Essays

Online communities, e-journals, videopoetry, poetry apps and multi-disciplinary digital encounters are giving Indian poetry a new lease of life in the age of the Internet.

In October 2015, a select group of invitees in Mumbai experienced a unique work-in-progress – the collaboration of poetry and music between Indian and British musicians to commemorate Shakespeare. As vocalist Shubha Mudgal accompanied Opera North’s rendition of the Bard’s sonnets with lyrics derived from Amir Khusrau’s poetry, strains of the tanpura emanated from her tablet computer. A member of the audience was prevented from recording this interaction on her mobile phone (for uploading on Youtube, no doubt).

We take this everyday interaction with technology for granted. That poetry lends itself to collaboration with other disciplines – music, art, dance, photography – is known, but its easy relationship with digital technology is new. Indeed, poetry – given its brevity of form – is well suited to the digital medium and has received a new lease of life with greater reach and experimentation. It is now possible for poetry to challenge, enhance or transcend language.

Indian Poetry in the Internet age

In the early 21st century, poetry – a genre dependent on indie publishers and often relegated to the bottom of the literary sales pile – began to seek its audience on the Internet. In India, bloggers and communities such as Caferati provided an online platform to poets and writers. These extended to online peer group reviews and read-meets. Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda Literature Festival invited its audience to participate in an SMS (text message) poetry contest. With the advent of social media, poets struggling to find publishers began posting their poems on Facebook, while poetry written specifically for Twitter, limited to 140 characters, earned the appellation ‘Twihaiku’. There is also a reverse trend, with websites that turn tweets into poetry.

As Indian poetry found a new platform, it reached out to a larger audience. Today, it is as easy to access Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry online as it is to read Oscar Hahn.

When poet and publisher Hemant Divate’s little magazine Abhidhanantar disappeared from the Marathi scene in 2008, new poets were compelled to turn to social media for lack of poetic avenues. The works of Ajeet Abhang, Omkar Kulkarni, Ignatius Dias, Pranav Sakhdev, Satyapal Singh Rajput, Ajinkya Darshane, Mahesh Londhe, Felix D’Souza and Treshit Siddbhatti were eventually mined from this medium and published by Divate when he resurrected Abhidhanantar in 2014with the special issue, Facebook Ani Kavita (Facebook and Poetry). However, these multi-disciplinary encounters restricted the Internet to a platform; there were no experimental trends influenced by technology.

Trends in digital poetry

In the last two decades, videopoetry as a form, spawned by digital technology and the Internet, has been stealthily gaining worldwide recognition. In Bangalore, the arts network Peaking Duck facilitates multi-disciplinary collaborations. Namita Malhotra, one of its founder members, is also part of The Videopoetry Collective comprising filmmakers and poetry enthusiasts who came together in 2012, ‘to engage in a freewheeling exploration of the relationship between image, sound and text in a videopoem.’ Recently, the editor’s pick of the Asia Literary Review on National Poetry Day included Kavita Jindal’s videopoems. ¹.

While initiatives such as CAMP and Khanabadosh test the boundaries of interdisciplinary interactions and poetry features in the collaborative artistic projects of both, it cannot be considered central to their work. Recently, the video of Chennai-based protest-rapper Sofia Ashraf went viral on the Internet. In her essay on Mizo poetry, Margaret Ch Zama too refers to musical interactions with poetry. However, as Caferati founder, Peter Griffin observes, one is yet to see poetry that has pushed the boundaries of form or medium. “Indian poetry has nothing like ‘My boyfriend came back from the war’ by Olia Lialina,” he adds.

E-journals and apps

That said, the Internet has democratised poetry and expanded its audience. E-journals like Pratilipi, The Four Quarters Magazine, Kritya, Muse India, among others, act as both platform for poets and writers, and sieve for readers wary of sifting through works of questionable quality. TFQ even runs a Copynet check (a plagiarism software) to ensure originality, apart from the quality, of its works.

The remarkable extension of reading from books to e-devices and now, mobile phones, inspired the founders of the Great Indian Poetry Collective to create inPoetry, a poetry app. The app was conceptualised and developed by Bangalore based poet-publisher Minal Hajratwala and Deepthy Menon, founder of One3One4, a tech company. Subscribers of inPoetry will receive one poem per week from an Indian poet. The service is free and the purpose, say the founders, is “to get the word out about modern Indian poetry”. Among its first poets are Ravi Shankar, Neelanjana Banerjee, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Sudeep Sen, Sridala Swami, Jeet Thayil, Vijay Seshadri, as well as the founders of the collective, Ellen Kombiyil, Shikha Malaviya, and Minal Hajratwala.

With regard to mainstream publishing, Juggernaut targets ‘phone-readers’ with apps; its newly unveiled list includes fiction and non-fiction in physical, e- and mobile formats. In the past, HarperCollins India too have experimented with form and format in fiction. Given the rapid transformation of the literary landscape, poetry can’t be far behind. Perhaps, in the future, we will see a serialised version of the Epic of Gilgamesh appear on our digital screens, or find the animated words of EE Cummings falling and blurring into our text messages. The poems of Kabir may appear as sound files embedded in our reading material or there will be mobile poetry games. And for all the naysaying and doomsday prophecies, poetry may just play a greater role in our daily lives.

References

1. https://www.facebook.com/events/413041885451728/permalink/413042372118346/