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Literary Review
Four too many
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Greater representation of fewer poets might have resulted in a better anthology, says MANOHAR SHETTY.
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THE poet and anthologist D.J. Enright delighted in making subjective and idiosyncratic choices in putting together a collection of poems he liked unequivocally, unfazed by reputations, nationality or schools of poetry. Others like Alan Bold went by the political ideology they subscribed to. Yet another like Michael Horovitz by no ideolgy at all, revelling in including every poem pell-mell, the only broad test of their legitimacy being the exclusion of punctuation and the upper case. The more weighty anthologists like A. Alvarez and Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison set themselves far more lofty agendas — a departure from the past and a re-mapping of the current poetry into a new direction. For Alvarez it was the charting of a new poetry, tougher and bloodier than the "gentility" of the Movement poets of the early 1950s. Twenty years later, Motion and Morrison in turn uncovered a "decisive shift in sensibility", claiming that the new breed showed "greater imaginative freedom and linguistic daring" and that they had extended the "imaginative franchise".
Reasons for Belonging, with its passionate Introduction by Ranjit Hoskoté, while acknowledging a debt to the older poets, seeks also to venture into new pathways. Hoskoté rightly deplores the foolish contention of an earlier anthologist who sought to escape the rigours of writing successful contemporary poems by the simple political expedient of condemning the past generation for "its aloofness and alienation from India, its secular dogmatism, its outright rejection of the past, and above all, its arrogant narcissism and self-absorption". Hoskoté is much kinder to the old fogeys, claiming affinity with Agha Shahid Ali, Keki N. Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Dom Moraes.
Hoskoté prizes "tautness and texture of expression, the vivid and sensuous materiality of the image, the variegation of authorial strategy". The poets selected here are born after 1950, with the youngest in 1972, and are all, Hoskoté claims, "united by their attention to craft, to the cunning allusive weave of sense and artifice". They are "at home in a world in which the boundary between the local and the global has increasingly been blurred". "They test the border separating the domains of private significance and public meaning... they investigate lost imprints of thought and expressiveness". "Their poems act as vivid takes on a kaleidoscopic reality, quixotic and adversarial arguments, pretexts to explore a maximalist spectrum of tones ranging from anger and grief, through delight, to elegant wit and wry self-irony". Bearing in mind the adage that nothing is convincing that requires such elaboration, one turns to the poems in some trepidation. And the misgivings are largely confirmed, beginning with these lines from "The Word-worker" by Smita Agarwal which Hoskoté praises in the Introduction for its "visceral relish for words":
My eyes lick them off the page;
I chew them, suck the juices,
Let the flavors seep in. I am
The dreamer; words, the cocoon
I knit.
This may read well in a women's glossy. Not in an ambitious anthology.
The poems of Tabish Khair are littered with long, lax lines:
The newspaper was a thin shield full of the world,
Held against that which had been too much with you
And now was slipping away like loosely held paper.
That second line is a marvel of non-poetry. But there is more in a poem called "Amma":
Slowly you shuffle examining each new tear in the curtains
Which will have to be mended when the first monsoon rain
Provides a respite from sun, curtails the need for shade.
In a poem these lines are worse than prosaic.
The works of Gavin Barrett and Vivek Narayanan, both "at home" in a wider world and no doubt beneficiaries from "the paradoxical process of globalisation", are all light-weight and loosely written. This dilution of quality in order to fit into a preconceived pattern is inexcusable. Sophistry is not the guardian angel of poetry. Anthologies like this are meant to be standard bearers of quality. Hoskoté himself quotes Adil Jussawalla: "That sense of `beingthere'...is never finally dependent on where the writer is physically situated...{lcub}It{rcub} is finally dependent on the quality of the writer's imagination and the strength of his talent". A basic truth, one would imagine, but Hoskoté's theoretical frenzy seems to have clouded his judgement. It is the poem which is important, not the poet's address.
Amidst the clutter there are some fine individual poems, notably by Jeet Thayil, C.P. Surendran, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Vijay Nambisan, Hoskoté himself, and some unusual, quite ingenious work by H. Masud Taj. The continued exclusion of Menka Shivdasani is puzzling. Her charged and spiky poetry is an ideal distaff side complement to the jagged anger of Surendran.
For all his zealous arguments, Ranjit has in reality little to work with. As many as six of the 14 poets have not yet published a single full-length book. This may in itself not be a serious lapse given the bleak publishing scenario, but it does indicate how wide the editor had to trawl to come up with the few gems that grace this anthology. In India even the "canons" are not well defined, and perhaps exist only in the embittered imagination of poets who feel left out. In a literary climate with no more than 30 (at an optimistic count) English language Indian practitioners of this cantankerous craft, this anthology is surely premature. Greater representation of fewer poets may have resulted in a more substantial contribution — fourteen is at least four too many.
Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Ranjit Hoskoté, Viking Penguin India, p.148, Rs. 195.
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