‘Writing poetry is a risky enterprise’ 

- Anonymous

We are passing through a violent and traumatic period of human history where even writing poetry is becoming more and more a risky enterprise. Theodore Adorno said in the context of the holocaust, “Poetry is impossible after Auschwitz.” Perhaps he was hinting at the need for a new kind of poetry: the kind of poetry that the great poets of the holocaust like Paul Celan, Abba Kovner or Nelly Sachs wrote, a poetry described by the Polish poet Tadeuz Rosewich as “a poetry for the horror-stricken, for those abandoned to butchery, for survivors, created out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words from the great rubbish dump.”

The history of poetry has also been a history of martyrdom: a Kabir beaten up by the King’s henchmen for declaring his allegiance only to a single Divine Master and refusing to decorate the court, a Meera administered poison by her jealous royal husband for quitting the joys of the palace for her love of Giridhar Gopal, a Tukaram whose abhangs were thrown into the river by the Brahmins for his being a non-Brahmin saint, a Chokha Mela, kept out of the temple of his God for being born an untouchable, the Sufi saint-poets condemned alike by Hindu and Muslim orthodoxies why, more recently a Sarojdatta or a Cherabanda Raju, revolutionaries, sentenced to prison and death by our own liberal State. And we have plenty from world poetry, like a Lorca, murdered by Franco’s guards in his own Andalusia; a Neruda, his natural death accelerated by the shock of Pinochet’s criminal coup in Chile; a Mandalstam, a victim of Stalin’s tyranny in the former Soviet Union; and the several suicides from Sylvia Plath and George Berryman to Yesenin and Mayakovsky; not to speak of hundreds of young talents oppressed, imprisoned, gassed, electrocuted, hanged, labeled mad, by totalitarian regimes of all hues headed by a Hitler or a Mussolini, a Franco, a Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Caesescue, a Khomeini or a Saddam Hussain.

It is true, James Joyce said of writers, “Squeeze us, we are olives, and the oppression of Jews and of socialists under the Nazi regime, Blacks in the United States, communists in Indonesia, Turkey and Europe, Palestinians by Israeli forces, and several ethnic, religious and political wars from Vietnam to Croatia, in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, did produce excellent poetry: but one can hardly forget the innumerable potential poets either killed or silenced by these traumatic events all over the world. It was Antonio Gramsci who spoke of the destiny of the modern Prometheus eaten away by worms rather than being attacked like a hero by the divine vultures. He also said, “I do not forget that shame is a revolutionary feeling. Today’s poet is forced to create poetry, out of shame, out of the violence that surrounds us, out of the cruelty, of the injustice and inequal~ty of our terror-stricken world that fills our drawing rooms with corpses and drowns our dreams in blood.” Writers can no more live in ivory towers, and even if we have some left, they too are swept off by the winds of violence and change.

The processes of globalization are choking our languages, standardizing our pluralistic culture, reviving colonial imaginaries, imposing civilizational amnesia and murdering our native knowledge and cultural expressions; the market is invading our most private and sacred places; communal forces are stealing our ancient symbols and archetypes for consolidating their patriarchal and hierarchical world views and threatening our multireligious existence; war, terrorism, exploitation of the poor, the displacements caused by inhuman development, alienation of large masses of people in their own lands: Poetry cannot flee this battlefield and remain ‘pure’ any more. Neruda was right in speaking of an impure poetry that carries the shapes, memories and odours of our humdrum existence.

It is difficult for me to speak of my own poetry as it is to any poet. I do not know from where poetry came to me. I spent my childhood and adolescence in a rain-soaked village in central Kerala. Probably it was this incessant rustic rain that told me tales and whispered songs in my tender ears like my mad grandmother that hurt me into poetry. It was not the rain of Malgudi or Marcondo: it was birds and bees, oracle and secret agent, demons who descended on earth in slender tubes of magic glass. I remember the full house-well, the overflowing pond, the flooded river and the leaking roof of our small tiled house. At four, I had a three-month old fever and a coma: it was the visions and nightmares of this second consciousness that turned my poetry surrealist much before I knew Paul Eluard, Salvador Dali or Pablo Neruda. I remember too the village goddess whose temple was just in front of our house; the Mother who brought inflorescence to our coconut trees, filled the grains of our paddy with sweet substance and lent fragrance to our herbs, colours to flowers and music to larks and streams. Siva looked after the herds of sheep grazing on His hill and Krishna with His Shepherd’s flute awaited his Raadha near the newly harvested fields, those exhilarating skies studded with blue flowers. Ours was a family of farmers. I still have that farmer in me with his moments of ecstasy and despair that the crops gave. I look at poetry the same way: an upturning of the virgin soil, planting of seeds and their germination followed at times by a devastating failure of crops that fills one with a sense of utter loss.

As a farmer I understood my great predecessors other than Kumaran Asan, Idassery Govindan Nair and Vailoppily Sreedhara Menon and later, the greater pantheon of farmerpoets from Robert Bums, John Clare and Wordsworth to Robert Frost and Seamus Heany, even artists of other fields, say, Van Gogh or Mozart.

However, my first encounter with great poetry came with the ritual reading of the Ramayana by Thunchath Ezhuttacchan whose charged words had the luminosity of a thousand suns. I first heard Kumaran Asan’s poems from the lips of Bharatan Sankaran, a lunatic who, before he lost his sanity, was a Malayalam munshi. I was often late for my school as on the way I would stop enchanted by Sankaran’s enthralling recitation of Asan’s radiant lines that always found a spell-bound audience in the village square. Then came other influences: in the school and college days I read the Mahahlzarata in its beautiful Malayalam version, the brilliant translations of Tagore by G. Sankarakurup, the Holy Bible, the Dharnmapada, the Communist Manifesto and the modem poets of the West from Baudelaire to T. S. Eliot, and the Existentialists, the icons of the Nineteen Sixties. The pursuit of science at the graduate level gave me a sense of form and helped me know the natural world more intimately: all my symbols and most of my images still come from nature. It was in the late sixties that I began to take my poetry seriously: that was the time when the idiom of poetry was being modernized by a group of poets that included Ayyappa Paniker and N. N. Kakkad, two of the pioneers of new poetry. Those were years of turbulence: we were criticized for our jagged rhythms and ‘obscure’ formal devices on the one hand and admired for our contemporary sensibility, novel images and metaphors, use of free verse and prose and the employment of irony, on the other. By the Seventies, our modernity was mature enough to articulate social concerns. It was also the time of the discovery of a parallel radical modernist tradition in world poetry that included poets like Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Wole Soyinka, Langston Hughes, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Yannis Ritsos, Vkoznesensky, Ai-Ching, Rendre and several others. This discovery, along with the various liberation movements in Latin America, Africa and India, gave the eyes of history to our modernist poetry. This concern grew larger in the Eighties and Nineties addressing the issues of peace, civil rights, gender equality and environment. I have gone a step further in my quest for the spiritual basis of justice and equality of all beings.

I do not find any contradiction between my social concerns, modem sensibility and spirituality. As such a synthesis is very much part of the Indian poetic tradition as found in the Tamil Saiva poets like Tirumalar, Kannada vachana poets like Basavanna, Bhakti poets like Tukaram, Namdev, Kabir, Meera, Chokka Mala, Raidas, and Sufis like Bulle Shah, Baba Farid and Shah Abdul Latif. All these poets rejected the caste system, transcended class, gender and even religion in its limited sense, negated the hegemony of Sanskrit and the role of priests, questioned rituals and superstitions, battled against political and economic power and upheld a cosmic love that embraced men, beasts, birds, trees and the whole of nature.

I believe that poetry is an intensely spiritual activity by which one is able to transpose oneself into other beings and objects. Lorca means this indefinable spiritual element by the term ‘duende’ common in Andalusian popular discourse. It is the mystery of the dark voices that rise from the black earth described by Thoreau, the intangible mystery that Goethe found in Paganini’s art, the divine persuasion that the Gypsy dancer La Malena felt in Bach’s music played by Brailovsky. It is the dwarfish merry god of Descartes that he encountered on the seashore as he, tired oflines and circles, began to listen to the sailors’ songs. The search for it is a solitary journey without maps. There are more ways than one to attain it: the ways of John, St. Paul and St. Teresa, of the lean meditative passages of the Buddha, Ramana, Ramakrishna, Nizamuddin Olia or Moinuddin Chisti. Also the ways of the great creative artists from Dostoevsky and Kazaentsakis to Lorcaand Paz, from Michael Angelo and Raphel to Rodin and Picasso, from’ Beethoven and Bach to Mahalia Jackson and Arita Franklin from Tarkovsky and Bunuel to Parajinov and Kieslowsky. In Arabic when singers and dancers reach this height the audience shouts, ‘Allah, Allah!’ It is a whirlwind felt by the poet and the reader alike that subverts all logic and pulls down all pre-conceived projects. There are hundreds of poets who have never had a vision of this fleeting goddess, to whom poetry is ‘literature,’ they can write to order, keep the rules intact and speak of the ‘craft’ of poetry but for those who have been shaken by the visitations of this irregular and in calcitrant goddess, poetry is religion; they do not need to authenticate their work; it bears the mark of their inspiration. We have experienced this state of high wakefulness in poets from Valmiki, Vyasa, Kalidasa, Jaidev, Kabir, Basava, Andal, Akka Mahadevi Chaitanya, Saraladas, Tukaram and Bulle Shah to Ghalib, Mira, Bharati, Tagore, Jibananda, Kumaran Asan, Bhima Bhoi, Adiga and Faiz Ahmed Faiz whose tradition lives on in the best of contemporary poets. This experience may not be limited to poets: I have touched this infinity while listening to Girijadevi singing her thumris perched between the sun and the moon leaving her voice to Sarayu’s breeze to rock the cradle oflittle Rama, or to Kumar Gandharva or Mallikarjun Mansoor scaling the heights to God in the tender evenings of Bhopal. All my musicians from Amirkhan to Fayyaz Khan to M.D. Ramanathan and G. N. Balasubramanian have alike lifted me up to this harmony where the conscious and the unconscious dissolve in each other. The limitation of Western humanism is that it conceives an anthropocentric world with Man as the master while in the best of our traditions even the smallest of beings has a place in the order of things in the cosmos. I believe in a spirituality that transcends all religions though being the primal source of all of them, interrogate power in every form and upholds truth, love, justice and equality for all beings. This spirituality is the very opposite of religious fundamentalism and bigotry that seem to be poisoning our country today: it is materialism in the worst sense that glorifies violence in the name of religion and has nothing to do with the tradition of Kabir who turned into flowers when the Hindus and the Muslims fought to claim his corpse. We need more Kabirs now and I am happy to be the dust on their tired and wandering feet.