I wrote about Diane Ackerman’s memoir about her partner Paul West’s astonishing near-recovery from global aphasia, One Hundred Names For Love, for Cerise Press. Global aphasia is a stroke-induced condition that leaves the sufferer bereft of vocabulary. The review is here.
Time Out India’s “Urban Verse” Special
Do check it out – lots of goodies here.
Tamil Mourning Performances: An Essay In Motherland
Motherland carries a long article on performances in Tamil funerals, specifically focused on two oppari singers from Ayodhyakuppam, Chennai, and the self-styled subculture star Marana Gana Viji. Read it here.
An Interview And A Poem In “The Missing Slate”
The Missing Slate interviewed me at some length about my experience representing Malaysia at Southbank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus, page vs. stage poems and my fantasy dinner guest (and what the menu would be). They have also published a poem, “Poem For Clothes Left In Another Country”. The magazine is in pdf format, so you can view it here.
Some Recent Press
I talked to Isahitya (October 2012) about vulnerability, mysticism and the book I’m concentrating on now.
And to Doodleblue (August 2012) about my old column, “The Venus Flytrap”, and what I dislike about India.
And to The New Indian Express from London (July 2012) about participating in Poetry Parnassus.
Book Review: Nelycinda & Other Stories by Susan Visvanathan
One would think the novella would find more favour in these times of abbreviated attention spans. Less demanding than the novel and meatier than the short story, it is the Goldilocks “just right” of texts. Susan Visvanathan’s “Nelycinda”, at just under a hundred pages, is a stunning novella. Told in twenty short chapters, it makes superb use of the neglected form, with a perfect balance of generosity and restraint. It should have been published as a stand-alone book; instead, Nelycinda & Other Stories becomes just that: one superlative piece of writing in a volume made unnecessarily plump with extras.
The title story is set just 300 years after the birth of Christianity, in a time when the southwest of India was a collision, or a collusion, of Roman, African, Chera, Chinese and other influences. Visvanathan writes about Kerala before it was Kerala with remarkable skill, painting a picture that is as vivid with texture and humanity as it is shorn of pretentiousness. At the centre of the novella is Susa, the wife of a wealthy trader who is frequently, and then seemingly permanently, travelling. At once ambitious and intimate, “Nelycinda” is both historical fiction and the story of one woman’s choices, circumstances and agency.
Not all the remaining stories in this collection are fillers, but the two that immediately succeed “Nelycinda” particularly pale in comparison. In “An Incomplete Travel Diary”, the second longest in the book, a former abused maid and her rich, impotent husband travel to India to adopt a child. In “Shopping in Paris”, both father and son in a family of Martiniquais musicians are obligated to choose between staying at home or travelling for work or love. Neither story compels in language or in mood, nor are their characters well-etched. It’s not progressive to suggest that an author mine a single landscape repeatedly, yet there is such a marked difference when Visvanathan writes about Kerala that it’s difficult not to wonder about her limitations.
A few stories are unmemorable, as when Visvanathan turns her gaze to Malayalis in the Middle East in “Gulf Baby” and “Further Away From Paradise, Returning Home”, or “Allapuzha”, which begins and continues as a short factual essay before suddenly diverting into a fictional introduction. There’s a pointlessness and an absence of grace in their lines, as though the evidently gifted author herself was ambivalent about them.
Still, the book is not without rewards. A trio of linked stories – “Correspondences”, “Pepper Vines Trail My Hair” and “Sludge Without Sun – are catalysed by the beautiful centre piece, in which a woman prophesied to die young maintains only a delicate and bittersweet attachment to the world. The first story comes long before the second, so that we arrive at the connection with delight. The collection ends on a strong note – “Odd Morning”, in which a Malayali American theatre actress leaves a train mid-journey, discomfited by its male passengers, and stays for weeks in a remote village.
Visvanathan is a curiously underrated author, despite her prolific output (Nelycinda & Other Stories is her fifth book of fiction; she is also the author of seven non-fiction works). In the best of her work, there is a lyricism and suppleness in the writing, tethered by deep reflections on history, gender and religion, and a distinction of style that deserves a larger audience. This collection of disparate pieces suffers only from bad curation. This doesn’t detract from the brilliance of the title story or the few persuasive ones. The demoted novella could have had better company, or none at all, but it is still a gem – albeit among a less sparkling assembly.
An edited version appeared in DNA.
Book Review: Selected Poems by Subramania Bharati (trans. Usha Rajagopalan)
There must be poets all over the world whose work thrives only in their native tongues, the quality of whose writing we must take on the word of those who are proficient in those languages. The politics and reasons as to why some make it into the English language, arguably the one with the most far-reaching sphere of influence in the modern world, while other don’t are worth lengthy discussion. But the truly exasperating travesty is when a poet whose work has undeniable eminence is insulted not by being ignored, but worse, through poor translations.
Subramania Bharati, the 20th century’s preeminent Tamil writer, is one such poet. Born in 1882 and living only till the age of 38, he pioneered a renaissance in Tamil poetry and fought through his life against colonialism, caste and the oppression of women. To date, no significant English translation of his poetry has done justice to either his persona – romantic, radical, a genius who in the manner of the true artist engaged completely in his own context while being far ahead of it – or the writing itself. Usha Rajagopalan’s new collection of translations makes only slight inroads of improvement: while the book fortunately lacks the cringe-worthiness of prior efforts, Selected Poems, right from its very titling lacks inspiration and imagination – keywords that the very mention of Bharati ordinarily summons among those familiar with the poet.
These translations suffer most of all from a sense of restraint. Bharati was the quintessential fiery artist, prone to being overcome by fits of grandeur, tormented by personal demons, and always redeemed by a profound oneness with the world as a theatre of triumph. This is not mythologizing: all of these attributes are evident in his original writings. Line by line conversion, without fluidity, cannot achieve this effect. Selected Poems, while rarely clumsy, often lacks inventiveness. Words like “Alas!” are used; there is no attempt to contemporarise the sentiment. But the worst offense would be the reduction in “A Baby Fire” of the culminating line, “thath tharikitta thath tharikitta thith thom” – a stunning onomatopoeic flourish that captures both a spitting fire and a visceral rhythm also found in classical dance and music – to “Whoosh, crackle, snap, sizzle.” Elsewhere, these flourishes are retained in translation – an inconsistence that isn’t justified.
This happens not infrequently. In “Aspirations” (which also takes Bharati’s “Om Om Om Om!” and turns it into a decidedly meeker “Om… Om… Om… Om…”), the word “viduthalai”, which can be interpreted straightforwardly as “liberation”, is instead rendered as “unfettered” – imagery that sabotages the original’s spirit. In “In Search of Answers”, a modernist hymn in which he addresses the deity Sivashakti, he uses the demand “solladi”. The nuanced Tamil conversational suffix “di” indicates an entitlement complicit in the relationship with the female other being spoken to. It is an entitlement that is by turns intimate and insolent; Rajagopalan’s explanation of “solladi” as “pray tell me” is stripped entirely of these subtleties.
A handsome bilingual edition, this book would serve beginner and comparative purposes well, but for any reader seeking sheer beauty, it falls short. For the next translator, who picks up the torch from Rajagopalan, one suggests greater license with syntax, less liberal usage of exclamation points (which have fallen out of favour in the language of translation), an academically sound set of footnotes and a more variegated vocabulary.
A volume of selected writings cannot possibly include everything unless the writer in question is one of limited prolificacy. Still, that Bharati’s most iconic poem, “Suttum Vizhichudadar”, is not represented in this collection is baffling. Once again, the idea of a translator as an executor comes into play: to what extent are they obligated to the author’s estate, which includes facets of character and legacy, at large? Absences, sometimes more than inclusions, raise questions.
In this regard, the introductory note is expected to shed light. Rajagopalan’s is mild, almost taking for granted that the reader is familiar with the poet, and taking no pains to introduce him and the ethos of his work to a new audience. The poet who comes through in this introduction as well as in these poems is anachronistic rather than maverick, religious rather than spiritual, perhaps even over-rated – the antithesis of the reasons for which he is beloved to this day. Rajagopalan’s translations are cleaner, less bombastic, and generally better than what has been available in English of Subramania Bharati so far. But, unlike the poet, they are deeply inhibited. An inhibited Bharati, as anyone who has ever been moved by his originals on the page or in song knows, is no Bharati at all.
An edited version appeared in DNA.
Review: The Akram Khan Company’s Gnosis
In Gnosis, the first production by The Akram Khan Company to be performed in India in eleven years, the eponymous principal dancer appears in two distinct incarnations: Akram Khan as purveyor of beauty, and Akram Khan as perpetrator of violence. In each mode, he exudes power in completely different, but equally riveting, ways.
We are introduced to the former incarnation during the first half of the show, consisting of three pieces: Polaroid Feet, Tarana and Unplugged. Here, the choreography doesn’t stray far from Khan’s kathak roots; it is the music that modernizes. His movements are informed and counterparted by cello and western percussion in addition to tabla and classical vocals. The result is extraordinary, so stunning a sonic and visual experience that dichotomized ideas of tradition versus experimentation lose their relevance. The synthesis is so perfect as to allow their being forgotten.
In Unplugged, an improvisational section, Khan has a certain ease in the shoulders and a wordless amity with his musicians that give one the impression that above all, he is having fun – like someone in a club, who can’t help but groove. His feet, meanwhile, could be instruments of evisceration in their precision.
In the show’s latter segment, consisting only of the titular Gnosis, he takes off his ghugroos and joins Fang-Yi Sheu in a piece that takes its ethos from the contemporary and its sense of drama from the classical. Here, Gandhari and Duryodhana – who in literal or figurative ways chose darkness – are the crux of this exploration of greed, violence and transformation. A powerful dancer, Sheu has a deadly, almost martial, presence juxtaposed with the vulnerability of blindness. Together, the duo evinces a chilling performance.
Pure evil emerges in one surprising moment. Sheu is at centrestage. A pinpoint of white emerges in the darkness behind her, grows larger and larger, until Khan himself steps forward – that eerie looming light was the one reflected off his bald head. If the body in dance is inseparable from narrative, this innovative detail – the use of even the top of the dancer’s head to create mood – strikes an extraordinary note.
In the final minutes, Sheu’s mastery of technique is evidenced in a sequence in which she appears to lose control. Here there are no cheap ruses emulating chaos. Her body behaves as though it has been possessed, as though she is a doll being manipulated. The effect is astounding.
Something inexplicably seamless exists between the kathak-based and contemporary segments of this show, and it’s difficult to place one’s finger on what that is. Perhaps it is a lack of pretension. The emphasis is not on philosophy but on sheer performance. Gnosis is spellbinding: a feast that stirs. Don’t think. Just watch.
An edited version appeared in The Sunday Guardian.
Breaking The Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired By The Ramayana
Breaking The Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired By The Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, is out now from Zubaan Books. It contains 24 stories, from authors including Kuzhali Manickavel, Tabish Khair and Manjula Padmanabhan. I have a short story in it called “Petrichor” (not to be confused with my poem of the same name).
In India, you can purchase it from the Zubaan Books website, as well as retailers including Homeshop18 and Flipkart.
Book Review: The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy
Rare is the book that can make an adult feel – in the most delightful, magical way possible – like a child. Rarer still is the book that can pull this off without the slightest condescension – incidentally, the same trait that is often, quite wrongly, ascribed to the feline species. Felines, as anyone ought to know, are regal. The felines who populate the pages of Nilanjana Roy’s debut novel, The Wildings, are certainly regal – bravely, protectively, powerfully so, with just a splash of the imperiousness that any creature (human or otherwise) who is all those things is due.
The wildings are a clan of “outside cats” – what the less-enlightened might call “strays” – in Delhi’s Nizamuddin. They prowl, play and hunt prey by the rules: adhering by a strict ethical code that allows them to co-exist with other clans and creatures. Amongst themselves, they communicate through their whiskers in a psychic process known as “linking”. With non-cats, they speak Junglee. And to Bigfeet, or humans if you prefer, if they interact with them at all, they miaow.
Very early one morning, at an hour when only ferals or the weak wander or hunt, a new voice interrupts the link – tiny yet authoritative, petulant, and in deep distress. The wildings gather in alarm and their leaders – Miao, the grave Siamese with the intense eyes, the fierce toms Hulo and Katar and the beautiful and lethal Beraal – agree that a powerful foreign element must surely be dangerous. But when Beraal, dispatched to kill, discovers that the voice belongs to an ingenuous newborn who isn’t even aware that she is linking, she convinces the clan to accept the kitten into their fold. Although Mara of the orange fur and monsoon-green eyes is too frightened to leave the Bigfeet house where she lives, she is capable of tremendous astral projection, going as far as befriending a family of tigers at the zoo during her “walks”. Knowing that a Sender – a cat of preternatural telepathic intensity – is born only in times of great need, Beraal begins to train the kitten for something that none of them can name yet but all their whiskers can sense.
Roy’s cats are not anthropomorphized humans; but if this novel does take after preceding literature with animal casts, it is only in its directions on how to live better. The Wildings, like only the best morality tales do, dispenses of its wisdom with an elegant sense of discretion. Its lessons in harmonious co-existence, duty to self and to others, responsibility, trusting one’s intuition, compassion and the dangers of a closed existence are never forceful. Most importantly, these lessons do not take away from the core of the action: like all epic narratives, it is taut with suspense and culminates in a climactic, vividly-described battle. The wildings must fight the ferals of the Shuttered House, who never having seen the sky do not know how much they fear it. The ferals’ only pleasures are derived from senseless killings, and their release could spell doom for the Nizamuddin ecosystem.
Punctuated often with beautiful, but never overwhelming, illustrations by Prabha Mallya, The Wildings is a superlative achievement that cuts across genres and far exceeds its own hype. The author is the country’s foremost book critic; this book cements her position as one of its foremost storytellers. Roy’s style has the even, unfaltering omniscience of a master narrator with a deliberately underscored presence, and the book should appeal equally to adults, older children, and readers of fantasy and adventure and well as the category known as literary fiction.
Shining through, however, is her wonderment at her subjects, a wonderment lovingly conveyed in the way they are etched. The Wildings is above all a love paean to cats; that it also happens to be a marvelously-spun novel that could well become a classic in its own time is almost secondary. One cannot read, let alone leave, this book without a childlike wish for a furry orange apparition to stroll across one’s line of vision and demand to be cuddled. Mara captures the heart; the other wildings seize the imagination. A sequel has been promised, and it cannot come soon enough.
An edited version appeared in The Sunday Guardian.
A Story In Elle
My short story “Greed and the Gandhi Quartet”, which received a 2012 Elle Fiction Award, has been published in the August issue of ELLE India. Some of the line/section breaks have been edited for space, but I was impressed that my, erm, strong language was retained! The magazine is on stands all over India this month.
A Poem In Breakwater Review
It’s odd how a poem I wrote a couple of years ago while beginning to conceptualise a multimedia installation (“The Country of Intangibles”) about the effect that harshly dehumanizing realities of immigration and displacement have on our interior landscapes, using my own experience of leaving Malaysia as a base, has been published not longer after Poetry Parnassus, where these same questions emerged in new forms and with new answers.
This poem, “The Amputees”, has also received third place in the inaugural Breakwater Review Poetry Contest. You can read it here.
Book Review: Radhika Santawanam: The Appeasement of Radhika by Muddupalani (trans. Sandhya Mulchandani)
The figure of the medieval devadasi in popular thought is an interesting one: many narratives about these artist-courtesans rest on the notion of their having been downtrodden, whether by British lawmakers, Brahminical oppression or patriarchal hegemony. Without glorifying a past in which exploitation certainly occurred, or glossing over the difficult realities of modern offshoot systems like the Yellamma cult, it remains that such narratives overlook elements of agency – devadasis were learned, accomplished women who had an autonomy which other women of their time, restrained by “securities” like husband and household, did not. Basic literacy was a given, and in the grander courts, so was multilingualism (in the 19th century, a talented devadasi might know English, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu) and proficiency in numerous art forms. They not only had access to power, but also wielded it themselves: the legal right to possess land and wealth gave them the ability to make endowments, as evidenced by the 11th century Shantavve’s commissioning of present-day Karnataka’s largest, still functional, water tank or the 8th century Paravai’s continued veneration in numerous Shiva shrines in Tamil Nadu. These may be selective examples, but in a context in which women were predominantly not allowed education and forced into arranged marriage, not having the opportunity to wed seems a small price to pay for so many relative rights and freedoms.
Sandhya Mulchandani’s The Appeasement of Radhika, a translation from the Telugu ofa narrative poem by Muddupalani (1730-1790) of the illustrious Thanjavur court, makes a fine case for the reconsideration of those standard narratives of oppression. The original Radhika Santawanam was writtenaround 250 years ago, when Muddupalani was a favoured courtesan of the Nayaka king Pratapsimha. The text experienced a revival at the turn of the 20th century at the hands of another devadasi, the erudite Nagarathnamma (who founded the Thyagaraja Aradhana in Thiruvaiyaru, which continues to be the world’s most famous Carnatic music festival). When Nagarathnamma republished the manuscript, with portions which had been excised by an earlier editor intact, it was found to be objectionable for its sexual content under the prevalent morality of that period, and banned in 1911.
The ban was lifted in 1952, but the politics around the text remain interesting, if complicated. Mulchandani’s introduction itself carries a deeply problematic passage, reproduced here in part: “Muddupalani cannot, in all honesty, be called the forerunner of the feminist movement in India. Being a courtesan, whose very existence was dedicated to providing pleasure to God and men, she reveled in her trade and never consciously took up the struggle of sexual equality for women”. These are late 20th century feminist ideas: they cannot be so dismissively juxtaposed upon a context of centuries ago, just as they no longer hold water for the sex-positive feminism of today, in which the sexual initiative, and indeed the “revelry” displayed in The Appeasement of Radhika would certainly be applauded.
As it were, the beauty of the poem does not in fact lie in its descriptions of lovemaking or physical attributes, which are not truly that different from other works in the canon, but in its emotional landscape. Much is made in this book about the fact that its author is a woman of sexual experience, but the template of the poet approaching the divine in a concubine’s voice, by turns jealous, pining or desirous, is not in itself unusual in Telugu devotional poetry, even that which predates Muddupalani by centuries (see When God Is A Customer, translated by A.K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman). That it is a courtesan herself who has penned the text, rather than a male poet transcreating the experience, matters politically, but perhaps more so than it does creatively.
What makes the poem utterly convincing, however, is Radhika’s yearning. Here, a curious fact emerges in the autobiographical parallel that takes place between the author’s life and the archetypal. The heroine can be surmised to be based not on Muddupalani, but on her grandmother, the gifted Tanjanayaki. Both women were courtesans of King Pratapsimha, and Muddupalani is said to have been envious of the attention the monarch continued to lavish on her grandmother despite her own youthful charms.
But as a poet, Muddupalani successfully puts on the older woman’s anklets, so to speak: in Radhika Santawanam, the middle-aged Radha gives her protégé Iladevi away in marriage to her own lover. Although she bedecks the young bride and blesses her, and even instructs Krishna on the gentle treatment of the virgin, she becomes wracked with pain afterwards at the thought of the two of them together, made worse by Iladevi’s betrayal – she asks Krishna to leave Radha for good, and he agrees. This news comes to her by way of her spying emissary, a parrot, and devastates her.
Muddupalani’s empathy for Radha is striking – the lovemaking in the book, though extensive and at times erotic, is not nearly as memorable as the lamentation. Radha grieves: “Has she forgotten that she learnt/ To sing like the nightingale from me?/ Has she forgotten she learnt to write poetry from me?/ Has she forgotten she learnt to play musical instruments from me? Has she forgotten she even learnt to make love from me?” Krishna’s inveterate disloyalty is one thing, but to have Iladevi turn ungrateful embitters her perspective of everyone around her, from her sakhis to even her spy: “The parrot that carried out only my orders/ Is it now sitting on that woman’s wrist?”
“I wouldn’t wish love like this to even my foes, Krishna!” Radha finally unleashes her ire when he returns begging to be allowed back into her bed. Which, sadly or not so sadly (depending on your taste for masochism), she does – although not before a pleasantly subversive kick to the head.
The reimagining of devadasis is tricky terrain: on the one hand, there is the risk of glorification, on the other, the danger of undercutting their self-evident influence as cultural catalysts. The Appeasement of Radhika is touching, though not masterful, and thoughts of Nagarathnamma’s recovery of the original text linger. The litigation around it adds dimension to how we approach the empowerment or disempowerment of this community, but artistically too, there is reason to reflect. Somewhere, the suspicion remains that Mulchandani’s translation does not do complete justice to the original, which we are told was praised both in Muddupalani’s lifetime and later. Once again, perhaps, a different editrix may have to come to the rescue of its English incarnation.
An edited version appeared in The Sunday Guardian.
Sharanya Manivannan 