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Literary Review
Been here before
ALIENATION and despair suffuse Indian English poetry. Vilas Sarang has written about the "funeral pyres [that] burn unceasingly on the banks of Jayanta Mahapatra's poetic world", and if Nissim Ezekiel's poetry is less lachrymose it certainly isn't less sombre. Adil Jussawala says his Missing Person "presents the guilt of the bourgeois individual" and a generation later, Tabish Khair promises us in his introduction to the 1993 collection Reporter's Diary, that that is exactly what it is and "not a bloody book of poems". The reader who infers from this that Khair will pin down the transient, rather than reflect on the transcendental, will be disappointed. There is one poem about Baliapal and one on a German concentration camp, but the rest of the book is full of timeless, meditative poems about fear, death, memory, and the fragmented "bourgeois individual", memorably burdened with "two pasts... and half a future".
One would like to see the alienation project not necessarily relinquished, but move in fresh directions. Sujata Bhatt's poetry draws on her position as an expatriate Indian, and she is on occasion unnecessarily pointed about this, but she is also adept at letting things be what they are. She isn't always forcing the subjects of her poetry into metaphors about alienation. C.P. Surendran often is. A woman drying her sari, letting it sail over her head in the breeze, becomes someone waving "The flag/ Of a kingdom exiled/ From the most detailed map". The idea of the flag already sits a little too heavy on the commonplace, if visually lovely, image of holding a sari that way. Why then go on to draw an even more strained parallel between the flag and its kingdom and "A refugee gazing at asylum from afar"?
Surendran's poetry is often ingenuous — "I would like to know/ What happens to the people in the dreams/...when you wake in alarm"; or uninspired — to the man who tells him, "If someone told you/ The story of your life when you were/ A child, you wouldn't have believed it", he says, "Perhaps we are all leading/ Other people's lives"; or just plain nebulous — "He made a habit of yesterday/ Worked hard at the addiction/ And out of that landscape/ Fashioned a hospitable ruin".
Then there are clear cases of afterthought — "...the poor wove/ The needle of their bodies/ Through traffic lights, / Fabricating/ The lie of a lifetime". Which lie is this, and is it only there because the stitching image suggested "fabricating" to him and one of the meanings of that suggested lies? This is also true of the flag poem. The sari evokes a flag so what follows? Exile and the Kingdom.
Surendran's earlier book, Posthumous Poems, began by talking about disillusionment and bad times. "I recall those days were full of wrong trains in the middle of the night brittle with sodium vapour lamps, waking up in huge railways yards very quiet and weighted down with iron". The poems that followed delivered on the promise of these unique images. There seemed to be an ambition at work there, which, even if stolidly within the confines of the Alienation Project, was heartening. There was the feel of the city ("You've been here before, collaged between the African bush/ of an armpit" in a Bombay local) and a lot of not unironic heartbreak.
This collection has the same concerns but is all fulsome generalisation and seems, sadly, like a watered down, faltering version of the other — certainly not a development on it. Surendran views the universe through a numb fog, or doesn't view it at all but mocks up his own desultory, quasi-mythological version of it, full of figurative lions and faceless men. One third of the collection passes before we meet someone real — a grandmother who "consumed/ half a cake of Pears in one bath". She is hidden away through the rest of the poem by images that do not distinguish her from other dying grandmothers. On page 70 we finally encounter an entire poem about something tangible — "There's something about the milk/ I had at play school/You poured the milk/ amidst the clamour/ into the bell of a bronze glass".
Most of the time, besides, there is Surendran's grievous inattention to language: the unforgivable clichés - "burning gates of hell", "mountains covered in a shawl of mist", "irritating his back like an itch", love like "the stone in the bed of a river now dry", and someone "tough, old weather beaten like a stone"; as well as the grammatical lapses — "Excess baggage really you'd best left behind", "And the people you knew all dead/ Or were getting there", "Everything'd be its own purpose/ And nothing led to anything". Surely this does not bode well for Indian English poetry?
Canaries on the Moon, C.P. Surendran, Yeti Books, 2002, p.97, Rs. 125.
ANJUM HASAN
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