MADURAI ON MY MIND By Saleem Peeradina
My first trip to South India in two decades, was an eye-opener in many ways.
My destination was American College, Madurai, where I had been invited to spend a couple of weeks as writer-in-residence to conduct a poetry workshop and to do readings of my own work in local colleges. After the workshop, I was going to set out on a poetry reading tour in five other locations.
Within American College, it was The Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and in Translation (SCILET) that was my host. The Centre maintains an excellent library, study space and facilities not only for local students and faculty working on their MA, M Phil and Ph D degrees but it also welcomes scholars from all over India.
Paul Love, a mid-westerner, who first came to India on a cargo ship at the age of 25 in 1954, has now made Madurai his home and heads SCILET. He is the driving spirit behind the Centre’s activities which includes Kavya Bharati , one of the few poetry journals now left that still comes out, albeit on an erratic schedule.
Paul and his colleagues have also organized a Visiting Writers Series for SCILET, which has included such names as Meena Alexander, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Suniti Namjoshi, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande, Ayyappa Paniker, Gita Hariharan, Gieve Patel, Sujata Bhatt, and Keki Daruwalla.
The Centre staff is knowledgeable, helpful, and unobtrusive. The atmosphere is very conducive to research. The holdings on Indian Writing including the periodicals section are very impressive. There is also a small section of books by writers from other South Asian countries, and some Tamil fiction. Satellite collections of Australian, Canadian, and Native American literature are being added. Titles in ancillary fields such as history, philosophy, social sciences, and women’s studies can also be found in the neatly labeled and organized book cupboards. In fact, nearly half of the writers in the library’s holdings are women.
If there is something comparable to Scilet elsewhere in India, I would like to know about it. If there isn’t, more people working in the field of Indian Writing in English should be trekking down to Madurai to use this resource center.
The campus itself is large, green, shaded and quiet. Outside the gates is a busy thoroughfare with daylong traffic. In the neighbourhood are bakeries, farsan shops, fruit and juice stalls, idli and dosa joints, internet browsing centers and other stores. Auto and other transportation is easily available. Aside from the awesome architectural marvel of the Meenakshi Temple (and the unique experience of being blessed on the head by an elephant’s bristly snout), the splendid but faded Mahal and the hilltop observation point, the bustling city of one million which natives like to call an overgrown village, has little else to offer—a plus, if you are looking not to be distracted from your work.
Further out, there is an inviting landscape of sugarcane and paddy fields, banana plantations and coconut groves. And many other places of interest, depending on which direction you go and how far east or west. I made a day’s excursion to Thekadi or the Periyar Lake Sanctuary—a 3-hour drive into the hills. The boat ride on the sprawling lake was enchanting and I was lucky enough to spot at a distance, elephants, deer, hogs and bison.
Driving along the southern tip of the western ghats that wags its tail into Kerala, I passed through a village notorious for infanticide. Despite the 1994 Prenatal Diagnostic Technique Regulation and Prevention of Misuse Act, the practice continues, slanted as usual, towards female infanticide. Not far from this site is the constituency of a noted political figure: her well-fed face smiles smugly from wall posters all over town. Tragedy and farce have been old-time cohorts!
The level of literacy in the South has always been high and school and college education is widespread. Everywhere I meet eager, bright-eyed, students. At Farouk college in Calicut, it is heartening to see so many aspiring Muslim women in the audience, most of them in burqas, listening with rapt attention. But although they question and debate, they are not ready to challenge parental dictates leave alone break from them. The majority of them will be forced to fit into traditional roles.
Salma is a good example: MA in English; working in the college library; quietly confident and articulate. She gave up the veil while in college, but seems resigned to her future role as wife and mother with no guarantee that the husband chosen by her parents will permit her to work.
In another village I meet Vedha, an ex-graduate of American College, who now runs the high school his parents started 30 years ago. It has 1800 students who study in the English medium—a mixed population drawn from agricultural families, children of business fathers (brokers) dealing in cardamom which is a staple crop. Pepper, coffee, tea, clove, cocoa and fifty other spices are also grown in the region.
*
As for the Workshop itself, I had a group of fourteen which produced some good, average, and some pretty bad verse—no different from what students produce elsewhere, including in the US. It is easy to underestimate these students whose English is not of the highest quality. City-slick students have a tendency to put down small town students but I found them well-informed, inquisitive, imaginative, alert, politically sensitive, and what touched me most, very earnest.
Having lived and taught on two continents, it never ceases to amaze me how avidly Indian students search out and soak up new knowledges from everywhere. In stark contrast, the cultural insularity of average Americans, their lack of interest, indifference even to want to know about other worlds dismays me. Up until thirty years ago, most Americans did not even care about “other” worlds within their own geographical boundaries. The redefining of the canon in the interests of making the curriculum more inclusive made a huge impact in opening up and letting in a diversity of voices. Today’s students are the beneficiaries of this trend, and are taking it a step further. Even more direct than reading about the philosophy, art, history, religion, and literature of other countries, is going over to live in those countries. The development of Study Abroad programs is one of the best outcomes of the expansion of American educational horizons.
Madurai offered two such surprises. A program called “Shansi”, brings to the American college campus recent graduates from Oberlin College, Ohio. The Shansi program (first started in the city of Shansi, China, after which the program is named, and later expanded to include Madurai) originated long before “multicultural” became a catchword—on this campus it was celebrating 50 years while I was there in January.
Another program, this one associated with Lady Doak college in Madurai, is the South India Term Abroad (SITA) which brings a group of American students for a semester’s stay in South India involving academic study, field work, and home stay in middle class family homes. I spoke to the group one afternoon and was amazed at the initiative and courage of these students—wearing Indian attire, learning Tamil, eating the food, observing the customs—to immerse themselves in a culture which is alien even to North Indians! The most amusing gesture was the sideways shake of the head—an ambivalent Indian-style affirmation--which the students had studiously adopted as a badge of belonging!
*
The poetry reading segment of my trip that followed the conclusion of the workshop was timely, because the American edition of my third book of poems, Meditations on Desire, had just been released. The Indian edition will be out later this year.
I started in Madurai, continued through Kodaikanal, Ooty, Calicut, Bangalore, and ended in Bombay. I did eighteen presentations altogether, read at book clubs and for private groups, and on many campuses including Thygarajar college, Lady Doak and Fatima colleges, Providence college, Calicut university, The National Institute of Advanced Studies, and The National Centre for the Performing Arts. Everywhere, the response was overwhelming.
My books have been in circulation in India for thirty years and it was reassuring to know that older readers had not forgotten my work even though I have been an expatriate for the last fifteen years. The college-going generation was studying selections from my poetry anthology in courses on Indian Writing. And for many of them, to hear a living poet—a creature that had not crossed the floor of their classroom before—was truly a thrill. Besides, in addition to its literary appeal, the poetry spoke to the students’ own concerns, occupying as it did a shared cultural turf. Recognizable content, familiar nuances and allusions, lowered the customary barriers that surround the study of ‘English’ literature in India.
Through the poems, I use my privileged position to the fullest extent to provoke questions on thorny issues relating to women’s lives, gender bias, religious bigotry, and social pretensions. This makes poetry more accessible and more meaningful to an audience. I have seen plenty of good poets—both here and abroad—who do bad readings of their own work in a stodgy, monotonous style that fails to do justice to the poetry and strains the listener’s patience. My goal is to involve and engage the audience, not alienate it. Perhaps it is the teacher in me that works in conjunction with the poet to ensure effective communication. Getting a sense of the make-up of the audience is part of the trick. You can’t make the same pitch to 12th graders that you make to an older age group.
When I read to American audiences, I have to ‘explain’ a little more before I venture into the poem; this helps smooth over their entry into the poem’s historical space. Often, the emotive layering in the poetry can be experienced by the listener without intervention from the author. The sensation of having touched and moved listeners with the magic of poetry is a delight like no other I have tasted.
The “localization” of the study of literature in India has come very slowly but is far ahead than what it used to be in my time. These days, literature students get to study some Indian writing although the choice of texts is uniformly applied to all colleges in the system and is still dictated by intellectually dried out academics living in the past. Younger faculty working on their Ph Ds engage in fancy research in post-colonial literature, but ironically, are not allowed to teach the material because they can’t get it past the elected-for-life committees. This is a crying shame and causes a lot of grief among talented teachers. It is the dead-end I ran into fifteen years ago that propelled my flight abroad.
In the American liberal arts tradition, it is a given that instructors “own” their syllabi. Over the years when I have formulated new courses like Non-Western World Literature, Autobiography, Women in Literature, and Creative Writing: Non-fiction, all I had to do was get an outline approved by the department chair, and schedule the class. If six students signed up, I was in business.
About my professional life, I have few complaints.
As a poet now slotted in the diaspora, location matters only to the extent that it enlarges the context out of which one writes, and how it enhances one’s sensibility.
Visiting India at regular intervals to recover the first half of my divided life provides nourishment for the soul.
Feeling “at home” in America? Now that’s another story.
My first trip to South India in two decades, was an eye-opener in many ways.
My destination was American College, Madurai, where I had been invited to spend a couple of weeks as writer-in-residence to conduct a poetry workshop and to do readings of my own work in local colleges. After the workshop, I was going to set out on a poetry reading tour in five other locations.
Within American College, it was The Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and in Translation (SCILET) that was my host. The Centre maintains an excellent library, study space and facilities not only for local students and faculty working on their MA, M Phil and Ph D degrees but it also welcomes scholars from all over India.
Paul Love, a mid-westerner, who first came to India on a cargo ship at the age of 25 in 1954, has now made Madurai his home and heads SCILET. He is the driving spirit behind the Centre’s activities which includes Kavya Bharati , one of the few poetry journals now left that still comes out, albeit on an erratic schedule.
Paul and his colleagues have also organized a Visiting Writers Series for SCILET, which has included such names as Meena Alexander, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Suniti Namjoshi, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande, Ayyappa Paniker, Gita Hariharan, Gieve Patel, Sujata Bhatt, and Keki Daruwalla.
The Centre staff is knowledgeable, helpful, and unobtrusive. The atmosphere is very conducive to research. The holdings on Indian Writing including the periodicals section are very impressive. There is also a small section of books by writers from other South Asian countries, and some Tamil fiction. Satellite collections of Australian, Canadian, and Native American literature are being added. Titles in ancillary fields such as history, philosophy, social sciences, and women’s studies can also be found in the neatly labeled and organized book cupboards. In fact, nearly half of the writers in the library’s holdings are women.
If there is something comparable to Scilet elsewhere in India, I would like to know about it. If there isn’t, more people working in the field of Indian Writing in English should be trekking down to Madurai to use this resource center.
The campus itself is large, green, shaded and quiet. Outside the gates is a busy thoroughfare with daylong traffic. In the neighbourhood are bakeries, farsan shops, fruit and juice stalls, idli and dosa joints, internet browsing centers and other stores. Auto and other transportation is easily available. Aside from the awesome architectural marvel of the Meenakshi Temple (and the unique experience of being blessed on the head by an elephant’s bristly snout), the splendid but faded Mahal and the hilltop observation point, the bustling city of one million which natives like to call an overgrown village, has little else to offer—a plus, if you are looking not to be distracted from your work.
Further out, there is an inviting landscape of sugarcane and paddy fields, banana plantations and coconut groves. And many other places of interest, depending on which direction you go and how far east or west. I made a day’s excursion to Thekadi or the Periyar Lake Sanctuary—a 3-hour drive into the hills. The boat ride on the sprawling lake was enchanting and I was lucky enough to spot at a distance, elephants, deer, hogs and bison.
Driving along the southern tip of the western ghats that wags its tail into Kerala, I passed through a village notorious for infanticide. Despite the 1994 Prenatal Diagnostic Technique Regulation and Prevention of Misuse Act, the practice continues, slanted as usual, towards female infanticide. Not far from this site is the constituency of a noted political figure: her well-fed face smiles smugly from wall posters all over town. Tragedy and farce have been old-time cohorts!
The level of literacy in the South has always been high and school and college education is widespread. Everywhere I meet eager, bright-eyed, students. At Farouk college in Calicut, it is heartening to see so many aspiring Muslim women in the audience, most of them in burqas, listening with rapt attention. But although they question and debate, they are not ready to challenge parental dictates leave alone break from them. The majority of them will be forced to fit into traditional roles.
Salma is a good example: MA in English; working in the college library; quietly confident and articulate. She gave up the veil while in college, but seems resigned to her future role as wife and mother with no guarantee that the husband chosen by her parents will permit her to work.
In another village I meet Vedha, an ex-graduate of American College, who now runs the high school his parents started 30 years ago. It has 1800 students who study in the English medium—a mixed population drawn from agricultural families, children of business fathers (brokers) dealing in cardamom which is a staple crop. Pepper, coffee, tea, clove, cocoa and fifty other spices are also grown in the region.
*
As for the Workshop itself, I had a group of fourteen which produced some good, average, and some pretty bad verse—no different from what students produce elsewhere, including in the US. It is easy to underestimate these students whose English is not of the highest quality. City-slick students have a tendency to put down small town students but I found them well-informed, inquisitive, imaginative, alert, politically sensitive, and what touched me most, very earnest.
Having lived and taught on two continents, it never ceases to amaze me how avidly Indian students search out and soak up new knowledges from everywhere. In stark contrast, the cultural insularity of average Americans, their lack of interest, indifference even to want to know about other worlds dismays me. Up until thirty years ago, most Americans did not even care about “other” worlds within their own geographical boundaries. The redefining of the canon in the interests of making the curriculum more inclusive made a huge impact in opening up and letting in a diversity of voices. Today’s students are the beneficiaries of this trend, and are taking it a step further. Even more direct than reading about the philosophy, art, history, religion, and literature of other countries, is going over to live in those countries. The development of Study Abroad programs is one of the best outcomes of the expansion of American educational horizons.
Madurai offered two such surprises. A program called “Shansi”, brings to the American college campus recent graduates from Oberlin College, Ohio. The Shansi program (first started in the city of Shansi, China, after which the program is named, and later expanded to include Madurai) originated long before “multicultural” became a catchword—on this campus it was celebrating 50 years while I was there in January.
Another program, this one associated with Lady Doak college in Madurai, is the South India Term Abroad (SITA) which brings a group of American students for a semester’s stay in South India involving academic study, field work, and home stay in middle class family homes. I spoke to the group one afternoon and was amazed at the initiative and courage of these students—wearing Indian attire, learning Tamil, eating the food, observing the customs—to immerse themselves in a culture which is alien even to North Indians! The most amusing gesture was the sideways shake of the head—an ambivalent Indian-style affirmation--which the students had studiously adopted as a badge of belonging!
*
The poetry reading segment of my trip that followed the conclusion of the workshop was timely, because the American edition of my third book of poems, Meditations on Desire, had just been released. The Indian edition will be out later this year.
I started in Madurai, continued through Kodaikanal, Ooty, Calicut, Bangalore, and ended in Bombay. I did eighteen presentations altogether, read at book clubs and for private groups, and on many campuses including Thygarajar college, Lady Doak and Fatima colleges, Providence college, Calicut university, The National Institute of Advanced Studies, and The National Centre for the Performing Arts. Everywhere, the response was overwhelming.
My books have been in circulation in India for thirty years and it was reassuring to know that older readers had not forgotten my work even though I have been an expatriate for the last fifteen years. The college-going generation was studying selections from my poetry anthology in courses on Indian Writing. And for many of them, to hear a living poet—a creature that had not crossed the floor of their classroom before—was truly a thrill. Besides, in addition to its literary appeal, the poetry spoke to the students’ own concerns, occupying as it did a shared cultural turf. Recognizable content, familiar nuances and allusions, lowered the customary barriers that surround the study of ‘English’ literature in India.
Through the poems, I use my privileged position to the fullest extent to provoke questions on thorny issues relating to women’s lives, gender bias, religious bigotry, and social pretensions. This makes poetry more accessible and more meaningful to an audience. I have seen plenty of good poets—both here and abroad—who do bad readings of their own work in a stodgy, monotonous style that fails to do justice to the poetry and strains the listener’s patience. My goal is to involve and engage the audience, not alienate it. Perhaps it is the teacher in me that works in conjunction with the poet to ensure effective communication. Getting a sense of the make-up of the audience is part of the trick. You can’t make the same pitch to 12th graders that you make to an older age group.
When I read to American audiences, I have to ‘explain’ a little more before I venture into the poem; this helps smooth over their entry into the poem’s historical space. Often, the emotive layering in the poetry can be experienced by the listener without intervention from the author. The sensation of having touched and moved listeners with the magic of poetry is a delight like no other I have tasted.
The “localization” of the study of literature in India has come very slowly but is far ahead than what it used to be in my time. These days, literature students get to study some Indian writing although the choice of texts is uniformly applied to all colleges in the system and is still dictated by intellectually dried out academics living in the past. Younger faculty working on their Ph Ds engage in fancy research in post-colonial literature, but ironically, are not allowed to teach the material because they can’t get it past the elected-for-life committees. This is a crying shame and causes a lot of grief among talented teachers. It is the dead-end I ran into fifteen years ago that propelled my flight abroad.
In the American liberal arts tradition, it is a given that instructors “own” their syllabi. Over the years when I have formulated new courses like Non-Western World Literature, Autobiography, Women in Literature, and Creative Writing: Non-fiction, all I had to do was get an outline approved by the department chair, and schedule the class. If six students signed up, I was in business.
About my professional life, I have few complaints.
As a poet now slotted in the diaspora, location matters only to the extent that it enlarges the context out of which one writes, and how it enhances one’s sensibility.
Visiting India at regular intervals to recover the first half of my divided life provides nourishment for the soul.
Feeling “at home” in America? Now that’s another story.
POETRY ON THE RUN by Saleem Peeradina
Yes, all possible connotations of “run” are implied in the title.
Last year, I undertook a marathon reading tour within the space of six weeks. Starting and ending in Bombay, the trip took me to Madurai, Kodaikanal, Ooty, Calicut and Bangalore. Altogether, I did eighteen readings. Without going out of breath. In the resting spaces between—yes, I had time to keep a journal and do some reading—I tried to catch up on books that had been published in the last decade. The poetry I sipped on the run nourished me most of the time; a few morsels gave me indigestion.
I heard over and over again that poetry was being shown the door by publishers—mainly by the big boys who had turned bullies. And having been chased into corners, poets were planning counter strategies. Most gratifying was the evidence that poetry was flourishing—going a bit helter-skelter, but still running—and audiences big and small, old and young, came with a steady and renewed appetite for words.
Let me go over the map I have just drawn and explore the territory further.
The first eye-opener for me was American College, Madurai, where I had been invited to spend a couple of weeks as writer-in-residence to conduct a poetry workshop and to give readings in local colleges. Within American college, it was the Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and in Translation (SCILET) that was my host.
Paul Love, a college teacher of English from the mid-western US, who first came to India on a cargo ship at the age of 24 in the mid-fifties, is the driving spirit behind the Centre’s activities which includes Kavya Bharathi, one of the few poetry journals left that comes out albeit on an erratic schedule.
Paul and his colleagues also run the Visiting Writers Series that has included such names as Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi, Shashi Deshpande, Ayyappa Paniker, Gita Hariharan, Sujata Bhatt, Gieve Patel, and Jayanta Mahapatra.
The center maintains an impressive collection of books and journals, study space, and facilities not only for local students and faculty working on their MA, M Phil or PhD degrees but it also welcomes scholars from all over India. Titles in ancillary fields such as history, philosophy, social sciences, and women’s studies can also be found in the neatly labeled and organized book cupboards.
If there is something comparable to Scilet elsewhere in India, I would like to know about it. If there isn’t, more people working in the field of Indian Writing in English should be trekking down to Madurai to use this resource center.
As for the workshop itself, I had a group of fourteen which produced some sharp, average, and some pretty bad verse—no different from what students produce elsewhere, including in the US. It is easy to underestimate these students whose English is not of the highest quality. City-slick Indian students have a tendency to put down small town students but I found them well-informed, inquisitive, imaginative, alert, politically sensitive and, what touched me most, very earnest.
The students who came to the readings everywhere get to study a bit of Indian literature these days, although the choice of texts is uniformly applied to all colleges in the system and is still dictated by burnt out academics living in the remote past. Current faculty who do their dissertations in post-colonial writing complain bitterly that they are often unable to introduce these texts in their courses. Systems in India are still doing what they do best—letting us down.
At readings, I use my identity and voice as a poet to full advantage to raise questions on thorny issues (in the context of some of my poetry) relating to women’s lives, gender bias, religious bigotry and class conflict. This raises some faculty brows and some smiles. Many are pleased that as a privileged guest I am able to provoke the students and get away with it. That the domestic and social culture still tends to be conservative in the south makes my pleas even more urgent.
I read on many different campuses—Thygarajar college, Lady Doak college and Fatima college; Providence college, Calicut University, Farouk college, and National Institute of Advanced Studies—and everywhere met eager, bright-eyed, and responsive students. Further conversations confirmed my suspicions that even though large numbers of boys and girls were getting a college education, most of them, especially the women, would be forced to fit into traditional roles.
At Farouk, it was heartening to see so many aspiring Muslim women listening with rapt attention. The founders of this college got at least one thing right—that running a college is far more productive than setting up madrasas.
Having lived and taught on two continents, it never ceases to amaze me how avidly we search out and soak up new knowledges from everywhere. In stark contrast, the cultural insularity of average Americans, their lack of interest, indifference even to want to know about other worlds dismays me. On a micro level, the “Loquations” group of writers and readers that gathers every Tuesday at Chauraha at the NCPA in Bombay to discuss poetry, exemplifies this spirit. Dwarfed by the surrounding office towers, smothered by the din of the city, they have created an intellectual space for discovery and learning.
My own desire to stay in touch is easier done through sampling recent movies, film-addict that I’ve always been. But book-tasting was also on my itinerary. In late December, as I was setting out on my trip, I remember reading that Arundhati Roy had donated the entire amount of her substantial Lannan Literary Prize money to fifty select NGOs and other agencies. My topi off to her. She had always been outspoken and fearless and now this. I had not cared very much for parts of her book I had read when it first came out but I resolved to make a second attempt to read The God of Small Things. I persisted over two months; I was disappointed one more time. And angry with the publishers. Some chapters are racy, hilarious, and rich in texture. Some segments of the book are grossly overwritten and self-indulgent. Editors who let loose writing like this and even hype it, should have their licenses revoked.
I have to admit that my interest in new writing was driven by writers I knew. I had been looking for Vrinda Nabar’s Caste as Woman, and I found it at the SCILET library. I was impressed first, by its readability, and second, by its clear and balanced examination of the women’s movement from multiple perspectives. I recommended it to a Ph D student who was doing her dissertation on Nayantara Sahgal and she found it unputdownable. I read with pleasure Shama Futehally’s Reaching Bombay Central—a more mature novel than her first, Tara Lane.
To find out what the younger poets were up to, I picked up Reasons For Belonging, edited by Ranjit Hoskote. That several new voices were clamouring to be heard is itself a matter of celebration. That many of them (in and outside the anthology) are casting about wildly for models to emulate and labels to wear and, in the process, producing pretentious, mannered verse is to be expected. A handful of them seem to have found a firm footing—Smita Aggarwal, Arundhati Subramanium, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Anand Thakore and Hoskote himself. Among the newer poets, Thakore’s was one of the more individual voices whose Waking In December I enjoyed reading.
To remind myself that I was not being unduly harsh on the younger breed of poets, I went back to an original—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—whose The Transfiguring Places, I had not read. What a treat: deep and meaningful content, mastery over craft. Another recent achievement for him as editor, is The Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. When I visited Adil Jussawalla’s home, I glanced at this forbiddingly expensive edition. There is Kolatkar too whose new work I was eager to see but could not lay my hands on. They are the old masters now, worth study.
That poetry has been unceremoniously ditched by mainstream publishers has forced poets back to the old idea of co-ops which were successfully managed in the 70s by Clearing House and Newground. Another development is making its debut. All along it has been easy for the urban elite to marginalize the provinces and the vernacular writers. My tour of the educational and literary hinterland revealed a new phenomenon : the centre is calling the periphery for help! Now, writers like Dom Moraes, Anita Nair, Surendran, and myself are tying up with outfits like Yeti Books in Calicut.
Rajeevan Thachampoyil, a brilliant poet in Malayalam, who works in the PR office of Calicut university, is the originator of this start-up. I offered to proofread his galleys for a new book in English translated from his Malayalam originals. Page after page bristled with raw energy and inventive imagery. Other times, the poems work too hard and self-consciously to wave their post-modern tags in the reader’s face.
Rajeev and a dedicated (read crazy) band of poetry lovers have thrown their meagre middle class savings into the publishing pot to start this small venture. With several titles out and more in the pipeline, they are already feeling the pressure of dwindling funds.
Let’s face it. Corporate funding, academic backing, or other philanthropic support is never going to be handed to us to make life easy for poetry. Poets need to help each other. I, for one, will not get rich on a few thousand rupees of royalty and I’m willing to put that to work to help the next poet in line. Poetry is not dead yet. Neither are we. Let’s keep the supply running.
Yes, all possible connotations of “run” are implied in the title.
Last year, I undertook a marathon reading tour within the space of six weeks. Starting and ending in Bombay, the trip took me to Madurai, Kodaikanal, Ooty, Calicut and Bangalore. Altogether, I did eighteen readings. Without going out of breath. In the resting spaces between—yes, I had time to keep a journal and do some reading—I tried to catch up on books that had been published in the last decade. The poetry I sipped on the run nourished me most of the time; a few morsels gave me indigestion.
I heard over and over again that poetry was being shown the door by publishers—mainly by the big boys who had turned bullies. And having been chased into corners, poets were planning counter strategies. Most gratifying was the evidence that poetry was flourishing—going a bit helter-skelter, but still running—and audiences big and small, old and young, came with a steady and renewed appetite for words.
Let me go over the map I have just drawn and explore the territory further.
The first eye-opener for me was American College, Madurai, where I had been invited to spend a couple of weeks as writer-in-residence to conduct a poetry workshop and to give readings in local colleges. Within American college, it was the Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and in Translation (SCILET) that was my host.
Paul Love, a college teacher of English from the mid-western US, who first came to India on a cargo ship at the age of 24 in the mid-fifties, is the driving spirit behind the Centre’s activities which includes Kavya Bharathi, one of the few poetry journals left that comes out albeit on an erratic schedule.
Paul and his colleagues also run the Visiting Writers Series that has included such names as Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi, Shashi Deshpande, Ayyappa Paniker, Gita Hariharan, Sujata Bhatt, Gieve Patel, and Jayanta Mahapatra.
The center maintains an impressive collection of books and journals, study space, and facilities not only for local students and faculty working on their MA, M Phil or PhD degrees but it also welcomes scholars from all over India. Titles in ancillary fields such as history, philosophy, social sciences, and women’s studies can also be found in the neatly labeled and organized book cupboards.
If there is something comparable to Scilet elsewhere in India, I would like to know about it. If there isn’t, more people working in the field of Indian Writing in English should be trekking down to Madurai to use this resource center.
As for the workshop itself, I had a group of fourteen which produced some sharp, average, and some pretty bad verse—no different from what students produce elsewhere, including in the US. It is easy to underestimate these students whose English is not of the highest quality. City-slick Indian students have a tendency to put down small town students but I found them well-informed, inquisitive, imaginative, alert, politically sensitive and, what touched me most, very earnest.
The students who came to the readings everywhere get to study a bit of Indian literature these days, although the choice of texts is uniformly applied to all colleges in the system and is still dictated by burnt out academics living in the remote past. Current faculty who do their dissertations in post-colonial writing complain bitterly that they are often unable to introduce these texts in their courses. Systems in India are still doing what they do best—letting us down.
At readings, I use my identity and voice as a poet to full advantage to raise questions on thorny issues (in the context of some of my poetry) relating to women’s lives, gender bias, religious bigotry and class conflict. This raises some faculty brows and some smiles. Many are pleased that as a privileged guest I am able to provoke the students and get away with it. That the domestic and social culture still tends to be conservative in the south makes my pleas even more urgent.
I read on many different campuses—Thygarajar college, Lady Doak college and Fatima college; Providence college, Calicut University, Farouk college, and National Institute of Advanced Studies—and everywhere met eager, bright-eyed, and responsive students. Further conversations confirmed my suspicions that even though large numbers of boys and girls were getting a college education, most of them, especially the women, would be forced to fit into traditional roles.
At Farouk, it was heartening to see so many aspiring Muslim women listening with rapt attention. The founders of this college got at least one thing right—that running a college is far more productive than setting up madrasas.
Having lived and taught on two continents, it never ceases to amaze me how avidly we search out and soak up new knowledges from everywhere. In stark contrast, the cultural insularity of average Americans, their lack of interest, indifference even to want to know about other worlds dismays me. On a micro level, the “Loquations” group of writers and readers that gathers every Tuesday at Chauraha at the NCPA in Bombay to discuss poetry, exemplifies this spirit. Dwarfed by the surrounding office towers, smothered by the din of the city, they have created an intellectual space for discovery and learning.
My own desire to stay in touch is easier done through sampling recent movies, film-addict that I’ve always been. But book-tasting was also on my itinerary. In late December, as I was setting out on my trip, I remember reading that Arundhati Roy had donated the entire amount of her substantial Lannan Literary Prize money to fifty select NGOs and other agencies. My topi off to her. She had always been outspoken and fearless and now this. I had not cared very much for parts of her book I had read when it first came out but I resolved to make a second attempt to read The God of Small Things. I persisted over two months; I was disappointed one more time. And angry with the publishers. Some chapters are racy, hilarious, and rich in texture. Some segments of the book are grossly overwritten and self-indulgent. Editors who let loose writing like this and even hype it, should have their licenses revoked.
I have to admit that my interest in new writing was driven by writers I knew. I had been looking for Vrinda Nabar’s Caste as Woman, and I found it at the SCILET library. I was impressed first, by its readability, and second, by its clear and balanced examination of the women’s movement from multiple perspectives. I recommended it to a Ph D student who was doing her dissertation on Nayantara Sahgal and she found it unputdownable. I read with pleasure Shama Futehally’s Reaching Bombay Central—a more mature novel than her first, Tara Lane.
To find out what the younger poets were up to, I picked up Reasons For Belonging, edited by Ranjit Hoskote. That several new voices were clamouring to be heard is itself a matter of celebration. That many of them (in and outside the anthology) are casting about wildly for models to emulate and labels to wear and, in the process, producing pretentious, mannered verse is to be expected. A handful of them seem to have found a firm footing—Smita Aggarwal, Arundhati Subramanium, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Anand Thakore and Hoskote himself. Among the newer poets, Thakore’s was one of the more individual voices whose Waking In December I enjoyed reading.
To remind myself that I was not being unduly harsh on the younger breed of poets, I went back to an original—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—whose The Transfiguring Places, I had not read. What a treat: deep and meaningful content, mastery over craft. Another recent achievement for him as editor, is The Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. When I visited Adil Jussawalla’s home, I glanced at this forbiddingly expensive edition. There is Kolatkar too whose new work I was eager to see but could not lay my hands on. They are the old masters now, worth study.
That poetry has been unceremoniously ditched by mainstream publishers has forced poets back to the old idea of co-ops which were successfully managed in the 70s by Clearing House and Newground. Another development is making its debut. All along it has been easy for the urban elite to marginalize the provinces and the vernacular writers. My tour of the educational and literary hinterland revealed a new phenomenon : the centre is calling the periphery for help! Now, writers like Dom Moraes, Anita Nair, Surendran, and myself are tying up with outfits like Yeti Books in Calicut.
Rajeevan Thachampoyil, a brilliant poet in Malayalam, who works in the PR office of Calicut university, is the originator of this start-up. I offered to proofread his galleys for a new book in English translated from his Malayalam originals. Page after page bristled with raw energy and inventive imagery. Other times, the poems work too hard and self-consciously to wave their post-modern tags in the reader’s face.
Rajeev and a dedicated (read crazy) band of poetry lovers have thrown their meagre middle class savings into the publishing pot to start this small venture. With several titles out and more in the pipeline, they are already feeling the pressure of dwindling funds.
Let’s face it. Corporate funding, academic backing, or other philanthropic support is never going to be handed to us to make life easy for poetry. Poets need to help each other. I, for one, will not get rich on a few thousand rupees of royalty and I’m willing to put that to work to help the next poet in line. Poetry is not dead yet. Neither are we. Let’s keep the supply running.
A POETRY READING TOUR By Saleem Peeradina
Earlier this year, an invitation from American College, Madurai, took me to South India where I conducted a poetry workshop and did readings of my work in local colleges. The trip was an eye opener in many ways.
Founded by American missionaries way back in 1881, the college has a sprawling, shaded campus and is now part of the larger Madurai University system. Within the college, it was the Study Center for Indian Literature in English and in Translation (SCILET) that was my host.
The Center has one of the largest libraries and databases in Asia for the study of Indian Writing in English. It serves not only local students and faculty, but scholars from other parts of India as well working on their M Phil and Ph D degrees. It publishes one of the three surviving poetry journals in the country and invites distinguished writers under its Visiting Writers program.
The moving spirit behind SCILET is Paul Love, a teacher of English from Michigan, who first went to India on a cargo ship at the age of twenty-five in 1954. Madurai has been his home now since the mid-eighties.
The city offered two other surprises. One was Shansi, a program funded by Oberlin College, Ohio, which provides a home for some of its graduate students desiring an Indian experience. Shansi (first started in the city of Shansi, China, for which the program is named, and later expanded to include Madurai, India) originated long before “multiculturalism” became a catchword. The Madurai portion of the program was celebrating 50 years while I was there in January.
The other program, SITA (South India Term Abroad) associated with American college, brings American students to the city for a semester’s stay involving academic study, fieldwork, and home stay with middle class families. I was invited to speak to the group, and was amazed at the initiative and courage of these students—wearing Indian attire, learning Tamil (the state language), eating the food, observing the customs—to immerse themselves in a culture which is alien even to North Indians!
As for the workshop itself, I had a group of fourteen which produced some sharp, average, and some pretty bad verse—no different from what students produce elsewhere, including in the US. It is easy to underestimate these students. City-slick Indian students have a tendency to put down these small town students but I found them well-informed, inquisitive, imaginative, politically sensitive, and, what touched me most, very earnest.
This was especially evident in the enthusiastic response to my poetry readings.
Since my third book of poems had just been released, I had an additional reason to undertake this trip. After my Madurai stint, which included five readings in local colleges, I set out on my poetry reading tour. My books have been in circulation in India for thirty years and it was reassuring that faculty and older readers were familiar with my work even though I have been an expatriate for the last fourteen years. The college-going generation was studying selections from my anthology in courses on Indian Writing. Over two months, I traveled to six locations to make eighteen presentations and the adulation I received everywhere—Indian audiences are generous in the appreciation they show--was most gratifying.
Running into old friends, classmates, former students—many after twenty years—is always a recurring phenomenon on my travels. In Bangalore, which is fast becoming the IT capital of Asia, an American woman now living in India, came up to me after a reading and said she was from Ottawa Lake and would I give a message to her old friend, Mary Rose (Weeber), from Blissfield? Small world indeed!
Saleem Peeradina is Associate Professor of English at Siena Heights University, who is spending the Spring semester as Writer-in-Residence in Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC.
Earlier this year, an invitation from American College, Madurai, took me to South India where I conducted a poetry workshop and did readings of my work in local colleges. The trip was an eye opener in many ways.
Founded by American missionaries way back in 1881, the college has a sprawling, shaded campus and is now part of the larger Madurai University system. Within the college, it was the Study Center for Indian Literature in English and in Translation (SCILET) that was my host.
The Center has one of the largest libraries and databases in Asia for the study of Indian Writing in English. It serves not only local students and faculty, but scholars from other parts of India as well working on their M Phil and Ph D degrees. It publishes one of the three surviving poetry journals in the country and invites distinguished writers under its Visiting Writers program.
The moving spirit behind SCILET is Paul Love, a teacher of English from Michigan, who first went to India on a cargo ship at the age of twenty-five in 1954. Madurai has been his home now since the mid-eighties.
The city offered two other surprises. One was Shansi, a program funded by Oberlin College, Ohio, which provides a home for some of its graduate students desiring an Indian experience. Shansi (first started in the city of Shansi, China, for which the program is named, and later expanded to include Madurai, India) originated long before “multiculturalism” became a catchword. The Madurai portion of the program was celebrating 50 years while I was there in January.
The other program, SITA (South India Term Abroad) associated with American college, brings American students to the city for a semester’s stay involving academic study, fieldwork, and home stay with middle class families. I was invited to speak to the group, and was amazed at the initiative and courage of these students—wearing Indian attire, learning Tamil (the state language), eating the food, observing the customs—to immerse themselves in a culture which is alien even to North Indians!
As for the workshop itself, I had a group of fourteen which produced some sharp, average, and some pretty bad verse—no different from what students produce elsewhere, including in the US. It is easy to underestimate these students. City-slick Indian students have a tendency to put down these small town students but I found them well-informed, inquisitive, imaginative, politically sensitive, and, what touched me most, very earnest.
This was especially evident in the enthusiastic response to my poetry readings.
Since my third book of poems had just been released, I had an additional reason to undertake this trip. After my Madurai stint, which included five readings in local colleges, I set out on my poetry reading tour. My books have been in circulation in India for thirty years and it was reassuring that faculty and older readers were familiar with my work even though I have been an expatriate for the last fourteen years. The college-going generation was studying selections from my anthology in courses on Indian Writing. Over two months, I traveled to six locations to make eighteen presentations and the adulation I received everywhere—Indian audiences are generous in the appreciation they show--was most gratifying.
Running into old friends, classmates, former students—many after twenty years—is always a recurring phenomenon on my travels. In Bangalore, which is fast becoming the IT capital of Asia, an American woman now living in India, came up to me after a reading and said she was from Ottawa Lake and would I give a message to her old friend, Mary Rose (Weeber), from Blissfield? Small world indeed!
Saleem Peeradina is Associate Professor of English at Siena Heights University, who is spending the Spring semester as Writer-in-Residence in Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC.