Lamentations of a Debonair Poet

The life of Adil Jussawalla and the despair of poetry in India

Three writers go to a nursing home to visit an ageing unwell poet. They find him jumping from subject to subject and exhibiting signs of delusion—sometimes he thinks he is in the offices of PEN, the writers’ organisation of which he used to be secretary, and there is a lecture going on nearby. However, they also find him kind and considerate, especially towards his roommate, a giant of a man who keeps coming in and out. One of the three writes about the encounter in a column.

The poet Nissim Ezekiel, who would die of Alzheimer’s in 2004, is an important figure for Adil Jussawalla, but ‘Notes Towards A Portrait of Nissim Ezekiel’, which was published in the Sunday Observer in 1999, is an unusual sketch. For a subject that expects commiseration, there is instead a mild deadpan humour at their own discomfort at Ezekiel’s incomprehension of who they are—‘Are all of you together?’ ‘Are the three of you from the same place?’

But in between such a narrative, the use of Ezekiel’s poetry serves as punctuation: ‘I see how wrong I was / Not to foresee precisely this: / Outside the miracles of mind, / The figure in the carpet blazing, / Ebb-flow of sex and the seasons, / The ordinariness of most events.’ And to end the piece, after they have stepped out, unsure of how to take the experience in, the only note which brings the sadness together, a line as Jussawalla looks around him: ‘The kohl starts running, the buildings start breaking up.’

‘Notes towards a Portrait of Nissim Ezekiel’ is one of the articles featured in Maps for a Mortal Moon, a collection of Jussawalla’s selected prose, edited and introduced by Jerry Pinto. The anthology includes essays and columns spanning four decades. In his introduction, Pinto says he ‘knew Jussawalla had done an enormous amount of writing… That has been the heartbreak of editing this book: how much has had to be dropped. My selection came up to 300,000 words. My second, after a month of ruthless chopping, weighed in at 280,000. Finally, I had to submit it to Jussawalla the surgeon, and he helped. We’ve got it down to this size.’

Jussawalla has many imprints on Indian literature—publisher, academic, essayist, columnist, literary editor of Indian Express and Times of India, editor of Debonair (in an age when it printed poetry of value), a port of call for aspiring writers, someone intricately involved in every debate around Indian writing in English. But his principal identity is as a poet, and the irony is that his poetry, unlike his prolific prose, is spaced across decades. His first collection, Land’s End, was published in 1962; Missing Person, considered seminal, came after 14 years, and then it took 35 years for the next book of poetry, Trying to Say Goodbye.

We are sitting in Jussawalla’s 18th floor apartment in Cuffe Parade and it is one of the questions I ask him. He says the prose was a job with the pressure of deadlines—you just had to do it, whether you were happy with it or not. Poetry did not have such urgent claims, but that is not the only reason. “I haven’t been very good with setting myself deadlines, when someone is not really waiting at the other end. If a publisher had said, ‘I am giving you two years for your next book, you do it,’ it may have helped. I am just saying ‘may’. I also like my drafts of poems to stand for a while. Now I have 30 or 40 new poems, but each time I go back to them after a space of time, I am not happy and I change things. And I feel they are getting better. They are closer to what I want to say. The words are speaking for themselves instead of an idea speaking through the words. That is one way of looking at it. I could flagellate myself and just say that I am a very lazy person when it comes to my own writing. I do feel that writing a poem is not the be all and end all of my life. If one has to be saved and if the people one loves have to be saved in a religious spiritual sense, then poetry is not enough.”

Trying to Say Goodbye was published by Sharmistha Mohanty, founder and editor of the literary magazine Almost Island. Mohanty says the long gap is an indication of the state of publishing itself. “Adil has been writing over all these years. It is simply that no one has probably asked him about publishing his work—I mean, truly asked him, with the respect that he deserves. Publishers here don’t actively look for talent, or bring back those who are known to be accomplished. I’ve heard mainstream publishers say they missed their chance with Trying to Say Goodbye, and my response to that is: you know where he lives, don’t you?”

Mohanty knew that Jussawalla had two new manuscripts. She solicited and published a few poems in Almost Island. She also organised a reading at the arts centre Jnanapravaha in Mumbai. “The hall was full, people were standing at the back, and Adil got a standing ovation even before he began. It was beautiful. After that I asked him whether Trying to Say Goodbye could be the very first book Almost Island would publish. He said he’d think it over and thanked me. I told him that if he wanted to go to a mainstream publisher I would understand. He came back to me quite soon, maybe a couple of weeks, and said he’d give it to us. He said he had much more faith in independent publishing; after all, that’s how poetry in English had survived here,” she says.

Mohanty says she has rarely seen a man of Jussawalla’s integrity, in his life and work: “When we were working on the manuscript for Trying to Say Goodbye, I will never forget how closely he listened to our comments, criticisms. It was an incredibly equal dialogue, again rare in this country.”

In Maps for a Mortal Moon, the absence of publishers and readers is considered in the first essay, ‘Six Authors in Search of a Reader’, written in 1981. In it, Jussawalla speaks about how writers had to locate their readers in India’s literary environment and often could only do this by becoming publishers themselves. This was why, in the 1970s, he came together with three other poets—Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel and Arvind Mehrotra—to form Clearing House, which published many of their own works and those of other important writers of the time.

“Contrary to what people believe of poets being impractical, we always had to be very practical about how to get our work visible. It seemed to be a very logical thing. One of the unique [aspects] of Clearing House was we were so fortunate in having both a poet and designer of genius in Arun Kolatkar. And there was no question of charging one another for our services. So he did all his wonderful work for free, so did the others in the group. We decided to try and reach those parts other publishers don’t reach. We tried to do that by mail order. We saw that there were people in smaller towns outside Bombay who were interested in reading our book,” he says.

I ask Jussawalla about paying to get his first collection Land’s End published in 1962 after his first return from England as a student. He says that is common even now if poets want to get published. “I don’t know if poets are willing to admit that upfront, but many pay for their books to be published. I don’t know why people are so shy of mentioning it. Maybe because they are afraid they will lose the patronage of big publishers. A publisher will tell you privately that poetry does not sell, which is bullshit, because poetry sells over the years. If a publisher prints only 500 copies, if the work is any good, within five years it will be sold out. The problem is that it is too long a time for publishers to hold on to copies, that’s all. They also don’t have the staff to be able to judge manuscripts properly.”

When he was Book Reviews Editor of The Indian Express in the early 80s, Jussawalla gave two broadsheet pages to a review by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. This is not something that had a precedent or has been repeated in a mainline paper since. He says he got away with it, but wouldn’t be able to do that now. “It wasn’t two pages in one issue. It was a two-part review. What I had at my disposal was one full page without ads. And Arvind sent such a massive review. He said ‘I don’t see how I can cut this’. I just went ahead and did it. I don’t even know if anyone approved. I didn’t do much of that. Mostly the reviews I used were of the normal length,” he says.

A writer tells me that the era when Jussawalla was the editor of Debonair towards the end of the same decade was extraordinary—nude photos were, in a sense, paying for poetry. Jussawalla says he was just part of a continuum that began when Vinod Mehta became editor and modelled the magazine on Illustrated Weekly. “Debonair was really trying to do the same thing. All the editors— Vinod, Anil [Dharker]—had both some very good literature, [and] some very good poems, because of Imtiaz Dharker editing the poetry page.”

The editors didn’t have anything to do with the centrespreads themselves. “No one ever attended a photo shoot; that was left to the photographer. He had to deal with the models and the payment,” he says. The only time editors would get involved was if a model got cold feet at the last minute and didn’t want the photographs published after she had been shot.

One instance of his time at Debonair comes up in Maps for a Mortal Moon in ‘Remembering Sudhir’, an obituary of the writer Sudhir Sonalkar, who had a drinking problem. In the obituary, Jussawalla recounts turning Sonalkar down when he called asking for a job in the magazine. Jussawalla writes: ‘‘Then fuck off!’ he snapped and disconnected. Just as well. If the conversation continued I wouldn’t have been able to tell him why I’d turned him down; that I sometimes overdid my drinks too, that I had recently taken on the magazine a writer who turned out to have a drinking problem greater than any I’d seen, that taking Sudhir on board would have meant capsizing the raft altogether.’

Jussawalla tells me there were two things that led him to drink: “One is to try and shut out the pain of living— it was a kind of anaesthetic. The other was that, being a somewhat silent and reticent person, at least in a group of people, it opened me up. People would say, ‘You keep tossing them back, but you get clearer and clearer as you talk.’ Until a time is reached when one more drink or sip and all the happiness goes very suddenly. Part of that comes into that two part essay ‘Shikast’.” In 1999, Jussawalla stopped drinking. A book suggested that he approach it as a conversion from a faith called drinking to one called non-drinking. A few days later, he went into one of his regular bars and came back after drinking only a bottle of Limca. “This attitude has worked [for] me in other major decisions of my life, leaving architecture when I was just 18 to try and write a play. It was an act of faith, that’s all I can say, and it works for me.”

Sharmistha Mohanty believes that another reason for Jussawalla’s long silence, when it came to poetry, was a fundamental struggle within the self. On the evolution of his poetry, she notes that Missing Person is “the work of someone more angry, disturbed, in chaos, than the person who wrote Trying to Say Goodbye. Maybe in this one it is a more tranquil man, with more tranquil forms. The anger is more compressed under that tranquillity, and deep inside, that tendency of looking at the rawness of things without denying beauty remains: ‘the sea a massive bolt, shot across.’ Only, the poet perhaps now holds himself a little further away from what he writes.”

She feels that poets of his generation lived a kind of writers’ integrity. “They were not their own project like so many writers and poets one sees today, where production of work becomes overwhelmingly important,” she says. This integrity is evident in the fact that Jussawalla never became a novelist, though he did begin one in the mid-70s.

The novel was meant to be about one man’s political education, told through diary entries. The man, a photographer living in England, is commissioned to do a book on the Indian monsoon, but that is the year the monsoon fails and there is drought. “He is torn. He says, ‘How can I do a book on the monsoon when what I see is drought?’ It’s a question of his becoming politicised. I couldn’t tell that story using a diary format. It didnt work, so I just abandoned it,” he says.

I ask him whether it was difficult.

“Not really. I have not found it hard to abandon things.”

Adil Jussawalladespairpoetry