The Indian Ark

by Rebecca Starford , December 1, 2009 • Leave a comment

Prithvi Varatharajan reviews The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets.

Bloodaxe cover Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Indian poet and candidate for the 2009 professional poetry role at Oxford University, once wrote that ‘anthologies are graveyards, and the anthologist’s job is to see only the best corpses get in’. He reckoned that the anthology was where poems (or short stories or essays) went for interment, having died in the public imagination. Mehrotra would later wince at this ghastly metaphor in an introduction to one of his own celebrated anthologies of Indian poetry.

We could imagine more appropriate metaphors for such an anthology – the ‘well-kept garden’ comes to mind. All anthologies try to present, and to preserve, exemplary writing from a field. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, is a little different to most nation-based anthologies of poetry. It draws on Indian poetry, but in a very broad sense. Thayil explains:

The Indian poet now lives and works in New York, New Delhi, London, Itanagar, Bangalore, Berkeley, Goa, Sheffield, Lonavala … While some may have little in common in terms of culture (a number of the poets have never lived in India), this anthology shows how they are all bound by the intimate histories of a shared English language.

Jeet

Seventy poets of Indian heritage or upbringing, writing in English between 1952 to 2007, are collected here. Thayil’s selection ranges from the well known, such as Nissim Ezekiel, Vikram Seth, A.K. Ramanujan and Kamala Das, to a host of younger and lesser-known poets.

Dipping into this book is a delight. It isn’t ordered chronologically or alphabetically but instead ‘with a view to verticality’; the editor sets mutually resonant poetries next to each other. In practice, this means that browsing is chancy. This may irritate some readers, but I enjoyed flicking through from poet to poet, not knowing what would follow.

Jayanta Mahapatra was one of my favourite discoveries in the anthology. Mahapatra is a prolific poet, well known in India. His poems are melancholic, and revel in sensory details. Many are set in his home state of Orissa. In the poem ‘A Day of Rain’, he writes:

…I hear the flutter of light feet

on the warm earth, excited wings

loosening from the dark…

…Out here,

the stupid code of the crickets,

the wind’s low whine; who knows

what’s dying underneath

a growing blade of grass?

The second stanza’s gravity is indicative of the dominant mood in the anthology. Although there are lighter moments, humour tends to be scarce. Eunice de Souza’s conversational poems (which the editor tells us, ‘[prize] immediacy above form’) provide some relief. In her ‘Poem for a Poet’, she says cheekily: ‘It pays to be a poet. / You don’t have to pay prostitutes.’ Then there are the experimental poets, like Srikanth Reddy, Mani Rao and Mukta Sambrani, who toy with intersections between form and content. There’s even a detour through surrealism, as in the lush ‘Stationery’ from the late Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali:

The moon did not become the sun.

It just fell on the desert

in great sheets, reams

of silver handmade by you.

The night is your cottage industry now,

the day is your brisk emporium.

The world is full of paper.

Write to me.

Although the sombre outweighs the satirical, there’s a wide range of styles and subjects in this anthology. Given the diversity, the quality of the poems is surprisingly (and consistently) good. The editor’s capsule biographies of each poet hold the anthology together, and are captivating in their own right. Introducing postmodern poet Mukta Sambrani, Thayil notes wryly that ‘her first book, The Woman in this Poem Isn’t Lonely, was received in India with admiration and incomprehension’. Introducing Srinivas Rayaprol, he relays Rayaprol’s comment that reading American poetry ‘with its beatniks and the Jazz poets and the daytime poets and the night-time poets, the poets in pony tails and the poets of the hoola-hoop school, I feel sick’. Thayil goes on to note, ‘his opinions endeared him to some American poets, among them William Carlos Williams’.

The included essays on Indian English poetry are required reading; Arvind Mehrotra’s ‘What is an Indian Poem?’ is especially strong. If you need even more stimuli, there are full page, black-and-white photos of some of the more prominent poets.

All of this – the wide selection, creative biographies, supplementary essays and photographs – made me consider Thayil’s anthology as a kind of ark. Thayil wants Indian poets writing in English to be seen as part of one community, regardless of their physical location. His anthology is a community-building project, which unites Indian poets who have been (to quote Thayil’s essay title) ‘separated by the sea’. It’s an ark sheltering many good, lesser-known poets from the dark waters of obscurity. As it turns out, Thayil’s ark isn’t big enough for translations from India’s many vernacular languages. But an anthology of all Indian poetry would be a mammoth undertaking: even Noah may have struggled with that task.

Prithvi Varatharajan lives in Melbourne. He is a freelance producer for ABC Radio National.