This article is possibly the closest we will ever get to reading an almost-Nazi and absolutely chilling description of the Hindutva project in any mainstream publication.

For those who have difficulty imagining Swamy’s HINDU NATION, here is what it means.

Majoritarianism and political power to Hindus

If half the Hindus voted together, rising above caste and language, a genuine Hindu party would have a two-thirds majority in Parliament and the assemblies.

Portraying Hindus as the sole victims of terrorism 

The first lesson to be learnt from the recent history of Islamic terrorism against India and for tackling terrorism in India is that the Hindu is the target and that Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.

Denying non-Hindus the fundamental right to vote, and the fundamental right to power-sharing making them non-citizens

The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus. If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan. India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors were Hindus. Others, who refuse to acknowledge this, or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration, can remain in India but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives).

Retelling history in which even atrocities by Hindutva like the Babri Masjid demolition are recast into narratives where the Hindu becomes the “victim”

The third lesson is that whatever and however small the terrorist incident, the nation must retaliate massively. For example, when the Ayodhya temple was sought to be attacked, we should have retaliated by re-building the Ram temple at the site.

Calling for the demolition of several other Muslim religious places of worship

Remove the masjid in Kashi Vishwanath temple and the 300 masjids at other temple sites.

Not recognizing the autonomy of Kashmir

Remove Article 370 and resettle ex-servicemen in the valley. Create Panun Kashmir for the Hindu Pandit community. Look for or create an opportunity to take over PoK.

Making India a Hindu nation through a cultural genocide

Implement the uniform civil code, make learning of Sanskrit and singing of Vande Mataram mandatory, and declare India a Hindu Rashtra in which non-Hindus can vote only if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus. Rename India Hindustan as a nation of Hindus and those whose ancestors were Hindus.

Denying the freedom of religion enshrined in India’s Constitution

Enact a national law prohibiting conversion from Hinduism to any other religion. Re-conversion will not be banned.

Maintain the inhuman caste system which is central to Hindu identity and the Hindu nation

Declare that caste is not based on birth but on code or discipline. Welcome non-Hindus to re-convert to the caste of their choice provided they adhere to the code of discipline.

Meddling with the internal affairs of non-Hindu neighbouring states

- If Pakistan continues to back terrorists, assist the Baluchis and Sindhis to get their independence.
- Annex land from Bangladesh in proportion to the illegal migrants from that country staying in India. At present, the northern third from Sylhet to Khulna can be annexed to re-settle illegal migrants.

That hate-filled article should not have been titled “How to wipe out Islamic terror”. It must have been, “How to wipe out India’s minorities.” Making use of a terror-hit emotive background to espouse a policy of eradicating India’s secular character is nothing but a threat to national security.

(I also urge you to read Shivam Vij’s response to the DNA piece)

Read the rest of my response here.

In Meena Kandasamy’ s Ms Militancy, we encounter a series of self-dramatisations, each the result of an acute consciousness of having to address the pressures of perception that attend poets, women, and poets who happen to be women. Sometimes, this self-consciousness summons forth a generic response, cast in the approved form of resistance essayed by numerous women poets who draw on subversive mythic exemplars while affiliating themselves to heterodox woman saint-poets from the Bhakti teaching lineages.

In this spirit, Kandasamy writes ‘Should you take offence…’, which serves this collection as a Preface:

My Maariamma bays for blood.My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings…. Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. (Ms Militancy, pp. 8-9)

Fortunately, there is a considerable current of surprise and elusiveness that does battle with the strain of predictability in Kandasamy’s poetry; even when she rehearses a well established choreography of feminist self-assertion, she does so with a sharp eye for detail, a grasp of worldly insight, and an appetite for phrasal shape-shifting. Her poetic personae— actors, commentators, drama queens, rebels—segue through history, cinema, television, myth and the venues of metropolitan culture.

Looking at this young woman, all of 26, exuding a gypsy-beauty in jeans and a light top matching her purplish earrings and a cotton stole thrown casually around her shoulders, you wouldn’t know she needs healing. But she insists it’s not about personal healing. “I think society needs healing. Something like the caste system is society wounding itself. Every time you accept your superiority it’s because you don’t want to be wounded in some way, and you have at least this one thing to be proud about. But to feel proud, you go and hurt somebody else. This is the cycle.”

She enumerates the other ways in which society wounds itself — with domestic violence, with child sexual abuse, with the hatred around us. “These are all things that need healing.” At her most excited, her sentences wrap around an ascending series of notes that makes it appear that she’s the one asking the questions.

Sometime after school, Meena began volunteering with the Dalit Media Network. She says it wasn’t just empathy that made her interested in Dalit causes. “It’s also about being very shrewd and looking at the fault lines. You go to the OBC leaders, and they are very proud of the fact that they are OBCs. They hate Brahmins, and yet they are not accepting of Dalits.”

It was someone similar, a Nobel-winning non-accepter of Dalits, who spurred Meena’s foray into journalism. “When I read Naipaul, he came across as really slum-o-phobic. He says crazy things about the caste system. How did this guy get the Nobel Prize? That’s how I wrote my first article, ‘Casteist. Communalist. Racist. And Now, A Nobel Laureate’.”

A different writer who made news around the same time elicits an altogether different reaction. Talking about Arundhati Roy, Meena positively coos with admiration, seeming for the first time the girl-woman her age would seem to indicate. “All of a sudden, it was a post-Arundhati Roy world. After her Booker happened, it became a cool thing for girls to want to write.” She says she can still reel off sentences from The God of Small Things, and she does. “Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it.” That’s a good sentence, I say. She agrees.

Meena is currently writing her first novel — The Gypsy Goddess, inspired by her ancestral deity Kurathi Amman — but her early attempts at the form were abandoned hastily. “A novel is not something you can write at 17. You can write excellent first chapters, but beyond that do you really want to stay with those people?”

Ultra-sensitive

Poetry, she says, is more convenient. “It’s not unwieldy and large.” Meena started writing her own poetry at 17. Her first poem was about a sex worker. “I don’t know why I wrote this kind of poem. I think it’s a lot of reading feminist literature and things like that.” I ask her if she remembers what triggered this sudden outburst of poetry. She laughs and says, “I think things just started because I’m ultra-sensitive.” She sobers up. “I don’t know. I think I’m a deeply disturbed, deeply angry person.”

Her favourite poem is Mulligatawny Dreams, in which she dreams of an English language that “shall tire a white man’s tongue” and where “small children practice with smooth round pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha.”

With so many poems published, with so much fame at such a young age, I wonder if she’s finally happy, if her writing has finally healed her wounds and alleviated her anger. She thinks for a moment and says, “I’m not sure what happy means. When I feel happy, I feel empty. It’s a crazy situation. Misery is a very solid emotion. You can hold on to it and cry. But happiness, you can let go of it. You don’t know where it went. Misery, you can save it and keep it and…” I suggest, “Make poems out of it?” She laughs, “Yeah. It’s very nice to be melancholic and miserable.”

I conclude that she’s a Romantic at heart, a Byronic heroine even, completely at odds with the activist persona that prompts people like me to meet her. She should be writing about lost lovers amidst swooning sunsets. She laughs again.

“I never imagined this kind of success,” she says. “It’s really success. There’s no other way to put it.” I ask if she’s really honest about herself, the way artists are supposed to be in the pursuit of great art. For the first time during the interview, she plays cute. “Am I allowed to lie?” she asks. And then she says, “Of course I’m honest.”

Listen to the three-part podcast on OpenSpaceIndia.

Special bits: I read Random Access Man (about the love triangle: Ram, Sita, Ravan), and Massacre of the Innocents (about the Gujarat genocide 2002).

Celebrating the loud, slutty sensibility
Or how, the militant assertion of female sexuality can change Indian men

A TORONTO police officer’s off-the-cuff misogynist remark – “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised” – to York University students during a campus-safety briefing earlier this year triggered the first SlutWalk on April 3, and since then nearly 100 events have taken place, or, are being planned, globally to challenge the victim-blaming, sex-shaming attitude.

With slogans like “A dress is not a yes” and “We have had enough,” young women not only wear their riot-girl attitude in the open, they also go about reclaiming the word ‘slut’, declaring that irrespective of whether a woman enjoys sex for pleasure or work, it is never an invitation to violence. And since the corporate control over the mainstream media ensures that ‘sexy’ becomes visibile, SlutWalk is being heralded as the feminist revival of our times. Cheering the thousands of women who marched for the cause worldwide, feminist icon Germaine Greer spoke out in support of the defiant display of the right to be dirty, going so far as to suggest that “the rejection by women of compulsory cleansing of mind, body and soul is a necessary precondition of liberation”.

Women in the West are privileged enough to be loud and be heard, but the fight against street sexual harassment has been around for a long time in India. I can think of at least two young feminist initiatives – Blank Noise and Mend the Gap – that have campaigned against a prejudicial, protectionist mindset that provocative dressing leads to victimisation.

It is a known fact that beyond television and Twitter, laying claim to public spaces in central to every revolution. For instance, Brand MK Gandhi makes one immediately think of the Salt March to Dandi. A SlutWalk seamlessly fits into this fashion-forward formula. Given our inherent love of spectacle, how many Desi SlutWalks will have to be organised to break the shackles of silence around this everyday terror (that is ludicrously called ‘eve-teasing’ by the media and defined legally as ‘attempt to outrage a woman’s modesty’)?

In our context, merely fighting the manifestation of an evil will only provide a quick-fix reality-TV friendly solution that will not address, or attack, the disturbing root cause of the problem itself.

It is flawed logic to expect Indian men to not indulge in leching, leering, groping, harassing, molesting and raping women on the streets when they are seasoned wife-beaters at home. According to UN statistics, more than two-thirds of married Indian women have experienced domestic violence; when our homes are unsafe, it is impossible to imagine our streets will turn safe unless we address the fundamental assumption that men have a right to control women’s bodies.

While it is essential to foreground issues that require immediate attention, it is unwise to stick to a superficial approach that forgets the larger picture. I find that those who condemn honour killings and dowry deaths because it is the politically correct thing to do, rarely speak out against the system of arranged marriages that holds this nation to ransom through a preservation of caste and religious identities. They maintain a studied silence when it comes to the culture of impunity that gives caste-Hindu men the entitlement to rape and murder Dalit women at will.

SlutWalking might not save all or any of us. After all, the patterns of discrimination against women here is far more vicious, and is intricately entwined with the massive oppressive structure of caste. That is why,

in our country, when a man chooses to abuse a woman by calling her a whore or slut in any of the regional languages, he attaches a caste-epithet to the slur. Needless to say, such an epithet almost always carries a reference to one untouchable caste or another. We need a potent counter to this home-grown misogyny that we are warring against. We need to replace our meekness with some militancy, our servility with flamboyant or outrageous sexuality. We need to mix feminism with a message of caste annihilation.

Moreover, SlutWalkers are fighting against shame, because it is an oppressive tool in rape culture. But, here in India, a woman does not have to live long enough to be raped to learn its acid taste. It begins at birth when she is seen as the burden with a dowry tag. She does not have to wait to be shamed until she turns a slut. She does not have to wait until her endless sexual hunger sets the world on fire. She is shamed even before she has seen the light of day, when her sex is revealed in a shady scan, when she is not allowed to be born because she will grow up to be a woman. She is shamed when she joins a sisterhood of aborted girl children, 12 million in the past thirty years. She is shamed by deathly silence. She is shamed by us, the survivors who have not spoken out, either for her, or for ourselves.

A set of poems in the collection draws a theme around the women saints of the Bhakti tradition, Karaikal Ammaiyar, Andal, and Mira. Separated by centuries, language, and geography, these women shared a common will. Evading marriage, they lived their lives outside the margins drawn for women. They roamed the streets, wrote poetry, sang and danced. Their lives and how they ended are not always clear to us but their poetry has become immortal. So erotic is the Nachiyar Thirumozhi that the fifteen year old Andal composed, that it has been suppressed in preference to the more acceptable, although still urgent in its appeal, the Thirupavai. Celebrated for their unwavering pursuit of the male gods, Shiva, Perumal, and Krishna, these women and their lives are still troubling enigmas today that deserve some unpacking.

And Kandasamy unpacks. In ways that are arresting and bold, she explodes the myths that have put the women saints, and thereby all women, in their place. With phrases that provoke she makes these saints merely human, who bleed and suffer and haunt. What drove these women to such sexual frenzy and the compulsion to scream it into their poetry?

Here is Andal sacrilegiously admiring herself in the garland meant for the deity, as retold by Kandasamy:

the guilt glazed love lay on Andal’s breasts.
thick and heavy as him.               

frightened with force
and locked away, she conjured him every night,
her empurumaan, her emperor-man.

recklessness on speed-dial, she became
a rape romantic. He, a bodice ripper.

Here is Karaikal Ammayar who went out naked in the world and walked on her hands all the way to the hills of Kailash. Blessed by Shiva she became a demon-goddess haunting cremation grounds.

i am a dead woman walking asylum corridors,
with faltering step, with felted, flying hair,
with hollowed cheeks that offset bulging eyes,
with welts on my wrists, with creasing skin,
with seizures of speech and song, with a single story
between my sobbing pendulous breasts.

And that story in her breast is the betrayal by her husband who, frightened by her “miracles,” abandons her stealthily and makes his life with another woman in another city.

Mira,
Lying on her back—waiting
To be full, filled and fulfilled—
Mira sings a siren-song
To summon Krishna.

The collection, Ms. Militancy, opens with the poem titled “A cunning stunt” played upon by the “man of words” who names her yoni and calls it the

“… seat,
abode, home, nest, lair, stable,
and he opens my legs wider
and shoves more and shoves
harder and I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth”

It is clear then that to combat this unseemly burden forced upon women, words need to be deployed by poets.

In her preface to the book, Meena Kandasamy finds catharsis in this act of retelling the myths in ways alternate to the traditional narrative Hindus have come to believe as the truth. It is a way to forgive, by “Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you.”

Here is Sita, “Princess-in-exile”:

“Scorned, she sought refuge in spirituality,
and was carried away by a new-age guru
with saffron clothes and caramel words.
Years later, her husband won her back
but by then, she was adept at walkouts,
she had perfected the vanishing act.”

One may wonder why resurrect these women from a dead past when we have other female role models, women so powerful they rock our world, our political destiny, commerce?

There are urgent and important reasons to question and destroy these myths that have grown around the women to silence their scream at the injustice of their condition and who went insane doing so. These myths cloak the horrible conditions that these ancient women endured in a gauzy and palatable saintliness, something to shape our sense of self around these idolized notions of womanhood that finally, and with certainty, cripple us. We still today murder girl babies and we prefer male fetuses; women bear their babies in unspeakable conditions, just like Sita did. India’s infant mortality rate is shameful.

This kind of alternate telling of myths has always been with us, transcending cultures and religions, and geography. In suffering we are all sisters. Every woman may need to make that journey by herself, if not to change the world, then to change her self. Kandasamy is only following on the conventions of marginalized women in rural India everywhere who have for a long time used Sita to voice their own sorrows and condition of powerlessness in poetry. Here is Nabaneeta Deb Sen in her essay in Manushi about the various alternate telling of the Ramayana:

“In the women’s retellings, the Brahminical Rama myth is blasted automatically though, probably, unwittingly. Here, Rama comes through as a harsh, uncaring and weak-willed husband, a far cry from the ideal man. The women do not mind calling him names such as pashanda or papisthi or directly attacking him by saying, “Rama, you’ve lost your mind” (“Ram, tomar buddhi hoilo nash“). This is possible because the women’s songs are outside the canon. Women’s Sita myth where Sita is a woman, flourishes only on the periphery. The male Sita myth where she is a devi, continues in the mainstream. In the women’s retelling, Sita is no rebel; she is still the yielding, suffering wife, but she speaks of her sufferings, of injustice, of loneliness and sorrow.”(from Lady Sings the Blues: When Women Retell the Ramayana, Manushi Issue 108)

But what is different in Kandasamy’s work is the way it hovers over the sexualization of spirituality in all these stories and episodes. While the other various subversive retelling are often hidden to us because of linguistic borders, this voice in English is confrontational and stark, and yet somehow speaks in all the languages of India.

There are other noteworthy poems in the collection that are political, that speak from a dalit stand and in solidarity with the struggles of the Sri Lankan Tamils. While these also stand out in the awesome beauty of their expression, the rhetoric is predictable in their thrust and lack the energy and spark in a deeply personal way that the feminist ones do. We can certainly look forward to more from Meena Kandasamy and to the way her writing matures.

In a language darkly . . .

Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society.

A man who saw the poet Meena Kandasamy read out from her latest poetry collection, Ms. Militancy, at the Jaipur Literary Festival this January apparently felt threatened enough to post his reactions on his Facebook wall:

“Watched a so called poetry reading session of a so called dalit-feminist-poet from chennai! The so called poem and the so called reading postures quite resembled that of w***** invitation to clients on roadsides! She addressed herself as a dalit-feminist! All the way i wondered, what did dalitism and feminism had to do in that poem, which literally worshiped group sex practice!!”

Perhaps it is unfair to give such reactionary words more circulation than they deserve but they do give us an entry point to the kind of poems that Meena Kandasamy writes (definitely not pornography) and a counterpoint from ‘real’ life to our notions of ourselves as a ‘progressive’ society. I don’t know what that Facebook person’s idea of poetry really is but if yours is anywhere remotely in alignment with his, perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this collection. Or, come to think of it, perhaps you need to read it more than anyone else…

No easy passage

It won’t be an easy passage if your politics are mainstream, let alone conservative. As a woman dalit poet, Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society. Necessarily, what she sees is different from the images we have constructed for ourselves. It was Ambedkar who said that “women are the gateways of the caste system”. Kandasamy is intensely aware of how the female body is used as an instrument of control, by naming it, fixing it and locating it within a discourse whose concerns are very different. Talking about the female self and body in ways not ‘allowed’ by this discourse becomes a way of reclaiming it, of declaring one’s independence from this discourse:

Tongues untied, we swallow suns.
Sure as sluts, we strip random men.
Sleepless. There’s stardust on our lids.
Naked. There’s self-love on our minds.
And yes, my dears, we are all friends.

There will be no blood on our bridal beds.
We are not the ones you will choose for wives.
We are not the ones you can sentence for life.

(“Backstreet girls”)

And it goes hand it hand with an irreverent taking apart of the contradictions, hypocrisies and pretences she finds around her everywhere in life, literature and the mythologies of the mainstream. But it’s not all mockery, for, she can also write with chilling clarity about the way things still are. Sample this:

One-eyed

the pot sees just another noisy child
the glass sees an eager and clumsy hand
the water sees a parched throat slaking thirst
but the teacher sees a girl breaking the rule
the doctor sees a medical emergency
the school sees a potential embarrassment
the press sees a headline and a photofeature

dhanam sees a world torn in half.
her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,
the price for a taste of that touchable water.

In other poems, she writes with a gay abandon that comes from the liberating knowledge that she doesn’t have to play by your rules anymore. Her poems mock the countless edifices of tradition, culture and literature that had been/are complicit in keeping a whole people invisible and worse for centuries. In spite of the delight in wordplay, the startling phrases that catch you unawares and ambush you as you turn a corner (there’s that delightful emperuman, Emperor-man), her poems are mostly simple, direct, effective and often violent. Because it takes violence to rip apart structures that have kept you down, structures that have become invisible, transparent and part of the ‘natural’ order of things to those who don’t have to live with its stifling oppressiveness. Actually, Meena Kandasamy does a favour to people like that gentleman on Facebook by enabling them to see again. For, acceptance could be the first step towards change, for oneself and others.

Possible redemptions

For herself, it is through rebellion that the path to freedom lies, to other more enabling possibilities. As she puts it poignantly in the ‘ foreword’: “I have to write poetry to be heard, I have to turn insane to stay alive….Telling my story another way lets me forgive you. Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you. I work to not only get back at you, I actually fight to get back to myself.” The possibility of redemption, then, through the rubble of rebellion, both for her and us. But if her poetry only shocks or offends us, if we can only mourn the past that has been shown up for what it is, the possibility of reconfiguring our world and living spaces and discourses on a more equal and just footing would be lost, yet again…

Interview with The Wall Street Journal: Margherita Stancati of WSJ interviewed me when I was in Jaipur (asking me the kind of questions that is one cannot deal with auto-response) and here’s the link to the interview. She says of my work:

Ms Kandasamy’s woman, like female figures in a lot of feminist literature, makes unbridled sexuality the main weapon of her social militancy. One of Ms. Kandasamy’s top targets is Hindu society and in her poems she repeatedly goes back to Hindu and Tamil myths—which she seeks to debunk.

Sleeping Beauty on Indian Celluloid: Again, this has been a great year for my poetry. One of my new poems (and it is not in Ms Militancy) has just been published in the March issue of Caravan. This poem is a retelling of the classic fairy-tale, borrowing from Hindu mythology and Bollywood/Kollywood cinema narrative.

Don’t miss reading Caravan‘s Dalit-centric February issue with the lead story by S. Anand, Lighting Out for the Territory about Dalit literature in India today. He was kind enough to ask me for a little of my opinion, and generous enough to quote one of my poems in his piece. This poem Random Access Man, looks at the love-triangle involving Ram, Sita and Ravan and goes like this

His voice-balloons always came out
Empty as hiccups—He was not a husband
who shared his secrets. He was not a husband
who shared his spoonful either—on
cold nights he played Gandhi
to her waiting wife’s body.

Denial aroused desire and
lust rolled on her breasts,
lust rode her hips.

Read the rest in that article.

Speaking of poetry, for some reason One-eyed has become this favourite poem from Ms Militancy for a lot of people. For me, it was the only poem that totally drew from a real-life incident. It was excerpted in Mint Lounge.

Last but not the least, I did a really long and in-depth interview with the amazing Kavya Rajagopalan of Thamarai.com in which we spoke about the Hindu response to my poetry, the challenges one has to face as a woman writing about sexuality, my love affair with Tamil, and lot’s more.

My poetry reading as part of Chauraha on the 23rd January (with Arundhati Subramaniam, Karthika Nair and Jatin Das). I read for the first quarter.

http://vimeo.com/19403531

For the lazy ones, don’t skip the post 42:00 bit. I perform Jouissance in honour of Ahalya (and Lacan, among others).

And, here is the video to the Hall of Shame on the caste system where I was on a panel with Patrick French, S. Anand and Chandra Bhan Prasad (22nd January, Durbar Hall).

http://vimeo.com/19213155

And the first day of the festival comes last. This was Anthardwani, in honour of silenced voices. I read a poem The Noble Eightfold Path on the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka and the poem was dedicated to the 60,000 Tamils killed in the last few days of the war. (For those of you in a hurry, I read at around 19:30)

http://vimeo.com/19114183

Jaipur will remain one of the most memorable highlights of my life. I still can’t believe it is over, that I’ve returned back to real life. Those were the most magical days and nights of my life! Not just because there were the nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and JM Coetzee. But because I got to meet Chimamanda in the flesh and blood. Because I got to rebond with Gcina. Because I could get to hear Jeet Thayil read from his explosive new book Narcopolis. Because over dinner one got to talk to people one had only read, or read about. And also because, over and above all this, my voice was heard. Where else in India would I have got the chance to (and got away with) talking about the Tamil genocide? Where else could we discuss police atrocity on dalits during a lit festival? Where else could you have such heated discussions on Kashmir? It was my first big literary festival within India, and I loved every bit of it.

Poetry Readings in honour of silenced voices by Ali Sethi, Giriraj Kiradoo, J.P.Das, Mangalesh Dabral, Meena Kandasamy, Nirupama Dutt, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Renee Ranchan & Sheen Kaaf Nizam

~

Day Two, 22 Jan 2011, Durbar Hall
Hall of Shame: Caste & its Exclusions

Chandra Bhan Prasad, Meena Kandasamy & Patrick French in conversation with S.Anand on how India’s elite appears indifferent to the persistence of caste and the violence and exclusion it engenders.

~

Day Three, 23 Jan 2011, Durbar Hall
Chauraha

Poetry readings by Arundhathi Subramaniam, J.P.Das, Karthika Nair and Meena Kandasamy

~

Being there at the JLF is one of my most impossible dreams come true.

Come and see me live out my cherished dream.

Life’s been incredibly lovely (touchwood) and here are some highlights of news from my writing life this new year.

A new group blog:

So, the ten days in mid-December at Adishakti Pondicherry, the three-city hop-over, and endless bonding with seven other similarly eccentric poets did not end up in mere memories. We are letting loose our poems into the wild world and what’s worse, trying to kick up a storm in eleven languages–thanks to a Literature Across Frontiers project. To those who would like to know how we went about the translation process, or to those curious about the strange occurrences around a certain Looser’s Table, follow our gang-blog Dubious Saints. Yes, I write there. I share Tamil translations of poems, and I tell you the trade secrets of how sinful and scary this process of carrying across precious words can be. If you think you like me, you will actually love the stuff on that site.

A portrait and an interview:

Well, this is not exactly a 2011 event, yet I’m taking the liberty to share it now. When I was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program, Iowa, I had this wonderful opportunity to actually sit as a subject for Spanish artist Felix de la Concha. He painted my portrait in two hours simultaneously interviewing me, asking me questions about why I wrote and how India was and what made me write and what made me angry and so on. That morning is still clearly etched in my memory. Felix’s wife Ana Merino (poet and professor and a wonderful warm woman) drove me to their home on the outskirts of Iowa City. Felix was a silent man, the contemplative artist type, but generous with his smiles, and highly intuitive, so one felt such an urge to talk to him. And I talked and talked, and he painted and painted, as their cat Thumbelina climbed in and out of my lap. The painting was a part of a larger project, and now, it is all available on the public domain. Click here to have a look at Felix’s ‘Portraits with Conversation: 50 Writers with Anacoluthon‘ that features me and 48 Spanish writers/intellectuals/cultural figures.

Panel discussion on Translation and Publishing:

I was in the capital from Jan 7 to 9, to take part in the workshop on Post-colonial Translation which took place at the India International Center, and was organized by Univ of Newcastle, SOAS, JNU and Univ of Delhi. On the last day, I made a presentation on my own experiences of translating two key Tamil Dalit texts authored by VCK President Thirumavalavan– Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation and  Uproot Hindutva: Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers. Other panelists were Saugata Ghosh (Sage Publishing) Ritu Menon (Women Unlimited) and S. Anand (Navayana Publishing).  For photos, view my facebook album.

Reading Ms Militancy in New Delhi:

Since I was in Delhi, I also read my poems at my publisher Navayana Publishing’s office in Shahpur Jat to a small and intimate audience that consisted of many important writers, journalists and editors–the precise names who’ve inspired me. There was Arundhati Roy herself and just that single thing made this evening the best evening of my life (see this post to know how i worship her work). She’s not just brilliant in person, but she’s enormously sensitive to suffering which is why she has been at the forefront of so many people’s struggles. When she left, her parting words to me were, “never stop being angry.” Will remember that all the way to my grave! The other wonderful people who were there were Urvashi Butalia, V.K.Karthika, Asad Zaidi, Prof.H.S.Shivaprakash, Anita Roy, Mridula Koshy, Amruta Patil, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Shikha Sen, Dr. Azhagarasan, Mary Therese, Gautam Subramaniam, among others. The pleasure of reading to such an enlightened audience was more than the pleasure of seeing the book in print!

On Barkha Dutt’s The Buck Stops Here:

On, 13 Jan 2010, I was briefly part of this debate where Patrick French’s new book India: A Portrait was discussed on NDTV 24 x 7. The focal point of argument was whether economics alone was shaping the New India, and the prevalence of hereditary MPs. I spoke a little about what identity means to me, and how central the Indian Constitution was to Dalit and oppressed people’s emancipation/empowerment, and how the reality was very different from much of the hype surrounding India’s growth as an economic superpower. Didn’t speak for the first part of the show because of audio trouble, and also because the bulldozer named Mani Shanker Aiyer didn’t let anyone else have an opinion. He just went on and on. Other panelists were Hamdullah Sayeed, MP from Lakshadweep, Patrick French (of course), and Alyque Padamsee.

There’s more lined up for this month, and hope to share everything with you, and soon.