VERSE
Mercurial regiment of women
VIJAY NAMBISAN
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A volume that is a signpost of change.
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We Speak in Changing Languages: Indian Women Poets 1990-2007; edited by E.V. Ramakrishnan and Anju Makhija; Sahitya Akademi; Rs 120.
When information is as freely available as it is today, anthologies are easier to make. They look good, too, on a writer’s résumé. It takes the reader’s skill to pick out the deserving. Here is one indication. It’s never e
asy for a writer whose work falls in the category of selection to be selfless. That Makhija, whose poems certainly qualify for this volume, has left herself out is a sign of devotion to the task. The name of her co-editor, who has been responsible for so much good work on the Sahitya Akademi’s shelves, is also a hallmark.
Reassign roles
Of course, this is also an inclusive age, and to base a collection on gender when we should be breaking down such barriers may seem retrogressive. The editors say in their Introduction: “It is no more possible to reduce women’s poetry to feminist or ‘womanist’ concerns or issues alone…. While the poets of the 60s and 70s question their assigned roles as women, the poets of the 90s move away from a strident and aggressive… assertion. [They] have internalised the lessons of women’s movements and are sensitive to social oppressions of all kinds.”
This volume is, then, a signpost to change. It shows how women poets have moved away from the concerns of, say, Kamala Das. It is the “poets” in the subtitle that should be stressed, not the “women”. To be fair, many of the pre-1990 poets left out have also changed their themes. Those included here are the poets who were first published around or after 1990.
The Introduction further says, “The angst-ridden, confessional and existentialist writing of the 60s and 70s has given way to a self-assured critical voice that probes all aspects of living including gender from an inclusive social perspective.”
This is a bit sweeping, but on the whole justified; particularly the “self-assured critical voice”. The senior-most poets here are probably Menka Shivdasani and Rukmini Bhaya Nair, and we expect self-confidence in image and expression from them; but the youngest poets are hardly less poised. (Mukta Sambrani [born 1975], whose poems I have heard of but first read here, seems indeed too self-assured to an old traditionalist like myself.)
A poet’s voice, and her need to speak, spring from her sense of identity. Naturally, then, these poets speak as women. That their voices are different, in the context of ‘mainstream’ poetry, was once enough to lump them together as, first, women and later as feminists. (Sappho is still often regarded as a freak and not for her unproven and, if proven, unremarkable lesbianism.) That is what makes me fear for anthologies with such themes. They are good news for readers of poetry, of course, but what effect will they have on the current of criticism?
Most poets here write on, serenely unconscious of such worries. ‘Serene’ is the best word to describe Anjum Hasan, for instance, even when she writes of the traumas of being convent-schooled and of growing up. Mamang Dai is also serene, her voice as old as the hills and rivers, as she cries out against her land’s desecration. Serene, too, is Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s tone. That is however an ironical serenity when used with the weapons she self-consciously borrows from old Tamil. Jane Bhandari sees with the poignant serenity of an outsider to the action.
Angry voices
And ‘serene’ is hardly the word to use of some poets. Sagari Chhabra’s anger jags and tears her lines. Seeme Qasim writes more reflectively on the same subjects, hate and injustice. Sampurna Chattarji uses bodily images and the violence is always latent.
Enough! The space hardly suffices to treat honestly of one poet, and here are 21. It is not possible to sum them up with the reviewer’s usual insouciance. But one last image is permitted. K. Srilata writes, in “Saree”, of a bridal piece panicking “at the sudden sun” and set to melt “its parchment skin”. Arundhathi Subramaniam has, in “Sari”, a cloth worn at work — “nine yards of womanslough”, “snakeskin, wordless….” I wonder (as a man) both what I may see and what I may be allowed to see.
The title does not specify that these are all English poets, which is a serious omission. Sahitya Akademi proofreading furnishes its habitual shovelful of errors, but they don’t matter when you can get a book like this for Rs 120.
Vijay Nambisan is the translator of Two Measures of Bhakti: Puntanam and Melpattur, recently published in Penguin Classics.
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