Is it still poetry if it’s described as “prosaic” and as “lacking in the expansiveness, the rhythm, the capacity to elevate”? When poet and writer Anjum Hasan first came “face to face” in her teenage with an Indian poem in English, this is precisely how she felt about it, with “something approaching distaste”. The poem in question was “Night of the Scorpion” by Nissim Ezekiel – often mentioned when the beginnings of post-independence Indian English poetry is considered. What made her uncomfortable, Hasan writes, was that the poet’s voice was “too close at hand as well as unsettlingly direct, nonchalant even”.
As a young reader, novelist, critic, and poet Amit Chaudhuri, too, found himself “slightly repelled by the India of post offices and railway compartments”, as he wrote in his introduction to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. “I didn’t think the India I lived in a fit subject for poetry”. What was spectacular enough about India to be poetic? For the young Hasan, Ezekiel’s poem – which unfolds a rural scenario using (and perhaps generating) phrases like “a sack of rice,” “mud-baked walls,” “swarms of flies,” and “the endless rain” – may have failed to inspire a reader brought up on, for instance, the English poet William Wordsworth’s loftiness both on the level of language and of subject matter.
Larger than life
But if Wordsworth’s heart leaps up when he beholds a rainbow in the sky, in Chaudhuri’s latest collection of poems Sweet Shop, the heart leaps up at beholding almost everything. A collection of new and selected poems written between 1985 and 2023, it begins with the title poem “Sweet Shop”: “The whole universe is here / Every colour, a few / on the verge of being barely tolerable.” Before a line-up of sweets in their varied shapes and forms, the poet stands like a thrilled onlooker in an exhibition. The racks of sweets well over with colour, all colours, and some, even those “barely tolerable,” overwhelm the eye. The sweets are life forms in themselves. Despite the splendid (dis)array of “mass and form,” Chaudhuri intuits a certain equilibrium in the last few lines, as though it was fated for the universe to give itself away in all these sweets coming to life:
[…] The soft oblongs and the minuscule,
hard pillow-shaped ones are generated
so neatly that instinct alone
could have given them shape, and no mould.
In the harmony shielded by the glass
is an unnoticed balance of gravity and play.
Harmony here comes from instinct, a sixth faculty, and is not something that can be forced into a mould. For me, Wordsworth’s poem “To the Skylark” prompts a similar feeling, when it reassures the skylark of its matchless superiority over the nightingale: “Leave to the nightingale her shady wood; A privacy of glorious light is thine; / Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood / Of harmony, with instinct more divine.” The skylark needn’t worry about the nightingale because the former carries a glorious light and its voice carries a harmony with a divine-like instinct. The skylark is unbeatable because something glorious and divine reveals itself as it flies and sings over the world. Wordsworth’s poem makes the skylark in the sky greater than just itself, as Chaudhuri makes the sweets in a small shop in Calcutta greater than just themselves – they now cradle the whole universe.
No matter how close to home or far-off, all are worthy of becoming the subject of poetry. But my example above is not to say that things must exude or be made to exude greatness in order to be poeticised. There is great literary joy in just picking something, like one would a vegetable from a market stall, and in looking at it with an unorthodox eye, as though the vegetable were not an item to be cooked and eaten but something else.
Chaudhuri, luckily, is a keen customer, and he picks up several items: a sweet mould, which he imagines to be a cradle or an exoskeleton from which the sweet in making must free itself; the noun “left”, which he thinks of not as the other hand but as a “shadow-figure / outside the doorway / always hovering, always near, / but instructed without edict / not to present itself”; his parents, whom he sees as people “unreliable in their departure.” For this reason alone, Chaudhuri’s experimental poem in the collection “Short Q and A” is especially delicious. Here he asks miscellaneous questions of himself and rolls out answers which, dispassionate at times and straight from the heart at others, are never insincere.
Chaudhuri’s conviction as a poet lies in his ability to rouse things into life. In a recent talk on the collection at Ashoka University, he said, “When you have moved to the end of a poem, you haven’t learnt anything new. But some kind of shift has taken place.” Of course, Chaudhuri’s poems don’t offer any new information the way a teacher readily hands out notes in a classroom. Instead, what the poems more invaluably give us are moments where something suddenly comes alive and looks new – these moments aren’t inarticulable shifts, as Chaudhuri seems to suggest, but to which one can certainly point.
In “Fingers,” the poet writes about boycotting cutlery and his fingers learning about their vitality for the first time: “It was then that my fingers / discovered life. They plunged into / its heat . . . They entered the world below. Never had they known anything / like the contact, been so close.” The touch of the food here is like entering a new world, where the fingers revel in their newfound existence. In “Tele Bhaja,” Chaudhuri writes stunningly of a market becoming aware of its own stomach: “Someone keeps launching / fritters in oil. / The tele bhaja drown / rise steadily, and brown. / The smell of kerosene / and smoky besan stirs the market’s appetite for itself.” The market, dormant to its own fortune, learns of its flavours as the fritters slowly rise in oil. In making things new, the poems, without a question, give us something new.
English Vinglish
If Chaudhuri’s poems in English don’t shy away from – and take pleasure in – dwelling on subjects too close to home, one must ask: what happens to their language? Chaudhuri has a sophistication with English which one might call the result of assimilation. After graduating from University College, London, he wrote his doctoral dissertation at Balliol College, Oxford. Dividing his time as he does at present between Kolkata and London, Chaudhuri doesn’t use an English that sounds like a car going over regular speed bumps, so to speak. Nor do his poems. In “Short Q and A,” he asks and answers:
[…] Q. What is poetry?
A. A form of subtraction where words are viewed as impediments. […]Q. Why is craft spiritual?
A. Because it devises ways to conceal meaning.Q. Does concealing meaning require craft?
A. Yes. It’s near-impossible to speak without meaning something. […]
For Chaudhuri, the business of poetry is more like pruning an oversized bush than stringing leaves together. It is not a hit-or-miss affair to say words and mean something, but a given. In “To My Editor,” he expresses thanks to his editor for taking away stubborn, extra words from him: “I’m beholden to you / for deleting unneeded words / when I can’t find a way of losing them.” The toil for Chaudhuri, as a poet, is to do away with words.
At this point, I am reminded of these lines from Ezekiel’s “Very Indian Poem in Indian English” I always find provocative: “Other day I am reading in newspaper / (Every day I’m reading Times of India / To improve my English language)”. The parenthetical move to let us know of his tussle with the language even as he writes in it is an earnest confession of the poet’s syntactical constraint. For Ezekiel, writing in the immediate backdrop of colonial independence, words were “impediments” in precisely the opposite way as they are for Chaudhuri.
Chaudhuri’s language, so intact, never betrays stiffness or constraints. So, what his poems do instead is to behold the semantic dissonance just like they behold everything else – language, in this manner, is turned into a subject itself. In his poem “Faltu,” Chaudhuri writes of this colloquial Bangla and Hindi word as:
[…] so much more
personal and nearer
than “inconsequential,” “waste of time,”
or “feckless.”
Like a pet name
or a relative
or a small town you once visited
and remember intermittently.
The poem tells of the irreplaceability – and not untranslatability – of the word “faltu” for Chaudhuri. He writes similarly of the Bangla word “tuchchho” (meaning petty or insignificant): “How can what’s / tuchchho be homeless? / It’s always close, like an only / child. We never beget epics.” No matter how much the English language tries with its copious sum of vocabulary, the words can only come close and never really touch the pristine “faltu” or “tuchchho”. Chaudhuri doesn’t endorse a hybridisation of the English language – some “Hinglish” or “Banglish,” if you will – the kind Salman Rushdie’s “chutnification” in Midnight’s Children famously does. Rather, he inhabits the English language with the propriety of British syntax and occasionally writes back.
Chaudhuri is a poet who dwells not on his own limitation with the English language but on the language’s limitations for him. Ranjit Hoskote, a prominent Indian poet and art critic, voices something similar in his poem “Harbour Thoughts”. Here is the final stanza:
Land is what you look for, all your life.
Zameen is what you hope to find.
Even though the Hindi-Urdu word “zameen” translates squarely as “land” in English, Hoskote maintains and asserts a difference. The same word in two different languages certainly bequeaths and stirs different cultural associations, but it is also telling of the Indian poet’s endeavour in English. The English language in which the poet writes is never always adequate for what the poet wants to realise – the wholeness of native expression, that which is bred in the bone. Both Hoskote and Chaudhuri don’t dither with English, but occasionally point to its inadequacy. They do not confess a struggle, as Ezekiel did, but make note of it in their poems, almost like individual case studies.
Chaudhuri’s impulse as a poet is in the making-new, in terms of subject matter and not language. In Sweet Shop, the poet-observer often watches the world around him as a keen, unassuming, and sometimes self-effacing presence. But I wonder: what happens to the conscience of the Indian-English poet as the poems prepare to meet the outside world – the world outside home? I am thinking of these lines from Chaudhuri’s poem “Tarting Up” in the collection, where he feels uneasy as his book must step out:
It’s time
to go out.
I’m not tired of writing
but
of that instant
when the book must step out again . . .
Before meeting the outside
you begin to tart up, choose
an eye-catching photo
for the jacket
reassessing it like a dress
you’ve worn many times […]
For the poet – whose eye catches and ponders over so many things – whose eye is it that he must catch?
Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2023, Amit Chaudhuri, NYRB/Poets.
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