You Have Seen the Peacock Dance
But Have You Heard Him Sing?
Sailen Routray
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Shtandart (ship, 1999).
During the event "Escale à Sète 2016". Sète, Hérault, France
https://commons.wikimedia.org/ Christian Ferrer |
In the poem 'Wind', by Vivek Narayanan, included in the anthology under review, the poet declares:
If there are others in this page with us,
they are marked by a tapering mound of thatch,
or the yellow shrapnel of a shrine.
Wind is the hint of what could happen. (p.483)
This poem becomes a metaphor for this collection of poems titled 'The Dance of the Peacock' (henceforth called TDOTP); for, the 'others' who 'are in these pages with us' are a multitude. This creates peculiar problems for a reviewer. How do you write the review of an edited volume of poetry that contains the work 151 poets? How do you even grapple with 496 pages of poetry, and try and produce a reasonably fair review within a relatively generous word-limit set by your editor?
This review is, in some senses, as much a review as an answer to these questions. There is a continuing crisis in publishing poetry in English in India. Commercial publishers in India, almost as a rule, no longer publish volumes of poetry; with may be one or two exceptions, hardly anyone has a remotely decent poetry list.
However, this not a trend that is limited to English. Apart from a few languages (whose number one can perhaps count on the top of the fingers of one hand), in most Indian languages such as Odia, according to anecdotal evidence, there are practically no new volumes of poetry that are not self-published one way or the other. This is perhaps largely true of poetry in English in India as well.
There are, mostly; only two avenues for publishing English poems in India now: one is the set of webzines that have been started (quite a few times, by poets themselves); the second avenue being the increasing number of poetry anthologies being published by publishers, both big and small. Mention can perhaps be made here of the one edited by Jeet Thayil (titled '60 Indian Poets', and published by Penguin in the year 2008), and the anthology edited by Sudeep Sen (titled 'The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry', and published by HarperCollins Publishers India in the year 2012).
When faced with the choice of absolutely no poetry being published in English in India, webzines and anthologies are of course to be welcomed for creating a much needed space for poetry in the language in the country. These spaces can also, to an extent, claim to be more open and democratic compared to the earlier extant avenues and spaces that published poetry. Compared to some of the earlier anthologies (for example, the one edited by A. K. Mehrotra), the newer anthologies are more expansive in their scope, and the number of poets whose works they contain: for example, '60 Indian Poets,' as the title suggests a tad unimaginatively, represents the work of sixty Indian poets; Sen's anthology contains the works of more than eighty poets.
However, the volume under discussion is perhaps the most expansive and 'democratic,' containing the works of 151 poets. Many of these poets, such as Arundhathi Subramaniam, Bibhu Padhi, Jayanta Mahapatra and Keki N. Daruwalla are well-known. However, it's the relatively unknown inclusions that form the few welcome surprises in this collection. There seems to be no particular logic of inclusion of poets/poems in the anthology. This need not be the case with all large anthologies with an expansive scope though.
The volume '60 Indian Poets,' for example, with its inclusion of poets such as G.S. Sharat Chandra, and Srinivas Rayaprol tries to rewrite the genealogy of poetry in Indian English. To this reviewer's eyes, the anthology under discussion has no governing framework; the only logic at work seems to be one of 'inclusion'. Poets of all ages and geographical locations seem to find place in this edited volume, unlike say 'The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry' that excludes all poets born before 1950.
This rather odd logic of 'inclusion' that seems to frame editorial choices made in TDOTP makes for some pleasant surprises, and interesting reading. For example, Archna Sahni in a startling way combines the very poco-pomo (postcolonial-postmodern) anxieties of the desi 'exile' with a 'traditional' trope when she writes:
Not to bring a healing herb
to a wounded hero,
but to save myself
I must turn to you,
my triangular homeland,
upside down
and carry you
like a hill on my palm
across the oceans
and gently put you down
on prairie land. (p.64)
and turns the narrative voice to a Hanuman jumping across the 'seven seas' between India. and the US, carrying the 'desh' to the 'deshis' in one gargantuan mythopoetic leap.
In a similar way, Ami Kaye provides a very astute description of a Mughal garden in a 'miniature painting'-and uses this apparently 'premodern' art-form to interrogate concerns such as that of 'history' and questions surrounding the circularity/linearity of time that are central to postmodern debates. For each competent poem included in this anthology, there is a non-poem neutralizing its effects.
One wonders why this is so. Is it a result of the 'democratic' commitments of the editor? He declares - 'we have the poems of doctors, engineers, diplomats, bureaucrats, politicians, film makers, management professionals, scientists, bank employees, accountants, journalists and many more who carve out some time in their tight schedule crowded with their occupations for livelihood. With their poems they breathe a sigh of relief from the onslaught of day to day drudgery' (page xvi).
Perhaps it is theory of 'poetry as emotional release', and the idea of the task of editing as creating a Noah's ark of poetic entities where one selects 'two of each'. In the order in which the poems are published, one can detect similar pseudo-democratic proclivities.
But better than not having any poetry being published at all, volumes such as TDOTP give us some good poems. In these times of drought of poetry in print, any such attempt has to be welcomed. But perhaps new approaches to creating anthologies have to be thought about. The anthology edited by poet and editor Manu Dash, tided 'Wings over the Mahanadi: Eight Odia-English Poets', published by Poetrywala this year (2014), with a fitting and stunning cover painting by painter and writer Ramakanta Samantaray, provides fresh points of departure by foregrounding the work of eight English poets from Odisha.
It's time one interrupted the linear narrative of "Poetry in 'Indian English'" to map out the multitude of collectivities and their poetic oeuvre that such a linear narrative occludes and silences. ln this, we are reminded about the true nature of activities of a poetic and editorial nature, and the true democracy of poetry, by a poem contained in this anthology that declares:
Black tongue of the road,
I flicking from the mouth of the car,
I Above, circles of crosses - birds of prey,
Poets, we are eaten and eat everything.
Details About the Book: 'The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India' Edited by Vivekananda Jha, Hidden Brook Press: 2013, Pp.518+xvii, $26.95.
Note: A slightly different version of this review was first published in 2015 in Indian Literature 285: 183-186.
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