Periodicals
The relevance of being `little'
THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN
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In the current issue, as in the previous ones, Chandrabhaga's accent is on poetry.
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Chandrabhaga, No 11, New Series, Biannual, edited by Jayanta Mahapatra.
ONE more issue of Chandrabhaga, the biannual literary journal edited by Jayanta Mahapatra, and subtitled "A Selection of Indian Writing", reaches our hands. The 11th issue in the new series. The content is exactly what one expects from the stable, though, it shouldn't stop one from turning the pages, because, for a literary buff, a journal like this is not just a periodical attempt at compiling poems, essays and short stories. It reminds one of the meaningful cultural practice of the modernist period, in which, it seemed, in each writer there was an Isaac Bashevis Singer character who gives himself over to running a "Little Magazine". Hence, in India and elsewhere in the world, the period of modernism witnessed, together with the emergence of pioneering writers and poets, the appearance and disappearance of a number of publications called the "little magazines", which were the real movers of the creative momentum of the avant-garde. This is something an Akademi journal or a university publication, despite all the claims of promoting literature and supporting writers, can never achieve.
In the current issue, as in the previous ones, Chandrabhaga's accent is on poetry, both originally written in English and translations from "regional" languages, from Bengali to Kokborok. This again deserves special mention as poetry and translation are two areas being neglected, rather relegated to a position far behind fiction and theoretical and journalistic prose. That's why any attempt to reinitiate a dialogue on them becomes relevant. Also laudable is the importance and exposure Chandrabhaga gives to the writings from the North-East, a region that contains a turbulent, but lesser known, margin of Indian political and literary consciousness.
The poems are arrayed in such a way that it naturally yields, at one level, a comparison between Indian English poetry and the poetry written in the regional languages. At another level, it draws out poetry's interrelatedness with social dynamics. And, what it reinforces is the Indian English poets' disregard for what happens in their neighbourhood — in the case of some, an apathy that develops into a sort of ignorance making them incapable of addressing the "real issues" of life, and turning their poetry into "merely few words".
For example, when Samartha Vashishtha writes about mother as,
In the dead of the night, my mother sobs.
Drooping, she keeps on telling me stories (Women),
it communicates something commonplace and fails to evoke anything exact. At the same time, the Manipuri poet Raghu Leishangthem's mother images, such as,
The babies
Start moving inside the womb:
Mother, I wish to see the light,
A part of the sky rightly belongs to us (Baby and Mother); and
The cradle
Don't anyone touch it
Let me go and plant a flowering plant
So the tune of the song of the flowering petals
Will spread the fragrance.
At the same time
On the cremation ground
I see a sleeping child (Mother's Cradle),
conjure up many a diverse and complex feeling and experiences rooted in specific socio-political situations. "The battle of dream and reality in which the baby and its mother tussle", "the cradle" that the mother forbids all from touching, and "the child sleeping on the crematorium" are suggestive of the struggle, anxiety and premonition of an impending disaster; all born out of the region's political uncertainty and have become part of the poet's consciousness. And, it is this subtle association of the world within with the world outside, through an insight into how the external world is principal to one's own destiny that lacks largely in Indian English poetry of recent times. As the Kokborok poet Chandrakanta Murasingh writes:
Writing poems is not so easy, my friend
From one landing stage to another, lots of deep water.
A poem is not merely a few words alone
(Tay Tay Tay Tay).
The translated poets also include Sunil Gangopadhyay (Bengali), Leeladhar Jagudi, Rajendra Nagdev (Hindi), Anubhav Tulsai (Assamese) and D. Vinayachandran (Malayalam). And Sampurna Chattarji, Shimanta Bhattacharya, and Revathy Gopal are the other poets in English who appear in this issue. The prose part consists of short stories by Ashokamitran (Tamil) and V. Chandrasekhara Roa (Telugu), and essays by Rabindra K. Swain and Pramod K. Nayyar on Indian English poetry. What has been overlooked as peripheral so far has now turned out to be central in poetry is the impression Chandrabhaga, taken as whole, creates in a reader.
Thachom Poyil Rajeevan is editor of Yeti Books and can be reached at rthachompoyil@yahoo.com
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