Writer R Raj Rao on why biographies of living poets are crucial to understanding their work

The poet Keki Daruwalla passed away in Delhi last week at the age of 87 without, we are told, completing his memoirs. In 2023, we lost three major poets, Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel and Saleem Peeradina. In 2004, another three significant poets, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar and Dom Moraes died in the same year. Kamala Das left us in 2009, Eunice de Souza in 2017. The first of the poets to take our leave was AK Ramanujan, way back in 1993. Very few poets from the first generation of post-independence Indian-English poets are now in our midst.

Yet, apart from Nissim Ezekiel, whose authorised biography I published in 2000 (reprinted in 2017), none of these poets has had their definitive biographies written during their lifetime. This is truly unfortunate. In the Western literary tradition, almost every major writer has a biography.

A biography of a living poet is by no means easy to write. It requires years of dedicated research, as well as quality time spent with one’s subject to get an insight into their life. It is also imperative upon the biographer to read every single poem and prose piece that their subject has ever written. Ezekiel’s biography took me over five years to research, and another couple of years to write. The last years were particularly difficult as Ezekiel was by then stricken with Alzheimer’s disease and had lost his memory.

Writing a biography while one’s subject is alive ensures a measure of authenticity. The poet is around to show their biographer where they have grown up, the schools and colleges they went to, the places they have travelled, the books that influenced them, the friends they hung around with, and so on, as well as what they have regarded as their successes and their failures. I remember Ezekiel telling me that I should title my biography A Thousand Failures. I remember him writing me a postcard to say he would tell me whom I should speak to (and whom I should not).

Of course, a biography isn’t a hagiography, and there are things about the writer’s personal life which they might want to suppress. Here, the biographer must be astute enough to find sources that can provide them with information about their subject not revealed by the subjects themselves. Several poets, in my experience, are especially unwilling to speak about their strained relations with their families. They are also reluctant to speak about their romantic and sexual lives. But a biography isn’t a biography if these details are glossed over. Trivia concerning a poet’s life has as much place in a good biography as a critical study of their poetry does.

Students of literature usually know a poet merely by the handful of anthologised poems to be found on the syllabus. But what goes into the writing of these poems? What goes into the making of the poet? This, only a biography can tell. It tells us, for example, why Ezekiel, raised in a somewhat conservative Bene-Israel Jewish household, wrote Hymns in Darkness and Latter-Day Psalms, or the iconic poems “Night of the Scorpion” and “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa TS”. It tells us why Ezekiel preferred the poetry of statement to imagist poetry.

This is true of all the poets listed above. Keki Daruwalla’s life as a police officer has a bearing on so many of his poems. As a Zoroastrian for whom fire worship is sacred, the burning ghats at Varanasi outrage him. Again, if Daruwalla’s poems are longwinded, as some of his critics feel, what in his personality accounts for such longwindedness?

Although Jayanta Mahapatra was monolingual, he regarded himself as rural rather than urban, and frequently described himself as an Odia (as opposed to Indian) poet who wrote in English. He said he derived his poetic metre from the folk and tribal chanting that went on all night in the distance. Did the house in Tinkonia Bagicha, Cuttack, where he spent all his life have something to do with this?

What made Arun Kolatkar the recluse he was? To what extent was his birth in Kolhapur and life in Bombay responsible for his writing of Jejuri, which falls midway between the two cities? Was it his privileged existence as an ad man that caused him to be shattered by the words of the rustic old woman whom he encountered in Jejuri?

As a medical man, was it Gieve Patel’s profession that led him to foreground the body (as opposed to the soul) in so many of his poems?

Kamala Das wrote her autobiography and then denied that most of what was narrated in the book was truly autobiographical. A biography written during her lifetime would have enabled her readers and admirers to separate the grain from the chaff.

What was Dom Moraes’s life like during the years when he had a run-in with Bombay’s religious extremists for the racket that they created in his neighbourhood? Likewise, what was his life like when he left his Colaba home and his wife Leela and began living separately? Nissim Ezekiel, too, lived separately, and my biography does document the kind of lonely life that he lived at The Retreat.

Of course, it isn’t as if a biography cannot be written after a poet has passed. Some may even regard such a biography as objective, given the aesthetic and emotional distance that it affords the biographer. But a biography written after a poet’s death would be heavily dependent on secondary sources, and this, to my mind, puts the biographer at a disadvantage.

There are critics, even today, who dislike literary biographies because they think that they encourage biographical criticism, which to them is a euphemism for gossip. But this view is passe. In the postmodern age, where the personal is political, one cannot afford to make artificial distinctions between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” as TS Eliot has famously written in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

There are literary historians who regard the first generation of post-independence Indian-English poets as also the last. They argue that although the next generation of poets has some names that stand out, they are nowhere near their illustrious predecessors. If this is true, then it is highly regrettable that we are left without definitive biographies of most of them, which would tell us so much about their lives and their work.

R Raj Rao is a writer and professor. He is the author of Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorised Biography.