Arundhathi Subramaniam
Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and writer based in Mumbai. She has published two collections of poetry: On Cleaning Bookshelves (Allied, 2001) and Where I Live (Allied, 2005), is the author of a prose study, The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005), and was co-editor of Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of contemporary Indian love poetry in English. Translated into Hindi, Tamil, Italian and Spanish, her poetry has been widely anthologised. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship at the
As well, Subramaniam is a creative consultant at the National Centre for the Performing arts,
The Poetry Society hosted Subramaniam in the UK for two weeks (19-30 October 2006) during which she read her own work and discussed contemporary poets of India to a wide audience, in programmed events across the UK.. She has participated in several international poetry festivals and conferences in
Her own work leaps between taking a dynamically philosophical view on immediate daily experiences to skillfully etching cultural or geographical references as compass points to a sweeping emotional landscape. Few poets capture contradictory impulses so convincingly. This unexpected range is what makes Subramaniam’s work such a pleasure to read. You never know what country, mood, streetscape, or relationship you’ll be plunged into but the ferociously intelligent attention to detail ensures that you are given every opportunity to engage with the pure energy of the poem:
and the taste of coffee one day in
suddenly awakening an old prescription –
Peabury,
and fifty grams of chicory
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.
As Keki Daruwalla (Kavya Bharati, 2006) says “Subramaniam’s poetry is one of illumination. She flashes a pencil-torchlight on a subject, and suddenly you feel you are the richer for it . . . Even more than precision, what defines her verse is its subtlety and the angle of vision from which she sees life.”
. . . the musky torsos
of football stars, ancient Egypt and Jacques Cousteau’s
lurching empires of the sea, bazaars
in Mughal India, the sacred plunge
into a Cadbury’s Five Star bar, Kanchenjanga,. . .
Jules Mann, Poetry
An article on Arundhathi Subramaniam
The Act of Writing Poetry
….Subramaniam writes in English, and is eloquent on the subject of poetry’s – and in particular, English language poetry’s – embattled position within the Indian cultural establishment. Set against the international success of ‘The Great Indian Novel’, and badly positioned to survive “the increasing spirit of cultural nativism sweeping across the country…\which sees the use of English as a reactionary throwback”, she laments the fact that “Indian poetry in English simply doesn’t count” to most people – in particular, to publishers – but also sees embattlement as at least implying “the recognition by the status quo of a potentially unsettling presence”. Although denying the idea of a “coterie” identity or set “criteria” in the
Subramaniam’s own poems are testimony to this sense of the art-form as something which, through a combination of necessity and choice, works quietly in the background, while still insisting on its own significance, and in its own terms. In ‘Another Way’, her poetic response to the Gujarat riots of 2002, she advocates an artistic stance which seeks to “leave no footprints/ in the warm alluvium,/ no Dolby echoes,” and which, by its sheer openness to possibility in the matter of its own making, offers up a paradigm of good politics (as Derek Mahon said good poetry should), and of open-minded, liberated living. “To swing yourself/ from moment to moment,// never racing to the full-stop,/ content sometimes/ with the question mark” is, the poem suggests, as valuable a way of “keeping the faith” as to thrust oneself militantly into the front line waving “saffron flags”, and her work is notable for its refusal to sacrifice poetry to propaganda.
Light-footed and lyrically musical, sensuous and spare at the same time, although entwined with contemporary culture and events and, most predominantly, with the city of Mumbai, the poems engage with their external subject-matter from intelligent and unusual angles, frequently using an examination of their own procedures as a metaphorical bridge into something else, and vice-versa. In ‘Return’, for example, an old lover’s re-entry into the speaker’s home becomes conflated with the return of inspiration, “this dreaming playhouse of possibilities/ choreographed by another accent”.
The poem develops into a meditation on the essential ‘two-ness’ of the artist – on the gap between empirical self and poetic voice, entities which come together unexpectedly and unpredictably in the “startled collision” of writing, where “the arm reaches out/ and finds/ with some primal riverine instinct/ a familiar lost tributary of self.” As the distantiation of self from body in the final image suggests, however (“the arm”, not “my arm”), this is not merely a self-fulfilling strategy, designed to do nothing more than document the means by which Subramaniam’s poems come into being. ‘Return’ elevates poetry and its way of ‘happening’ into a doctrine for a way of life, one whose emphasis on plurality, and the necessity of seeing things anew – of giving things the “space to test” themselves out – speaks volumes in a world of increasing polarisation, where identities are all too easily and rigidly formed.
Yet if some of the poems try to influence, and suggest better ways in which to shape the world beyond the written page, that world, in the form of the city of Mumbai, has invaded and conditioned their shapes at almost every turn, insinuating into the “dreaming playhouse of possibilities” its “insurgent cardiogram” of “flesh and mortar”, a “rabid wilderness/ of matter” which “refuses to yield/ to coercion or command”.
Whilst poems like ‘Living Alone’ may advocate, and indeed celebrate the successful making of space, “long afternoons/ gliding through rooms/ and rooms/ of vacant mind/ recovered after years of subletting”, their battle, like that of the art-form itself, is hard won in the context of, and always threatened and enhanced by, the ever-pulsing presence of the “garrulous” city into which they have been born, and of which they are confirmed inhabitants. Even if not overtly present in the frameworks of such poems, the city is always leaning up against their bounds, breathing into them and colouring their awareness of the temporary privilege of escape – even working its way, sometimes, into the domain of language itself, which becomes a kind of symbiotic partner, an inseparable element of the great, heaving organism of the whole: “a sentence heaves into view/ deflected by leaden vapours”.
As is perhaps inevitable in a boundlessly over-populated and commercially cluttered city like Mumbai, writing can by no means find immunity or synthetic ‘solutions’ easily, and the poems are both frustrated in their efforts to convey or delineate such multiplicity, and continually invaded by its bits and pieces, “an obstinate conspiracy/ between self-perpetuating/ coffee cups and the frantic/ bushfire of books laundry Chinese restaurants”.
Subramaniam’s Mumbai is a city bursting at both the material and the human seams, a site of endless paradox, of holiness intermingled with abject horror, and one in which the individual subject, like the poem, is both totally and terrifyingly anonymous, and, at the same time, involved in everything:
City where you can drop off
a swollen local
and never be noticed.
City where you’re a part
of every imli-soaked bhelpuri.
Accordingly, her attitude towards its “hope and bulimia” is two-fold: whilst the poems often display delight at the sheer variety and character on offer in a city “uncontained by epigram” – what MacNeice called the “incorrigibly plural” world – they also recognise, like MacNeice, the “spite” inherent in that world, and, whilst they don’t tend to indulge in the perhaps too easy practice of overt, hectoring social commentary, stray lines and images do indicate a disapproval of, as she puts it, the “status quo”, and a celebration of naturally engendered variegation (“Give thanks/ for the strumpet apparel/ of the rhododendron,/ the rococo benediction/ of fern”) goes hand in hand with a concerned awareness of both the monetary disproportion endemic to the city, and the commercial bulge afflicting its havoc-ridden skyline.
Against the similarly marginalised populations of nature and the cripplingly poor, who, “perpetuating that third world profusion/ of outstretched hand”, have been forced to adopt “a certain cussedness” in order to survive, to create “ways of being ancillary…/ without resenting it”, she sets the ever-growing consumerist trend of “the great Indian middle class/ bloating steadily/ on duty-free”, filling up the remaining cracks and crevices with their insatiable demand for “things”. In such an atmosphere, the poems’ plea for “unransacked” space is profoundly and obviously, if quietly, political – an asserted need for the re-division, or re-apportioning of space, and for the recognition that all “things” do not have an equal claim on the space (or lack of it) “between tenancies”, that “foam and rubber” should perhaps give up ground to flesh and blood.
The heroes and heroines of Subramaniam’s poetry are things of stoical proportion, which are willing to commit to “asking the question/ that has been asked before”, to the continuation of “dated” and difficult rituals, or even just to “confirming yet again/ that it’s not about justice,/ just weather,/ just waiting”. These are all suggestive parallels for the act of writing itself, and particularly in the contexts she describes in her prose comments on the cultural establishment. Yet this should not suggest a laissez-faire aesthetic, or the idea that poetry trundles on endlessly, by and for itself, without much hope of, or interest in, the chance of making anything happen.
Poetry is a vital force for Subramaniam – in both senses of the word – and, if its balance is precarious in a world which simultaneously hurts and ignores it, then it nonetheless remains, emphatically, an integral part of that world, and one capable of tipping it, every now and then, in the right direction. Days, like poems and, indeed, status quos, rest “on slabs/ angled precariously - / a fragile architecture of meaning” into which the tiniest thing can insert itself, given the space, and alter or bring down the whole. “Which is why”, amongst many other reasons, “this” – the individual poem and the act of writing poetry – most definitely “matters”.
(By) Miriam Gamble
Some of her poems
5.46, Andheri Local
In the women’s compartment
of a
we search
for no personal epiphanies.
Like metal licked by relentless acetylene
we are welded –
dreams, disasters,
germs, destinies,
flesh and organza,
odours and ovaries.
A thousand-limbed
million-tongued, multi-spoused
Kali on wheels.
When I descend
I could choose
to dice carrots
or dice a lover.
I postpone the latter.
Demand
And on days like this
nothing else will do.
Nothing but that whisper
of breath against the ear.
Breath that’s warm
like the sigh of palmyra trees
in Tirunelveli plantations.
Breath
that’s crisp
like linen, rice-starched,
dhoop-soaked,
in a family cupboard.
Breath
to be trusted,
with a thread maybe
of something
your foremothers never knew,
or pretended not to –
the spice-mist
of hookah on winter nights
in
of Himalayan rain, or wine
baroque with the sun
of al-Andalus.
Breath
of outsider,
ancestor,
friend,
who leaves nothing more than this
signature of air
against skin,
reminding you
that there’s nothing respectable
about family linen
when cupboard doors close,
reminding you
that this
this uncensored wilderness
of greed
is simply –
or not so simply –
body.
Home
Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
never worrying
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside.
A home that I can wear lightly,
where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to fill in the crevices.
A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting.
I was neither born nor bred here.
But I know this city
of casuarina and tart mango slices,
gritty with salt and chilli
and the truant sands of the Marina,
the powdered grey jowls of film heroes,
my mother’s sari, hectic with moonlight,
still crackling with the voltage
of an MD Ramanathan concert,
the flickering spice route of tamarind and onion
from Mylapore homes on summer evenings,
the vast opera of the Bay of Bengal,
flambéed with sun,
and a language as intimate as the taste
of sarsaparilla pickle, the recipe lost,
the sour cadences as comforting
as home.
It’s no use.
Cities ratify
their connections with you
when you’re looking the other way,
annexing you
through summer holidays,
through osmotic memories
of your father’s glib
lie to a kindergarten teacher
(‘My mother is the fair one’),
and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca
suddenly awakening an old prescription –
Peabury, Plantation A
and fifty grams of chicory
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.
City that creeps up on me
just when I’m about to affirm
world citizenship.
Rutting
There was nothing simple about it
even then –
an eleven-year-old’s hunger
for the wet perfection
of the Alhambra, the musky torsos
of football stars, ancient Egypt and Jacques Cousteau’s
lurching empires of the sea, bazaars
in Mughal
into a Cadbury’s Five Star bar, Kanchenjanga, kisses bluer
than the
on temple wall, a moon-lathered Parthenon, draught
of northern air in Scottish castles. The child god craving
to pop a universe
into one’s mouth.
It’s back again,
the lust
that is the deepest
I have known,
celebrated by paperback romances
in station bookstalls, by poets in the dungeons
of Toledo, by bards crooning foreverness
and gut-thump on FM radio
in Bombay traffic jams –
an undoing,
an unmaking,
raw
raw –
a monsoonal ferocity
of need.
Sister
Supple as wisteria
her plait of hair across our beds –
my talisman at the age of five
against torch-eyed gods and ancestors
who leaked nocturnally
out of cupboards, keyholes,
the crevices of festering karmas.
Later
we drank deep draughts
of monsoon wind together,
locked eyes in mistrust,
littered our bedroom with books, fuzzy battle-lines,
quivering dominions of love and malice,
even as we ruptured time,
scooping world upon world
out of cavernous weekend afternoons
through the alchemy of mutual dream –
turquoise summers over ruined Mycenae,
the moon-watered stone of Egyptian temples,
and those times we set the zephyr whispering
under the black skies of Khorasan.
Clothes were never shared,
diaries zealously guarded,
but in the hour before the mind
carves out its own fiefdoms of memory
we dipped into the same dark estuaries
of lust, grief and silted longing.
Now in rooms
deodorised into neutrality,
we sniff covertly
for new secrets, new battles, new men,
always careful to evade
the sharp salinity of recollection,
anything that could plunge us back
to the roiling green swamp of our beginnings.
But tonight if I stood at my window
it would take very little, or so it would seem,
to swing myself across
to that blazing pageant of peonies
that is your
careening across continents
on that long-vanished plait of hair,
sleek with moonshine,
fragrant with Atlantic breezes.
The Same Questions
Again and again the same questions, my love,
those that confront us
and vex nations,
or so they claim –
how to disarm
when we still hear
the rattle of sabre,
the hiss of tyre
from the time I rode my red cycle
all those summers ago
in my grandmother’s back-garden
over darting currents of millipede,
watching them,
juicy, bulging, with purpose,
flatten in moments
into a few hectic streaks of slime,
how to disarm,
how to choose
mothwing over metal,
underbelly over claw,
how to reveal raw white nerve fibre
even while the drowsing mind still clutches
at carapace and fang,
how to believe
this gift of inner wrist
is going to make it just a little easier
for a whale to sing again in a distant ocean
or a grasshopper to dream
in some sunwarmed lull of savannah.
Where I Live
(for Anders who wants to know)
I live on a wedge of land
reclaimed from a tired ocean
somewhere at the edge of the universe.
Greetings from this city
of
and diesel afternoons,
deciduous with concrete,
botoxed with vanity.
City of septic magenta hair-clips,
of garrulous sewers and tight-lipped taps,
of ’80s film tunes buzzing near the left temple,
of ranting TV soaps and monsoon melodramas.
City wracked by hope and bulimia.
City uncontained
by movie screen and epigram.
City condemned to unspool
in an eternal hysteria
of lurid nylon dream.
City where you can drop off
a swollen local
and never be noticed.
City where you’re a part
of every imli-soaked bhelpuri.
City of the Mahalaxmi beggar
peering up through
a gorse-bush of splayed limbs.
City of dark alleys,
city of mistrust,
city of forsaken tube-lit rooms.
City that coats the lungs
stiffens the spine
chills the gut
with
flesh
and mortar
and foam leather
and delirium
where it is perfectly historical
to be looking out
on a sooty handkerchief of ocean,
searching for God.
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