Surveyors with a Spyglass

WHEN A POET TURNS his gaze onto the universal, he is making a choice to look at the things that bring us together, not the things that tear us asunder. And for over three decades now, Ranjit Hoskote has been a master of documenting and ex­plaining these cultural encounters across history that end up marking both parties indelibly. In his latest (eighth) collection of poems, Icelight (Hamish Hamilton; 128 pages; ₹399) Hoskote writes, in a poem called ‘Retreat’, “The surveyor continues to look / for a world at the other end / of his spyglass / knowing it’s out there / a distant cousin to the one / that’s blowing up around him”.

The ‘surveyor with a spyglass’ is a typical Hoskote protagonist, an adventurer to faraway lands. They may or may not be able to explain the kinship with explorers past and the cultural resonance that they feel, but they try to ar­ticulate it all the same. They’re essentially trying to piece together a kind of race memory if you will, things that our ances­tors did, things that are coursing through our veins (and not merely lying dormant in our history books). Here, for instance, is the entirety of a short, sharp shock of a poem called ‘Spur’. “Am I the boy / who climbed this spur / and laid claim / to the scrubland sweating / in its shade? // What coiled through me / and sheared into space? / a memory of colours churning wet / obsidian saffron jade / transmitted from other lives // Have I stood here before?”

Icelight is full of startling moments like the concluding line above. If, as Amitav Ghosh and others have sug­gested, the novel is basically an artful way to represent the passage of linear time, then the accomplished poet is surely the Scrambler-in-Chief in charge of non-linear time. With poems like ‘Spur’, Hoskote’s historicity isn’t con­fined to the human—again and again in this collection, human actions are rendered small and fleeting by the enti­ties witnessing them. Which is to say, the trees, the moon, the earth itself. This realisation both humbles Hoskote’s pro­tagonists and anchors them to concepts bigger than themselves or any grandiose ideas of adventurism they may have.

In Icelight, there are few direct or explicit responses to art, but the ones you spot are in a darkly funny mode. The lovely, rhythmic poem ‘Crow Hymn’ has lines like, “bring us in whispers news from all corners of the world / bring us in glass jars storms from all quarters of the world”. Every alternate stanza in this poem ends with the itali­cised crow-chorus that goes kaf­kafkafka — ‘Kafka’ means ‘crow’ in Czech, which is why it was the name writer Franz Kafka chose for himself.

Hoskote also knows that ‘history’ doesn’t include just written texts or even orally passed down texts. It must also make room for hearsay, for suppressed truths, for rumours that evolve into cautionary tales. Here’s how a poem called ‘Exit’ begins: “Choose / your exit // Oxygen mask clamped / to your face / your switch toggled // Or as summer fades / into monsoon rain / hearing the flame whimper / in a cistern of its own wax // Or after single-minded years / of following your Schwanz / running out and hugging / a broken carthorse / that a man was whipping / to death in the street”.

The first ‘exit’ here is involuntary, someone tied down to a hospital bed. The second ‘exit’ being described is often described as ‘natural causes’ — indeed, Hoskote’s summer-monsoon line even bestows upon it kinship with nature. The third ‘exit’ is where Hoskote gets funky and it is very much the sort of death that causes a poet to stop and think.

Although Hoskote doesn’t spell this out, the incident being described here is a well-known but unconfirmed tale explaining the descent into insanity and eventual death of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844- 1900). Apparently, in 1889 Nietzsche saw a horse being cruelly whipped in the streets of Turin. The experience caused a mental breakdown—Nietzsche alleg­edly uttered “Mother, I am dumb,” and did not speak another word for a decade and died in a mute state.

Hoskote is almost daring us to see the third ‘exit’ as voluntary but in reality it is neither suicide nor a ‘natural’ death— which is rather the point. Icelight is a col­lection that will always keep the reader on their toes. It never presumes to lecture, and yet it delivers discrete little packets of wisdom in an orderly, elegant manner.

A BOOK OF POEMS that also works as a biography — the idea felt like a publishing gim­mick. However, Darwin: A Life in Poems, a biography of Charles Darwin written by Ruth Padel, a contemporary poet and critic (who also happens to be Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter) does precisely that. A reader will be enthralled by the book’s formal range, its expansive humanity and the sheer inti­macy of writing in Darwin’s voice, recreated with the help of diaries/ correspondence as well as accounts writ­ten by his friends, family, and colleagues.

Shikha Malaviya’s Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems (HarperCollins; 136 pages; ₹399) uses a similar methodology to as­semble a de facto biography of its subject, the first Indian female physician and the first Indian woman to receive a medical education in the US, back in the 1880s.

In the preface, Malaviya confesses that she had her reservations about embark­ing on such an ambitious project — even if most narratives around Anandibai’s life were filtered through the lens of her husband being “her advocate and guide”.

“I wondered if I were to tell Anandibai’s story through poems in her own voice, what would that mean? How would it change the narrative? Would it give her agency back to her? Would it give South Asian Americans a deeper sense of roots and history? And supposing it did, was I the right person to undertake this task? I was a poet after all, and not a historian.”

Malaviya is selling herself short with that last line, for Anandibai Joshee is impec­cably researched. More importantly, these poems do feel like we’re listening to a time capsule, like Anandibai preserved everything important in her life in a pot that has been unearthed a century later. Here she is, for instance, describing the gender-segregated childhood that so many Indian women experienced (and continue to experience today), in a poem called ‘A Different Kind of Arithmetic’.

“(…) the haveli halved into two sec­tions / the mardana and the zenana // a different kind of arithmetic— / the louder the men spoke // the softer the women / never in the same room // next to each other / unless an auspicious occasion”.

One of the book’s many impressive achievements is the portrayal of Anandibai’s marriage. At nine she was married off to a “fanatically liberal” man in his mid-20s. He threatened to leave her if she did not receive a formal education. It’s a fascinating relationship. There’s abuse here, there’s co-dependence, there’s the spectre of ‘forced progressiveness’ but there’s also a grudging respect.

Malaviya writes: “His tongue is a sickle; when the words come out they cut me like a handful of grass, uprooting me from where I stand. Dullard, lazy, incompetent, adjectives he swings at me again and again (…)”.

These lines are from a concrete poem called ‘Consumption’—Anandibai died from tuberculosis before she could start practicing medicine. A concrete poem forms a specific shape on the page via blank spaces and typography—this poem forms a sickle, taking off from the first line (“His tongue is a sickle”). It’s difficult to adequately convey how well this works without actually recreating the page, but suffice it to say that it is only in the rare concrete poem that form and content dovetail so beautifully.

Malaviya is also alert to the politics of Anandibai’s position as a pioneer—the fact that she’s born to an upper-caste family is explored in poems like ‘Caste Away’. Similarly, in the poem ‘A Com­mendation from the Queen’, Anandibai remarks on the quandary of receiving a letter from Queen Victoria, the person in whose name the British were stripping India of its wealth. “Empress Victoria, whose men continue / to plunder our land, the Koh-i-noor snug / against her chest shining bright, commanded / her secretary to reply how she read the news / of my graduation with great inter­est—and that / I should be all smiles, my success spread far & wide.”

CLEARLY, STATECRAFT — whether monarchic or demo­cratic — is a tough nut to crack and a tricky process to capture within the formal constraints of poetry. And yet, Shrikant Verma’s Magadh (1984), one of the classic works of 20th-century Hindi literature, pulls it off with an incredibly pared down, minimalist style (there are barely any adverbs in the book, for ex­ample). Rahul Soni’s English translation was first published in a bilingual edition (Hindi on the left, English on the left) by Almost Island in 2013. Since then, the Hindi rights have reverted to Rajkamal Prakashan and now, the translation has been republished in an all-new edition (sans the original Hindi text) by Eka (144 pages; ₹599), alongside an all-new transla­tor’s note by Soni and critical essays by Ashok Vajpeyi and Mantra Mukim.

As Apoorvanand (a Hindi professor from Delhi University) notes in the pref­ace, Magadh can be read as a series of epi­sodic poems — or as a single long poem lamenting mankind’s failure to learn from its historic mistakes. Verma’s overarching subject here is nothing less than cap­turing the rhythm of time itself. At the individual level, this means making one’s peace with one’s own death in particular and mortality in general. At the societal level this means understanding the cyclical nature of his­tory, how kingdoms live and die, only for a new one to take the place of the fallen.

In the poem that lends the book its name, Verma seemingly addresses the readers by saying, “But there is / neither Magadh nor Magadh / You too have been searching / brothers, / this is not the Magadh / you’ve read about / in books, / this is the Magadh / that you / like me / have lost”. The bit about “neither Magadh nor Magadh” is a typical demonstration of Verma’s faux-circular logic as well as an air of artful nihilism that pervades these verses. It reads like an admission of guilt, partially because of Verma’s complicity in the structures of (ill-fated) power. He was a leading figure in the Indian National Congress in the 1970s, and as Apoorvanand notes in his essay, this fact contributed to the critical ambivalence around Magadh back when it was pub­lished for the first time in 1984.

booksHindi literatureMagadhRanjit HoskoteShikha MalaviyaShrikant Verma