In the Unifying Language of Verse
Published in India’s 75th year of Independence, Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (2022) presents unique and diverse voices from the diaspora, with poems that are a sustained discussion with history, oneself, the environment, myth, science, and relationships.
Poetry is a conversation between the poet and their soul, a dialogue that often results from a lifetime of perseverance by dedicated poets. Sometimes, this translates into something culturally viable and appropriate. Published by Pippa Rann Books in 2022, Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians is one such sustained discussion through poems with history, oneself, the environment, myth, science, and relationships.
The collection’s editor Sudeep Sen expounds on his editorial choices in his note, “The unifying factor being integrity of thought and language.” Published in India’s 75th year of independence from British rule, this volume was intended to celebrate this occasion, reflecting on the diversity of voices present in contemporary letters among Indian poets.
A few important voices were left out of this volume, including Usha Akella, founder of Matwaala (a festival inviting South Asians across the Diaspora for literary celebration), or Tanvir Ratul, editor of the little magazine lastbench and translator of the lost materialist tome the Charvaka. These omissions, however, don’t deflect from the quality of writing embraced in the collection: With over 600 pages containing 117 unique Indian voices from the diaspora, this volume is a modern masterpiece. These poets include deceased greats including Jayanta Mahapatra and Saleem Peeradina (who edited one of the first anthologies of modern Indian poetry in English in 1972). Their inclusion lends the volume some posthumous glory, as well as to their own oeuvres.
By adding this voluminous account of Indian poetry in English to the world conversation, Sen also heightens the English poetry tradition. Within the 600-plus pages, readers will find variety. There are voices to suit any taste: you have avant-garde poets such as Ranjit Hoskote, Arundhati Subramaniam, or Kiriti Sengupta; confessional style works of Varsha Saraiya Shah; themes of mortality in works by Rabindra K. Swain; conversations about body in Bibhu Padhi; celebrations of deep love by K. Satchidanadan; and traditional spiritual themes in Sanjukta Dasgupta; and so many more.
There are 135 million English speakers in India currently, making it the second-largest English-speaking country in the world. Ten percent of India’s people speak English fluently. From 1765 to 1947, the British Raj established English as the language of administration and education. According to FluencyCorp, “Today, English is the only veritable way to communicate between Indian states that do not speak Hindi.” Converse reflects the nation’s complex modern era; according to the editor, “[…] themes of a fragmented society with nuclear families, issues of mental illness, loneliness, social media manipulation of half-truths, cancel culture, societal and political censorship find a presence in this book.”
Sen’s own poems construct a dis-logic, turning the often-problematic social issue on its rhetorical head. For example, in “Hope: Light Leaks,” the rhetoric from the Black Lives Matter movement and its critics is unified in a hopeful strain that celebrates racial justice. Poets are great historians who also serve as dispensations of the common cause for justice. Beginning with an epigraph from Dr. Martin Luther King, the poem expounds on nature in a critical way.
Light’s plane waxes, wanes —
viral load expands, contracts.
Photons spill, conduction sparks —
light show removes cataract’s veil.
In this blackness, lives matter.
Only light can drive out darkness. Black Lives Matter critics often stated messages like “White Lives Matter” to contrast the conflicted message they received from the heated moment. The idea was to present a message that all lives matter, although this rhetoric is easily construed as racist. This unfathomable moment in history following the death of George Floyd and the sudden surge or protest is registered in the poem as a natural event; Sen uses imagery derived from physics to explicate the moment. The arc of history is long but it is moral. ‘Blackness’ is an assertion of the importance of the movement’s intents without negating the principle of justice for all.
The next poem, “Burning Ghats, Varanasi,” also invokes scientific conceptualization. Lines such as “fragmented waves of golden-amber spark” explicate the burning of the dead bodies during the COVID era. Sen renders this moment with great sympathy: “Amid so much noise, / the business of death being transacted / carries on, without any emotion or fuss.” This line engages readers with critical and passionate economy. Seeing death as something transactional and carried on without any emotion illumines the alienation of our humanity. We lose sympathy for the dead as the process of dying becomes akin to a machine-like devastation; as so many bodies are accumulating, the heart of humanity suffers.
Converse reflects the nation’s complex modern era; according to the editor, “[…] themes of a fragmented society with nuclear families, issues of mental illness, loneliness, social media manipulation of half-truths, cancel culture, societal and political censorship find a presence in this book.”
Arundhathi Subramaniam also wrestles with the COVID-era devastation in her poem “The World Takes a Breath.” The poem is more subtle than Sen’s exposition, but nonetheless, this grants it deep power. The poet coins the phrase “pandemic of pieties” as she highlights social hypocrisies and futilities such as the
recycling anodyne
text messages
about the wisdom
of looking within
and how “meaning won’t save us / (never has).” There is a way forward for the poet in “rhythms.” What is meant by rhythms is the lessening of pollution through bicycling: “[…] we’re cycling, / hands free, hands free, / on air.”
These final lines suggest freedom and the possibility of emerging from a cleaner, healthier world. Subramaniam focuses her poetic skills on decadence, using images like “smoking / empires of sulphur” to engage the reader. She further writes that beneath these empires of sulphur there is “shiver of doubt,” as if to imply the truth is known but not acknowledged. However, the context of the poem grants it wry irony.
“I Grew Up in an Age of Poets” opens with the epigraph from Eunice de Souza, “Best to meet in poems,” suggesting that COVID-styled isolation is nothing new to the poetic mind. She even lampoons the toxic positivity of our era with “all darkness deodorized.”
The poet Zilka Joseph from Mumbai, now living in Kolkata, goes to the root of many social ills of today. In “Sea of Lost and Found,” her eloquence presents us with longing and loss for the nuclear family. She writes,
…
unborn soul looking to be born
to my mother
who swept me to shore
how did I find her.
This conundrum of birth seen from the lens of reincarnation is further established throughout the poem when an albatross tells stories of mother and father “so lithe and so radiant they were / who sailed these latitudes once”. The middle section of the poem “Even the Hundreds of Migrant Swallows and Hoopoes” implies the migrant crisis worldwide. The poem resembles Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” even if the message is contemporaneous.
Joseph writes, “[…] my father’s lurking ship took shelter during storms / turbulent tropical crossings” and presents a world where various birds are messengers of “my parents’ destiny.” This statement heightens the emotions associated with loss:
I cannot hear my mother sing
Que sera sera
a red shroud
spreads
on the water’s mirror
The use of mirrors suggests a self-likeness to this visionary folktale. The self-likeness is contemporary society of which “there is no list of the lost here.” The poem following this one celebrates nature’s freedom through the bird image: “friend never believe anyone who keeps / a bird in a cage”. The intention of this poem is to mock phony fortunetellers who discourage spiritual independence, but the image of the bird as a symbol of free-spiritedness resonates with Joseph’s love of nature.
In “For the Earth That’s Losing Itself” by Vinita Agrawal, ecopoetics is developed to illumine society’s need to understand ecology. She writes,
Write about shrinking spaces
Write about the colour green
Write a line of chopped trees
Write a symphony of broken rings
ite yourself an optimist.
This poem demands an understanding of both the poet’s and the citizen’s need for clarity in ecology. There is some irony in the phrase “shrinking spaces” after the social distancing era. “Write yourself polygamous”, adds Agrawal. In a world that has increasingly decided anything goes, the poem embraces a demand for positive change. We are urged, “Write about grandma’s earth.”
What can we remember in an era increasingly hostile to humanity and nature? In “Trees Have Always Spoken to Me” the “broken rings” are again emphasized: “trees speak of another year of rain / recorded by a ring” reveals the interconnectedness of nature and her processes. The poet’s ecology is personal as well as political.
In Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s “Nameri” poems, love is sacred. In “Temple,” he writes, “I worshipped you again and again. / I made myself humble before you again and again.” The repetition of again implies futility, but also some sense of psychological dependence on the beloved for virtuous development. Love is seen as a passionate embrace of betterment and humanism. “Like them, / people like us, / always live on borrowed time.” Love of a beloved heightens awareness of mortality and being. “We spoke in hushed tones,” Nongkynrih writes. The poem also is bold as these lines emerge: “I thought of Trump and Bolsonaro / and all the enemies of the earth.” His increasingly dystopian world is filled with light by his romantic heart.
In “Oldness”, a poem about age, the poet articulates, “My love, however, is a winter bonfire / on the hill of my childhood years.” This resonates with other nostalgias in the anthology that engage with the not-so-distant past.
Kiriti Sengupta also takes up the subject of love in poems such as “The Expectant Mother” and “Love Story.” In the first, the expectant mother “stretches her hands / to douse the sky / with blood and water.” This scene seems horrific on the first embrace, but it intends to describe the process of giving birth from an outsider’s perspective.
Sengupta, a doctor, articulates processes from an objective lens. Even his poem “Love Story” discusses the process of photography. “Polaroid despises disguise. It / celebrates light.” This postmodern ambiguity resonates with symbolic importance concerning a model’s “greasepaint.” The poem could celebrate the natural beauty of a subject, although gender is not framed. Readers are left to interpret. The camera is the central focus as it “reciprocates a mirror, / making impressions of / hidden flaws.”
As the poem concludes, the “anxious ghost” files “his scrimshaw memories / as he shuffles between roles.” These lines indicate dissatisfaction with life as a human being because of the flux and inability to construct meaning from it. The poem’s irony has brutal resonance.
Aesthetics are further illumined in “Tournesols,” a poem about Vincent van Gogh. This poem requests positivity in contrast to previously discussed poems. Sengupta writes, “Life would not have stilled / had there been water in the vase.” Hope is also ambiguous in this image. Does the poet mean water for painting, or metaphorical waters of love in van Gogh’s life?
Water plays a role in Ranjit Hoskote’s poem “Sentence” as well: “This sentence of rushing water swirls / around the silent hill where I first met snow.” The poem speaks further as it reveals its ecology,
these signatures you turn
believing they were willed to you
blank
waiting for your script to spell itself
with detonator and backhoe.
Human stewardship of the earth is called into question as humanity is called into account for destructive behaviors toward the natural world. The poem refers to itself initially and evolves into a condemnation of deforestation.
In “Storefront Self Portrait” the poet writes of chronicling the speaker’s pirate pasts, requesting an assurance from the sea that he can:
go missing
between a rusty telephone booth sprayed with graffiti
and a bulletin board patchworked
with rival posters for the district elections
as if to suggest that life on the sea is more satisfying than one among civilization. As the poem concludes, the “anxious ghost” files “his scrimshaw memories / as he shuffles between roles.” These lines indicate dissatisfaction with life as a human being because of the flux and inability to construct meaning from it. The poem’s irony has brutal resonance.
C.P. Surendran writes of the “occult of the word” in “I Am Nearly Not Here.” Prefaced with an epigraph from Rimbaud, “I’m not concerned with that anymore,” this poem is about language and its healing capacities. Surendran bears a remarkable burden to instigate and exfoliate crises among world civilization when communication breaks down. “Soul, soul, / why do you persecute me?” he writes, suggesting the poem is about healing the inner world. The soul must heal itself through “A Little more writing which no one wants. / Ink expended on sands.”
The images describing suffering address and alleviate an inner turmoil.
In the shadow of thorns. In the shade of the rose.
In the silicates of silence, perpetual revelations. Loathing of the self, the object of a killer’s desire
Or a lover’s, of excess and shame.
In “Options for an Old Man in a Far Room,” similar images emerge to heal the heartbroken: “[…] Underfoot, the bridges rattle its bones to the passing cargo of shaken hearts… / Why the heart, after all / This, is yet fastened to the dying animal […]”
Gopal Lahiri also invites discussion of language. In “Black and White,” he writes of “the exile moments in a broken language” but the language is photography and its technological manipulation. In his poem “Kolkata High Street,” Lahiri suggests language is outside of moral bounds: “The footprints seek the light of a deeper place, / commoners talk about freedom without compromise / for good or evil—willing to be struck dumb.”
Anticipation of being “struck dumb” suggests a contradiction of one’s deepest conviction during the street talk. While people openly chat about political upheavals and hopes, they may find that their definitions are not shared. This poem which seeks “the meaning of memories” when “each trope comes close to song,” even celebrates city noise and its ecology. Cities are not to be dismissed as aesthetic symbols.
Converse is a wide-ranging journey into the nature of increasing globalization and its complexities, the pandemic, and the role poetry plays in defining as well as healing the psyche throughout place and time. As a contemporary anthology, it represents a variety of attitudes, situations, lifestyles, and beliefs—its only singular requirement is that the poets are Indians writing in English. Under Sen’s brilliant editorial guidance, however, the language becomes a tool of universal expression by voices of differing artistic aims and pursuits, a conversation among poets gathered in this healing space.
***
Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Café Dissensus Everyday, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, and several other publications. He hosts the popular interview series ‘World Inkers Network’ on Youtube. You can find him on Instagram: @poetpickering and Twitter: @DustinPickerin2.
