I recently re-read an essay by TS Eliot that is familiar to most students of English literature, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ which can be found in the collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, and began to think of the tradition to which I might belong and to which, perhaps, I must respond.
Before I say anything else, I apologise for the title of this post, which was chosen for its ease and similarity to the title of Eliot’s essay; I am speaking only of the Indian poet who writes in English. And this is where I struggle: the tradition of Indian poetry in English is simply not that old. The oldest such poet that I remember reading is Toru Dutt, whom I loved as a teenager, and maybe I should read again.
[Tradition] involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. The historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
As I prepared to leave for the States, I decided that among the many practical things I had to do, reading a good number of Indian poets* was a priority. I felt that I might have to represent Indian poetry in English (something which hasn’t yet been asked of me) and that the least I could offer was some knowledge of the literature of my country. This is not to say that I hadn’t been reading Indian poetry before this, but that now I was making a more determined effort. I began with whatever anthologies that were easily available and used them to find poets that particularly interested me. I’m afraid I didn’t get very far. Of course, of course, I found some that I loved, but the general feeling was — I was underwhelmed. And if ‘underwhelmed’ isn’t the right word, then I certainly wasn’t overwhelmed by what I read as a whole. And there lies my second problem.
I imagine that a person attempting to engage with the literary tradition of her nation experiences certain things: a sense of being overwhelmed, for one, and if she is a writer, energised and excited to further that tradition in whatever small way, or to encounter it in new ways. Unfortunately, there is very little about the tradition of Indian poetry that overwhelms or excites me. The rare instances — should I count them?
This seems harsh. I don’t mean to indict an entire history; I am aware, even more acutely after I was reminded by someone older and wiser, that the first Indians to write poetry in English were performing a magnificently difficult task, because they had no one in precisely the same situation before them; they could only work with British poetry and Indian poetry in (so to speak) Indian languages. But how does one work with something that is not wholly one’s own and something that is one’s own but is in a different language? And this at a time when national and local identities were not the nebulous things they are now. (Or perhaps they were nebulous? The fact that one was both Indian and part of the British Empire, and possibly also fighting it?)
Another feeling one might have when consciously accessing a tradition is that while one’s admiration is unflinching for only certain writers, one doesn’t necessarily dismiss the others. This is a comment about canons in general: even those writers we don’t admire are generally accepted as worth remembering, as examples of something or the other. It is rare to question the writer’s work entirely. What is upsetting is that writers have been ignored, forgotten. And again, I find myself questioning the worth of so many anthologised, critically appraised writers of the past, and some of the present.
It is important that Eliot says
[The poet] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe — the mind of his own country — a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind — is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen.
So my situation is not that I feel the poetry itself should have improved (though certain writers could have been edited out of the picture or given less importance), but quite simply that I haven’t found enough to engage with or channel or feel in my bones — both as a writer and a reader. I cannot help but feel that I have been failed by the Indian poets as a whole who have come before me and that I am failing to understand them. And apparently I’m not alone: a playwright friend of mine says he feels the same way about Indian plays written in English.
To go back to this idea of tradition and writing ‘not merely with [one's] own generation in [one's] bones,’ there may be several approaches to taking on this challenge. One would be to see oneself as furthering what one already views as important in the tradition. Take what you can, in other words.
Another would be, as an Indian poet, to consider a much wider range of work as part of one’s literary order: to take in poetry from as many Indian languages as possible, in translation or otherwise. This is most definitely exciting. The trouble is, if one is serious about belonging to a tradition of Indian poetry in English, poetry from other languages can only help so much.
But our notions of identity have changed. We have access to so much writing, and to much writing in different media, that the idea of belonging to one tradition seems to me antiquated. No matter how we configure our locations on a literary map, boundaries are dissolving. A good writer is a good reader, I know that, and a good reader reads widely. My own literary gods had their own gods coming from all kinds of countries and cultures, but there still seemed to be a desire, or if not that, a feeling that one was contributing to a national literature. For example, the way the Russians refer to the Russianness of their own or their characters’ sensibilities. What if we rewrote Eliot a little; what if, instead of ‘the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country,’ it said just ‘the whole of literature’?
I’ve begun to lean towards the idea that my being Indian and my being a poet are two largely separate conceptions of myself. There is no way for me — no, actually, there is no need for me to reconcile the two, and there is no need for me to respond to a tradition of poetry from this place called India, but only to respond to a tradition of poetry from the world over, or at least, to the tradition formed by a library composed of the books that I have read and will read.
Anthologies organised by nationality (however loosely defined) continue to be published and some cogent arguments for them also exist. But for myself, to take whatever and however I read and use that to be aware of myself as an Indian poet and to channel an Indian tradition of English poetry seems strange and unnecessary. (Is it an amusing coincidence that I’m articulating this now that I live in another country, even though I’ve had these same feelings the past two years? And moreover in a country whose poets seem so conscious of the fact that they are writing American poetry?) When discussing Eliot’s essay in a workshop, one of the poets said that there seemed to be running through the essay a religious motif, an almost Christian asceticism urging the (clearly European) poet to sacrifice himself to the greater cause of poetic tradition. There certainly is a call to action in many parts of the essay, an attempt to elevate the act of writing to some higher order spiritual act, and this is also responsible for my general resistance. And much as I would like to ‘respond to a tradition of poetry from the world over, or at least, to the tradition formed by a library composed of the books that I have read and will read,’ it sounds terribly lofty — and I only wrote that line two days ago. A balance needs to be struck between not taking oneself too seriously (and expecting great things of oneself) and not taking oneself seriously at all.
And finally: although I began with the tradition and the Indian poet, I really only want to think about tradition and the poet.
__________
*For the sake of convenience, I am using the terms ‘Indian poets’ and ‘Indian poetry’ to mean Indian poets/poetry in English. I am, of course, aware the literatures of India in other languages are much vaster.
Lots of stuff in there but just a minor snark that I’d like to get out of the way: I’m a little tired of (and often guilty, myself) of the overused tropes of map and boundary. Boundaries, in whatever way we perceive them, have always been soluble, or at the very least, permeable. I’m beginning to think it’s an instance of laziness whenever any of use these terms.
Ok that’s over!
What I’d really be interested in knowing is why you are underwhelmed or don’t really respond to IPE. This is not said in defense of Indian poetry, but just as a qs that might lead all of us to define our aesthetics and/or politics and identities. To say why one has trouble liking IPE might go some way in understanding what one expects of poetry.
I think some amount of self-definition is useful, if only so that it leads to rigour. There’s too much of the “Oh, I write because I must and the poems just come to me fully-formed (*gag*)” school of writing.
Thanks for this post!
Gah. Typos. ‘whenever anyone uses these terms’ is what I meant. Also, that extra ‘of’.
Boundaries, in whatever way we perceive them, have always been soluble, or at the very least, permeable.
Really? How have they always been soluble?
This is not said in defense of Indian poetry, but just as a qs that might lead all of us to define our aesthetics and/or politics and identities. To say why one has trouble liking IPE might go some way in understanding what one expects of poetry.
Who is ‘our’?
Why I don’t like a lot of IPE is fodder for a whole other post. Here I just wanted to say that this idea that Eliot’s concept of a national tradition doesn’t work for me because I don’t respond well to the tradition in general. I think it’s partly a taste issue — in the way that one may prefer, for example, French cinema over German — and partly a numbers’ game. There haven’t been enough poets for me to find enough that I like. But when it comes to the ones I don’t like or absolutely hate, it’s often, embarrassingly, to do with the fact that the work doesn’t read like poetry and when it does, it’s really just verse, full of cliches. Another problem I have is that sometimes the poetry reads like activism. Some of it is fairly shallow. Now, if I were to hate ee cummings, to pull a name out of a hat, it wouldn’t be because his poetry reads like prose or is just verse or full of cliches or reads like activism.
Also: this is hardly a tract against definitions. There are several ways I might define myself without saying my writing is typically Indian. Not that it’s un-Indian, but really, where do I fit in? Or where would I fit in if I were a (dream) published poet?
Boundaries: Nationally they’ve been drawn and re-drawn enough times for it to not need an explanation. Literary/cultural boundaries are not set in stone. Any history of art, music, literature will testify to that.Unless you’re questioning my use of the word ‘soluble’ specifically?
‘Our’: Indian poets writing in English. By which I mean people like you and me among others.
(But more later. This has now been interrupted by real life!)
“I am aware, even more acutely after I was reminded by someone older and wiser, that the first Indians to write poetry in English were performing a magnificently difficult task, because they had no one in precisely the same situation before them; they could only work with British poetry and Indian poetry in (so to speak) Indian languages. But how does one work with something that is not wholly one’s own and something that is one’s own but is in a different language?”
I don’t buy this. In what sense is British poetry not one’s own (or to put it differently, in what sense is British poetry ‘British’?). If you were small-minded and unimaginative enough to be unable to relate to the poetry you read because it was ‘British’, why would you want to write poetry at all?
Agree with most of the rest of your post. Have never seen the point of thinking parochially about literature / arts. Using nationality as a means of categorizing art is just lazy, and rarely useful.
What is needed is not to rewrite Eliot, but to unwrite him. I admire Eliot greatly – he was a brilliant politician. He provided a most compelling solution to the problem of tradition and the individual talent, and where there is a solution, there must be a problem, must there not? Masterful – he was a master of rhetoric. Note the vatic style, it brooks no argument. As if his words were set in stone. And his emphasis on the impersonal, it works paradoxically – it is Eliot who comes to symbolize the impersonal, who sets the tone for the new century. He made the New Criticism, he was their god, and there are secret shrines to him still in dusty offices in universities across England and America.
Eliot’s essay is an exercise in the poetry of criticism, that is all. And yet I am a fanboy, otherwise I wouldn’t care to criticize. It’s a delight to read.
As for Indian poetry in English, it’s about as significant in its categorical muchness as English poetry in Indian. But then that seems the conclusion of your post anyway. This much I’ll say – as Indians, we have an instinctive appreciation of the macaronic, and English is the most macaronic of languages. What’s not to match (or munch, for that matter – it’s time for dinner…)
Space Bar,
If boundaries are soluble as you say, why do you want to define an aesthetic for ‘us’?
Falstaff,
I was thinking about it in terms of language. Some early Indian poets sound so stilted and faux British to me (the syntax, the tone, that sort of thing) that I wonder if that’s all they had to play with; was English still too young for them? I don’t think it’s a problem with relating to British poetry, really, clearly they could do that. It’s also a time when people, I imagine, didn’t have much access to a lot of writing in English, whether it was British, American or something else. You would have to have some knowledge of poetry in English to attempt writing it yourself — which is a separate argument, I know.
On the other hand, when I started writing I hardly knew any Indian poets; but that’s too personal.
On another note, poets (and writers in general) can be pretty small-minded and unimaginative, I hate to say. You benefit, I think, from not attending too many readings and author events.
CC,
Have you read Hamlet and His Problems. It’s so flawed and we discovered self-contradicting, but nothing stops him from being a big ol’ pompous ass. What’s not to love?
Hrm, I wouldn’t read Eliot to get a sense of one’s own tradition, unless you were European. Eliot champions Europe (you see it in The Mind of Europe) and while we claim him as American, the English also claim him as one of theirs, and for good reason — he was an expat. He wasn’t entirely sold on being an American. He was also, at least in his earlier years, anti-Semitic, so again, he’s not championing the heritages of *all* cultures. Even then, I *believe* he cut out large portions of the canon he didn’t like (the Romantics and Victorians), so he didn’t really support the whole canon (though ‘knowing it’ and ‘liking it’ are of course different).
Basically, Eliot’s a champion of the Dead White European Males (Sans Sentimentalists), which wouldn’t be a problem if he liked other cultures, too. (Was he influenced by the East, like Pound…? I don’t remember.)
I believe Naipaul said something years ago about how there wasn’t a literary tradition in Trinidad, at least not by Western ideas of literature. He couldn’t call his writing Trinidadian, because there was nothing like it in Trinidad before, but at the same time, it was written by a Trinidadian, sometimes set in Trinidad, and featured Trinidadian characters. I think he identified with Indians for awhile, and of course, is considered British. Now he’s Trinidadian, and so the first famous Trinidadian author and ‘founder’ of their new literary tradition. I guess it’s a bit of the same, where you have to write however you feel is best and not worry about labels. Other people can label you later.
I agree that we live in a world where globalization is spreading, and with greater means to communicate with those from other cultures comes a greater influence of other cultures. I’m German-American (Dad’s an immigrant), but I feel no need to read German novels or poetry simply to become part of that tradition in my own writing. If I read a German piece (in translation), it’s because I want to, not because I’m obliged to.
Similarly, I cringe when I read writing that enforces stereotypes about the author’s culture. I’d love love love to read a poem about India that doesn’t mention Spices. When Columbus was looking for India in 1492, he was looking for Spice, and nothing seems to have changed since. Not that spice is *bad,* but it’s almost too easy a metaphor.
Aditi: Agree, but that’s why I think the whole argument about early IWE poets performing a “magnificently difficult task” is so bogus. A certain tradition (to use the theme for the post) of British poetry spoke to them and they chose to engage with it by writing poetry themselves (with decidedly mixed results, but that’s another story). Nothing particularly difficult or unique about that – it’s what pretty much every poet / writer does. Heck, if we’re going to start lauding people for writing in genres that IWE hasn’t explored before, where’s my medal for bringing the short-short story to IWE?
I have to say I’m a little unconvinced about this lack of access in the old days point though. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the older generation of poets were both better read in and more engaged with poetry from outside the country than a lot of people who call themselves poets in India today are. Obviously there’s a selection bias there, but I’m not sure those old poets didn’t have access. Didn’t Vivek have a post about this somewhere?
Audrey,
Eliot’s argument is certainly Eurocentric and he had his prejudices, but I don’t have to look at how he put his own ideas into practice to question the ideas themselves.
Spices — that reminds me. There is an actual movie based on actual book called the Mistress of Spices written by an actual person who teaches at the University of Houston, apparently.
Falstaff,
It’s 3.15 am. Tomorrow/later today.
Audrey: “The Waste Land” has snippets from the Upanishads. As for Naipaul, I’m sure he wouldn’t acknowledge being the founder of the Trinidadian literary tradition. If anything, he “belongs” to the British landed gentry…
Novelists, in general, feel less of a need to belong, or if such a need exists, can harness it to good effect. Alienation crystallizes style. Conrad, Nabokov, Beckett, Gombrowicz, Naipaul… With poetry, reaching as it does to the roots of language, the question of identity, or more accurately of authenticity, is more awkward. I think Walcott has done well in this regard, so too Simic.
Aditi: Despite what I said, there’s no equivalent to Desani or Narayan among Indian poets writing in English. Not that criticism should be a theory of equivalences, but there is the hint of a question here, if not the one that Eliot posed (implicitly, by answering it in his slyly authoritarian way)… And somehow, I doubt that you’d enjoy re-reading Toru Dutt.
Haven’t read “Hamlet and His Problems”. Should, considering that I like “Prufrock” so much.
Falstaff,
Hmm, I don’t know. You don’t think it’s at all difficult to write in a language that no one in your country has for the first time; and what if it’s a second language? In any case, it’s really very sad how most things have turned out for Indian poetry.
And I thought Vivek was the one who said they didn’t have access?! I must be confusing someone.
Aditi: I think that the only reason you would choose to write in a language that no one in your country has written in before is because you found it easier than writing in any other. Revealed preference rules.
I may be wrong about Vivek’s post.
P.s. It seems to me that you’re confusing the difficult with the merely improbable. It may be less likely that the average reader will relate to poetry in a language that no one in his or her country has ever written in. For the (relatively) improbable reader who happens to feel this connection, however, the leap from there to writing poetry in that language is neither difficult nor inherently magnificent.
This whole discussion reminds me of a Shahid poem called ‘Introducing’ (which I can’t find online and am too lazy to find among my books and type in) where he talks about growing up in Kashmir reading both Keats & co. and the regional language poets, then discovering Eliot at the age of 18. The point being, of course, that a talented individual can both relate to and draw on a number of disparate traditions.
You may be right, but unfortunately, this makes everything seem so much more bleak: other than the issue of access, I have no explanation for why so much Indian poetry is terrible. And while I’m sure taste is part of it, it certainly doesn’t account for everything.
I think I agree with the Shahid poem; that’s more or less my point anyway.
Aditi: I know his personal practices don’t negate his ideas, but I would still take his advice with a grain of salt.
Cheshire Cat: Yes, but being Eurocentric doesn’t mean ‘no other place had good ideas/poetry,’ simply that by and large, he considered Europe the best. It’s true that Europe had a thriving intellectual culture for several thousand years, but so did the Middle East, Far East, etc. Also, until the Renaissance–though I may be wrong–it’d be more accurate to call the intellectual center of the world ‘the Mediterranean,’ instead of ‘Europe,’ ne?
Of course, this was still at a time when the world was divided in Oriental/Occidental, and white people in America were still held to be superior and generally treated better than other races.
I think I might have said they had less access to each other, if I said something like that. Foreign books, at least until maybe the late 70s appear to have been quite available. At least through the 60s, many libraries were quite up to date too. I’ve heard that the Asiatic library in Bombay, for instance, has Laura Riding editions that it acquired in the 50s; similarly I have beautiful Bollingen editions of St. John Perse that a friend found in Select– they are stamped from a library of a place called The Indian Institute of World Culture on North Public Square road in Bangalore–I wonder if it’s still there? Kolatkar and others in Bombay seem to have had all kinds of books in their library, like the Harold Norse versions of GG Belli that Arvind talks about, and also complete editions of various literary journals. Finally, there was travel, for a few at least. The State department (which many feel was a front for CIA funding, but anyway…) was pouring money into commonwealth literature and appears to have been funding Indian visitors (Arvind Mehrotra, Dilip Chitre, etc.) to the Iowa writing program (Arvind Mehrotra, Dilip Chitre, etc.) so generously that they could hang around there for months and maybe even years. Ayappa Panicker turned a whole generation of Malayalam poets onto journals like Chicago Review, and that scene was definitely very up to date with its reading.
By the late 70s / early 1980s, if I was to guess at dates, all this changed, and the whole scene became more inward looking, perhaps more chauvinistic. The number of foreign books coming into the country decreased, maybe, although fantastic books from the various libraries and private collections started to turn up on the streets and there was a period of bonanza buys for street-shoppers before the taps went completely dry.
So yes, I don’t think the problem was, at least earlier, one of lack of access or exposure. You didn’t have the instanteneity you have now, of course, but still.
So the question remains, at the very least, why was the total output so little, and so unadventurous? Why was everyone playing it safe? Why was it (is it still) routine to have ten years between slim collections? Was everyone on the Larkin model, waiting for poems from “God”? Various theories abound. All one has is impressions, obviously, there’s no way to know for sure what it was like. The bigger issue was maybe that English poets were isolated from each other, and from their audience, especially if they were outside of places like Bombay. In all these years, no generous or critical energy has gathered at all. Zero.
I agree with all your formulations here, Aditi, you put it very well. And I find myself equally unconvinced by the idea of contemporary British poetry as Indian poetry–American poetry still seems to hold something, but perhaps only because of the limits of its imperial ego, its deep, deep self-absorption. Jeet’s anthology is conceptually interesting only to the extent that it determinedly tries to frustrate or subvert the expectations and assumptions raised by its title. Still, even apart from “nation”, there seems to be real strength in a poetry that can locate itself somehow, otherwise it runs the risk of being generic, featureless, bland. So what would be your alternative to global mush?
Didn’t have access to each other — that makes sense. Thanks for offering a brief history, Vivek. It puts things into perspective for me.
It’s interesting what you say about American poetry. I’ve been here only a month and a half and I get the feeling that Americans primarily read themselves. More than, say, the British read themselves — if that makes any sense. It’s only an impression and I don’t want to be too certain about it. I haven’t been to Britain, but from reading blogs and journals, I feel like that might be true. Someone mentioned The Thought Fox in workshop the other day and almost everyone looked blank.
But I don’t mean that as a criticism, really. It’s just fascinating to notice because I’ve grown up reading other literatures before my own.
So what would be your alternative to global mush?
Ask me to bring about world peace already. : P
I definitely agree that poetry needs to locate itself somehow, but it can’t be this grand thing of feeling all of Indian poetry in your bones before you write. It may be about specific things, ways of using language, ways of using argument within poetry. I think that poets can be read in clusters and the clusters are often interesting when they defy geography.
I’ve been thinking about anthologies a lot lately. It’s hard to escape them. I do like Jeet’s anthology, because it puts a lot of poets together that seem pretty unrelated. And also because it’s a great starting point. There are not that many exclusions as far as I can tell and that’s probably because there aren’t that many Indian poets out there? Imagine trying to bring out a comprehensive anthology like that for contemporary American poetry or Indian poetry in all the different languages.
Since we have to live with anthologies and labels, I feel like it might be useful to reinvent them. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have an anthology consisting purely of one person’s favourite poems and to not have the anthologist argue her way through some silly explanation of why the poems are more than just that.
Another way I’ve been thinking about it is that any sort of location an anthology may offer, geographical or otherwise, is necessarily artificial. I remember James Midgley, who edits/used to edit a journal called Mimesis, saying that while he never sought to publish work around a ‘theme’ or ‘form’ or ‘concept,’ his method of simply picking the best and more interesting work to his eyes would often result in an issue in which the poems seemed to belong to together in some sense, they began to converse with each other.
Well, that’s as close as it gets to world peace for me.