Last week, I was shocked to learn that a judicial magistrate court in India has issued summons to me under Sections 153, 153 (A)and 505(2) of the Indian Penal Code, stringent provisions of the law that seek to punish those “wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot”, “promoting enmity between different groups” and “creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes.” As the English translator of Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers, I was accused, along with its author Thol. Thirumavalavan (Member of Parliament and President of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi party) and publisher Mandira Sen (of Stree-Samya Books, Kolkata) of creating communal disharmony. What was our crime? We had portrayed two Tamil folk deities, Ponnar and Sankar, as “Dalit brothers.” A non-Indian parallel might illustrate this story better: An African-American leader says Jesus Christ was Black, and a White man takes him to court for causing communal disharmony. Would we not readily label the White man a racist and a supremacist?
Meena Kandasamy
A blog by a 26-year-old tamil woman obsessed with dr.ambedkar's dream of caste annihilation.
Tagged with politics …
Interview in The Hindu Metroplus with Baradwaj Rangan
There’s something entirely appropriate about the lassi that Meena Kandasamy orders one April afternoon. It isn’t just that a merciless sun is beating down upon us, sneaking up even in the shade we’ve settled into. It’s also the rage bubbling beneath the surface of her small frame, threatening to erupt any instant. She needs that lassi like the Fukushima facility needs coolant. She also needs her poetry. “You don’t know how it heals you, but it heals you,” she says. “It helps you channelise your anger.”
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.”
Audio interview and poetry reading in OpenSpace
When I was in Montreal for the Blue Met Literary Festival, Veena Gokhale got talking to me about my writing and activism. This was one hell of an interview: we were recording it in my hotel room at 10 in the night, and then it went on till 11.30. I had not eaten anything, and was tired after two back-to-back readings in the evening. And yet, for all the fatigue, it was a great experience.
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).
Early January updates
Happy New Year folks (since I have been rude and mannerless and forgot these basic courtesies). I have always been lamenting whenever I visit this blog with the intention of writing something–Facebook and Twitter seem to have taken over my life (and information-sharing) in such an easy, communicative and personalized way that I don’t think twice about blogging anything. In spite of all that, I do miss blogging a great deal–after all, the 420 characters that facebook allows or the 140 characters of twitter are not the best medium for a mind that wanders like mine.
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.
Ms Militancy: Praise, Preface, and so on
PRAISE BY K. SATCHIDANANDAN
“Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporaray Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, de-politicised, neatly sterilized.These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and sting the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society.The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. She uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socio-aesthetic practice.She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by reappropriating the hegemonic language in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed.The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counter-poetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy.”
MY PREFACE
If you take offence . . .
You are the repressed Ram from whom I run away repeatedly. You are Indra busy causing bloodshed. You are Brahma fucking up my fates. You are Manu robbing me of my right to live and learn and choose. You are Sage Gautama turning your wife to stone. You are Adi Sankara driving me to death. You are all the men for whom I would never moan, never mourn. You are the conscience of this Hindu society.
Your myths put me in my place. Therefore, I take perverse pleasure in such deliberate paraphrase as these poems show.
I am no atheist—I allow everyone an existence. It is just that I struggle with any story that has stayed the same way for far too long. So, my Mahabharata moves to Las Vegas; my Ramayana is retold in three different ways. I am unconventional, but when I choose to, I can carry tradition. That is why I am Mira, Andal and Akka Mahadevi all at once, spreading myself out like a feast, inviting the gods to enter my womb. I am also Karaikkal Ammaiyar, suspected of infidelity for being ravishingly beautiful. Like each of these women, 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 its 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. I do not write into patriarchy. 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. They take on the sun, they take after me.
I choose my words, coarse as the conned Kannagi’s colourful curses, chaste as her breast that burnt down a capital city. This tongue allows me to resist rape, to rescue my dreams. My language is not man-made, it is beyond the white-hot seminal of your texts. My language is dark and dangerous and desperate in its eagerness to slaughter your myths. My lines are feverish with the heat of the bodies you banish in your Manusmriti and Kamasutra. Tamil woman that I am, I do not spare the ageist, classist, sexist Tholkappiyam either. The criticism that I embark on, like your codification and my cunt, is beyond all culture.
Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. I sew it on everything I wear, I tattoo it into permanence. I strive to be a slut in a world where all sex is sinful. I strive to be a shrew in a society that believes in suffering in silence. I strive to be a sphinx: part-woman, part-lioness, armed with all the lethal riddles.
Come, unriddle me. But be warned: I never falter in a fight. And, far worse, I seduce shamelessly.
~~~~~
WHERE TO BUY THE BOOK ONLINE
Scholars Without Borders
It is INR 150, plus shipping.
I will upload a list of bookstores in Indian cities soon, I promise.
; )
Poetry Africa: Press
Me, on the closing night of 14th Poetry Africa, reading a poem on the Tamil Genocide
Actually, I made it to the front page of a daily newspaper for the first time ever. In a beautiful photoshoot, poets Ronelda Kamfer and Busiswa Gqulu (South Africa) and I were each grabbing Jamaican Rasta warrior-poet Mutabaruka and it really made for a pretty, pretty picture on Mercury. But since that is something might mother might disapprove (three/women/poets/fighting over a rasta?) I have decided to only share the serious stuff here.
Book South Africa about my performance on the opening night,
Meena Kandasamy’s provocative piece about the colonised status of the English in India prompted rapturous applause, and her books sold like hot-cakes at the books stand afterwards.
And what they had to say about my 20-minute reading the following night (October 5, 2010)
Indian poet Meena Kandasamy swept onto stage like a small whirlwind, swirling the audience into admiring applause for her vital, quick words. I will never see tea-drinking in the same light having heard her describe the making and drinking of tea as a seductive ritual! At 26, a consummate wordsmith, Kandasamy went from reading love poetry to “more angry poems”. In answer to Seboni’s poem about his grandmothers, she read a poem about hers, who suffered terrible abuse at the hands of the British, as well as their own husbands, and whose grand-daughters now, “mostly write”. Unsurprisingly Kandasamy’s soon-to-be-published collection is called Ms Militancy. We got a taste of that fiery political energy when she chose to read a poem challenging the caste system in India, which insisted on “giving names to our inward anger”.
And, finally, and most important of all, here’s what Niren Tolsi (one of the smartest and most provocative journalists I have met in a long, long time) had to say about my work in the highly intellectual Mail&Guardian,
Feminist and Dalit activist Meena Kandasamy recited with verve, sex-tinged verses. She spoke in a demure sexual manner and in language that seemingly brought into view stereotypes of submissive womanhood, but always ended with a twist that felt like a brutal kick to patriarchy’s testicles. She explored the caste system in India, love and gender violence.
What else? This was THE best poetry festival I have ever been to. I wrote a daily journal during the period I was there, so perhaps, someday I will share it all here.
In Today’s iDiva, Times of India (interview-profile by Lakshmi Krupa)
Click on the picture for a larger version..
And here’s the text:
SUBALTERN SPEAK
City-based poet, writer and translator Meena Kandasamy lends her voice for the historically oppressed
By Lakshmi Krupa
In urban India, where caste, seemingly, does not interfere with day-to-day activities, many take the life opportunities they are offered for granted, even as caste cripples the lives and careers of a vast majority. It is this realisation that, in a broad sense, led 26-year-old city-based Meena Kandasamy to examine caste from close quarters and lend her voice for the sake of the oppressed. “I come from a very mixed background–almost four different backward castes including a Dalit,: she says, at the beginning of our discussion that lasts a good half hour, even as she traces her own life experiences and brush with political awakening.”My grandparents and my parents had an inter-caste marriage adding eclecticism to my identity,” Meena explains.
From 1997, around the time of Ambedkar’s centennial celebrations, when his thoughts and writings gained momentum again, Meena’s interest in the subject grew deeper. “The Dalit Panthers were also on the rise when my understanding of Dalit issues was increasing and soon after finishing school, I started edited a bimonthly magazine, The Dalit, that was being brought out by the Tamil Nadu-based Dalit Media Network,” she says. Meena has also translated the works of Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (Liberation Panthers Party) leader, Thol.Thirumavalavan, including his speeches and books. “I have noticed that the market sells only Dalit first-person accounts on oppression and poetry and there really isn’t much in English that talks about their take on politics and what the thinking Dalit wants, and so I decided to translate Thol’s works,” she adds.
Born to academicians whose “careers staggered because of caste” Meena decided to focus on writing poetry and published her first collection, Touch, in August 2006 and worked for the cause of the Tamils in Sri Lanka soon after. “I grew up in Chepauk and as a child of the 80s, the Lankan Tamil issue was something I had heard about a lot and was familiar with almost everything that was happening,” she says. In 2007, she wrote a blog post about the death of Tamilselvan adn was then invited by TamilNet, “a newswire service that was independently reporting the war from Lanka” to wrier. Many people from war-torn areas in Sri Lanka would talk about what was really happening on the ground over Skype. I would receive these conversations (in Tamil) from Norway and spend hours translating them to English,” she adds.
Caste is not only self-defeating, Meena observes, but also reflects directly on the control a society exercises over a women’s sexuality. “If the system does not allow a woman to marry a man because he is from another caste, like honour killings for instance, is it not a direct oppression of her sexuality?” she asks. Caste identity, she says, is a double-edged sword in the sense that while it allows her to speak on certain issues boldly as she herself a part of the community, it also shuts the doors in many other areas. “I cannot escape that identity, it is who I am,” she says with a smile and continues, “But sometimes, even in my artistic work, critics look for political meanings while I yearn for a critical acknowledgement for exactly what it stands!”
So is politics on the cards for this youngster? “Never! Now I have the freedom to say what I want without sugar-coating it,” Meena says with a laugh. “But what I would like to see is an intense politicisation of our people; for them to be aware and make demands from governments. When people lack basic sanitation facilities what good will a television set do?” she asks, before signing off.
Mike Daisey and Monologues and some soul-searching
Yesterday, I was at a workshop organized by the US Consulate Chennai where Mike Daisey, the celebrated monologuist was explaining his craft and talking about what stories he chooses to tell, and how he fashions these extemporaneous performances. I adored what I saw of his work on YouTube and other places, and I respect some of the things he has to say about capitalism and employment conditions and so on. (Many of the more interesting things he had to say got deflected of course, given that some of our wannabe types in the audience had styooopid questions for him which took none of us anywhere).
All the time I was listening to him, I was wondering how this kind of theater has parallels with spoken-word and performance poetry. Yes, in the case of slam poetry you are closely following a certain poem, but the use of space and timing and voice and body and agenda and delivery and so on, is really, really similar. What evidently varies is the duration, you certainly cannot be reading poetry for two continuous hours. And you can actually get away with a lot more when it is going to be spontaneous speaking with an outline as opposed to performing a poem.
Which medium do I prefer? Poetry of course. Even though it might not have the weight of theater behind it, even though it is ghettoized in relation to fiction, there’s something about poetry that works not only on the level of thought, but on the level of language too. That vitality and extra layer is something I would think twice about losing. But for all this one-vs-another comparison, I am a fan in equal measure of both StaceyAnn Chin and Mike Daisey. What is crazy that labels tend to drive them so far apart! In that context, one other name comes to mind immediately: Sarah Jones, who does amazing one-woman shows, taking up to eight characters and switches between the world of plays, performances and hip-hop poems with effortless ease.
Second part of my interview in Thejas
Here is the second part of my interview (to M. Noushad) in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine THEJAS. A friend wrote in to say that the magazine has been published for the past 14 years, and that a majority of its readers are Dalits and Muslims. (-:
(I still haven’t read the first part, unable to find any Malayalam friends. Will read it soon. All that I can appreciate now is the layout and photographs based on which I have tagged this article)
Poetry as an enemy of the oppressive state
This 10-minute video is a part of a hour-long discussion on how poets are regarded by totalitarian regimes. Sohail Najm of Iran and Milos Djurdjevic of Croatia, Khet Mar from Burma and I participated in this discussion that took place on September 11, 2009 at Pittsburgh. We were there as poets from the IWP to take part in the City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert.
In this video I speak about Tamil poetry, poetry as resistance, Kasi Anandan, Tamil Tigers, suicide bombers, Eelam, language, oppressive states, exile and whatever else 3 minutes can hold.. : )
On a related note, here is an article in Sampsonia Way Magazine by Desiree Cooper about the collaboration between the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the City of Asylum Pittsburgh. Check it out..
My review of ‘Rapids of a Great River’ in today’s New Indian Express
Read the official version here.
Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
Lakshmi Holmstrom, Subashree Krishnaswamy, K.Srilata
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Pages: 222, Price: Rs.499
There cannot be a better way to begin a book of Tamil poetry than with A.K.Ramanujan’s translations of Sangam poets. In Rapids of a Great River, the journey starts splendidly but on the way downstream, everything begins disintegrating.
The first section consists of selections from Sangam poetry, Silappadikaram, Manimekalai, Tirukkural , Tirumurai, Periya Puranam, Tiruvaymoli, Naachiyar Tirumoli, and Iramavataram. One also finds excerpts from the works of the Siddhar and Tayumanavar, and from Kuttrala Kuravanci and Nandanar Charitra Kirtthanai. The translators have conveniently used extant translations for this section and one finds it sufficient. However, I personally prefer Suddhanandha Bharati or G.U.Pope as translators of the Thirukkural, since P.S.Sundaram’s rendering in English is flat and dull, and does not bring out the depth or the poetry of the original couplets.
Although the first section does have a sprinkling of the Usual Suspects, there are some omitted Tamil classics such as the Kalingathubarani which valorized/ glamourized the spectacles of war and heroism and occupies a pre-eminent place in the Tamil canon. Likewise, the religious and cultural diversity of the Tamil tradition is not highlighted by failing to include selections from Veeramamunivar’s Thembavani, a celebrated epic poem on the life of Jesus Christ and Umaru Pulavar’s Seerapuranam, a biography of Prophet Mohammed written through 5000-odd poems.
The second part of the book consists of translations of Tamil poetry beginning with Subramania Bharati. Much as I would like to be blind to the politics of selections, there are certain lapses here too that cannot evade notice. Iconic poet Bharatidasan (1891-1964) whose poetry radically influenced the politics of Tamil Nadu is missing from the anthology. Is this reflective of a prevailing elitist mindset which sidelines poets who sympathize with the ideology of the Dravidian/ Communist/ Dalit movements, preferring to label them political poets, and not poets’ poets? Bharathidasan and Suradha were trend-setters, they took modern poetry to the people, but the manner in which they’ve been ignored is disheartening.
Other glaring omissions include notable poets like Ka.Na.Subramaniam, Abdul Rahman, Abi, Inquilab and the Vaanambadi group (consisting of progressive Tamil scholars like Sirpi, Mu. Mehta, Puviyarasu, Erode Tamilanban). Likewise, although cinema is deeply embedded in Tamil society/ culture, it is regrettable that there’s no mention of Kannadasan, Vairamuthu, Na.Muthukumar, Arivumathi, Thamarai and others who not only hold the lay people in their sway, but have also proved themselves as literary poets. Even as one cheers for the inclusion of about a dozen Eelam Tamil poets in this anthology, the above instances of exclusion raise doubts about the criteria required to make the cut.
Coming to the poems themselves, in many instances, the translators seem to have not understood particular nuances of the original text. As an illustrative example, in Sukirtharani’s poem Pallichenru cholli (sic) vidukiren from her collection Iravu Mirugam (Night Beast), the line Appavin thozhilum aanduvarumaanamum/ solla mudiyamal/ vaathiyaaridum adivaanguven, literally translates into: “Unable to reveal/ Father’s occupation and annual income/ I would get beaten up by the teacher.” Here, a Dalit schoolgirl speaks of her inability to divulge the details of what her father does for a living because it would not only ‘place’ her socially and economically, but also because of the stigma and the humiliation she would face if this information became public. She seeks shelter in silence, and even suffers the corporal punishment meted out to her.
Instead, the translation in the anthology (by K.Srilata and Subashree Krishnaswamy) introduces an undertone of obstinacy (which is neither existent, implied or intended in the original poem) when these lines are transformed into: “When my teacher caned me/ I didn’t reveal/ father’s occupation/ income per annum.” (p.198) The internal helplessness which she faces, her being punished for a powerlessness that seeks protection, is totally absent in such an alternative rendering. As a result, the militancy in the last lines—where this hesitant girl grows up to tell people outright that she is a Paraichi (a Paraiyar woman, an epithet used as a slur by caste-Hindus)—is effectively mellowed. Fidelity to the text may be fast going out of fashion, but a greater sensitivity towards, and perception of, lived Dalit realities would have ensured that such sabotaging of denotation did not take place.
Rapids of a Great River is surely an ambitious project as far as its aspirations are concerned, but at the end of the book, one is left wondering: Where are the rapids? And what really became of the Great River en route to its English avatar?
Another Interview
(An edited version of this interview appeared in the Indian Express North American. Sujeet Rajan interviewed me for the weekly. This came out about a month ago, but only today I was suitably lazy to do this job)
You write candidly of love and love-making; leaving windows open to the bedroom sometimes. If it is autobiographical, how difficult is it to tabulate emotions of love and love-making through poetry?
I am not sure it is always the bedroom window I leave open, for love, after all, happens everywhere. And again, I am going to keep the suspense and not own up or disown the possibility of my poems being autobiographical! I think poetry is best equipped to enclose some emotions and exhibit others, because writing of love/ love-making in prose would simply call for too many excruciating details, and in the most cautious of cases, it would require a great deal of aesthetic and choreography to get the damn scene right. And only rarely can such elaborate construction capture spontaneity, which is what love is all about.
From an artistic medium, what is best to express love: the written word, the spoken word, brush on the canvas, silence? Why?
I have done everything but paint. And well, you have left out something which I see as central to love: movement. As in dance, as in theater, and also as in all of language.
3. Is anything taboo for you to write about?
No. Except of course if someone asked me to write a poem of praise, that tends to make me nasty. 
5. You were displaced from home, from Chennai, for more than three months, having been invited to a writing residence program in Iowa. What has been the experience like?
I loved the time I spent in Iowa, and I also got to travel widely across the USA. The best part of the program was getting to meet these fabulous writers from other countries. The next best was the University library and the second-hand bookstores. My novel is about the Kilvenmani massacre, and surprisingly I completed most of the research while I was here, in a foreign nation. And lastly, I did write like crazy. I wrote the 50-odd poems that go into my second collection of poetry (Six Hours of Chastity).
6. How has the West influenced your writing during these last three months?
Nothing radical happened. And the subtle changes, if any, will have to be picked out by scholars or theorists, and even in that case, one never knows how accurate it is! I am always in a state of flux, so I do believe that coming here, and being footloose and fancy-free, would have changed me in some ways, and which would change the poetry in a sense.
7. If you were to write a poem based on the experience of your last three months, what would you write about?
I am too involved with the experience to verbalize it right away. There will be a diary at some point, and trust me, there will be love poems too.
8. You are an intrinsic part of the Dalit movement; an indelible, vociferous voice for the underprivileged in India. How do you reconcile yourself to a situation where you yourself live in a metropolitan city which is removed from the caste predicament for the most part, and now are in a developed world which has only academic interest in the problem?
I don’t think the Dalit movement is a rural movement, or that untouchability/ casteism does not exist in cities. The migration to the city does erase some identities even as it allows the scope for anonymity, but the Dalit remains a Dalit for the most part. The metropolitan cities are better suited for the Dalit movement’s growth and establishment because they allow for the Dalits to carry out democratic/ public agitations/ demonstrations without fear of a backlash, of being targetted and done-to-death and crushed by oppressor castes whose violent diktat operates much more freely in the villages. Coming to the second part of your question, yes, the developed world only has a superficial interest in these issues, which is quite disappointing. However, the struggle against caste should be waged only by those who have suffered because of it, and it should be supported by those who don’t believe in discrimination. I guess here the curiousity of the West could help since it actually brings things to the world’s attention. There’s another way of looking at it: the militant and political Dalit struggle (or even literature) has hardly been effectively theorized, or documented, so the academic interest emanating from this is certainly beneficial.
9. You write, commiserate with Tamils in Sri Lanka; is it emotional baggage for you now that crisis in Sri Lanka is no longer in the news with the Tamil Tigers gone?
The Sri Lanka crisis is now in the news in a way in which it has never been before. The US State Department’s report of what happened earlier this year in the war zone in which tens of thousands of Tamils were mercilessly bombed to death by the SL Govt., the Tamil Diaspora re-mandating their right to a homeland in the North-east, people all over the world being concerned about the three hundred thousand Tamils caught in concentration camps, Sri Lanka being the second-most unsafe country for journalists all over the world–these are issues of prime importance, irrespective of whether the media in the US, or India decides to highlight it or not. I take up a cause because I am involved with it, or I empathize for it, and not on the basis of the amount of media spotlight that it accrues. I guess the Tamil issue will always be an emotional baggage until we receive the right to a life of safety and security and self-determination. I trust that now is the time for humanitarian people all over the world to actually support the Tamil cause because things have never been worse.
10. Race, religion and caste come to play the most when elections are around the corner. In that respect the United States might not be much different from India. Emancipation apart, what needs to be done in India to remove barriers for equalization?
Yes, what you describe is the typical vote-bank scenario. I believe that equalization can come about only when the oppressors also decide that it is time for them to change, it is time for them to mend their ways. There is a possibility that such a change can come about through self-directed/ self-initiated efforts, but there are not enough pointers from history which lets us reinforce this belief. Those who seek to maintain the status quo, those who work against equalization and democratization, are known to change only when their own power is questioned and challenged. So, much of the responsibility for bringing about change lies in the hands of the oppressed people, since they have to continue their resilient struggle against oppression. If they resist the subjugation successfully, and if they manage to break out of it, then equalization will come about. It can never be beyond reach. What needs to be done in India is to encourage the freedom of the press, to bring out more stories of victimization and resistance to light, and to empower women without resorting to any cultural dogma. Anyone can observe that all systems of oppression ideally go hand-in-hand, so none of us can be free until all of us are free. For instance, I would like the feminist movement in India to really take up the ideology of annihilating the caste system not just because it is discriminatory and inhuman, but also because it is based on the control of a women’s sexuality (in order to keep the caste pedigree pure).
11. Do you agree with the quota system for the backward classes in government and educational institutions in India?
It is not for anyone to agree/disagree with the quota system, what people need to concentrate on is to ensure that all sections of society achieve real growth, and that no one is left behind and marginalized. I think the decision to extend the quota system for the backward classes (here i make a distinction from the Dalits) was taken because of their abysmal presence in both state-run educational and employment enterprises. We have to become a more tolerance and more inclusive society, and affirmative action is just one way of getting there.
12. Kamala Das backed your poetry; wrote a foreword to your debut collection of poems. Why does that mean so much to you? What do you like most about her poetry?
What Kamala Das said about my poetry meant so much to me because she is a woman who calls a spade a spade, she’s forthright and outspoken and doesn’t say things that she doesn’t mean. So, when such an authentic and genuine (not to mention accomplished and fiery) poet like her encourages your work, you just gain confidence in yourself, and you channel more efforts towards writing more, representing people more. I love her poetry, because she broke the barriers against Indian woman writing on troublesome/ taboo topics; at the core of everything, she was truth-seeking. Personally, I also adore her flamboyance, her fire.
13. How do you reconcile poetry with reality? Does imagination triumph?
My poetry is rooted in my reality: the reality of the Dalits fighting against caste-atrocities and violence of the oppressive forces who want to subjugate them, the reality of women who still have to fight to assert their equality and their rights, the reality of Tamils who have to express themselves in spite of the worst kind of threat to the freedom of expression, who have to struggle against systematic genocide in their own homeland. My poetry is a product of all my multiple, coexisting realities–right now, I don’t think I outsource my poetry to imagination.
Book Review: Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardene
(First published in The New Indian Express, 02 August 2009.)
Sam is poor, Sinhalese, and a servant in the Master’s River House. His only best friend is the owners’ dog Brutus. Sam is someone who can never figure out what a problem is, someone who doesn’t know why people cry. He has never learnt anything, not even how to write his name. He is a village idiot who doesn’t know what breasts are, but then, surprisingly, he knows about the Tamil militants.
Employing the first person narrative throughout the text, Sam’s Story succeeds in its attempt to imitate the raw, sparse prose style of Hemingway — the stark simplicity blends with the irreverence and dumbness of the protagonist, and the sudden shifts of action make for an aesthetic reading experience. But the story-telling embeds a clear-cut political agenda and is nowhere as remarkable as the superficially successful prose-style.
Sam’s Story, first published in 2001, painstakingly avoids even a single oblique reference to Tamil suffering on the island. Perhaps, it is left for us to infer that just as the stupid Sam is incapable of looking at reality, even to the minimum extent of noticing that Tamils are being discriminated against, people too refuse to accept that linguistic and racial chauvinism have wrought a climate of hatred on the island.
Most of the novel is a successful study in hate: the narrator prefixes everything about the Tamil language, people or culture with the word “stupid” and goes little beyond depicting Tamil people as those “who threw bombs and killed our soldiers and tried to divide our country”.
After more than 100 pages of a monotonous rant, we are privy to the picture on the other side, of how the Sri Lankan military is also a convoluted place to be. Perhaps, this is one way of striking a balance and attempting neutrality, although the damage is already done; no amount of salvaging can help the text.
The depiction of the brutalities of army life begin when Sam talks of his brother Jaya who’s killed-in-action, and his brother Madiya who deserts the armed forces. From this point forward, the book changes vastly in tone and treatment. Madiya, in his brief stopover at his home (after his desertion, and before going into hiding) explains the poverty draft and the meaninglessness of the war.
Against this backdrop, Jayawardene explores how poor people, bereft of all opportunities, send their children to war; and how they make do without food and medicine whereas a rich man’s dog gets immediate access to the best doctors and a stream of visitors inquiring about its health. He writes of this divided world where the political ‘punishment’ for a Sinhalase man campaigning for the Other Party involves being transferred to teach at a faraway Tamil school.
Sam’s lives his life in a climate of mutual hatred, and he instinctively distrusts the Tamil servants at River House. While Sam tolerates the housekeeper Janet, he resents the cook Leandro, who, with his talk of Eelam, divides the world into easy binaries — the people who are willing to kill (The Army) and the people who were willing to die (The Tigers).
Sam’s suspicion of Tamils extends to everybody: he thinks Velu, a servant in a nearby bungalow is a spy; and he doesn’t appreciate that Master’s son has found himself a Tamil girlfriend. The fatal climax, replete with a truck-bomb driving into a national bank, throws them all apart, and widens the rift to such an extent that any coming together seems fraught with impossibility.
