Essays

Arundhathi Subramaniam explores the notion of 'Indianness' in poetry – the problems implicit in that term and the many ways of being Indian that the contemporary poetry scene exemplifies.

Arbiter of identity,
remake me as you will.
Write me a new alphabet of danger…
Teach me how to belong,
the way you do,
on every page of world history.

I wrote these lines in a rather savage poem entitled, ‘To the Welsh Critic who doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’. Surprisingly, the poem, now a decade old, still strikes a chord among readers from different contexts. Cultural fundamentalism is evidently a pervasive disease.

On one level, this poem sprang from personal rage. But its real genesis was a deeper unease. In my years as curator, performing arts journalist, and poet, I encountered many legislators who doled out blueprints for cultural belonging. Theirs was a language of dogmatic full-stops, uncomfortable with lives lived out in hyphens or commas. Their formulae for identity made no room for life lived outside slogans. They could not understand that it is possible to be in simultaneous states of dissent and love. That some of us might want to critique a tradition without denying it. That we didn’t want to be puppets of our past, but didn’t want to amputate it either.

However, the ‘not-quite-Indian enough’ chorus hasn’t died down yet. It will evidently take a certain kind of Western reader a long while to accept that ‘the literatures of the world are not’, as poet-critic Adil Jussawalla puts it (in New Writing in India, 1974, Penguin), ‘colonies in his empire of taste’.

Besides, this quest for a unitary ‘Indianness’ is also found in provincial strands of the Indian cultural establishment. There is still a sprightly nativist bastion that bemoans the absence of ‘authenticity’ in any cosmopolitan cultural practice. Urban Anglophone Indian poets are particularly familiar with this charge. Their work is routinely dismissed as self-conscious, navel-gazing (all façade and no courtyard, as one writer put it) – and nowhere as ‘rooted’ as poetry in other Indian languages.

Fundamentally, the ‘prove your Indianness’ argument tells us more about the seeker than the sought – and can, at its worst, turn into a form of cultural terrorism. It is a position fearful of hybridity, of plurality, of cultural dynamism. Central to it is the notion of an unsullied ‘Indianness’ that can be labeled, itemised and turned into a visa to establish one’s cultural credentials.

In my years as editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web, I discovered poetic skeins of tremendous diversity – diversity that established time and again that there is no single or privileged way to be Indian, no singular way to belong.

There are, for example, several poets from North East India whose work responds to regional challenges of insurgency, state-sponsored terrorism, negligence, authoritarian church politics and the erosion of a tribal heritage by stoutly asserting the role of the poet as collective conscience. ‘When the Prime Minister visits Shillong the bamboos watch in silence’ is the title of a trenchant poem by Khasi poet, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih. Mizo poet Mona Zote puts it memorably:

If the moon looks grey tonight, if you think she weeps…

If the wind brings no news of love, if the villas are silent
and empty, it is because
you live on a reservation

But there is nothing monochromatic about this ‘political’ poetry either. The North East also produces the lyric poetry of Mamang Dai of Arunachal Pradesh who sings of river, forest and mountain as living presences, dense with sacred memory. When she asserts with quiet simplicity that ‘the river has a soul’, she offers an oblique but powerful indictment of a mainstream worldview premised on greed and guile.

Another interesting case in point is the upsurge of urban Marathi poets in the 1990s. In verse that unapologetically invokes a new globalised India, these poets draw with impunity on Mumbai slang, brand names, billboards, ad jingles, television serials and Bollywood cinema. Clearly comfortable in their own skins, they seem far from besieged by identity dilemmas, and are ready to critique and celebrate a composite identity.

Other examples across the country offer evidence of even greater diversity. In Veerankutty’s hushed and haunting environmental Malayalam poetry or Manushya Puthiran’s quiet exploration of the unrecorded silences of Tamil middle-class urban life, a critique of a worldview is implicit in cadence. The decision to drop the voice becomes a choice as political as it is poetic.

To cite other random instances, there is the deep sense of loss, punctuated by the sound of prison gates, that pervade Amarjit Chandan’s Punjabi poetry; the textured, ambivalent Urdu love poetry of Tarannum Riyaz; the avant garde Meta-realist Hindi poetry of Geet Chaturvedi; the dark surrealism of Joy Goswami’s Bengali poetry; EV Ramakrishnan’s English poetry that probes the distinction between ‘prayer and a false affidavit’; the small town perspective of quiet wonder in Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Hindi verse; the playful ability to bring Baroda, blue jeans and the Indian mystic Kabir, into a single frame in Gujarati poet Chandrakant Shah’s poetry.

Which of these is the real McCoy Indian voice? Is any one of these voices more Indian than the other? It would be naïve to make such a claim. Capable of irony and lyricism, self-doubt and social criticism, moral concern and metaphor, critique and carnival, these voices and many more, remind us that a world driven by narrow political agendas, impoverished of the imagination, denuded of wonder, is simply not worth living in. Cumulatively, they remind us of the great polyphony that is Indian poetry today.