Breaking the Rules

TS ELIOT IS rightly hailed as one of the greatest English-language poets of all time. But his work as a critic and an editor deserves equal atten­tion. For almost two decades across the 1920s and 30s, Eliot worked as the editor of The Criterion, a quarterly literary journal that published the likes of Ezra Pound,

Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, WH Auden et al. How did Eliot’s own literary output influence his editorial style, or the way he thought and wrote about books as a critic?

A pair of recently published poetry books reminded me that influence works in the other direction as well (Eliot’s work as a critic and an editor informed his own verses as well). In this framing, the ‘poet’ is better described as the ‘poet-critic’. A poet-critic’s reading of a text (or a body of work) may prompt them to recontextualise the work in light of both history and historiography.

In that vein, Ranjit Hoskote’s The Homeland’s An Ocean (Penguin; 272 pages; ₹499) arrives, a collection of 150 Urdu verses-in-translation by Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), alongside a beautifully structured, biographically detailed 80- page essay on Mir, the popular mytholo­gies around his life and work, and how his verses have been received in succes­sive eras by both critics and lay readers. Hoskote’s earlier book I, Lalla was also structured like this—a long, detailed essay on the poet Lal Ded followed by a selection of verses-in-translation.

Mir lived through turbulent times, to say the least, surviving the invasions of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali. He also suffered more than his fair share of personal misfortune. But as Hoskote shows, his poetry was not some unidi­mensional document of grief. Mir could also write humorous or even risqué poems. He could play the madman or the village eccentric in his verses. He could also write love poems of searing intensity.

In the 94th couplet featured in the book, Mir combines these two strands of thought in the same verse —the lover’s lament and the righteous fury of the dis­placed. “Dil voh nagar nahin ke phir aabaad ho sake / pachtaaoge suno yeh basti ujaad kar” or as Hoskote renders it in English, “The heart’s not the kind of town that would flourish twice. / You’ll regret—lis­ten up—ruining this settlement.”

Ranjit Hoskote shows that Mir Taqi Mir’s poetry was not some unidimensional document of grief. He could also write humorous or even risqué poems. He could play the madman or the village eccentric in his verse

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As the couplet above shows, Mir’s work had a degree of sophistication and linguistic flair that confirmed him as Ghalib’s equal, if not superior. And yet, his 19th-century successor remains by far the more fancied poet, among both Urdu diehards and lay audiences. This might appear counterintuitive at first — Ghalib’s poems are elaborate, Persianate, philosophical while Mir’s are demotic, conversational, sentimental at times, and borrowing from local registers like Brajbhasha. But as Hoskote explains, there were solid, commercial reasons behind Ghalib’s fame eclipsing Mir’s. Ghalib arrived right on time for the on­set of industrial-scale printing, Ghalib’s words became used widely in the na­scent Hindi music industry and so on.

Hoskote’s long essay has a fascinat­ing section on the linguistic politics and rivalries of Mir’s era. It’s true that during his lifetime the critical perception of his work suffered because of a bias towards Persianate language. It’s also true that later in his life, Mir himself would try to downplay the influence of Dakhani poetry in his work. Both these attitudes were rooted in the highly specific liter­ary politics of this era and Hoskote’s essay does a great job of tying them with the substance of Mir’s work.

In a couplet, Mir himself addresses his language. “Kya janun log kehte hain kis ko suroor-e-qalb / aaya nahin yeh lafz toh Hindi zubaan ke beech” “(How would I know what folks call the heart’s pleas­ance? / That posh word hasn’t made its way into Hindi yet).”

It’s important to note that Mir calls his language “Hindi” (or Hindavi elsewhere) because the word “Urdu” was not used at the time he began working. Mir’s life and his body of work—even the bare facts—are enough to puncture the mythology of “Hindi” and “Urdu” being hermetically sealed-off categories rather than a linguistic continuum that borrows freely and heavily from a bunch of other languages. As Hoskote rightly points out elsewhere in his essay, there is also a persistent falsehood about Urdu being a politically neutered language concerned mostly with elite excess and over-the-top expressions of passion or longing.

“Meanwhile, despite, or perhaps because of its ubiquity and status as a

marker of cultural accomplishment, Urdu poetry has suffered from wide­spread misrepresentations that swaddle it in nostalgia for the vanished milieu of Nawabi culture and embalm it in a kitsch medievalism that owes more to the Hindi cinema of the 1950s and 1960s than to the lived experience of the 1740s or 1840s. The truth is that poets such as Mir and Ghalib were intensely ‘modern’ in their sensibility.”

As a translator and a poet himself, Hoskote is an excellent interlocutor of the giants of the past. Sometimes when the ‘poet-critic’ is reading a canonical text with the requisite critical atten­tion and engagement, they arrive at the theoretical underpinnings of a whole new project —the critic Harold Bloom calls this creative process ‘the anxiety of influence’. Something similar happened with the other volume under review here, Vivek Narayanan’s The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions; 80 pages; ₹1299). The ‘mirror’ in the title is decidedly a modernist one, as evidenced by its fractured, idiosyncratic ‘reflec­tions’ of the original poems. This is a collection of 20 “close-fitting transla­tions” from the titular Kuruntokai (a Sangam Literature anthology of short love poems written between 1st century BCE and 2nd century CE), printed on the left-hand-side pages, alongside 20 “mirror poems” created by Narayanan, which are printed on the right-hand-side pages.

Narayanan’s previous book After (2022) was a one-of-a-kind project over a decade in the making, a book of poems informed by the Mahabharata, engag­ing with the classic text through endless variations, riffs, responses and all-new creations that took off where the original verses landed. Contemporary red-button political issues and India’s changing rela­tionship with Hinduism down the years also featured prominently. At least for this reader, After represented the pinnacle of what a gifted ‘poet-critic’ in conversation with the canon could achieve.

The Kuruntokai and the Mirror is a smaller, more intimate experiment along broadly similar lines. Bifurcating his “close-fitting” translations and his free-form riffs on the same is a sly move, because this allows Narayanan that ex­tra bit of licence in the “mirror poems”.

The device of the “mirror poem” means that Narayanan can make connec­tions that feel intuitive rather than strictly one-on-one. These are poems that invite you to read and re-read them, introducing ambiguity and flexion at strategic places.

The device of the ‘Mirror Poem’ means that Vivek Narayanan can make connections that feel intuitive rather than strictly one-on-one. These are poems that invite you to read and re-read them, introducing ambiguity and flexion at strategic places

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One of the original Kuruntokai poems-in-translation ends with this playful faux-denunciation of poetry: “If one poet’s a liar / that makes all of them / They’re like thieves / to the ones you left”. And Narayanan’s “mirror poem” on the right ends thus: “To have known him / is to have unlearned the giant and dreamless sky”. Now, both the original poem and the mirror poem are structured as love poems, but there is obviously room for so much else. In the mirror poem, the concluding lines say “unlearn the dreamless sky” because the narrator, enraptured in love, has finally learnt how to dream with open eyes, in broad daylight. But what if we capitalise the word ‘Him’? Does it then become a Sufi-adjacent poem that collapses the categories of “God” and “The Beloved”?

Like a lot of things in poetry, the an­swer is yes and no. Every poem changes when read by a different pair of eyes, and often we completely change our views about poems we read when we were much younger. The elements of ‘choice’ (by which we mean, of course, ‘inter­pretation’) and temporality are crucial to poetry. What The Kuruntokai and its Mirror does is point the reader towards a seemingly never-ending row of critical angles (or ‘mirrors’ if you will) that can be used to meaningfully engage with a pre-modern work of poetry.

Both volumes under review here point towards the straight line that con­nects critical reading and the processes of ‘rewriting’ (The Kuruntokai and its Mirror) or critical ‘recontextualisation’ (The Home­land’s an Ocean). In these projects, the poet-critic combines close reading or literary analysis with other realms of knowledge, like history, sociology, psychology, and so on. In that interdisciplinary spirit, an old, much-recycled line from the actor/mar­tial artist Bruce Lee comes to mind, one that encapsulates the ‘rewriting’ process involved in books like these: “First, learn the rules and then forget them all.”

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Aditya Mani Jha

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