MINSTREL BEHIND LYRICS: A LIT-CHAT BETWEEN ARUNDHATI
SUBRAMANIAM AND GOUTAM KARMAKAR
SHORT BIO
OF ARUNDHATI SUBRAMANIAM
Described as ‘one of the finest poets writing in India
today’ (The Hindu, 2010), Arundhathi Subramaniam is the award-winning author of
eleven books of poetry and prose. Widely translated and anthologised, her
recent volume of poetry, When God is a
Traveller was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for
the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Arundhati Subramaniam is the recipient of various
awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza
Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero
Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Zee Indian Women Award for Literature, among
others. She has written extensively on culture and spirituality, and has worked
over the years as poetry editor, cultural curator and critic.
As prose writer, her books include the bestselling
biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life and most
recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru). As editor,
her most recent book is the acclaimed Penguin anthology of sacred poetry,
Eating God. She can be reached at arundhathisubramaniam.webs.com. Among many
other video links on herself, two have been given here: Video Links
QUINTESSENCE OF THE CONVERSATION
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Hello Ms. Arundhathi Subramaniam.
How are you, ma’am?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: Thanks,
Goutam. I’m well.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Although you have answered quite
a few times about this question but one more time answer it for me. Will you
begin the conversation by discussing something about your childhood, schooling,
college days and educational background? Are there any childhood memories that
you still cherish?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I
grew up in Bombay in an apartment with an enormous peepul tree at the window
and the Arabian Sea in the distance. That was a defining view in many ways. I
now see that my deep-seated affinity with harbour cities has much to do with
having lived in one for most of my life. The whiff of ocean air at dusk, the
smell of fish, breezes from foreign shores, polyglottal conversations, the
distant crackle of mercantilism – all that and more is Bombay for me.
I
went to the JB Petit High School, a well-known school in the Fort area of
Bombay, and was grateful for its liberal temper, its high level of commitment
to the arts (we had professionals of the calibre of Pearl Padamsee and Piloo
Pochkhanawala teaching us drama and art, for instance), and the fact that a
narrow focus on academics and competitiveness was not the priority.
Later,
I went to St Xavier’s College where I did my BA in English Literature, and
subsequently my MA at the University of Mumbai. That was an important phase. It
was for me the opportunity to view the subject I loved not as passion alone,
but as rigorous discipline.
After
that came my years of involvement with the Poetry Circle of Bombay –
essentially a forum where a bunch of people, similarly besotted by verse, met
to talk and read poetry. In terms of my personal trajectory, this was
particularly important because this offered a sense of community, and was an
opportunity to engage with the workshop aspects of poetry, to engage with it as
a form that calls for precision and strenuous work. It was here that I met
fellow poets and writers like Jerry Pinto, Ranjit Hoskote, Menka Shivdasani,
Masud Taj, Prabhanjan Mishra, TR Joy, Marilyn Noronha, Anju Makhija, and many
others who have continued to remain involved with the form in their own ways.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: At what age did you discover your
passion for poetry? And why have you drawn to poetry? Kindly elaborate.
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: It
was the earliest verbal art I encountered, and I was hooked from the start. I
was excited, like all children are, I imagine, by the energy and velocity of
language in nursery rhymes and nonsense verse. And the act of releasing that to
the human voice was a pleasurable one.
I
believe that its energy, its charge, and its aliveness remained significant
reasons for my staying engaged with poetry later on. When I say aliveness, I
don’t mean ‘acting out’ or ‘performing’ a poem which is what so many people
believe it is. I mean the heightened, pulsating experience of sharing a poem as
spoken word.
And
finally, of course, there is self-expression, but even more significantly,
self-discovery. Poetry is the most direct verbal route to me that I know. It is
a way of acknowledging the importance of that journey and the elation of making
and finding the self all at once.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Do lines and thoughts naturally
come to you? Can you please tell the process of your revising and reworking
more precisely how a poem is completed by you?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: Sometimes
I arrive at a poem after doodling on the page. But most times, a poem begins
for me with a line – a line that is enticing, provocative, unexpected, a line
that demands to be followed. And it’s about obeying that beckoning, which can
sometimes an imperious summons and very often the subtlest invitation. The
crucial thing is to listen for that line, and not defer or dismiss the
invitation. Ironically, the line sometimes is edited right out of the poem in
later revisions, and may make its way to another poem later on. But the line is
important, nonetheless, crucial really.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: I have gone through your line
that you like the process of writing poetry to be play rather than work. So
what are the unique poetic features that differentiate you from the rest of the
Indian poets writing in English? Is it the lyrical pattern for many of your
poems are lyrical in nature?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I
am drawn to poetry as a lyric art because the lyric poem is the most immediate,
urgent verbal entity I know. It’s an intense distillation of a moment where
thought meets feeling, where body meets spirit, if you will, in a way where the
two are inextricable. There may be narrative elements, certainly, but the lyric
poem for me is recognizable by its musicality, its imagistic suddenness, its
electric charge, its capacity to feel startling and inevitable all at once.
GOUTAM
KARMAKAR: Are you aware of contemporary Indian English poetry and Indian poets
writing in English? Who are the poets from whom you have taken inspiration for
your writing?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I’ve
been nourished by different poets at different times in different ways. I grew
up in Bombay at a time when several senior practitioners of poetry were around
– poets who took their art very seriously indeed. And I owe a great deal to the
active encouragement of poets I admire like Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla,
Gieve Patel, and later, Imtiaz Dharker and Keki Daruwalla. Long before that,
there were poet Eunice de Souza whose lectures in English literature at St
Xavier’s were stimulating. Subsequently, at the Poetry Circle, conversations
with fellow writers (from Ranjit, Jerry, Marilyn and Menka to Taj, Prabhanjan
and Joy) and engaged academics (Shabnam Mirchandani and Abhay Sardesai to Jatin
Wagh and Mangesh Kulkarni) provoked new and fresherways of thinking about and
looking at poetry.
The
poets whose poems have mattered a great deal without my ever having interacted
with them are Arun Kolatkar (whom I’ve met but never really talked with at any
length), and more recently, AK Ramanujan.
I admire Kolatkar’s exactitude of image and tone, but more recently
AKR’s poetry (its intellectual and spiritual curiosity) and his wonderful
translations of Bhakti poetry (from Nammalvar to Akka Mahadevi) and of Tamil
Sangam verse has become particularly significant to me. He interests me more
and more.
And
perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that we didn’t meet! There’s a lovely line by
Eunice de Souza: ‘Best to meet in poems’. That’s absolutely true.
GOUTAM
KARMAKAR: Now-a-days people are segregating poets as good reputed poets and bad
poets who write only for getting attention. Why do we discriminate the poets
like this? Do you agree with me? And what are the parameters or the touchstone
method for you for a good poem and a badly written piece?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I
don’t know if that is a new segregation or demarcation, Goutam. Certainly one
cannot adopt rigid criteria to slot a poem one way or another. And I do believe
there is a lot of clunky, heavy-handed criticism that attempts to categorise
poetry on the basis of its politics alone, for instance, which is a woefully
myopic way to read verse.
But
I do believe it is possible to make a distinction between a good and bad poem.
Not in any dogmatic way, but in a way that acknowledges the historical
particularity and provisionality of one’s assessment. And it helps to make that
distinction because every utterance is not
a poem. A poem takes craft and attention, in pretty much the same way as
cooking a meal takes work. And we do
make distinctions between a good meal and a bad meal, don’t we?
Every
utterance is not a poem. But at the same time, every time one makes a judgment
it is important to be prepared to be surprised. It is just when you arrive at a
definitive idea of ‘good verse’ that you suddenly encounter a poem that
challenges it. That’s the joy of being a reader of poetry.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: You travel a lot and even when I
have contacted you have told me that you are travelling. So how are you
benefitted by this extensive travelling? And do you even write poems in time
travelling or you need certain place and space for your creative works?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I
do travel a lot. I grumble about it sometimes – the bureaucracy attendant on
it, from visa hurdles to security checks. But I realize that I do need it,
because it brings fresh breezes, fresh perspectives. It offers, above all, a
new way of looking at the old. As a Greek essayist, Anastassis Vistonitis, once
put it, when you return home, you realize that all you really wanted to do was
to shift the angle of your armchair just a little. But you needed to make that
long journey to discover that!
In
many of my books, from Pilgrim’s India (the
Penguin anthology of essays and poems that I edited) to When God is a Traveller (my most recent book of poems), journeys
have been significant. Many journeys are present as tropes in the poems – from
Shakuntala’s journey from forest to court (and her inability to belong to
either) to the young Muruga’s journey around the world to claim the fruit of
knowledge. The idea of a young impetuous pilgrim travelling the world to seek
knowledge when his parents are none other than Shiva and Shakti interested me
hugely (as does the prodigal son story in the Bible), and that eventually
became the title poem of my collection.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: On January 2015 you have won the
inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for ‘When God is a Traveller’, a book
where you have encountered with the real like Mrs. Salim Shaikh along with
mythic figures like Shakuntala. So what do you want show by this type of
encounters and contradictions? And do you really believe that there lies a
mistrust of dogmatism whether it is secular or sacred?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: What
Mrs Salim Shaikh and Shakuntala have in common is essentially that they are
travellers – one is a passenger in a contemporary context (an Indian Railways
experience, as it were) and the other is a more archetypal questor. They
interest me because they alter my perspective of things in their own ways – Mrs
Salim Shaikh by her cheerfully na├пve but deeply restoring common sense (that
refuses to be hijacked by agenda-driven political and communal rhetoric) and
Shakuntala in a deeper way because she refuses to splinter the world into
simple polarities of flesh and spirit, secular and sacred, forest and court (or
at least that’s how I see her in the poem).
In their own ways, they challenge dogmatism because they don’t allow
their worlds to become conceptually fragmented. Poetry is, in any case, always antithetical
to rigid categorisation, to dogmatism. It has to be, because it is a
celebration of the imagination – that wonderful, chaotic, churning, disruptive,
startling, mysterious, illuminating inner world.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR:
You have edited an anthology of contemporary Indian Love Poems namely
‘Confronting Love’ along with Jerry Pinto. So what is your definition of
‘Love’? I can memorise what Mr. Daruwalla says regarding your poetry. Allow me
to quote him that “Subramaniam’s poetry is one of illumination. She flashes a
pencil-torchlight on a subject, and suddenly you feel you are richer for it.
What defines her verse is its subtlety and angle of vision from which she sees
life.” So your readers want to know how and in which way you have seen ‘life’.
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: There
seem to be two questions here: one on love and one on life. But perhaps the two
are linked. Both life and love are both
full of unexpectedness, capable of sly twists and turns, of paradox and joy. I
cannot think of life without love. And because it is such a deeply energizing
experience, I suppose one cannot think of love without life.
I
don’t know if there is any single angle from which I view life, Goutam. Each
poem – indeed, each moment – requires another angle. The angle is adopted not
for effect, but is suggested by a deep attentive ‘looking at’ or ‘being with’
something. The reason we all turn to poems, even as readers, is for the same
reason, I believe. Poetry can create subtle but surprising shifts in the way we
view life. But for that, you need to be willing to adopt the lens and angle
that the moment demands. If you adopt the same lens again and again, you turn
rigid, stale and predictable. In fact, you run the risk of what we spoke of
earlier – turning rigid. That is the very antithesis of life, because life is
never -- absolutely never – rigid, capable of stillness perhaps, on occasion,
but never static.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Your spiritual guide Jaggi
Vasudev has left a lasting influence on you and your ‘Sadhguru: More Than A
Life” proves it. So have you succeeded to understand the inner life of
Sadhguru, a yogi and mystic? And after your encounter with Sadhguru what have
you discovered in you- mysticism or scepticism?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: Sadhguru
has certainly impacted my life as my spiritual guide in very fundamental ways.
And no, I certainly haven’t succeeded in understanding him fully. But then I
don’t think one ever understands anyone fully, and less so a mystic whose inner
life is unimaginably complex. More Than a
Life is a book that adopts a tone of wonder but also of enquiry to approach
this phenomenon. But it doesn’t claim to be a complete or comprehensive
picture, because I don’t think that’s possible anyway. I think it’s probably
somewhat unusual in that respect: it is neither a hagiography nor an expos├й.
What
are the significant ways in which Sadhguru has impacted my life? Probably in
helping me make my peace with uncertainty. (Poetry does that too, but a
spiritual practice helps you do that more deeply. That is also why any
authentic spiritual tradition can never be dogmatic, incidentally.) And another
important impact is this: because he has never asked me for belief, for
uncritical obedience, for weak-kneed adoration, he has, in fact, helped banish
for me the rigid divide (that the world so often sets up) between the mystical
and the sceptical, the magical and the logical.
He
is my guide for several reasons. But one important reason is this: he has
helped me embark on a journey where I don’t have to cease to be a sceptic in
order to be a seeker.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Your ‘Where I Live: New and
Selected Poems’ centres around the question of belonging and unbelonging and
your poem ‘Home’ expresses your quest for a place of your own. So what is your
definition of ‘Home’? How have you overcome the sense of alienation and
existentialism in your life?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: It’s
important here to say that Where I Live
was about unbelonging on many levels. But it was not about the kind of
‘alienation’ that people believe Anglophone Indian intellectuals suffer from.
So, I should say here that I have never felt alienated from India. I am
grateful to be heir to its great and bewildering cultural and spiritual legacy
(which is full of many messy inconsistencies that are sometimes deeply
disturbing and oftenutterly fascinating). I see English as one more Indian
language – one with unfortunate antecedents in a colonized country, but
nonetheless, one that is indisputably ours today.
Where I Live
was about another kind of unbelonging. I often say that Where I Live was about trying to bridge the gap between where I
live and where I belong – where I am and where I want to be, as it were. It
explored this gap on different levels - personal, physical, cultural, political
and existential. I knew where I lived. But I wasn’t sure, however, of where I
belonged.
But
with the new book, there is a definite shift: I know less about where I live,
but I certainly know where I belong. I don’t mean ‘belonging’ in terms of
geography. (I lead too much of a peripatetic life to have a single address
anyway!). I mean ‘belonging’ in terms of a deeper sense of inner anchorage, of
residence in the self. I am grateful for that.
You
are asking about my definition of home? It would be akin to TS Eliot’s ‘still
point of the turning world’. Or as I say in the poem, ‘Home’, it’s the place
that is ‘so alien when I try to belong, so hospitable when I decide I’m just
visiting’. Or as in another poem (‘Strategist’), I see it as about learning to
‘inhabit the verb’.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: When have you started your
spiritual journey? And how far does this spiritual journey shape your creative
impulse?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: The
sense of quest was around for as long as I know. But it assumed a certain
intensity in the late ‘90s, and grew more focused and committed when I found
spiritual guidance in 2004.
How
does it affect my poetry? In innumerable ways, I suppose. Just as it affects
everything else I do, but not in terms of the content of the poetry. Most people believe that ‘turning spiritual’
means turning vapidly pious or becoming a believer. I don’t do that in my
poetry. Even the poem, ‘When God is a Traveller’, is about Kartikeya or Muruga
as an archetypal seeker, not as god in any conventional sense.
But
I suppose the most important way in which the spiritual shapes the creative is
in terms of process. It makes the process more alive, more uncertain, more porous,
more open to surprise. Craft matters to me and always has, but I am more open
than before to trusting the poem, to following its lead. That honing of
receptivity is what the spiritual journey is about. And that’s what both the
spiritual and the creative have fundamentally in common: they are both
invitations to listen – to listen
deep and hard and attentively to the world around and within you.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Your ‘Eating God’ is all about
Bhakti poetry. So how have you developed your interest in Bhakti poetry? And
how far your reading of other poets’ works and translations regarding Bhakti
poetry influence your writing?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: The
Bhakti poetry anthology happened thanks to the suggestion of an editor at
Penguin, Kamini Mahadevan, and Ravi Singh who was the head of Penguin at the
time. I was delighted when they proposed it because it resonated deeply with a
personal preoccupation. These are poems that have offered me sanctuary,
companionship, illumination and signposts on what can often be a singularly
lonely journey. They’ve rescued me in some of my darkest moments.
So
the anthology essentially aims to be a compilation of some of the finest
devotional poets down the ages, from Nammalvar to Tukaram, from Basavanna and
Akka Mahadevi to Janabai and Soyarabai and so many more. I thought that they
would be excitingto read in polyphony. And so, the book is not organized on the
basis of language, region, gender, caste or sectarian affiliation, but on the
basis of tone, from the yearning to the enraged, from the erotic to the
despairing, from the ironic to the ecstatic. That, I believed, could be the
basis of a new kind of anthology. And I think that is the unique feature of the
volume – one that, I was grateful to find, struck a deep chord with several
readers.
How
does it affect my own writing? Probably in more ways than I know. From the
fierce directness of tone to the intimacy and irreverence of the address to the
divine, from the refusal to separate the erotic from the existential to the
deep need to seek personal answers to ultimate questions – all these aspects of
these poems have percolated into my life, as into the lives of so many in this
subcontinent. And so, they have undeniably shaped my poetry as well. Many of
the poems in When God is a Traveller have
epigraphs from poets like Nammalvar and Tukaram, for instance. And I’m sure
they have moulded my work in a host of other insidious ways that I’m not aware
of.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: The titles of your works are
somewhat different. ‘When God is a Traveller’ and ‘Eating God’ these two titles
are somewhat different. So can you please tell the journey and whose journey it
is in ‘When God is a Traveller’? And where lies the importance and significance
behind your taking a line from Nammalvar’s poem for your title of ‘Eating God’?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I
think I’ve answered this earlier. ‘When God is a Traveller’ is a poem based on
the travels of Muruga around the world. We sometimes need to travel far away
from home in order to return, recognize and reclaim our personal inheritance
for what it really is. And so, this is a poem about quest, about the fact that
we sometimes need to make external journeys even while knowing that the truest
answers lie within. This journey from innocence to experience is a trope we
find in mythology from across the world.
‘Eating
God’ is a line from a Tamil poem by the 10th century Vaishnava poet,
Nammalvar, that I love. It is a sentiment echoed by other poems by Bhakti
poets: in Janabai’s poem translated by Arun Kolatkar, for instance, or in Kabir
translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. These are poems that articulate a great,
unabashed, passionate appetite for the divine. They invoke the spiritual
journey not as some anaemic bloodless aspiration, but as a deeply sensual
desire that implicates both body and the beyond.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: If you are told to select some
of your poems for the anthology where poets all over the world will contribute
then which poems will you consider and why? And what are the possible areas of
poetry that you should be explored of your poetry by the critics, readers,
scholars and academicians?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I’d
select a combination from all four books. Perhaps ‘Prayer’, ‘Winter, Delhi,
1997’, ‘Vigil’, ‘By Thirty’ and ‘5.46, Andheri Local’ from the first. ‘Where I
Live’, ‘Madras’, ‘To the Welsh Critic who doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’,
‘Another Way’ and ‘The Same Questions’ from the second. ‘Leapfrog’,
‘Sharecropping’, ‘Epigrams for Life after Fifty’ from the third (which was a
New and Selected). And ‘Eight Poems to Shakuntala’, ‘When God is a Traveller’,
‘I Speak for Those with Orange Lunchboxes’, ‘My Friends’, ‘Six about Love
Stories’, ‘Where the Script Ends’, ‘Transplant’ and ‘Poems Matter’ from the
most recent.
I’m
reluctant to prescribe to anyone what they should look for in my poems. But I
would hope to find a reader who is interested at some point in an immersive
reading of the poems, and open to exploring tropes like belonging, city, relationship,
quest andtravel– all of which have been important preoccupations in my poetry.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: You have translated Tamil poems,
Gujrati poems and some poems of Abhirami Bhattar for your ‘Eating God’. So do
you think that while translating the translator’s thoughts are fused with the
original piece? And do the translator and the author need and get equal
attention and focus after the recognition of the translated work?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I
believe we choose to translate poets whose work resonates in some way with us.
So, I chose Abhirami Bhattar, for instance, because he’s a Devi bhakta – a
fascination that I share -- and I was keen on bringing in the Divine Feminine
into the Bhakti anthology.
Translation
is a challenging but exciting business. Like the writing of a poem, it entails
a profound act of listening. But it is an even more rigorous listening, because
it entails tuning into the voice of another – listening to a very specific
timbre and tone and aspiration which can sometimes be at variance with one’s
own. Translation has been described in various ways – as a s├йance (where you
turn medium and allow another voice to speak through you) and as ventriloquism
(where you throw your voice and use another poet as your channel). For me, it’s
a mix of the two. But even while it is an act of re-creation, there’s a certain
hubris in claiming that role of ‘co-creator’ too easily. Without the initial
act of deep, respectful listening, no translation is possible in the first
place.
I
have no problem with the author getting the lion’s share of the attention. If
my translations can stimulate someone to go back and read more of the Abhirami Antadi, I would consider myself
successful. But yes, of course, it is true that the translator’s role shouldn’t
be side-lined or trivialized. I think specifically of translators like AK
Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, David Shulman and several others, and how a tremendous
heritage of poetry is made available to us, thanks to their efforts.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: What is your opinion regarding
the future of Indian English poetry? Now readers are interested in fictions,
short stories and dramas. And poetry becomes neglected and hardly a few buy
poetry collections. So what are the possible suggestions and solutions you want
to give for the betterment of the future of poetry in general?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I
used to be deeply concerned about the marginalized position of poetry in the
scheme of things. I confess I am much less concerned now. It is true that
poetry is peripheral to many, but it is equally true that poetry cannot and
will not ever die out. There may be few takers for it, but they exist, and
always will.
Suggestions?
To potential readers (and that includes everyone except those who are already
reading it), I’d say, poetry is meant to be enjoyed, not feared. And to
teachers, above all, I’d say, find a way to create excitement around the
experience of a poem. Once you do that, the battle is won. Don’t paraphrase it.
Don’t be in a hurry to make conclusions or express an opinion too easily about
a poem. Allow it to breathe in the classroom; allow students to inhale it and
make it their own. After that, you have a reader of poetry for life.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: There is an evolving poetic
maturity as seen in your poems. You are not the same who has written ‘On
Cleansing Bookshelves’. So how will you describe this poetic maturity? And what
will your readers get from you in the future years-more changes in thought
process?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: The
first book was a varied compilation of poems – and I see it as a happily varied
book in terms of theme and style. The second book was an exploration of the
theme of belonging. The third – a New and
Selected – deepened the exploration, also probing the frontiers between the
sacred and secular. And the most recent book, When God is a Traveller, examines journeys of various kinds –
mundane and metaphysical.
I
don’t know if I can predict the primary concern of the next book, but I find
the poems returning to the question of time and ageing. The tone is not
elegiac, however, but somewhat reflective, sometimes even upbeat.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: What should be the actual role
of a poet for this society? And do you think yourself as a social reformer for
what your poetry give does to the society and its inhabitants?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: The
poet’s role is to be true to herself or himself, first of all. Authenticity and
artistry – we need both for any book to hold.
I
have no issue whatsoever with social reformers, but that is not how I see the
role of the poet. The role of the poet is to be true to her or his perspective
of life. To combine that integrity of perception with verbal relish and
dexterity – that is poetry.
In
the process of making or reading poems, change certainly happens – not in terms
of immediate social transformation, but in subtle ways. Poetry transforms the
way we look at the world, and the way we map our reality. It transforms our
interiority because of the way in which it aligns beauty and truth. And that is
the only profound and subtle shift that endures. It is never measurable, never
quantifiable, but it is undeniable.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: I know that you can memorise
your poems very well and you love poetry reading sessions. So what are the
pleasures you get which reading your piece? And what kind of readers do you
expect for your poetry?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: The
pleasure of reading a poem aloud, as I said earlier, is the sheer sensual
delight of following its contours – its every grain and syllable and pause. The
‘live’ quality of that act appeals to me. Even as a child, that was the charm
of poetry – that it appealed as much to the tongue as to the eye. It ached to
be spoken, to be celebrated vocally.
What
kind of reader do I like? The kind that is willing to listen attentively, that
is willing to enjoy the poem as a sensual experience, and is not in a hurry to
extract a singular message or air a conclusive opinion about it.
I
say this because I see poetry as a wonderful reprieve from opinion. And given
that we’re obliged to have opinions all the time in the world we live in, it
can sometimes get exhausting. I often get tired of it! Poetry is a way of
knowing that frees you from obligation to be certain, to bristle all the time
with conclusion. It reminds you that there are other deeper ways of
understanding ourselves and our worlds.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Who are the new voices of Indian
English poetry whose works you love to read? And what will be your advice for
the new poets and the amateur ones?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: There
are many younger contemporary poets I enjoy – not all of them younger than me
chronologically (although most are), but in terms of publishing history. I
thought Karthika Nair’s last book was remarkable. There are many others: Ravi
Shankar, Anjum Hasan, Sampurna Chattarji, Mona Zote, Sridala Swamy, Rohinton
Daruwalla, Tishani Doshi, Sharanya Manivannan, Meena Kandasamy, Anupama Raju,
Sumana Roy, Goirick Brahmachari, Michael Creighton, to name a few. I’m sure
there are many others I’m leaving out.
I
don’t think new poets need advice. Or want it! So, I wouldn’t presume to offer
it. Every poet has to find her or his way to make the journey. But perhaps the
only suggestions I offer to those who ask is this: don’t be in a hurry to
arrive. Take your time before putting your work out there. And merely publishing
a book (or books) isn’t proof of proficiency. Allow work to simmer and gestate.
Don’t be in a hurry to put it on the page. Don’t allow yourself to turn glib:
make sure you don’t mistake fluency and facility for the real thing. And
finally, I’d say, watch literary fashion, enjoy the headiness of craft, the
passion and urgency of political engagement, but make sure your creative
process is deeply linked to the journey of growing into yourself. In short,
don’t compartmentalize poetry and life. Allow the two to leak into each other
and enrich each other. That is the only way the journey makes sense.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: How far do you see yourself as a
feminist poet? And what is your opinion regarding contemporary Indian Women
poets writing in English?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: I’ve
discussed this at length in articles and interviews as well. I’m not
embarrassed by the word ‘feminist’. It has helped me in many ways to understand
myself and the contexts that others and I inhabit. It has, in short, been a marvellous
tool. But does that mean some cast-iron identity, some ideological straitjacket,
and some doctrinaire position that admits of no inconsistency? Not at all. I am
a work in progress, and I see feminism as a great resource of
self-understanding. I haven’t arrived. I don’t believe anyone has. Feminism is
a journey; not a destination.
There
are many fine women poets in India today across all languages. In fact, some of
the best poets writing in the country today happen to be women. I find myself
returning to their poems often – from Savithri Rajeevan (Malayalam) to Pratibha
Nandakumar (Kannada), from Anamika (Hindi) to Tarannum Riyaz (Urdu), including
all the other Anglophone poets I mentioned earlier.
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: What role does poetry do for
you- a liberator, a medium of expression, a way to deal with life or a way to
connect with the society and the self? You are among those few poets who
capture contradictory impulses in such a good way. And how far ambivalence,
contradictions, uncertainties mould your thoughts and imaginations while
writing poetry?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: Poetry
is the most direct and pleasurable route to the self, as I said earlier. But it
is not some intellectual process alone, although the intellect is implicated.
And it is not some emotional process alone, although the emotions are
implicated. There is no poetry without aliveness. The hallmark of a good poem
is one where it feels you’re encountering language in its most nascentstate –
the very ore or magma of language, as it were. That’s why poetry can give you
the naked wire experience – the sense of suddenly being in touch with something
electrical, magical and heightened. So, even while it starts with the self, a
good poem is never a solipsistic exercise. It connects with the world, with
nature, with culture, with everything really, because the self is never
separate from any of these.
About
ambivalence and contradiction, it isn’t something I consciously try to achieve
in my poetry. In the process of looking hard at something – anything really –
you see its many facets, its many contradictions, and that’s what I find
fascinating about most things, anyway. For example, I’ve sometimes been asked
why I hate Mumbai, and that surprises me. I don’t hate the city at all. It’s just
that any relationship of intimacy involves a complex welter of emotional
states. Where there is love there is bound to be intensity. I don’t have a
tepid relationship with Mumbai, or with any place or person or object that I
love. Where there is intensity and voltage, there is bound to be vibrant
complexity, not insipid blandness.
Do you think that now-a-days many poets are
trying to self-promote herself to establish his/her identity? Suddenly I have
remembered what you have said regarding the use of first person singular in
prose and poetry by women poets. Can you please elaborate this once again
before your readers?
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM: To
answer the first question about whether poets are self-promotional today: well,
I think the poetry scene today reflects the times we live in, and there is a
certain anxiety about PR and marketing in the general world we inhabit, isn’t
there? Not surprisingly, that ethos has infiltrated the literary scene as well.
In
a recent poem, I wrote about growing up in an age of misanthropic poets and
then finding myself in an age of market-savvy poets. I don’t feel particularly
comfortable with either! But to be fair, let me say this: I have no problem
with poets who want their work to be heard. I only have a problem with poets
who forget that the art of poetry is much about listening than about asserting,
much more about self-exploration than self-advertisement.
Regarding
your second question, that’s about an entirely different notion of ‘self’. I
think your question alludes to the essay I wrote for The Hindu last year. I was writing here of the unfortunate impulse
to dismiss the ‘personal’ as narrow, navel-gazingautobiography in poetry
criticism. We seem to have forgotten how to read poetry, unfortunately. If we
aren’t able to extract sermon or sociology from it, we’re frequently dismiss
it. I was also talking about the many biases involved in critiquing poetry
authored by women – labelling the use of the first person singular as
apolitical, for instance, which so often overlooks the explosive radical
potential in it.
(The
readers can find more about this question in this article)
GOUTAM KARMAKAR: Thank you Ms Arundhathi Subramaniam
for being so cooperative with me.
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM:
Thank you Goutam. God bless you. Best of luck for your anthology on selected
Indian poets writing in English.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Goutam Karmakar is currently working as a PhD Research
Scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute
of Technology Durgapur (NITD), India. He is a bilingual poet, critic, editor, book
reviewer and interviewer. His articles and research papers have been published
in many International Journals and edited books. He has taken interviews of
notable Indian poets writing in English. His poems have been published in many
international journals and anthologies. He seeks interest in Indian English
Literature, Postmodern and Postcolonial literature, gender studies, queer
theory, ecocritical studies, dalit literature, folklore and culture studies. He
can be reached at: goutamkrmkr@gmail.com
