracks like MGR
stands with his cap tugged firmly down his bald head. His joined
cardboard wings blow gently in the breeze or Somebody,
either standing MGR or reclining God, says a word.
Possibly two. We cannot be certain. The only thing reader is
certain about is that whatever else it might be, it’s not
poetry at all. And of course, the reader is not expected to
bother with such small things as the line-breaks or the stanzaic
patterns, for none of that appears to fall within the range of
the poet’s conception of poetry. What someone needs to tell
these intrepid young ‘poetasters’ is that ‘prose poetry,’
too, has its own subversive structures of internal rhythm. Where
are they, pray? Among the newest of the new, Jerry Pinto and
Gavin Barrett only manage to do a shade better. Perhaps Anjum
Hasan and Smita Agarwal, both women, are the only ones who show
definite promise and so deserve a more serious critical
attention, which is hardly a consolation, considering that what
is being showcased for us here is the ‘future’ of Indian
English poetry. And that appears much less than what it should
be, encouraging!
The staccato
rhythms of C.P. Surendran do nothing to salvage the monotone of
his existential solipsism, which would, at best, appear banal or
cliched, if not totally out of place in what the editor prefers
to describe as the ‘post-modern’ or the ‘post-colonial’
context. However, Vijay Nambisan does seem to possess a definite
sweep of imagination that often makes his longer poems more
graceful and lyrical, even better structured and more controlled
than his short lyrics. In this respect, Diary of the
Expedition and The Attic work much better than
Reflections on May Day or Madras Central. It was for
Madras Central that Vijay had won the All India Poetry
Competition in 1988, organised by the British Council and Poetry
Society (India). Incidentally, Vijay is not the only one to have
laid a claim to this honour, as this could easily be said about
most of the other poets included in this anthology as well. If
this were, indeed, one of the guiding principles of selection,
it would have been much better for the editor to declare so in
the title as well as the introduction.
Ultimately, it’s
the presence of the ‘veterans’ among the new generation such
as Jeet Thayil, Tabish Khair, Ranjit Hoskote and Rukhmini Bhaya
Nair that proves to be the saving grace of this anthology. They
have been around long enough to convince anyone about their
seriousness and commitment to poetry. It’s another matter that
they, too, discover their real springs of inspiration only when
they choose to drop their academic gowns and bare themselves, or
tremble on the threshold of a long-forgotten memory or plunge
headlong into the momentary truths, desperately holding on to
their fragile subjectivity. No matter what prompted Jeet Thayil
to pen down At Kabul Zoo, the Lion, its has the power and
the suggestiveness to set off reverberations across the
interstices of history. If part I of From: The Genesis Godown
captures the myriad faces of monsoon in Kerala, its part II
offers a sombre, reflective meditation on the "slow
erosions of memory." Tabish Khair, too, is very much in
perfect control of his poetic faculties when he either rips the
layers off personal relationships in his lyrical reminiscences
titled To My Father, across the Seven Seas or searches
anxiously through both memory and tradition in The Other Half
of Kabir’s Doha so as to retrieve his poetic identity. Of
a piece with this kind of poetry is Ranjit Hoskote’s A Poem
for Grandmother, poignant in its simplicity and disarmingly
honest in its tone and expression. And undoubtedly, it is this
kind of soul-searching poetry, free from the encumbrances of
academic pretentiousness, though not from the burden of memory
and history, that reader often seeks from an Indian English
poet, too. All that one expects from him is that he would return
more frequently to Kabir’s dohas or Ghalib’s ghazals
to revitalise the jejune literary forms than he actually does in
this anthology.
Trouble begins only when ‘our’
poet refuses either to recognise his own literary traditions or
to discard his academic gown. That’s when the poetry begins to
slip through his fingers, plunging his verbal artifices into
both obscurity and obscurantism. And it’s against the
militancy of this obscurantism and the overzealous fanaticism of
this academisation that the Indian English poetry must protect
itself if it has to survive where it ultimately should, within
the hearts of the people.
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IF
1980s saw the rise of what is now described as the ‘Stephanian
novel,’ 1990s may well be remembered as the decade of the
"Elphinstonian poetry." In this slim volume of less
than 150 pages, as much as half of the Indian English poetry has
flowed out of the creative springs of Elpinstone College,
Bombay. And it is hard to accept that it could be just another
act of literary fortuitousness. In our times of hardbound poetry
editions, such acts of literary or non-literary miracles happen
only if they are so willed.
