Shanta Acharya About Shanta AcharyaShanta Acharya is known for her evocative and insightful works. Born in Cuttack, Odisha, India, she has made a significant contribution to contemporary English literature with her poems, literary essays and reviews. The first person from Odisha to win the National Scholarship to Oxford in 1979, she completed her doctoral thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1983. She was among the first batch of women admitted to Worcester College that year. In 1983-85, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages at Harvard University. She has lived in London since.
Her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies worldwide. The author of twelve books, her seven collections of poetry include Looking In, Looking Out (2005), Dreams That Spell The Light (2010), Imagine: New and Selected Poems (2017) and What Survives Is The Singing (2020). Her poems have been translated to several languages. Her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published in the USA in 2001 and her novel, A World Elsewhere, in 2015. Her second novel and eighth collection of poetry are forthcoming.
She worked in the City, in London, and has the rare achievement of being commissioned to write books on finance. The largest institutional investor in India, when the stock market was liberalised in the 1990s, she has written extensively on asset management. She served twice on the board of trustees of The Poetry Society as well as The Poetry School in the UK. Founder of Poetry in the House, Shanta hosted a series of monthly poetry readings at Lauderdale House, north London, from 1996-2015. A life member of the Poetry Society in the UK, she has received several awards for her poetry, internationally. www.shanta-acharya.com.
Beauty Das About Beauty DasBeauty Das is a Research Scholar at the Department of English at Banaras Hindu University. Her area of research is South Asian diasporic poetry. She published her poems in Aulos: An Anthology of English Poetry (2020), and her Bengali poetry got published in Sangsaptak (2020).
BD: Women are sometimes doubly marginalised in society due
to their intersecting social identities like gender, race, class, caste,
religion, ability, etc. Can we call your experiences in diasporic land
“intersectional diasporic experiences?”
SA: An increasing awareness of ‘intersectionality’ in all
aspects of our lives is important. These ‘experiences’ are universal, and all
good writing springs from such experiences – the oppression and discrimination
resulting from the overlap of an individual's or a community’s complex social
identities. Every society is dominated by certain groups based on any number of
variables such as gender, race, class, caste, religion, age, education, marital
status, wealth, etc. Those outside that circle of privilege are marginalised
unless they surrender to the values of the dominant culture. The price of
admission is usually prohibitive. Standing alone, outside those fortressed
walls, is perceived as a threat to those inside. Interestingly, the
‘barbarians’ can also be seen ‘as a kind of solution’. This instinct for
self-preservation results in experiences, conscious and unconscious, reflecting
a community’s prejudices embedded in its value system. They vary so widely that
one cannot generalise about individual ‘experiences.’ This marginalisation can
happen in the country of your birth. Even within marginalised communities,
strict hierarchies exist. Human beings are not particularly inclusive. We tend
to identify ourselves with those like us, slicing and dicing everything in ways
that benefit us. Even within families, there are such pressures. Most of the
world’s greatest epics are about identity and the ensuing struggle for power
and survival—the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and the Odyssey,
among others. Perhaps that is why our greatest thinkers, philosophers, and
poets talk of love (‘agape’) as being the highest good. Love that is selfless,
unconditional, and sacrificial; the willingness to stand in the shoes of the
Other (including that of your enemy).
BD: Are there any differences between your experiences in
your homeland and the country to which you have relocated?
SA: There are bound to be significant differences between
living in Cuttack compared to life in Oxford, Harvard, and London. If you move
from Cuttack to Delhi, you will have different experiences. The oppression that
comes with marginalisation can be institutional as well as individual/
personal. And the forms it may take vary enormously. You cannot prepare for it.
Our prejudices/ perceptions shape all we think and do. We see the world as we
are, not as the world really is. The concept of ‘illusion’, or what in Hindu
philosophy is referred to as ‘Maya,’ sheds some light on the fragmented and
illusory nature of experience. I am not suggesting the oppression and
discrimination resulting from the overlap of an individual’s various social
identities is an illusion. Far from it—these experiences are real and cause
serious damage to the individual suffering from them and the society that
enables such injustice to take place. Prejudice is so common that one is bound
to have experienced it, even in the society in which one is born. I’ve also
benefited from prejudices that worked in my favor. Privilege and prejudice can
exist together. Human beings are primarily driven by self-interest. At what
point one might suffer from the benefits of such interests is far from
straightforward. To give you one example, during my Bachelor’s degree at
Ravenshaw College, I was ‘given’ a second class in my Honours in English
examination. I have a first-class academic career, I was always placed top of
my class. Yet, it was possible for the powers that be to deliver such
injustice, impunity, and unity as the Statutes of Utkal University permitted.
The statutes did not permit the re-examining of grades. Though it was widely
recognised, there was nothing anyone could do about this injustice. At the same
time, I was blessed in Oxford where my professors were men of great integrity
and calibre. I had a ‘congratulatory viva’ and was awarded a Doctor of
Philosophy. So much depends on the culture of the individual/organisation
concerned. In my experience, decent human beings treat others fairly without
expecting anything in return. It is always the weak and mediocre who are prone
to abuse whatever little power is entrusted to them. Being a woman
(unfortunately, women are just as prone to marginalising other women), Indian
(Indians are very skilled at marginalising other Indians), single (single
people sadly do the same), highly educated and independent, both financially
and as a thinker, can translate to worryingly high levels of marginalisation.
It would be wrong to generalise as every experience is individual and each
individual’s experience is different. I could be treated fairly by a white man,
not terribly well educated, intelligent, or well off, yet be thoroughly
marginalised by an Indian woman with a similar background. Everything depends
on the individual and what sort of human they are.
BD: How has your identity been shaped by your movement from
one country to another?
SA: Identity is a complex issue. Tracing its development over
time, place, and culture, especially as change can be imperceptible like the
movements of the earth, is complicated. Besides, the changes one perceives in
oneself may not be the same as those perceived by others. As Ralph Waldo
Emerson said: ‘People only see what they are prepared to see.’ Sometimes, I
think the essential me has not changed. Yet, I know I have changed in every
way. Living in London is one of the most cosmopolitan, diverse, and
multicultural cities in the world, being oneself is an interesting project as
one grapples with a competing range of views, perceptions, and possibilities.
Sometimes, being oneself does not ‘come as naturally as leaves to a tree’. Yet
unlike Keats, I cannot say it is better if it comes not at all. A
first-generation immigrant, female, single, facing all sorts of discrimination
(growing up in Cuttack, we used the word ‘discrimination’ positively – i.e. to
mean someone enlightened, gyani, with a sense of knowledge, superior awareness;
here, now it means someone without such awareness), where words do not mean the
same thing, you learn to focus on issues that matter and not be consumed by the
injustice inherent in every situation every day of your life. Either you grow
as a human being or are destroyed, left embittered by the negative forces
around you. Mind you, all this can happen in the place of your birth. One can
be exiled in one’s home, even killed. One of the compensations for being an
outsider is objectivity, a displacement that encourages self-examination. The
angle of vision from the centre is different than from the circumference,
helping one to see things uniquely. One’s invisibility is a magic cloak. Yet
for ideas to live and grow, one needs others to see it and share it. Ralph
Ellison’s hero said in The Invisible Man: ‘I am invisible, understand, simply
because people refuse to see me.’ Imagine a world without our greatest
thinkers, scientists, artists, industrialists, and philanthropists simply
because we refuse them a place at the table. Now imagine all the good we will
never know because we have destroyed it. How many gifted people have been
sacrificed because we did not have the ability to understand their gifts? It is
even more tragic when we ‘understand’ and instead of supporting, we erase. As I
have been trying to say – we are all limited in our perceptions, some more than
others. It is the human condition. As long as we remain open to possibilities,
and not get too comfortable in our conception of our ‘self’, there is hope. My
relationship with my adopted homeland is as complex as my relationship with
India. I have created my own cultural, literary, and spiritual home which I
carry in me. Roots matter to the extent that you need them in the process of
self-definition. I do not feel rootless because I do not live in India. I am
perhaps more Indian than many Indians who live in India. India is no longer the
country I was born into or the one I left. Neither is England the place it was
when I came here. Being a bit of an ‘outsider’ everywhere is no bad thing. It
gives one perspective. The nature of exile and the role of language in defining
a new personal identity are common among creative writers, perhaps more so
among self-exiled ones. The act of creation is also one of self-exploration. To
be able to delve into oneself or another’s is godlike. My writing is not just
self-definition, it enables me to understand others and connect with them. For
writers in exile, it is as important as breathing; without this connection,
they perish. It is the means by which I explore fundamental questions like: Who
am I?
BD: The notion of “home” is one of the major themes in your
poems. What is your idea of the concept? Caught between integration and
dislocation, does the immigrant want to start the journey back to his or her
birthplace, or does the immigrant want to make a home in a homeless land?
SA: Poets, perhaps more than most writers, are ‘outsiders’; the
‘other’ living at the edges of society, they do not belong anywhere. The
psychological cost of an exile’s self-restoration, working from the external
self, the false, imposed image, to the inner reality is high. I am an exile, a
choice I made decades ago. Yet, the longer I live here the less I belong here,
or for that matter there, where I came from. As both the place of my birth and
my adopted homeland keep changing, there is no going back. You live where you
are, in the here and now – at home everywhere and nowhere. Our search for
identity and belongingness is individual. Yet in our common humanity, we
translate our experiences into poems that explore identity and the self, which
keeps changing, reflecting our struggle to ‘be’ whole. Defining ourselves
through words, this search for self is a continual process as we never feel at
home, except in the reality we create. The value of poetry or any form of art
is that it embodies representations of life for our contemplation, both for our
aesthetic pleasure and inner renewal. Ultimately, what matters is the freedom
to find oneself, and perhaps share that insight with a stranger. It is this
sharing that is important. When you leave behind everything, and begin a
journey into the Unknown, you extend the limits of your personal reality. To
that extent poetry makes things happen simply by changing the way we perceive
the world. Each one of us determines the limits of our engagement with this new
world. So I am the ‘outsider’ making her own world.
BD: Is there any
significance behind the titles of your poetry collections?
SA: The title of all my poems and books serves as an
introduction – a greeting or a namaste, a welcome to my world, my home, a
prayer, an epiphany. Each title is significant. My poetry collections have
evolved over long periods of time and the poems carry on a conversation with
each other. Writing, for me, has always been a vocation, not a profession. It
enables me to do things as my own pace, finding a place for everything that
matters. The title of my first collection, Not
This, Not That (1994), refers to the concept of ‘neti, neti’, which has
greatly influenced my thinking and is perhaps essential to understanding my
work. While my first collection tries to define the connection between humanity
and divinity, my second, Numbering Our
Days’ Illusions (1995), takes off from neti, neti dealing with love and our
relationship with It, which by definition is illusory and thus limited. My
third collection, Looking In, Looking Out
(2005), is about perception, its illusive quality. All my books (including
their titles) are interconnected and speak to each other, offering a view of my
world as it keeps changing. Shringara
(2006) is an intense exploration of love and loss and reflects a way of dealing
with death. The entire collection deals with grief and how it shapes us. All
the people and experiences we have are our ‘shringara’, our ornaments, our
treasure. Dreams That Spell The Light
(2010) journeys into aspects of the self, and Imagine (2017), my new and selected poems, offers the promise of
being human. My latest, my seventh collection, What Survives Is The Singing (2020), is a reaching out, reflecting
a deep and profound receptivity to the world. Many of my poems are meditations
on the tragedy and triumph of being human. The manuscript had been submitted
before COVID-19. Its appearance during lockdown in the UK was a poignant
reminder of ‘strange times’ – not just of displacement but of man’s inhumanity.
Living on your own is the price you pay for priceless insights. I bring these
insights to bear on my writing. At the core lies a promise of hope and
redemption.
BD: Could you give us some information about your next
projects?
SA: My eighth poetry collection is almost ready. While it
continues with my exploration of the human condition, the insights I bring to
it are fresh and different. I am also working on putting together a collection
of poems, which is a lot of work but also gives me great pleasure. We have not
spoken about my novels; my first, A World Elsewhere, appeared in 2015, and my
second is due for publication in 2024. My novels are independent yet
interconnected, speak to each other, and benefit from being read together. I am
thinking of a third, a kind of trilogy. I don’t know about other writers, but
my life has been full of hindrances. Finding the time and peace of mind to
write has consistently been thwarted by a lifetime of obstructions. I have
never received any support for my work. The fact that I have done it in spite
of everything is a blessing. Unfortunately, the politics of publishing are
soul-destroying and have nothing to do with the rapture of writing.
BD: Please share a poem that best describes you as a poet
with us.
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