REFLECTIONS
Levels of displacement
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM
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It's always heartening to be reminded that there are nations of fellow-nobodies in every part of the world.
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My response to the recurrent question of identity was that I am deeply wary of an Indianness that can be demarcated, itemised and brandished like a visa to establish authentic citizenship.
Photo: Shaju John
Cultural connections: In search of an identity.
"I'VE never seen myself as cultural ambassador. I do not represent the Indian poetry scene and don't believe anyone can." That was the line with which I habitually prefaced my presentations in the course of my fortnight's visit to the U.K. last November.
Organised by the Poetry Society and funded by Visiting Arts, the purpose of the trip was twofold: to offer a glimpse into the Indian poetry scene through the website that I edit, and well, to read some of my own work.
The role of `emissary' is a terrifyingly onerous responsibility to arrogate to oneself. As editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web, it is a role I have consistently rejected.
To believe that it is possible to `represent' a country with 23 constitutionally recognised languages, a plethora of state, minority and tribal languages and an even more mind-boggling number of dialects, isn't merely arrogant. It's downright absurd.
Journey of exploration
In my three-odd years as country editor, the only strategy I've found empowering is to see my journey as one of exploration and discovery, rather than canonical appointment and exclusion. I see the website not as a compendium of contemporary Indian poetry, but simply as a quarterly multilingual web-journal with an international readership.
Once I decided to see my role as curator, not cartographer, the process became rewarding. What the India domain offers fundamentally is a perspective — historically particular, culturally fallible — but a perspective nonetheless. And one always hopes that the tribe of curators will grow more plentiful.
What made the prospect of the U.K. tour exciting was clearly the cultural connection between the two countries — the legacy of a fraught but inerasable colonial history. The overwhelming connection was, of course, language. The possibility of interacting with a South Asian diasporic community in the U.K. also opened up a potentially interesting avenue of discovery, extending my understanding of the multiple ways there are of `belonging'. My editorial role has offered me a chance to explore the seething literary subcultures and ecosystems that comprise the richly anarchic Indian poetry scene. The trip seemed to offer the chance to deepen an understanding of cultural borders — the synergies, the blurrings, the increasing and (to my mind) welcome difficulty in fathoming where one ends and the other begins.
It was a hectic but exhilarating trip, a mix of readings and discussions in diverse forums, venues and cities. Interestingly, despite the diversity (or perhaps because of it), the questions that surfaced time and again revolved around the theme of cultural identity. Audiences in universities, art galleries and literary festivals kept returning to a basic set of questions: Why do you write in English? Do you resent or appreciate the tag of `postcolonial'? What are the trends in contemporary creative writing in the country? Essentially, what does it mean to be an Indian poet today?
I recall in particular the animated exchange with a sprightly audience at the Manchester Literary Festival, moderated by Jules Mann; the intense q-&-a conducted by Raficq Abdullah at the Nehru Centre; the lively discussion with the creative writing students from Goldsmith's at the Poetry Society café; and the dialogue with a sensitive group of listeners at the Collins Gallery in Glasgow. A distinctive feature in these cases was the fact that the audiences represented an interesting, articulate and self-aware cultural mix.
My response to the recurrent question of identity was that I am deeply wary of an Indianness that can be demarcated, itemised and brandished like a visa to establish authentic citizenship. And I assume that holds true of any cultural identity. I know I am as Indian as they come, but I have no clue how to define it. Editing the India domain has been for me about discovering the infinite number of ways there are of `belonging'. I believe the bhelpuri demotic of a bunch of young Mumbai Marathi poets is as `Indian' as the sonnets or villanelles attempted by some contemporary Indian poets in English. I believe that a Kokborok or Khasi poet's deep need to speak in a mother tongue of a collective anguish at a fast-eroding tribal identity is as `cutting edge' as a Tamil woman poet's need to `write the body'.
As a poet practising in English, I have no doubt whatsoever that the language I write in is as Indian as cricket or democracy or disco-dandia. Do I need to split my infinitives or roughen my cadences to prove my distance from a colonial history? Do I need to write about poverty and tsunamis, communal riots and Himalayan yogis, to prove that I am the genuine article? Thankfully not.
I remain suspicious of glib gestures of defiance; they seem seldom to be accompanied by strenuous political or aesthetic engagement. There are innumerable ways in which you can critique and interrogate your heritage without denying or erasing it. A measure of ease within one's cultural skin actually makes it possible to celebrate the messy complexity — the multiple transactions, borrowings, forgeries and counter forgeries — of one's inheritance, without resorting to reductive polemics.
My own creative challenge (as I said in the course of the discussion at the Poetry Society café) is not to sound like an `authentic Indian', or `authentic woman', or `authentic postcolonial', but simply to sound more and more like myself.
Negotiations
This theme of `unsettlement as `settlement' struck a chord. Several discussions and post-discussion conversations were about the ways in which the listeners themselves negotiated levels of displacement in their own lives. "People keep asking me if I'm Caribbean or English," said one student. "I don't know how to answer that one. But I do know I'm me." Another talked with passion about how the tag of woman writer was still a simultaneous source of empowerment and marginalisation. Yet another talked of the many ways there are of being `South Asian' and how he relished being essentially unslottable. A young woman talked of her refusal to put in decorative allusions to her cultural identity in her novel merely to appease a readership's taste for exotica.
On the flight back home, the lines that came to my mind were the much-quoted ones from Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight": I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,/I had a sound colonial education, /I have Dutch, nigger and English in me,/and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
It's always heartening to be reminded that there are nations of fellow-nobodies in every part of the world.
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