In a wide-ranging conversation with, acclaimed poet and dancer Tishani Doshi spoke to Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario about her literary work, the fundamentals of ‘Vilambit’ in her writing, and artistic journeys through space and time.

- Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario

Much of Tishani Doshi’s work—her poetry, her performances—carries strong, vivid images, with sublime usage of metaphors and similes. A widely acclaimed poet, writer, essayist, columnist, freelance journalist, and dancer, Doshi, when asked about how she justifies these various mediums—like dance, as a form of performance poetry—answered, “I don’t see these as divided territories. It’s not as though once something is said in words and locked into the page, then it’s done with. I don’t know that justification enters the process at all. Nobody really needs another poem or a performance, so the reason why we make is always mysterious.”

“I had never planned to be a dancer,” she added, “but I was taken in that direction in my mid-20s and for a long time now, I’ve straddled these worlds, so it’s natural that I would try to find ways to bridge and connect.

“I also find the notion of ‘performance poetry’ a bit confusing,” Doshi added. “The tradition of poetry is oral. If a poet agrees to read their work in front of an audience, then they are performing—whether it’s flamboyant or mumbling from a corner on the stage. Once you have an audience, even if it is an audience of one, you are performing your poetry, and that connection between poet and listener is as old as the tradition of poetry itself, so I don’t see any disconnect with it.”

Born in Madras, Doshi completed her degrees in Business Administration and Communications at Queens College, Charlotte, North Carolina and her Master in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1999, before shifting to London to work as an assistant in the advertising department of Harper's and Queen magazine. She returned to India in 2001, where she was introduced to the renowned choreographer Chandralekha and joined her group as a dancer. This allowed her to travel to many places and perform in the international arena. In her travels, Doshi has trekked across the Ethiopian Bale Mountains, visited Antarctica with a group of high-school students, and also documented the largest transgender gathering in Koovakam.

As a freelance journalist, Doshi has written about her travels and experiences for The International Herald, Financial Times, The National, Tribune, The Guardian, The New Indian Express, and The Hindu. Her published books include, Countries of the Body (2006), Conflict and Instability (2008), The Pleasure Seekers (2010), Everything Begins Elsewhere (2012), Fountainville: New Stories from the Mabinogion (2013), Madras Then, Chennai Now (with Nanditha Krishna) (2013), The Adulterous Citizen: poems stories essays (2015), Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017), Small Days and Nights (2019), and A god at the door (2021).

“A poem is not an opinion or a statement. Its beauty is that despite its constraints of form and size, a poem is magnanimous—it enlarges rather than constricts.”

Doshi was the winner of the Eric Gregory Award for young poets under 30 years in 2001. She was awarded the, All India Poetry Prize supported by the British Council in 2005 for her poem, “The Day we went to the Sea”.

In a wide-ranging conversation with, Doshi spoke about her literary work, the fundamentals of ‘Vilambit’ in her writing, and artistic journeys through space and time. Edited excerpts:

The Chakkar: Tishani, let me begin by saying that, creative writing in its many forms—a poem, a fictional story, or even a personal essay—offers the reader an invitation to imagine. How do you think that, even if it’s not entirely true, such creative work has the ability to understand ourselves better, or to create memories for the rest of the world?

Doshi: I believe that imagination is something that can be activated. And that reality, memory, all this territory is an area of perception which belongs alongside imagination. When you are writing a story or poem, you may begin with something that tethers you to the ‘real’, but it actively becomes something else in the making. By making the story, you are also changing reality. It’s this moving back and forth between real and imagined that I think is so exciting as you write, and even as you read. This element of transport, of wonder.

Truth is an entirely different concept. I’m not sure that I’m so interested in the notion of truth while writing—emotional truth, yes, but not so much the truth that parades around with a capital T.

The Chakkar: I feel that much of the world has been fragmented by A.I., particularly the use of applications to generate art and prose. What, then, continues to draw you to poetry? What makes poems a better form of expression about the world we live in? Do you feel that debating, reporting, or complaining can be a valid form of such expression, too?

Doshi: I don’t know that these things need to be either-or. Debating, reporting, complaining, and poetry are all valid forms of expression. A poem is not an opinion or a statement. Its beauty is that despite its constraints of form and size, a poem is magnanimous—it enlarges rather than constricts. So, there’s a lot of space and breath around a poem, which allows a certain interface with the reader. It’s not so easy to be passive with a poem.

The Chakkar: You have found a balance as both a writer and a performer. Like a page, the stage too is a blank canvas. But, with writing, you have the intimacy to be alone or edit and rewrite at your own pace whereas a stage has its audience when you are out there to perform. It is time-bound and there are no retakes. How do you deal with these differing mediums of art?

Doshi: Once when I was reciting a poem in Norway, I lost the line of a poem and there was that looooong awkward silence. It was the thing that you dread—forgetting the line… But you know, it was not a disaster. I just said, I’ll go to the next poem. Then I remembered the line and came back to the poem and the audience cheered me on.

If we think of performance not as something that is ‘set’, something that is unfolding, in the way that in classical Indian music concerts, the musicians tinker with their instruments, the singers clear their throats, cough, talk to the audience in the middle of the concert—then perhaps we can find more flexibility in the idea of performance. John Gardner wrote this beautiful thing about how with fiction you want to create this vivid and continuous dream—and I suppose one aspect of making is this perfection—to not have the curtain fall in the middle of a show and spoil it, to not have any crack in the belief that we are watching something invented, to not break the spell that we are out of reality and need to stay there so perfectly so as to not forget that this is not reality. But I think there are other traditions, where there the communion between audience and performer is more osmotic. Of course you want to uphold the dream, you don’t want to miss the line, you don’t want your leg to shake on stage. All your rehearsal, all of your daily practice is to avoid that, but it may happen anyway. And if it does, it becomes a part of the performance. I think ultimately you have to believe that the audience is not against you. That they are there with you. That you can take strength from them, energy from them. This vulnerability is what makes live performance so powerful.

The Chakkar: How did working with Chandralekha help you in making poetry and dance one inseparable body?

Doshi: I came to know Chandralekha because of poetry. My first journalistic assignment was to review a book she had written, a long poem called Rainbow on the Roadside, for Seminar Magazine. Throughout our time together, she was always happily announcing that I was a non-dancer. That I was a poet—that my primary motivation was poetry—was very exciting for her. She introduced me to so many poets. During my first performance in Champaner, Gujarat, I remember buying AK Ramanujan’s Speaking of Siva, a book that has changed me utterly and has travelled with me. I remember bringing Chandralekha a velvet-covered collection of Shelley’s poetry because she loved reciting “Ozymandias”. So, poetry was something that bound us. Chandra could do haikus and limericks and sonnets and all of it, really, from the profane to the sublime. She did not believe in separations of art and life, or any of these binaries that draw boxes around disciplines, so it was completely normal for her that you could look to poetry, architecture, painting, film, music, dance, and that all these disciplines would feed into the imagination. She lived her life in this way, and I think that was the great lesson.

“This undesignated area, this space where there’s no objective to get something done, this exploratory zone where there is breath and room—that is where ideas can happen, and play, and boredom, and everything that I think is the raw material for making.”

Chandralekha’s final choreography was “Sharira,” and not only was there a completion, I think it is generally considered to be the work that brings together so many of her ideas in the most distilled way. I’m sure there may have been other plans, other projects that she would have liked to have worked on, but Sharira was and remains quite a remarkable choreography, and I think it must be one of the longest performed works by the same group of dancers and musicians. I mean, we performed it for fifteen years—it’s a long time to perform one piece. Your body changes, everything changes, and the piece in some way is also changing ever so slightly, but ultimately providing this kind of constant that you return to. We performed it for ten years after her death, and each time it was a revival of sorts, of her, her presence. I miss it.

The Chakkar: In your essay “Time is an egg”, you wrote, “Time is talked about in terms of money or freedom, as a limited resource.” What do you feel about this obsession of humans around time, especially when we know that time will never allow us to conclude things in the manner we wish to but however time itself chooses or conclusions: abrupt and sudden. Yet, we float around its diameter, living between, “it's time now”, “loss/waste of time”, “I don’t have time”, “timeless” (to refer to something as classic), and the very agonizing, “my time has come” situations?

Doshi: It makes sense for us to obsess about time, because our time is finite. This quest for immortality is our ultimate hubris, from the epic of Gilgamesh to the current Silicon Valley billionaires who are trying to find ways to live forever. I think our humanness is tied to our finiteness here, and every aspect of us is determined by our relationship with time, and even though our ways of thinking about time are so varied, we cannot help but relate to time. We try to manipulate it: to slow it down, to speed it up. To elongate. To pause. Time is the container that holds us.

The Chakkar: You have mentioned the paradox of the luxury of slowness, how we talk about slowness, and yet, are often rushing through our lives. You have further mentioned the abstract “vilambit”, the longest section in Hindustani Classical. How can we bring the fundamentality of vilambit to justify slowness through poetry or literature in this deadline-oriented world, especially since the shutdowns that followed the COVID pandemic created further uncertainty and rush for many in the world?

Doshi: It’s a great question and I think an important one, something that I keep renewing to myself and I suppose failing Despite the awareness of needing to create this vilambit space/time, there are always deadlines, there are always things that need doing or seeing to, so how to preserve that essential space? Sleep less? Understand time better? There were a few weeks when I would wake in the dark and go to a corner of the house to write, when no one else was awake, and I think that space/time was rich with possibility, for being within and inside languorously, rather than darting around like a fly in this fragmentary mode. I also like walking alone, nurturing a kind of solitude, as a way of sitting inside time. This undesignated area, this space where there’s no objective to get something done, this exploratory zone where there is breath and room—that is where ideas can happen, and play, and boredom, and everything that I think is the raw material for making.

The Chakkar: Many of your poems, including, “After a Shooting in a Maternity Clinic in Kabul”, “The Art of Losing”, “Ode to Patrick Swayze”, and “This May Reach You Either as a Bird or Flower—For Varavara Rao”, carry commentaries about other people or happenings. How do you think one must write about violence, rage, anguish, grief, crisis, or the body, in poetry or prose? How gentle does one need to be around such grey areas, for there is always a risk of being seen as a bitter person?

“Change is always happening, but poetry goes on. What I’ve found most enriching are the conversations and intersections with other poets… This generates a feeling of community, a shared feeling, which expands the sense of aloneness when you’re working on things.”

Doshi: I guess I’m okay with the risk of being seen as a bitter person. I often counter the popular notion of poets being depressive and unhappy because of all the lugubrious things they write about… I believe that the act of writing or making is a transformative act. How could someone not be affected by all the injustices and violences we see around us? That is my question. How to not find a way to intervene in whatever way was possible to you, to alter things through sound, image, play. That I think is the question I boomerang back to. Creation, imagination, making—these are ways of essentially trying to transform reality. This is hugely optimistic, hugely about not just believing in the possibility of another reality, but believing that we can create it. So, call us delusional by all means… But ‘bitter’?

The Chakkar: You have written shape poetry, too. How you developed an interest in this form? Do you decide in advance that you will write the particular poem in this style, or do you make the decision while writing?

Doshi: Yes, I’m very interested in shapes and geometries. I think partly because, like all forms, whether through metrics or syllabics or shape, it offers some container. I wrote a long essay about this for Poetry magazine, about the traditions of iconic and sonic in India, and how this image and word togetherness can be a way of generating a kind of power. I love the idea of language being held, of building the container to hold it in. I don’t think these things through in advance. It’s always after having written the poem that a shape will sometimes offer itself. I’ll try it in both ways and often I resist the shape because I don’t want to rely too much on that visual trickery. But if the poem feels strengthened by it, then I’ll submit to the shape.

The Chakkar: For Granta, you wrote an essay named “Breast or Tooth?” which addresses women’s rights in India. Do you think that it is possible in India to address at the mainstream level (in any language) serious issues like these through essays and poetry, instead of morchas, slogans, and dharnas, just like Indian cinema has been doing for generations?

Doshi: One of the most beautiful unexpected things about my work was seeing, on social media, a woman holding a placard at a women’s march in Philadelphia with a line from my poem, “River of Girls”:

This is the sound of ten million girls
singing of a time in universe
when they were born with tigers
breathing between their thighs;

First of all, to see your poem land quite far from where it was conceived, into a different landscape with different gender concerns, different applications and laws, is a small moment of magic. A connection was made between strangers through the poem, and every time this act repeats itself in some way, it’s continuously wonderous to me. That this poem means different things to different people over a period of time, is another thing about poetry: this enlarging aspect where it contains so many time zones all at once.

But to answer your question about slogans and mainstream and dissent, I think there have always been writer-activists who are strongly part of the mainstream dialogue, through plays and poetry, and it has certainly affected the mainstream consciousness about our ideas of gender and sexuality among other things. I do think that as a writer fundamentally, my intent is to write what I feel compelled to write, not to write into any particular mode or expectation. You cannot predict how the resonances will be made.

The Chakkar: A few years ago, you mentioned that you always remained loyal to your poetry, even though you had to switch to prose because of its wider appeal. Can you elaborate a bit, about this loyalty towards one’s poetry, as a poet and as a dancer. Is it a loyal reader who makes a loyal writer, or is it the writer’s job to make the readers loyal to whom they may be reading? Do you ever feel the fear of losing the attention or interest of a reader in your work?

Doshi: My relationship with poetry is a primary relationship, in that this is where I began, and this is where I always return. I don’t believe that I turned to fiction because of its wider appeal; I simply think that some projects require a different canvas, and a novel is a different kind of imaginative process that I am inherently interested in. But I also love writing essays, and have come to feel that poetry and essay-writing make very good companions of one another.

Perhaps I used the word loyal because I’m intrigued that writers who began as poets quite often announce that they’re giving it up. They’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m done with poetry’, or ‘Poetry is done with me’. Time passes. A year, ten years. And suddenly, a poem will emerge. My opinion on this is: It’s unwise to announce the death of poetry, even if you’re not feeling it.

As for the readers’ loyalty or attention span, honestly, no, I don’t think about this. I do think that if you’re very lucky you will find readers, publishers and editors who are interested enough to follow you through all your experiments and journeys; and if they don’t, you still have to make those journeys.

“No matter how far you may run from the world, the world has a way of landing up on your doorstep. So, I think that while landscapes have always been totemic for me, and the sea, particularly, is this agent of imaginative and transformative powers.”

The Chakkar: Despite being such a widely acclaimed poet, you have mentioned that, you are still trying to find out how to become a poet. Tell us about this journey inwards/self-search. What or who creates our identity?

Doshi: Oh, this is an impossible question. Of course, I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be a poet, of course I’m still figuring out who I am. I hope to always be dithering around about this.

The Chakkar: If we look at the present generation of Indian writers and poets writing in English, we find that feminism (as an expression) has evolved strongly. A few may still find a small section of writers sometimes writing a ghazal or trying to bring up elements from Sufi poetry in English. But, where traditional practices such as Bhakti poetry or references from Sangam Literature are concerned, it has gone a little on the quieter side. What do you feel that might have led to a change in the way writers and poets look at the world?

Doshi: I don’t know that I can take a pulse of contemporary poetry, or that I can even analyze any kind of trend or direction of contemporary poetry. Change is always happening, but poetry goes on. What I’ve found most enriching are the conversations and intersections with other poets, not just in India, but in other parts of the world. This generates a feeling of community, a shared feeling, which expands the sense of aloneness when you’re working on things. Something that has been quite meaningful for me is being a mentor for the South Asia Speaks literary mentorship programme, where I work with two mentees over the year on their poems and manuscripts. To have this one-on-one sustained conversation that centralizes someone’s work is incredibly empowering, and I think we need to create more opportunities like this for people to make connections with one another that go beyond social media and chance encounters.

The Chakkar: What does isolation or detachment mean to you as a poet and a writer, and how much does it contribute to your writing?

Doshi: I have begun to question the instinct for isolation. Many years ago, I thought it necessary to create a distance between the self and the world in order to be able to alter the pace of time, and the relationship to this information age that we inhabit, which is relentless in its onslaught. But isolation and withdrawal are extreme moves, and there can be too much inwardness, too much detachment. Besides, no matter how far you may run from the world, the world has a way of landing up on your doorstep. So, I think that while landscapes have always been totemic for me, and the sea, particularly, is this agent of imaginative and transformative powers.

I do believe that the interior spaces we hold inside allow us all kinds of movements, that we can find quietude in the busiest of places. I think writing is essentially about understanding the modes of innerness and outerness; you have to cultivate that interiority in order to be able to make connection—so, I try to find my balance, standing close to the world when I need to, and then stepping back beyond the boundary.

***

Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario studied at the St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. His articles, book reviews, essays, poems and short stories have been published in many national and international online journals and in print, including Cafe Dissensus Everyday, Narrow Road Literary Journal, Kitaab, The Pangolin Review, The Alipore Post, Alien Buddha Press and 'Zine, Grey Sparrow Press, and more. He writes from Kolkata, India. You can find him on Instagram: @ronaldtuhindrozario and Twitter: @RTDRozario.

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