Before and After — almostisland

This interview was conducted by Sharmistha Mohanty and myself in Bandra, Bombay, over two intense days in December 2010, as a prelude to editorial discussions of the manuscript of Jussawalla’s third book of poems, Trying to Say Goodbye (2011) that Almost Island was getting ready to publish. I began to transcribe and edit it nearly two years later. Many passages in the first transcription have been spliced and reordered so that the interview flows more smoothly in thematic sections and on the page. I’ve used square brackets for clarifications, continuity and smoothing over; anything not within square brackets is a direct quote.

– Vivek Narayanan, December 2012

Childhood, School

VN: Adil, could you start off maybe reflecting on your childhood and your boyhood? I’m also interested in the context of growing up around different languages, and your transition to English.

AJ: I’m glad we’re beginning with this question because, it was only yesterday – just to complicate a multilingual background further – I remembered there was one more language that was part of my childhood and that kind of language is I think part of many people’s childhood in India, but it’s never quite mentioned. We mention the languages which we use or hear in everyday life, but we don’t mention the ancient languages in which, for example, our prayers are written.

Let’s just say that I grew up like a lot of Indian children in multilingual circumstances. I don’t unfortunately – perhaps unfortunately from the point of view of what people want me to say about that multilingual background or environment – I don’t lay too much store by that. I feel like saying, So what? Yes, we grew up in a multilingual environment and some people don’t. I don’t see this multilingual environment necessarily making us write better poetry or write better prose than someone who comes up in a monolingual environment, right? I think we confuse things because this multilingual environment is largely oral. It is not literary. And it can hardly ever be literary. Except in very few, very remarkable cases, someone like Arun Kolatkar. It’s quite possible for a person to be multilingual, because of the environment he grew up in. That means he could be speaking fluent colloquial Marathi, fluent colloquial Gujarati – I’m just leaving English out of it for now – and perhaps fluent Hindi, but be writing badly in all three languages! This multilingualism doesn’t automatically make you a good writer. I think some of us make the mistake of... we confuse the things. I know Dilip Chitre talks a lot about being trilingual, but one wants to say that, Dilip, this is a commonplace. A truck driver will be trilingual or quadralingual, right? So many of us are. But are you saying that you are so multi-tongued and many-handed that you can write seriously in Gujarati – because that was his background, and he grew up in Marathi, and Hindi – and now [you] can bring in English. So... we have to be weary of this.

I regret the fact that the Parsi community I belong to has been seen through a very distorted lens. [There is] a completely mistaken notion, that we speak pukka English at home, and we’re so Westernised that we just talk to each other in English – no.

No more than people who’ve lost Malayalam because of their English education. They find it difficult to talk about certain subjects in Malayalam. And I find that strange, I find that irritating: “Why aren’t you talking in Malayalam, why are you talking in English?” So – I suppose, why I am I annoyed by that, or feel surprised by that, or don’t quite like it? Because perhaps I do have an idea that there is a “natural” language for people to talk in everywhere. I think the fact that you [Sharmistha] may not talk in Bengali in front of us is for reasons of politeness, right? That I understand. But sometimes there are discussions going on between two people who share a common language, and those discussions go on in English. Now the same thing happens among Parsis. After a certain point you can’t talk to your father or mother in Gujarati. You have to speak in English, the language of the papers you’re reading, and so on.

In my own case, I think my mother did finish her schooling in an English medium school in Pune. She had a broken... kind of... they were never in one place. My brother and I were the only ones in the family to be born in Bombay. My father was born in Lahore, my mother in Jalna, in Maharashtra. And they met in Poona, where they had gone for reasons to do with education. So my mother’s English has never been a very good English. And much of the time my brother and I would talk to her in Gujarati. My father came from a more Anglicised background. He wrote his books in English, there was no question of writing in Gujarati. But they could both read Gujarati; I had to learn how to read Gujarati, because Gujarati was not taught in school. And it has a slightly different script from the Devanagari. And there were no books to read in Parsi Gujarati. The textbooks were all in what is called “shubh Gujarati” – the correct Gujarati.

Why Parsis never wrote in their own particular kind of Gujarati, I’ll never know. But it could be partly the refugee’s or the immigrant’s want or desire to say, I’m like one of you, where it matters I can write in your language, not my language which you guys make fun of – it may be that. I’m not sure how I... I knew the whole historical business of the Parsis arriving in the ships, and that full glass of milk in which they put sugar... I’m not sure how much of that is true because that is repeated in other immigrant communities, the Jews have a similar... The Jews who came to India have also a shipwreck, and sugar being put in a glass...

SM: Really?

AJ: Yes. No, it’s quite possible Sharmistha, that that was a traditional way of welcome, of foreigners, that the king would offer a glass of milk and it was traditionally done, for the new arrivals. Put the sugar in. Nothing that the king is suggesting [instead] that, We are full up. And the Parsis say, No, no, but we are sweetening things!

Apart from that myth, did the king who gave us land and – more than a thousand years ago – did he really say, You must stop speaking your language? I’m not very sure. The language may just have died out. As happens when people leave their birthplace over the generations. It can happen in a matter of two years. We know now when children are transplanted from here to America, they lose the language very fast. So the... how did I start writing in English, I don’t honestly know. If I just consider the languages I heard as a child, it would be... Hindi from the people who came to see us, to sell their wares; there would be Marathi because my mother spoke fluent Marathi to the servants and my father also spoke Marathi to his staff. There would be a smattering of English, and perhaps more and more English between my brother and myself. And then there would be prayers, which both my brother and I had to learn, and which my parents themselves knew, because we had to get those prayers by heart for the Navjot ceremony.

I’d forgotten about those prayers. And I feel that myself and many other Parsis would have not strayed away from the Zoroastrian religion, not become Buddhists and Hindus and perhaps also some converted to Islam, if there had been poetic translations of the Gathas and the scriptures, which are written in... I’ll just use the word Old Persian because – it’s complicated, some are in Pahlavi, some are in Avestan. So let’s just call it Old Persian. If there had been a translation of the Gathas, which are supposed to be Zarathusthra’s songs in language which even remotely approached that of the King James Bible – which I think is magnificent – then I think many more people would have stayed within the religion. Because after a while, it takes its toll. You attend the Navjot, you don’t know what the priests are saying, what the child is saying. You attend weddings, you don’t know what the priests are saying, you attend funerals, you don’t know what the priests are saying...
I mean, a funeral is important, you are grieving, it’s good to have words with which you can grieve. And we don’t have that. There are translations in English, and in Gujarati. Now I can’t talk about the Gujarati versions, but the English versions are workaday, straight-forward translations. There’s not much poetry in them. I’ve gone away from the subject, but it’s also related – how we... lose, if you like, a root language. And possibly even the philosophy and religion which goes with it.

I grew up in my father’s clinic [which was also the Jussawalla residence on Cumballa Hill]. We just had one or two rooms in this huge clinic, and the rest was for my father’s patients, you know, massage cubicles and steam bath cubicles, and so on. Until I was ten years old, we didn’t have a “home” as it were, where a father would come home to from work. So I grew up in really a multilingual crowd – I mean, it’s not as though I would be mingling with the patients – we led a fairly separate existence, but from what one could hear... [there were many languages].

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Starting to Write

I didn’t see myself as a writer when I was in my boyhood. I was more interested in colour and paints and... I liked to draw, I liked to paint. My mother encouraged that. It’s just at some stage during my schooldays, maybe during the middle period, maybe standard five or standard six, I found that I was writing reasonably well, because I’d get good marks for essays, and the teachers I respected would say, Very good, or something. And then one was singled out as someone who was writing well. I don’t know how that happened.

As for poetry being well taught or badly taught... Many people say they’re put off poetry because it’s badly taught in school. Come on – I mean how do some people become poets? They have the same background – how do some people still... how are they still drawn to poetry? Art is hardly ever taught in schools, how is it there are so many artists and so many people who appreciate art? So I don’t go by that. I mean people are just not interested in poetry because it’s too much effort. You know, a book of poems is formidable, how can you have it in the house, because it’s... “I don’t understand poetry, I’m not going to take it down.” That’s it, basically.

I do remember liking some of the poems in our anthologies. I think we were lucky to have fairly modern poems – not Eliot, but pre-Eliot. Ralph Hodgson, and... you know – he made you feel for his animals. And in my final years at school, I did attempt a poem... I wrote a poem for the school magazine about being a prefect. Which was basically doggerel, right? So that... But I knew I could write, and by that time I had started keeping a diary. And I wanted to... Basically, the diary was there to record the public events of the day, like through headlines of newspapers, and a bit about my day. Gradually the public events part dropped away, and I just wrote about what I wanted to get off my chest, I suppose. And in terrible language. This is why I’ve kept the bad English of my diary for this book [Trying to Say Goodbye 1] there, you know. And I indicate that language was a problem for me in London, in my poem dedicated to the Pelikan Graphos [opening poem of Trying to Say Goodbye].

If you read the note from my diary, the English is very bad. “My inability in handling a Graphos...” – that’s not English, but I’ve kept it there to show that that was the kind of English which I was writing.

I did my Senior Cambridge in 1955. It was around that time, maybe ’53, ’54 that the Brits introduced A levels. When that happened, Cathedral school [a school in Bombay] introduced a course which they called “HSC”. And as luck or ill-luck would have it, they started with my year, a two year course. So in 1955, when I got my Senior Cambridge, the next step would have been, after a few months, to go to first year college here, in Bombay, right? By then I had dreams of escape. And I felt the soonest possible... Maybe I could do, perhaps two years in JJ School of Art, and then go off for architecture? But no, what happened was this HSC class in Cathedral, which meant I would have to spend two more years in a school I hated. So a kind of compromise was reached, I was still too young, I was just fifteen, so it was felt that ok, Do one year of HSC at least.

Now that year, I suppose 1956, was a turning point in terms of my appreciation of writing and literature. Because we were a very small class. It may interest you to know that... a painter, she painted very well, called Anjolie De was in my class – that is the Anjolie Ela Menon now. It was a lovely class, just four or five of us. We had a great art teacher – Lady Temple – but, importantly for me, they had imported a teacher from England, called Rider Salmon who introduced us to modern poetry. And modern literature. One of our texts was Murder in the Cathedral. And this iconic anthology, which generations of Indians seem to have been brought up on, Kenneth Allott’s Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse [1950; revised 1962]. Everyone here – Anand [Thakore] – every young person has also read that anthology. So that anthology has lasted. And it was the first anthology I read which had a lot of contemporary poetry and also the editor’s comments on each poet. We also had Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as one of [our] texts. So you could see that this guy [the teacher at Cathedral] suddenly opened up a whole new world, at least for me. And he wrote poems, and then I said, I’ll write poems, and wrote some Eliotesque piece about a toy boat going round in circles, you know, the kind you see at what used to be called Hornby Road – in a little basin, these little toy boats going phat-phat-phat around. So then I felt that not only was I being drawn to poetry, but I should write it. Not enough to make me think of myself as a poet, but that was a turning point, ’56.

[Then, during] my loneliness and ultimate breakdown in London, I had these megalomaniac moments and I thought I was turning into a lizard, or something, you know a very sort of a psychotic episode, because it’s very hard to accept that you’re saddled with this personality for the rest of your life. You can’t change. You came here to be popular, to be more outgoing, and in fact, you went more and more into yourself. So the release I had was in writing poems, the kind that you see... The only poem I published from that period was “Seventeen” [in Land’s End2]. But they were all written in that kind of style. And then I tried... naturally, one would think of home and childhood, so some corny, more formal poems were also written. I’ve never published them, because they just don’t work.

[1] Adil Jussawalla, Trying to Say Goodbye. New Delhi: Almost Island Books, 2011

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More on the Origin of the Poems in Land’s End

AJ: The poems in Land’s End, I think, really took shape – apart from the first one [“Seventeen”], which is really written in 1957, when I was seventeen – I think most of them would have been written in, say, 1959 and 1960 – after I had completed [a] play, I think in about maybe July or August of 1958.

The play itself is not something I would show in its entirety, because it’s a young man’s work. It’s basically an Ibsen play. It’s set in some dark area of Scandinavia, though I don’t mention the country. Its characters have Western names. The main character is called Jian, and the play is called that. I think it’s a Scandinavian version of “John” perhaps. And really, it deals with renunciations and breaking away from family, and the family being the symbol of bourgeoisie personified. I think the father is a priest, and he can’t understand his son who goes into these meditative phases and is basically a mystic. So that was the mystical connection and not the structured, religious one of churchgoing... And there is no doubt that this theme comes about from the crisis I was going through because of my personality: if my personality can’t change, it remains so introverted, then there must be a reason for that, a reason which is sort of beyond sociology and psychology. Having come from a country with such an overpowering religious, what do I call it, religious “element” in society. Although my family, my parents and brother, were not religious people as we would understand them – they didn’t insist on prayers or insist on going to the fire temple or anything like that – you still couldn’t avoid people talking about hearing the voice of God, which my uncle, Dinshah Mehta, quite volubly did, because he went through a conversion from being a naturopath and a doctor of Gandhi, one of Gandhi’s doctors, and having a clinic in Poona into a... if you like, a sanyasi. He heard the voice of god saying You must leave all this, and set up the Society of Servants of God: “You are the servant of servants of god”, and so on. Naturally, the kinds of things he would tell a thirteen year old like me, or a fourteen year old – I think he gave up everything in ’55 when I was fifteen – though I was sceptical, had an effect, and certainly those words came back when I had this crisis.

Then, I did go to my ex-piano teacher, who was a mathematician, and a teacher of maths in a school in London called Phiroze Mehta. And he was a practicing Buddhist, quite well known in Buddhist circles there, or he was at one point. And without him being my guru, he certainly made me think about spiritual matters in perhaps a more precise and different way than my uncle did, and... I suppose I still believe in most of the things he said. I mean one of them being that, not to think of an afterlife, but Heaven and Hell are really states that you go through. And Hell really is, having once seen the face of God, never to see it again. I think there’s a lot of truth in that.

I think all of us are given to having a mystical experience at least once in our lives, and somehow we do seek it unconsciously, if not consciously, and are then unhappy because we don’t have it, [or] because it doesn’t come back. It’s like Eliot’s “I heard the key turn once, and once only.” I myself don’t think that he ever had a mystical experience, but he wanted to. And you know, you speak to many people, and they say, Yes, there was one day when everything fell into place, and there were no questions to ask, and I knew why I was here, knew why the universe was here. It’s a very strong experience and it happens to practically everyone.

But people don’t like talking about it [such an experience] because they think you’ve gone off your head. And when I talked about it, people did think I’d gone off my head. And I, in a sense, had [gone off my head] – because having had that kind of experience close to where I was staying, in a park in London, when everything made sense, one starts getting megalomaniac, right, you think you’re chosen, that you’re some kind of prophet... so that didn’t endear me to my fellow students very much!

I don’t think I was offensive, but I was just uncommunicative, in my black turtleneck pullover. Black was very fashionable, and turtleneck pullovers, because of Colin Wilson – they would say, “death warmed up”, right? They [fellow students] knew something was happening, but they didn’t want to go anywhere near it. That kind of experience came through... the words for that experience came through in soliloquies that I gave Jian in that play. And those soliloquies were in verse, you see. Longish ones. I don’t mind showing those to you, imitative as they are of Eliot and other people.

So those were the kind of poems which... “Seventeen” [from Land’s End] was close to. They were written in that kind of form. But after that experience, I felt I should take the writing of poems more seriously, and began shaping poems.

[2] Adil Jussawalla, Land’s End. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1962

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Chronology: Leaving Architecture School; Between Oxford and India; Working in England After Oxford

V: Just to get the chronology right – although chronologies aren’t everything – you were born and you grew up in Bombay, and at the age of seventeen you went to England to study. And that was the school of architecture. And you were in the school of architecture for –

A: I was there exactly a year. I was probably the youngest – or one of the youngest – in the class. I didn’t realise that there would be students who’d done their A levels who were older than me. In that sense, perhaps I was inexperienced and immature. But I still got reasonably good notices from my teachers, it wasn’t as though they felt I had no future in the school, not at all. It’s just that what happened is, during that year I got so introverted... See, as I said earlier, there was one thing I wanted London to do for me: to change my personality. And it’s a great shock to realise that it’s too late, even at the age of seventeen, to change your personality.

At this time, one’s fantasies hardly had to do with writing, they had to do with singing, pop stardom, they had to do with acting, the stage, because that was what was so exciting about London at that time. It was just after Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, there was a vital theatre movement developing, with the Royal Court Theatre as its centre. If you were anyone you had to have a play out when you were seventeen or eighteen, like Michael Hastings did; across on the continent you had Francoise Sagan, who wrote her novel when she was eighteen. There was a whole post-Colin Wilson phenomenon of youth in the fifties.

Here I must say I completely disagree with many people who write about the sixties and seventies in Britain. They seem to have a real contempt for the fifties, as though nothing was happening, but they’re completely wrong. The whole anti-establishment movement which the sixties was full of – the irreverence and so on – came from the mid- to late fifties. The precursors of say, Monty Python in the sixties were the Goon Shows on the radio in the fifties. There was a certain sort of release of youthful energies in Britain. Irreverence, because they had last got rid of India, they’d gotten rid of empire – it’s something I mention in my introduction [to New Writing in India 3]. For us, it was a continuing burden, but for them, they were pretty happy!

V: As you mentioned in that introduction, though you wanted to be a part of that, the circumstances were completely different for you. You continued to feel outside of that.

A: That’s right, yes. I did very much want to be a part of that, in one way or the other, on my own terms; I hardly knew what was going on in Bombay between the years 1957 and ’61. I was in England for about four and a half years before I came back.

V: What did you do after architecture school?

A: After architecture school, let’s say I just lacked the guts to break out on my own financially. At that time you had to be registered in an institution abroad for the Indian government to release any funds for you. You couldn’t go for just any course. Architecture, like higher education, was a course that the government recognised to the extent that Ok, they would give you that six hundred pounds a year for your education there, right? I realised that giving up architecture meant the end of these funds. If I had more confidence in the play I’d finished by then, if I felt it was going to get anywhere, I might have got out of my depression and learnt the ropes of theatre by working backstage, by simply giving up academia, which I’m prone to do anyway, right, because perhaps I’ve never been happy in school. (This has unfortunately continued even to this day: when I was talking to St. Xavier’s College [in Bombay] recently, I said I like teaching but I don’t like being a student in these colleges.) So anyway what happened was, I was totally depressed, I think I had to accept the fact that I would have to continue my education in another way. Now everything started rebounding on me. I had got into this school of architecture early because they didn’t require A levels. A levels was something new at that time. But most colleges, practically every university in Britain at that time required students to have passed some subjects in their A levels. We didn’t have A levels here. Though after school, as I’ve said, I did one year of what could have been an A level course, but was a two year course. I decided to break it, I said I’ve had enough of being in Bombay and went away. Now after having left architecture, if I wanted to continue, then I would have to get my A levels, that meant going back to school. Which is a horrifying prospect when you are eighteen, going back to school. But that’s what I had to do.

I registered in a private school which groomed people to get into Oxford and Cambridge but at the same time had students from the Middle East and elsewhere who were taught English proficiency. And this was a little school in Felsham, a little village in Suffolk, where Angus Wilson lived. So that was a bonus, being there, because I could show him my plays, and all that. It was exciting meeting a writer like that. He talked a lot, it was quite brilliant.

And then again I had to apply for Oxford and Cambridge the hard way – it wasn’t the quota from India, I had to sit for the entrance exams as a British student would. One of the colleges rejected me, University College accepted me. So that was it. But my problem with myself only continued because there was no way I could become more sociable. Everything seemed to conspire to deny me social opportunities! What social opportunities do I have in an English village, right, where I spent a year and a half getting my A levels? Then you go up to Oxford and you’re put up in a separate building with some postgraduate students. You’re not even living in college – which would have given me an opportunity [for a social life]. And then on top of that one had to learn this dreadful – what I thought of at that time – Old English. Because of the great Tolkien, who was one of the professors there, they insisted – perhaps they still do – that to be properly educated in English literature you had to know Old English, which is to me a foreign language, and for everyone a foreign language, and I don’t have an aptitude for that. So I flunked Old English in the prelims, which were held during the second term of Oxford. After that you don’t have to do a thing until your finals; a bad system perhaps. So after flunking, and then I said look, I’ve had enough of this country, the people, everything, and I came back to parental shock and horror. I hadn’t told them.

Then I wanted to continue my education here, but couldn’t break out. I was too... kind of... already formed in that way. That you had to get your degree... and what work could I have done, what employment could I have had, without a degree up here, right? But the colleges here said, I suppose quite rightly, that you have to follow the rules, you have to at least sit for the Inter-Arts. To get admitted to Elphinstone, or... I applied to St. Stephens. So it just meant that I was being held back all the time. I felt that if I now lose another year, I won’t get a degree until I’m twenty-five. That is ten years after I probably left school. You understand that I suddenly didn’t like the idea of at all.

VN: But you published Land’s End almost immediately after you came back, at 22?

AJ: I came back in ’61 and it was only then that I got to know people like Nissim, and other poets. I think Kumar Shahane at that time was also writing poetry. And Nissim recommended P.Lal. Lal did a rush job because, you see what happened in the mean time was, since I was having problems getting into colleges here, I began a correspondence with Univ., my college in Oxford, saying, Can you take me back? So, they’re very good up there, they said, Yes, ok, but you’ll have to sit your Old English again, pass your prelims. So somehow I managed, and so...

VN: ...you went back to Oxford.

AJ: Yes, I spent about a year and a half year here and I went back, having dropped a year at Oxford, in 1962, and then I stayed the course till 1964 when I got my degree. Then I stayed on in London. And then it was, all my job applications after Oxford, no, no,no,no – and then I saw a little ad in, I think, the New Statesman, for a teacher training course, short course, two or three weeks, to teach English as a foreign language. And I’ll never forget that place because it was a turning point. The people at the course were out-of-work actresses and, you know, people who just wanted a diploma and if they had any talent in teaching English – using the direct method, which was completely new to me – then they’d get someplace. So that course brought out my suppressed acting ambitions, you know, the theatrical side of me, because it required teaching of a different kind: interesting the students right away in the language. Not using their language. So I did well in the course, and got teaching assignments. And I stayed on.

VN: And how long did you stay on for?

AJ: I got my first teaching assignment I think in 1965, and I came back in January 1970. By then I was with Veronik and her daughter Katia and I came here because of that book... [New Writing in India]

3 Adil Jussawalla (ed.), New Writing in India. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974

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Coming Back, Finding a Writing Self

S: I’ve been reading all your past interviews and essays; in a couple of places you’ve talked about the fact that you came back from England a couple of times and then went back again. And finally, you kind of felt that you had to return, because this is where you were actually able to write or be creative. So I just want you to talk about that. Also because both of us [Sharmistha and Vivek] have also done that journey in some sense or the other.

A: One thing should be clear [again] – I didn’t leave Bombay at the age of seventeen, I didn’t go to London with the idea that that would be a creative place for me, that that would be the place where I would be writing seriously. I can’t at all say, as so many people do, that I always wanted to be a writer. No, it wasn’t like that. If anything I was drawn to colour, and shapes and forms, and painting. But I did find writing privately in my diary to be a kind of release. And it seems to me I’ve always wanted to record things, maybe because I fear that my memory will one day go, or that it’s useful to record things. So it wasn’t – I didn’t go to another place for me to write better or even to start writing. But once I was there, I realised that I had to write, to save my life, that I had ambitions to be a writer. Basically, to be a playwright. I also read a lot of... I read a lot, as much as I had time to during my architectural studies. And it became clear that there was no real answer a writer can give as to why he chooses to move to another place – except that he has an instinct that that place will help his writing. So long before we started talking of diaspora and large scale immigration, the writer to me was always a person who didn’t have to explain, say why he needed to go from say, London to Madrid. Except that somewhere, deep inside him or at the back of his mind was the idea that this was the next step, for him to be able to go on writing. I think that is probably what drove someone like Lawrence Durrell to be here, there and everywhere... in Europe, by and large. That certainly is what made some American writers go to Paris. Certainly someone like James Baldwin: he instinctively felt that that would be the place which would help his writing. Now, I don’t think I’ve quite answered your question...

S: You have.

A: Yes. Ok, then why did I come back from England. I think again, it wasn’t because I felt, at least the first time I came back, it wasn’t because I felt that it could help my writing. I think that may have been a sort of secondary feeling that I had. I did come back having chucked up Oxford and having chucked up architecture in the first place. Now, I see from my father’s diary that my chucking up Oxford was what shocked him the most. He doesn’t mention the troubles I gave him when I left architecture, though I know that gave him a lot of trouble, and he wondered if I’d lost my head because I was talking mystical, you know, about hearing voices. But I came back because I felt London and “the West”, if you like, had become a dead end for me. I needed to almost angrily and vehemently go deeper into my Indian side. It happens to every single one of us – I think you both bear me out – every one of us who goes abroad from here does feel that, hey this is not what I expected and why are they so ignorant about me and where I come from... and this had reached a terrible pitch during my first year at Oxford. Because by then I had already written two plays, completely unstageable plays, and I had to realise the hard way that I couldn’t be a playwright. But it was not the disappointment of that so much, but just the idea, Hey, how is it that I’m not being seen? How is it that friends of mine, undergraduates at Oxford, could pick up my play Floodwaters, which was set in India, and say, "Who's interested in India?" Something of course that still continues. But that I suppose that would be the seed, those responses from which Missing Person 4 grew.

But that still doesn’t answer your question about whether I actually changed places to write better! I must say that I don’t know why I haven’t been more productive. One could simply say that I’ve been irresponsible, I’ve been lazy. I will accept that. But also, I find that it’s been difficult for me to set down in writing – what I really want to say – in poems. I’ve just basically written [many] things I don’t like. I feel that way. They’ve been written out of the wrong kind of impulse. Maybe to be more accessible, to be more popular... things based on political events, history, which I find that... I find looking at those drafts, looking at those poems that...perhaps I’ve written them to say, Hey, I’m one of you guys, I’m one of you committed people, whereas perhaps I’ve been wanting to say something else.

But even if it didn’t happen immediately, coming back to India did release me into writing more poetry and writing other things. As far as my literary career is concerned, I’ve really had to learn the hard way, through actual experience, that, this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. For instance, to go back to the time I thought I’d chucked up Oxford forever, when I came back and spent about a year and a half in India – I did attempt to write poems in the more, sort of, immediate style of the Beats to do with, say, a wedding in a poor area of Bombay, or just writing in that somewhat... not frenzy, but exciteable, excited beat tone. And then when I looked at those drafts, I said – but this isn’t me. This has happened quite a lot.

4 Adil Jussawalla, Missing Person. Bombay: Clearing House, 1976

contents

The Story of the New Writing in India Anthology; the Seeds of Missing Person

VN: You came back here in 1970 to do the anthology?

AJ: What happened was – this is an unwritten chapter in the Indian writing story. Part of that missing person syndrome also involved your feeling that, These guys are so effing ignorant. You know, they don’t know anything about Indian writers. I had that feeling right from the start, during Tagore’s centenary – and now it shows how I’ve aged, because it was fifty years ago – in fact, I wrote a piece on Tagore for the Times. Obviously it wasn’t going to be published, I didn’t know the ropes, right? I just wanted that the writers I knew should be known, and I felt I should write about them. I did that by replying to John Wain’s 5 ... what I thought was a supercilious piece, about his visit to India. I probably agree with everything he said at that time, but at that time I was furious... To say that “the most fortunate inhabitants of India are the birds”, because they have such freedom and others don’t. I probably agree with that now, but at that time I had a sense of outrage. I wrote a reply, sarcastically, to Encounter. None of these things got published, but I’m talking about a feeling, which was shared by other Indians there – Farrukh Dhondy, for instance, who came later, I think in ’64, Hubert [H.O.] Nazareth, who came to London to work, and other people like Ajit Singh who was at Cambridge and who later became head of Associated Capsules here in Bombay. Wherever we could – and I say “we”, because there was a sense of some people being together – we tried to promote writers from India. To some extent it was successful. Carcanet, which was a journal in Cambridge, had people like Adi Katrak, Kersey Katrak’s brother, who was involved. Farrukh was writing poetry at that time. He published in Carcanet. They had a special Oxford and Cambridge issue, where I and some other writers featured. We got invited to the Poetry Society at Earl’s Court, the readers being myself, Hubert Nazareth and... Nathuram Godse!

VN: Nathuram Godse [the man who killed M.K. Gandhi]?!

AJ: Yes, they got it wrong. It was a poem by Farrukh called “Nathuram Godse”! [ie., Farrukh Dhondy was one of the readers and one of the poems he was going to read was called “Nathuram Godse”. The Poetry Society mixed up the names.]

VN: So the missing person story really starts in England, in this community of alienated Indian writers.

AJ: It starts from – it’s an inadequate word, but you can say it starts from the culture shock every colonised person has when he goes to the mother country. Everyone. I’ve noticed this – Caribbean writers say, but we didn’t expect everyone to be like this, we didn’t expect this, we didn’t expect this... It is a shock. Because we have our dreams of our lives changing...

SM: Just a factual question, how many years altogether were you abroad, if you don’t count the return back and forth?

AJ: I went there in July 1957. And I came back in January 1970. Punctuated by at least two visits. I haven’t talked about my second visit, but that was different. By then I had a job. The first... it became a visit, it wasn’t meant to be, lasted for almost a year and three months. I came back in, I think June or July, from Oxford, and went back in October ’62. So that was a long period when I... it wasn’t a Bharat Dharshan then, but it was the wearing of white khadi and going to Chinmayanand’s lectures and exploring Indian, basically Hindu culture, going to Ajanta, and so on.

VN: And it was in that period that Land’s End was published...

AJ: Yes, but all of the poems in Land’s End were written abroad, in England. As I said, I had no idea as to what was going on here, the literary scene.

VN: Including this poem [from Land’s End], “A Letter for Bombay”? Which seems like a kind of... the first sort of hint of a transition to the voice that emerges in Missing Person.

AJ: Yes. There I recognise... I see it [Bombay] as a divided city, I don’t know for what reason, but I also recognise that I am a divided person. And hence I try, maybe in a corny way, to resolve it at the end, that “I shall return and pass beyond the storm” [quoting from “Letter For Bombay”] – a storm of division, actually. Yes, it was written from there.

VN: And this desire for return that is first expressed...

AJ: I must say that in that poem I did not expect – I did not mean return in a permanent way. That “I shall just pass through Bombay again, as a different person...”, this is what I suppose I was trying to say. I had no thoughts really of settling in India until... Ya, well, maybe the seeds are there because, shortly after that, I do come back, I do give everything up.

So these poems were written towards the end of 1961. Now, “White Peacocks”... The book [Land’s End] ends with “White Peacocks” – those were the peacocks I saw during my first year at Oxford from my digs in Merton Street. And there too, I say, “the prevalence of coarser things...” Implying that I should be coming back... You know, by “coarser things” I mean things that are coarser than white peacocks, not things that are coarser than me.... I do say, “Sufficient the moral in my nearing departure...” – so by then my mind must have been made up – “...And the prevalence of coarser things.”

VN: So, to go back to “Letter for Bombay”, the sense that returning is somehow going to allow you to be whole...?

AJ: Yes, I think so, but instead it didn’t make me whole, it made me a “Marxist”, right? I suppose practically everyone one knew at that time was intuitively left of centre. In London, I really hadn’t studied Marxism or any of the “required books” of communism and Marx, at all. I did so only after I returned to India. Anyway, instead of becoming whole in India, in a sense, all the different parts of me seem to have exploded or disintegrated, which is what Missing Person is about. Because it seemed to me impossible, and still is impossible, for me to reconcile the extremes to which one is subjected living in India.

VN: In terms of the anthology and the poems in Missing Person... the anthology comes first, I think, before you actually begin the poems in Missing Person?

AJ: Yes.

VN: How did the anthology come into being?

AJ: That was my unfinished answer to your first question, earlier question... As I said, all of us were feeling marginalised in the sense that... why do people talk about India in these simplistic terms, and do not try and come to terms with some of its writers and literatures. Which many of us, even though living abroad were beginning to get aware of, the writing in the languages, through translations... I mean, every time there was a book by an Indian out there, this little hurrah would go out, you know, even if it was a translation, or especially if it was a translation. And one had respect for the translators, scholars working in the field: Ralph Russell in Urdu, Gordon Roadarmel in Hindi, Ian Raeside in Marathi. They had a very tough time getting their works published, and one sympathised. And then I saw that Penguin were bringing out a series, beginning with Italian Writing Today. After that, they went on to some other country – Czech Writing Today, Polish Writing Today, like that. Because of people like A. Alvarez and Ted Hughes, and one or two others, Penguin in particular was building up a library of European writers in translation. And they were a revelation. We wouldn’t be where we are now, if it wasn’t for them.

SM: You’re talking about the slim books, Celan and Montale...

VN: And those were the same European writers the Indians were reading...

AJ: Right. This was a real revolution, because that connected us right across, right across from Britain to India. The British themselves, I’m sorry to say, were very protective about themselves and didn’t seem to share our enthusiasm for the European writers and certainly not for American writers. In my year and three months in India, I read a fair amount of American poetry, and I picked up whichever American writers I could. In London, they were really sniffed at. People didn’t want to know about Lowell, etc., other American writers. I don’t know to what extent it continues now, but I felt I was much better read in American contemporary poetry than the British poets. It was very noticeable. They had no time for the things I liked and the things other Indians there liked.

VN: So you went to Penguin.

AJ: I went to Penguin. I just wrote to Penguin saying, Are you thinking of a “New Writing in India” as part of your series, and if so, I’m interested. And Giles Gordon was at Penguin at that time, and he wrote back saying, I’m sorry we’re not interested right now. This was probably in ’67 or ’66. They were not interested, they had not thought of such a project at all – while they were bringing out South African Writing, every other country. China probably not, because China – that was Communist China, it was during the Cultural Revolution, and maybe an academic... I think they probably thought it would be impossible to give a fair representation, given Chinese censorship. Then, I had a friend from Oxford, Michael George, who had a job in London after he graduated, with Andre Deutsch. And I don’t know how... but I suppose as another publisher, as someone from another publishing house, he knew Jill Norman who became the commissioning editor for this series, the Penguin series, maybe after Giles Gordon. So he said, Can I approach her? I said, Please do. And she seemed to trust me partly because... I’ll tell you what happened, maybe even before Giles said no, I had been building up a kind of dossier of Indian writers: Ramanujan’s translations, Dilip Chitre’s chapters from Making Love Like a Hindu, an essay or a chapter from Nirad Chaudhuri’s books, probably Continent of Circe, as a sample, you know, to say that look, this is the kind of writing that we do... Also possibly Nissim’s “Naipaul’s India and Mine” was included in that sort of sample file. And Jill must have got interested in seeing what was there in the file. Interestingly, in the final anthology, none of those things “made the cut”, so to speak!

SM: Except for Nissim’s piece.

AJ: Except for Nissim’s piece, yes. And I had – of course, foolishly, as we never know the complexity of things – I had thought I’ll go on being in touch with people in India, and I’ll make the anthology from there [England] only. Then I realised this was going to be difficult. So one of the reasons for coming to India was definitely to get a clearer picture of what was going on, and meet individual writers, commission translations... so that’s the time in the early 70s, say between January and April 1970 that I went round different parts of India meeting writers. M.T. Vasudevan Nair, O.V. Vijayan, Nirmal Verma – we had common friends, so that made things easier.

And that’s when the bulk of the work was done. Then Veronik and Katia [Jussawalla’s French partner and her daughter] had to go back to London in April because of Katia’s schooling. And then – a shock for them, I said... I decided to stay, I would like to stay on. And if you want us to continue, you come here. There was this complete turmoil and friends involved there to try and convince Veronik or get her to accept my decision. Well, we’re still here, somewhat in one piece, but, just to round this out, the good thing was that Katia was very happy in the very school I was thoroughly miserable in: Cathedral school! I had vowed that no child of mine would go to Cathedral. That too, it’s like Oxford, you decide, no, never again, but if other colleges, other schools don’t accept you, what will you do? Good for her, because she was very happy there.

VN: So, it was a pretty forceful and creative act to make this anthology...

SM: To my mind, you gave so much to this project, so I really would like to know all the things that impelled you. In what ways did it impact your own work, and your own thinking? And there hasn’t been anything like it since, so that makes it doubly significant...

AJ: Let’s take up the last remark first, that “there hasn’t been anything like it since”. The format was given to me by Penguin. This series – “New Writing” – does contain bits of everything. So I had the earlier books as a model. This isn’t something I imposed. I mean, left to myself I’m not very sure if I would have used the format, which is I think what people normally have in mind when they say, There’s nothing quite like this.

VN: Also the translation and the unity of it.

AJ: Right. That “there hasn’t been anything like this in subsequent anthologies...” I suppose that’s true, but then they didn’t have to go by a certain format.

SM: With some of the other anthologies there’s the problem of taking up a huge chunk of time, and then having to either come up with something that doesn’t seem randomly chosen, or to accept the randomness... Whereas your anthology – maybe it also reflects a time, Adil – but it just has so many people who I think, wow, this is such a good book...

VN: It’s a snapshot of an era.

AJ: It’s also a snapshot of... It’s true, it belongs to a certain time, and a certain sense of us all being in it together. Overarching all this is something that continues to be part of our lives, but in a rather more... but in a sillier way now, and that is, Wow, Penguin is interested, now look, Penguin is interested. So I know that the writers I met were impressed by that, and were cooperative... Some, not so impressed and not so cooperative. But by and large I am very grateful, I can say I’m amazed, that I emerged from this anthology unscathed. There was very little bad blood. There were some sharp exchanges, in terms of correspondence, but I had at a certain time to put my foot down, as all anthologists have to do, see... Please, please, you’re the last one whose permission hasn’t come in, send us the permission otherwise we can’t use you, that kind of thing. So one’s tone did sometimes have to become sharp. But I will say that I had very, very good advisors, and people who were interested in the same thing as I was. I mean the Hindi section would never have been what it is without Arvind’s [Arvind Krishna Mehrotra] help, and Arvind’s such a good translator. I mean his translation of Gyanranjan, “Father” is so beautiful...

VN: And the Dhoomil also...

AJ: Dhoomil, yes. You know, I had very good advisors. Dilip [Chitre] had already done an anthology of Marathi writing before this one was out. So he was very helpful. It was very clear even from my previous trip, we were all interested in the same thing, the same kind of writers, who showed a modernist intent... That I think was what we were all interested by... Not necessarily irreverent, which is what modernism in Britain encouraged, that was one of the strands, you know, the vicious satire, the irreverence, no-holds-barred kind of thing. Well that was going on with the Hungryalists, whom I don’t include here, because their achievement does seem to be dubious in some way. Instead I prefer Benoy Majumdar, who came to me through Jyotirmoy Datta’s translations. See, there were sources there which helped me, quite apart from people. There was Mehfil, the journal which was later renamed Journal of South Asian Literature, being edited by C.M. Naim, which contained translations... There were so many things going on in the sixties which helped me. There too there were these little magazines which erupted and died, sometimes in one issue. Blunt, which had the [Vilas] Sarang short story, “Flies”. That story had been my original choice for the anthology, instead I substituted it with “Rabbit”, which is funnier, which is satirical. I’ll tell you in a minute why I did that. There were many other little magazines around which didn’t directly help with the issue. There was Dionysius, which published Arun [Kolatkar]. I think that went on for two or three issues. Bombay Duck – there was only one issue. So there were these other more public sources to draw from.

I’ll tell you what happened. Two things: again, one lives and learns. Apart from writing to my school that I would not be returning, I had to ask Jill Norman, I said, Look, how do we manage, will you just accept the manuscript from here [India], and correspondence as well, since I’m going to be based here now. She said, Of course, there’s no problem. And this is before email. So you know, they were nice about these things, it didn’t matter to them as long as they had material. Then, she sent back a reader’s report which was initially discouraging... And I think that they were right. Because perhaps of my own attraction to melancholic and deathly things, perhaps the anthology contained a bit too much of that. I had Sunil Gangopadhyay’s marvelous story, “Drought”, which is about the visit of some journalists to a drought- ridden place, naturally, because that was my preoccupation, with the Maharashtra famine. And it seemed to be very important to have such things there. And as I say, there’s a strong smell of death about Indian writing, which was a comment Dilip took umbrage to, he said, That’s you, there’s no strong smell of death. But Dilip’s writing is so full of death and mortality, all the time. I didn’t have the heart to tell him, But look at your own work!

So there may some sort of truth in that [that the anthology was death-obsessed], and maybe I have read more into the fragmentary nature of the images and content of Indian writing; maybe I’ve read more into them than I should. I by and large stand by my introduction. Anyway, let’s say I discovered – through my helpers, through correspondence – writers in this country who are close to my heart. Someone like Mauni, from Tamil. It was wonderful discovering him. I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own, because he was in Tamil.

I’m still coming to the question. If I – maybe I did feel at a certain time, that Hey, all this work on this anthology – and it went on for some years – was keeping me away from my own work, my own poetry... Maybe I did feel that at a certain time. Now, I no longer make that division. It’s too painful for me to feel that I have not produced enough because I’ve been involved in the work of other writers. I have not felt this with the New Writing in India anthology, but sometimes there were occasions during the Clearing House period when I felt that it was affecting me. But one thing I do feel is that this kind of work in the anthology, and any kind of editorial work, and even in journalistic writing, which often requires editorializing or opinions, is making a certain part of my brain work, which doesn’t help my poetry. Which is why, of late, perhaps a bit too late, I’ve decided to cut down on that. Sometimes not read the papers at all. So there can be ground... so I can see the ground from which new poems will emerge.

VN: Would it be fair to say that Missing Person could not have happened without the anthology?

AJ: Quite possibly.

SM: You do say somewhere that [making the anthology] was a way for you to connect across languages with writers from your generation and time.

AJ: There was an answer forming at the back of my mind when you talked about my “divided self being healed in some way” the first time, which was part of that poem, “Letter to Bombay”. I think that yes, in working on this anthology – I’ve never thought of it this way, but I’m – I am both physician and healer of myself – not a physician to others, but physician in the sense, I am diagnosing things. In that sense, yes, it has been a bringing together maybe of different elements in myself, but this was in some way exploded in Missing Person.

You see, the whole process of deciding to leave here [India, in the first place] was also part of this long term project of changing myself fundamentally. Maybe if I’d read the great spiritual... you know, spiritual “beings” and gurus, they might have provided me an answer, that you can’t change fundamentally. But I’m allergic to their writing, I’m allergic to what I see as their posturings – Gurdieff and so on. And so I don’t go there, maybe to my cost, because I could have finally answered that. And I do take this up in my interview with Peter Nazareth, that if you decide even to undo all that’s made you, which includes English literature, and that means Milton, Shakespeare, Hardy, whatever... If you feel that this has made you a worse person than you should be, or you feel that you have a potential of being a more useful, a more creative person, without these, if you like, “foreign” influences... It seems a very foolish idea when you put it this way, but I think somewhere at the heart of every colonised person, there is this project of wanting to decolonise himself or herself; this has led to some terrible writing, especially in the field of theory, but I ask Peter, what happens is, after you do that, or you think you have done that, then what? What’s the new person? You may have simply destroyed yourself, fragile as the self may have been, and fragile as the people must have been, you’ve just destroyed it with nothing to follow.

So I don’t think the Missing Person act can be repeated, because it does... it deals with all kinds of failures to connect, to be unable to change. The hope of transcending it all. There’s always the hope there. And there’s a question mark about whether it happens or not, the transcendence. I’m aware of that problem. I think that’s what you asked me about, the disintegration in Missing Person. But I’m also aware of the question, What follows? And so, I’m no longer stressed about these matters as much as I was when I was writing Missing Person. I mean, I have to accept that fundamentally, I can’t change, and I have to ask – by I, I don’t just mean me, it’s also projecting onto other human beings – How far can we change ourselves? Or, in a Marxist sense, how far can we de-class ourselves? I don’t really believe it’s possible... fully.

Now, to go back to New Writing in India, I’m sure friends and many of the writers in the anthology may wonder why I haven’t taken a more active, professional interest in their writing since. Well, it’s a question I’m asking myself, perhaps, but I feel that other people have asked it too. I can’t tell you how many times people have said, Why can’t you do another anthology, and so on. And again and again, people say, You must get this anthology reprinted. But that’s not for lack of trying. It’s just that publishers want some of this anthology, and then a new one. So I don’t really see myself working on that kind of anthology again. So if someone decides to reprint that, that’s fine by me. I have maintained an interest, at least in the writings of many of the people there [in the anthology], when I’ve been able to get hold of their books in translation, or whatever, though not professionally. And I have been by and large very disappointed in the new translations. And if one gets very disappointed, then you don’t feel like reading more of the person’s work. There are people here I still like to read, like Basheer, there are others. But I haven’t been able to maintain a professional interest in any single writer in the anthology – at least those writing in the languages...

VN: Was there a lot of editorial work on the translations?

AJ: A fair amount.

VN: What was that process like?

AJ: That was really a... no it was good, it was... if you like, “Englishing” the translations, making them closer to a British English idiom than the original would suggest... Sometimes there were some clumsy sentences, sometimes the wrong word was used – “If you feel there’s a better word, let’s use that.” And people accepted my changes. That is the other thing to keep in mind.

VN: At that point, what was the state of the – what’s now become very sterile – languages debate? Were you treated as a sort of comprador...

AJ: No, no – among the writers, no. The writers were fortunately... All of whom I met, the Indian language writers weren’t aware of... well, the only book I had out at that time, which was Land’s End. They didn’t see me as a writer, they saw me as an editor, maybe. That probably helped!

SM: What consequences were there in your own working life from this? Even positive or negative.

AJ: Nothing negative. The anthology gave me a focus when I was working on it, it kept me busy, in a good way. It’s only later when I... when the work on this was done, and I was... I mean the anthology was published in ’74, though I had submitted it at least a year or two earlier. And I think after I’d submitted it, I was teaching at St. Xavier’s College. And it seems to have happened all the time in my life, there’s a time when you want to quit an institution... Like I quit architecture to write a play. At first I decided to take a year’s leave, then I decided not to go back. Because I was, what I thought, working on a novel. I was also drinking a lot at that time and, around that time or just after, Clearing House – you know the idea of publishing myself and other people – also came up. And as I hinted at earlier, it was at a certain stage in Clearing House that I felt that the writing of the novel was suffering. In fact, I don’t think that was true, I think it had more to do with my wrong approach to the novel, my drinking... But I do remember writing to Arvind – I mean, I have copies – writing to Arvind saying, Oh my poor novel, when will I get back to it, that kind of thing. So, it’s not the anthology so much as being involved in the Clearing House project at the time when I was trying to write a novel, that led to some negative feelings and bad tensions... which probably I didn’t resolve in the best way, probably I just had one more drink or something. But I more and more believe that you can’t blame some outside circumstance or... you can only blame yourself for the choices you make. Blame is perhaps not the right word... but you’re responsible for the choices you make. And I just chose the wrong kind of form for my novel. My approach to it was too literal [and factual].

contents

On Missing Person: Preamble, then a Detailed Reading 6

VN: Was Missing Person written before the novel was begun?

AJ: No, not really, I think Missing Person was something I was working on intermittently.

VN: Because it seems to take a quite different route from that kind of... the idea of describing the world falls away in Missing Person.

AJ: If I’d been able to do something like that in the novel, it would have worked. Because... Ya, Missing Person and working on the novel, there are parallels in time. They overlap in time.

SM: Did you come back to prose again in that way after that, a novel or...

AJ: No. I think fiction is... I can see myself writing prose of a different kind, in fact, if at all this memoir of my father is to develop, it would have to be a kind elegiac prose. Once again, I’ve done a lot of research, I’ve collected facts, but I have to perhaps invent or get under his skin, and also my mother, by using more of the things he says in his diary, rather than the social historical context in which he was working.

VN: Do you think in Indian English writing one feels a pressure towards facts, or various kinds of documentary or social historical writing?

AJ: I could have answered that question more easily a few years ago. I think what is noticeable in writing in English up here, especially in the poetry written in English, is a horror of making any kind of political statement. Politics, or the idea of a political poem is in the minds of many poets equal to sloganeering and sloganizing. Which isn’t necessarily the case, as you know from your reading of East European poets. You talk even to students about a political poem and they physically shrink as though you’ve mentioned a pornographic poem.

VN: Missing Person is a political poem, but its answer to the question, “What is a political poem,” is kind of complex and confusing.

AJ: If you say so, Vivek. But I’m not sure, because we’re also in the area where practically every poet, despite his or her horror of the political poem, will also say, Everything is a political statement, the writing of poetry is a political statement or even whichever poem I write is a political statement. So you have, I think, two irreconcilable views. I’m perfectly happy to accept the idea – or maybe believe in it – that whatever you do or don’t do is a political statement of some kind. But when I’m talking of the political poem I mean a poem with an overtly political content. That’s what I mean.

VN: Isn’t Missing Person precisely that?

AJ: It is that. It’s there, the political statements are there. For many of my friends and readers of the poem, too explicitly there, they don’t quite like it. They would prefer the political statement to be much more disguised.

VN: Perhaps it might be useful if you could give us a kind of schema for the poem? Also discuss who the speakers of the poem are, because this is actually a subtle point about the poem – it’s not actually very clear who the speakers are.

AJ: I think that could be a very valid criticism of the poem; I would like to see it as a criticism. Friends have said, You can’t be both the speaker and the subject of the poem. In other words, who is the main narrator of this particular poem?

VN: Well again, I don’t say that as criticism, I find it interesting, but... I think the second part is different voices, the first part is presumably one voice...?

AJ: Well, I admit, there may be a bit of trickery here. You see the drafts of the poem as it went through didn’t have all the sections in this particular order. Some of the poems in the second section may have been in the first. But at a certain stage I saw a clear division, that the second part has different people commenting on or... not directly, sometimes just putting down the thoughts they had on having seen what has gone before. And what has gone before, in the first part, I see – perhaps I should have made this clearer – as something of a horror film. Even the birth of the Missing Person is not to be taken too literally, it’s seen in cinematic terms, because I begin with the words “house full” [in part 1, section 1], which also refers to pregnancy just before birth – that’s what I had in mind. And of course, the British would say, “Full House”; but we say, “House Full” always, right? And “it’s a shocker” and “it’s all happening” and the birth of a kind of monster. A sort of monster born into troubled times. I mean, this thing at birth has hair all over!

Then the second section – I’m not sure if it’s really successful, but – indicates that this is a film, called Missing Jack. And I use some clichés of cinema, such as the Western. I suppose – I’m not very sure, but I think what the lines in italics mean is actually the subject of the movie. The baby may be somewhat grown up, talking, saying this is only a movie, it’s not so horrible as you think it is.

VN: Even here, it’s not clear that the missing person actually existed...

AJ: Ya, that’s the whole thing. Is the missing person even missing as a person. Is he a construct, you know, part monster, part whatever. It’s a concept I like, because it’s something we ask ourselves, are we fully human.. and I’m android, and I’m alien! You know sometimes there are... one gets so disconnected from things that you ask yourself that kind of thing.

I must say that I don’t use the first part as a continual unspooling of reels of film. It is disjointed. But the cinematic references keep coming up. Like “Indians bite the dust”, that kind of thing at the end of [part 1] section 4 .

VN: The idea of the Western [i.e., Wild West] is still there.

AJ: The Western is still there, with the obvious pun on Indians, but now I can see the confusion that may arise. In the early part [Missing Person, part 1, section 2], in the italics, it’s the subject talking. But here [Missing Person part 1, section 5], there are two elements of society talking. The first part, it’s the army or the police. The second, the italics are people saying, but how do you expect us to lock up his hands... He has no hands, there is no such person...

And then of course, the missing file. So the fifth section emphasizes the “missingness” of the missing person, as a person.

Now the sixth section [of part 1] – again a valid criticism, am I actually as the narrator calling people Black vamps and White faggots? I’m saying, No. But why have I used these... obviously, in this day and age, politically incorrect terms, and terms I wouldn’t use except as... to cause deliberate offense? Maybe there could be a failure of technique here; I’m using the available and current terms of prejudice. Which – a way out of it would have been to put them in inverted commas, but that would have made it too self-conscious. I can’t honestly say why those terms are there, why I’ve used this, knowing that they would cause offence. Except perhaps it could be the biased prejudiced part of us which we all suppress, you know in polite company. When we are at home, we call people all sorts of things, right? As with the smooth-talking politician, when you record them in their private meetings, they’re so full of swear words, you know, whether it’s De Gaulle or... I imagine Vallabhai Patel was like that. So of course, it would be the subconscious or unconscious speaking, but... You could say it’s the nasty part of me speaking, I don’t mind that.

VN: That distance between the narrator and the persona is constantly shifting.

AJ: I will accept this as a criticism, Vivek, because I think that lies at the root of some friends’ unease with this poem. I think it’s true, I should have kept a steady distance.

VN: I don’t agree with you, but, I find it to be a very interesting problem. I find it to be the central problem of the poem.

AJ: I’m glad you see it as a problem.

VN: Poems are about problems.

SM: He’s using problem in a positive sense. I feel the same way, very much, actually.

AJ: You see, again, I’m just going to work out why... I’m trying to use clichés and accepted icons or figures in our lives. And I say “our”, because this is what makes the poem social and politically relevant today, is that this is common to all of us, we all had an experience of the Western movie. And Hollywood. We’ve experience trains. And maybe the Black vamps and White faggots is part of using these obvious – would you call them tropes? – what we are made to see, or what we make ourselves see every day. And try to give a different twist to it.

VN: Something is rushing in here. You mentioned that you were hearing voices when you were in Architecture school. That’s how I would understand it.

AJ: You see, I’m using the “wretched of history” [part 1, section 8], which is close to the Fanon quote, “wretched of the earth”. You see, so there are certain phrases which we use almost as clichés, and which I’m trying to put in a sort of defamiliarised context...

It’s interesting what you say that something’s going on, and it’s sort of tumbling out... I think it’s what Laetitia [Laetitia Zecchini, the French scholar of Indian poetry in English] says in her piece that... She quotes this “nothing we put in stayed put”[part 1, section 10], and this is like what goes into the oppressed child – oppressed by family and, in a sense, colonial politics – emerges transformed in a horrible way.

Again, you know, using a certain class’s popular artifacts, like the waltz, “invitations to the waltz”, references to classical music, like the mass in B minor [both from part 1, section 11]. I’m using these things as a kind of given. And words like “colonial ape”[part 1, section 12], that’s part of Marxist invective.

VN: And the character... I don’t know if he begins in England, but somewhere at the beginning he’s told to “go back to [his] language”, and so then he does. And this is what happens when he does.

AJ: That’s also there. So that’s very much of that first part. Where’s home? He’s asked to go back home, but you can’t ever go back home, which is our commonplace. It’s a commonplace in the whole history of, if you like, modernist writing. Was it Thomas Wolfe who said, You can’t go home again? Something like that. Exactly because you return and everything has changed.

And then [in part 1, section 13] I pick up the cinematic image, which I seem to have lost, when I say, I want the film to stop in one sort of freeze frame, and keep that frame, the sockets are broken, “time’s disjointed all”. There is, I suppose, a retreat into pretense, into politeness.

And then [in part 1, section 14] the film ends, I think strongly, in this sort of Hollywoodian choir that comes at the end of a film.

VN: Isn’t that in a way just a foil, because we don’t know what’s happened to him?

AJ: Ya. Because here it’s clear I’m referring to that “you” as the Missing Person, which may add another difficulty, viz. why haven’t I used that “you” before, right? So here I’m really pushing myself away. I’m asking people to see the end of this film, which is really like, isn’t it, the murder of Orpheus? The direct reference to Orpheus comes a little earlier [in part 1, section 11] “Heaven burns to ashes, / ... As the underground runs, reassembles...” – underground a pun on the underground movement as well – “thinks of an earlier damnation, / thinks of how Orpheus’ head / made straight for his heart and speared it / with the music of his future.” Here I’m giving the Missing Person a kind of impulse to transcendence, through music or possibly through art. So it’s because of that, because of the trances brought on by music or art that the former colleagues, the “commando comrades”, start butchering him. Orpheus said... you know the Orpheus myth where, in one myth the head gets separated from the body, but still goes on singing as it floats down the river? So he remembers Orpheus’ head doing that, and “his trances grow”, it’s like his head is getting separated from his body. And that’s when the commando butchers move in and finish off the job. And that’s when he also then abandons his friends.

VN: So the first part ends with him actually being pulled apart. Do we find out that he is real after all?

AJ: Yes, if you like, and yet, in the first comment made by one of the audience who has seen the film [part 2, section 1] again I make him not really real. Because I say, Satan is not “IT”, “Caliban is not IT”. So, what is he?

VN: So the second part of Missing Person is audience members who have watched the film?

AJ: That’s right. Something like that. Or different people who have seen... let’s not call it a film, let’s call it a spectacle in which film is involved. At the end of the first part [part 1, section 14], I use the audience too: “Give up your seats and join the cast of thousands...” I’m asking them to participate in this orgy of destruction. And the head, like Orpheus’ head, goes on singing.

And this is what I think this part, [also in part 1, section 14], “Students of Eng. Lit., / still bunched around her merciful tit” is saying: you face more terror than you can take, and this is how you will end, you will end like the Missing Person, who is not quite a person himself. Which is what I say in that interview with Peter. That if what has made you is something that you resist, you see that as a defence or a carapace and break it, then you do face more terror than you can take. What follows is, you have a nervous and physical breakdown. So this is I think what I’m getting at. In a crude way, a very crude way, the difficulties of de-classing yourself in Marxist terms. But I would like to put it more as the difficulties of finding yourself as a real person, which is more universal. We all go through this, that we are not what our parents tell us, what our textbooks tell us, and so on.

VN: So the second part now... Are those... each one is a different voice?

AJ: It is a different voice...
VN: Do you have a sense of who the speaker is?

AJ: (Laughs) Some friends would ask me not to answer that question because I have said that you know, if you guys are too confused I should perhaps have given headings like, the first one could have been “Lecturer” or “Professor”. Because the images have to do with Eng. Lit., basically. The second might be more of a sympathetic biographer or a historian, who sees what process has been going on, who has some insights into the character. Here again I’m on treacherous ground, because if he’s not a real character, then how does he talk about the thoughts at the back of his head? But I think it’s ok. He’s a cloudy character.

VN: So these are people from different walks of life...

AJ: They could be friends or relatives... People commenting on the spectacle that has gone before. They’ve seen something that they don’t understand. I think people are right saying, Don’t give titles. These could be voices. Voices of... I mean a person can be your friend as well as an academic. He can be your friend and also belong to a certain political party. The third section seems more like a friend. But what I notice about these voices is that they are much more sympathetic to the Missing Person than the narrative would lead us to believe. The narrative is sort of self-lacerating, because that’s the kind of person the Missing Person is. You know, there’s a sort of violence, and in the second part you have the violence being observed sympathetically, even the wife who... at the end, the last speaker is the wife, who refers to his – since we’re talking about performance – drinking and his lack of performance, sympathetically, right? And they really believe that the creature is an unloving creature, and driven to madness. But these are still – I noticed for the first time that these are fairly sympathetic looks at the Missing Person. I mean, they’re more on his side than not, or they seem to understand. I never thought of that, but it seems to be there.

6 The entirety of the long poem, “Missing Person” – although not the book, which contains other poems as well, can now be found in the recent anthologies edited by Jeet Thayil, 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India, 2008) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2008).

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Listening to Pound: Multilingual Poems, Tones and Voices

[VN plays for AJ an excerpt from Al Filreis’ interview of Richard Sieburth, editor of Ezra Pound’s collected recordings for Penn Sound7. Sieburth is discussing how Pound’s performances deeply complicate our reading of his poems.]

AJ: So, going back to what the person interviewed said about Pound, that, Is it Pound’s voice in certain poems, or is it a metaphorical voice, or has he even taken on the voice of an imagined narrator? I feel, again trying to justify my use of certain bad words, if you like, in Missing Person, of White faggot and Black vamps and things of that nature, have I not adopted the voice of the intolerant middle class prejudiced person, and do I do it all the way through in Missing Person? See, I don’t do it all the way through. That is the problem, I suppose. Because a poem written in... If I do have a voice – and maybe I don’t have a voice, I’ll come to that later – is that found more in my lyrical poems or in a poem like “Snakeskin”, which ends my next book [Trying to Say Goodbye] but is so very different I think from the voice in Missing Person?

So, now I’ll tell you why this again seems to have been a... maybe not a problem, but a fact right from the start. I know in one of his more aggressive moments in Iowa City, Dilip Chitre said, as he tended to, flinging his arms around, that, You have a tone, you don’t have a voice! It may be true that I leaven different tones, as there are different tones in my first book, Land’s End. There are the somewhat noisier tones of [the poem] “Land’s End”, which I must say would not have happened without my reading of Lowell, especially “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”. People say, no, no, you’re diminishing the poem by saying that, but I do know those... those sounds – and I can recreate those sounds again in another poem – have their source in Lowell. And I suppose I was going to... I was feeling at that time, Can I do it? Because I like these sounds. If you read “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”, you will see what the connection is. Now, I’m not running down my poems, but these are connections I make, so I don’t know why other people should not know about it.

So it may just be that I don’t have a voice of my own. That could also perhaps be said of my next book. And there I would say that may be true because some of it contains work which was begun a long, long time ago. So the voice I have now, when I’m writing my new poems, may be different from the kind of voice there is earlier, right? So I think there could be a way of looking at my work in terms of seeing the voice in different registers, and sometimes so different that you don’t think it comes from the same person. For me, it’s just a question of which side of me dominates when I’m working on a poem. I feel I do have a lyrical side, and sometimes I do want to emphasise the lyrical side. And sometimes I want a more dramatic, harsh effect. So then a different kind of tone comes into play there.

One more thing just based on the [Richard Sieburth’s comments on] Pound interview we heard. One thing is very true, we lose something by not being able to hear what those Chinese ideograms sound like. Because if they are read out, if the sounds are given, you might find that they correspond to certain vowels and consonants in English, in the poem. Now what is very striking about what I remember about that 1959 reading of Pound on the Third Programme, is, I think towards the end of the third section of part one of [Hugh Selwyn] Mauberly, which is in Greek. And he ends, very ferociously in that reading, he ends that section by saying, “What god, man or hero / shall I place a tin wreath upon.” He emphasises “tin”. Now, if you read the previous line in Greek, it’s Greek, you don’t know what he’s talking about. When he read it out, the word “tin” occurs in that line two or three times. I can’t quite remember what it is in Greek, it’s something like, O tinyaga, tintageron, something like that. [tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon] “What god, man or hero / shall I place a tin wreath upon”, see. So there’s a wonderful, wonderful sound connection there.

However, I think when you decide to use words in a different script in your poems, you must be prepared to face incomprehension and inadequate response. I felt that, especially in my year and some months when I was back in India that I would like to use Hindi in the Devanagari script in my poems, and I have done that in a poem called “Woodcutters” or something. I think it’s a legitimate impulse. I think we feel that, if we feel that there have been languages which have been trammelled over in your brain by English, and I’m afraid one of those who feels that – many people say they don’t feel that – but in my poem, “The Song” in Land’s End, I talk about a jackboot language, exactly this trampling over. I feel that certain scripts have been lost to me forever...

VN: This also relates to the two poems about Urdu in Trying to Say Goodbye [“Urdu Lesson” and “Wahab Sahab”]?

AJ: Yes, but there I have stated the fact that these languages have disappeared. In my interview with Nazareth, I do say “the various scripts crawling around in my head”. And they still do. I like the visual look of them, for one thing. Now things have become so nicely complex and wonderful, you have the ad for the Economist showing the Chinese students learning Devanagari. So but if you do decide to that, then finally you’re going to write a poem which may be unintelligible to a large number of people, so it comes down to readership. You may be being very true to yourself, having up a multingual poem, but god, the difficulty.

VN: What you’ve been saying has thrown up a hundred questions, I’m trying to remember all of them. What you’ve been saying about sound and language and script. I mean, that is in a way what you’re trying to resolve through your books in different ways. And you talk about Gujarati and that encounter with the Urdu script. That section of Missing Person where the Hindi उ appears, it’s not just the script, it’s also a sound... This is where really the complexity of voice starts to emerge in your work.

AJ: It does, but... it’s not that complex. I realise difficulty and use it very sparingly. Because even that... And the interview also mentions the hieroglyphs. I use the hieroglyph for water, but people may not understand it, so in Arvind’s anthology for Oxford 8 , it is published as a flat line! [Jussawalla meant it to be a wavy line, as it appears in the Clearing House edition] But I’m making it even more difficult for the reader by... I mean, however that hieroglyph was pronounced, in the language they spoke at that time, that’s not the pronunciation I want people to hear. I want people to hear that symbol as “squiggle”, so the line then reads, “a squiggle’s a giggle now”. So I am expecting surely too much from the reader. I’m being true to my own poetic impulse, but I’m expecting a great deal.

VN: You’re also saying more.

AJ: I’m talking not just about civilisation, but Egyptian civilisation, which has become trivialised, because that squiggle on the base of pyramids, on so much, their temples, their papyrus, everything, has become a giggle, the उ, which was something different at the time of the vedas, has become a little hesitant “er”, that kind of thing. It can be carried further, it can be made explicit in a performance...

VN: In this passage both performance and silent reading are integral, because the performance is somehow necessary to hear it as “squiggle” and “uh”, but in fact, the printed page is important to kind of, complete that circle [ie, to see the Egyptian glyph for water]. So in this case, you can’t separate the performance from the printed page because both together seem to make a...

AJ: Ya, again, maybe Pound was aware of that, which is why only through the reading of the Greek lines can you fully appreciate the poem.

[...]

See there’s a part of me, I don’t know if this requires psychoanalysis or something, or a further dose of religion, or just a severe beating-up, and saying, Come to your senses. But, despite all the flaws in Eliot’s theory of poetry, I do sort of subscribe to it. I feel that the less of my personality comes into the poem, the better. So in that sense, doesn’t one choose to be a missing person? Does one want to be found in the full flawed personality that I am, and in the way I speak? For me, more than Eliot, I am very attracted to the earlier concepts of the artist and craftsman in Hindu society – it may have been in other societies too – that is, to remain anonymous. You’re anonymous and the work stays. And I really would be very happy if I saw someone reading a poem or reading it out loud in my presence, without knowing that I have written it. In fact that is the reality that somehow I want. So it goes against the idea now, certainly, of writer as performer – you know, physically performing things, writer as personality/celebrity, having to have book launches, and these things. Of course one has to go through that. But I feel myself that the work is there, so don’t really bother about me.

Someone who felt this very, very strongly is Arun [Kolatkar]. He didn’t want biographical details of his life to be known. He was even slightly annoyed with me – he hardly ever was, but – slightly, because I’d mentioned that he earned his living through advertising in the bio note in New Writing in India. It went to an extreme: Arvind can’t understand it, I can’t understand it, why he didn’t want people to know that he did some very great work as a visualiser, and as an artist and advertiser. It’s not as if this was mediocre work, but he just didn’t seem to want to be known as someone who did these things. Which is extraordinary, because truly, the person was a genius, in so many ways, and yet he had this idea of being invisible. So this may also produce a certain kind of voice... it could mean the voice is rather more fluid than a poet who has a very clear idea of his own personality, like Robert Frost. The early Robert Frost sounds like the late Robert Frost.

VN: Though it’s a very constructed personality.

AJ: Very constructed. Maybe that’s the word. Late Eliot doesn’t necessarily sound like early Eliot; you can see the connections because you know he has written them. Certainly some of the language of the Quartets is nowhere near the satirical poems – “The Hippopotamus”, and so on. So there may be something there, that there are different types of poets. And possibly different types of artists, different types of novelists who maybe have a fluid personality or something.

I dread this, it shouldn’t happen to me, but what finally happened to Joyce, was that the language of Finnegan’s Wake is so different from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Dubliners... it almost seems that at that time there was really an idea behind modernism, to find a really new language which encompassed everything. And I think Pound tried to do it in his own way, through – bad word, but – “world culture”, you know, using bits here, bits there, and making poetry encompass more than it had done before, certainly more than the Georgians had done, or tried to do, and Joyce again, trying to write a tract which was like the history of the universe, almost, in an invented language. And I can see the temptation for maybe a writer in English here, or a writer in English in one of the African countries of trying to create this new language... You know, it’s just part of that modernist impulse. See, Gieve does it in his own way in his plays, by writing an English which Parsees don’t really speak, but he makes it sound as though they are speaking Gujarati when they’re speaking English, really. It’s a difficult illusion to carry off, because on stage you know they’re speaking English. But, when you read the plays, you know that’s the impulse. Then Desani did something, didn’t he, creating a mixed language. So maybe I shouldn’t think of my not having a recognisable voice, maybe I shouldn’t see it in negative terms, because a lot of people are doing it.

VN: But you do have a tone... I mean, there’s a certain approach to rhyme and prosody that runs counter and gets as strong in your last book as it is in Missing Person at times, more muted at other times.

AJ: Right.

7 Hear Penn Sound Podcast #10, “Poundian Sound Editor” for the excerpt
or the complete interview with Richard Sieburth on Penn Sound’s Ezra Pound page [].

8 Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed.), The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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On Land’s End and Trying to Say Goodbye

VN: What is the relationship between the poems in Land’s End and those in the first half of Trying to Say Goodbye?

AJ: As I’ve tried to explain in the note [introductory note to Trying to Say Goodbye] I’d made certain notes, and maybe there were one or two lines reminding me of people I’d met there... But these poems were all written quite recently. In the last four or five years or so, I did feel quite strongly that... I did get the feeling that there’s some unfinished business I’d left behind in London, and that I won’t be happy until... or, let’s say, I’d be happier if I could just get those out of my system. Which is to say, I’ve also tried to pull out some notes which I think work as possible lines of poetry – or let’s say, they have a poetic content. And I’m glad I’ve done this, because otherwise I would have felt a terrible waste. But now that the manuscript is complete, and I’m looking at it from a bit of a distance with your comments, I feel that it was that act of putting them down on paper that was necessary.

VN: So these poems [from Trying to Say Goodbye] were all written fairly recently, but sometimes using notes written at that time?

AJ: As far as I can tell, no poem [in Trying to Say Goodbye] has arisen out of any diary entry that I made in the proper diaries I kept. The “notes” section [used in the poem from Trying to Say Goodbye, “Wondering”] comes from a separate notebook where I used to write down lines which could perhaps turn into a line of poetry. So, directly, there’s nothing from the diaries I kept in ’55, ’56 and ’57. I didn’t keep any diaries in 1958, when I was already in London. Even “Sea Voyage” in my first book [Land’s End] doesn’t come from my memory of the sea when I sailed from Bombay to London; that comes from a different sort of channel crossing. So there’s nothing that comes directly from a diary. But just some names, you know the memory of the school, being taught Urdu there by C.J. Oliver. And that – the Urdu teacher never came to what became our home in Warden road.

I think the “notes” are more imagistic equivalents of some of the poems in Land’s End. I was very drawn to the prose poems of Rimbaud at that time... I mean, you yourself are [ie., one is] about Rimbaud’s age when he was writing, and who doesn’t fall in love with that kind of poet? So he was sacrosanct [for Jussawalla] just as Baudelaire was for Jeet [Thayil] for a fairly long time. But... that leads to some of the “notes” in Trying to Say Goodbye. I have a prose poem [in Land’s End] called “Westmorland”. Now, I think that if I had worked on these lines I wrote in my notebook, conscientiously at that time, they would have led to poems like “Westmoreland”. As with most of Land’s End, not all, for example, not “November Day”, I don’t allow my personal emotion or grief to come through. And except for one line in [“Wondering”], “Behold, I cry and every building knows me,” I don’t show my tears and emotion throughout, I’m just observing things.

[This was there even in] a poem like “The Song” [Land’s End] which covers some of the areas of Missing Person, which is about language, and country, and where you belong... In fact, “The Song” is a precursor to Missing Person; all the problems are there. It’s probably not a very successful poem, it probably goes on too long, but the kind of things I’m talking about in Missing Person are there in that poem. Which has to do with colonisation and the destruction of language. And I try and say it in a lyrical way.

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On the Poems Dedicated to Visual Artists in Trying to Say Goodbye

I’ve always been interested in painting. Because of Lady Temple at school and then after my first year of that HSC, which brought me to 1956, the middle of 1956, I still had some time before I left for England and got admitted to the school of architecture. So I spent that time painting, using poster paints, and I felt good about that. All that dried up really when I went to London. One really had to slog in that first year, the things one had to do for the course. Very enjoyable things, but I had no time either to keep the diary or to paint. Nothing like that. So it seemed to be natural that I could write about painting. I’d been friends with painters in London. It’s rather strange that some... I forget his name, but it’ll come back. There was a sculptor there who couldn’t write English very well. So he would want me to English his essays. Then there were people I met there – Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Vivan [Sundaram].

VN: In London.

AJ: In London. Vivan even lent us one of his big paintings to hang in our flat. I met Geeta Kapur there. I knew the painter community fairly well there. We all seemed to be engaged in the same modernist quest and the issues of indigenism versus the cosmopolitan... So when one came here... was it Nalini who asked me to write the catalogue for one of her shows. And then [Jehangir] Sabavala asked me to write, which I did. And then Gieve, who was doing a series on painters for Debonair, and he said, Would you do Bhupen Kakkar. So I went to Baroda, and that essay was something of a hit. Then Sabavala wanted me to write a whole book on his paintings, and I said no, and I recommended Dilip Chitre, who was a fan of his, so Dilip did that. But I told Jehangir that I would contribute a poem. That particular poem, “A Place”, which you seem to like, I can’t tell you the number of drafts it went through. And it’s the only poem where I’ve preserved some of the drafts. Normally, I just tear up the drafts after it’s over. [But I kept the drafts this time,] just to remind me of how completely different the starting point was, and the finishing point... very, very different.

So the poems [dedicated to painters and sculptors in Trying to Say Goodbye] are simply a direct response to the work as it is. And I really begin to feel maybe I would have written more if there had been more commissions because, even the poem for Piloo Pochkhanawala [“Materials”] – the earlier versions are very different from this. At some stage in the early eighties, as part of the Bombay Arts Festival, there was a section dedicated to Piloo’s memory. So I thought I’d write some poems. But they’re very different from the versions here. [Anyway,] the sections in “Materials” were basically inventions, they don’t bear much relation to Piloo’s work. I’m just using that particular commission to talk about the materials a sculptor might use. I’m not sure she ever used cloth and so on, but the dedication is a general dedication.

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On Themes and Motifs in Trying to Say Goodbye

SM: Both of us were interested in the idea of home in Trying to Say Goodbye, because it’s definitely a recurrent thing in this manuscript, in many different ways. And sometimes it manifests itself even in the high-rise, and that’s very present as well. And at the same time, as an extension of that, there’s also the sea. And in my mind, somehow after reading this, the sea is connected to the home theme rather than as something else. It’s as if it’s together. And then this amazing line [in “View”], “the sea a massive bolt, shot across.”

AJ: So the sea also becomes part of an enclosure, part of locking you in, instead of providing the escape, or what you thought of it possibly providing. I think one of the reasons I was not at ease in London is that I was spoiled in my childhood and youth by having such expanses of sky and seeing expanses of sea, and sometimes both together, because I lived in Bombay. London is not a city which, on a day to day basis, or even on a fairly regular basis, provides you with these expanses. I realised that, when I was in trouble, to heal myself, I needed the presence of water. I needed to go to the Thames, to the river. My memory of London is almost that of no sky. You see little bits of sky. In fact, there’s a two line poem I’ve never included, but one day it might be in my final manuscript. I’d call it, “What’s Left of London”: “A strip of sky. / A coil of water.” That’s all.

So London not having provided me with that liberation, you can see I’m thinking of Bombay and the expanses it provided. And the sea was both a release and also the passage by which the conquerors came. With their English language, killing the language of the island in “The Song” [poem from Land’s End]. So there is something there. Except, that right now, i don’t see that the sea provides me with that kind of liberation.

It just may be also that I am drawn to painful subjects, as a poet. Which is not unusual among poets. But also, “homecoming”, and I use that word very advisedly, has been really very painful. And now, a kind of horror and disgust is setting in. Because I think... not just Bombay, but the nation, it’s becoming a terrible place to live in. If I can say this with my privileged... out of my privileged point of view, [this is] what is it like for so many people. I think – well, let’s not go into it, you know what I mean: the social fabric, the lack of justice, the extremes that one has to try and make some sense of on a day to day basis.

VN: That was there as much in the sixties or the seventies...

AJ: Except that now I have to devise means of escape. And those escapes are in music and fable, that’s what’s happening. I don’t see the city itself providing me with very much positive joy or escape. But there is, certainly in “A Place” [poem from Trying to Say Goodbye], the home, if you like, and I do say, “not knowing what to call it, [I] call it home.” Because I’ve never really had a sense of home, or “is this home?”

It’s something that again, is not uncommon among people of my generation, because we are at home everywhere and at home nowhere. Dom [Moraes] went with that. There are so many people living abroad, not Indians necessarily, Europeans and... the sense of home itself has to be redefined or felt in a different way. I wish I could say that home can be defined just by domestic pleasures, and that may be the way finally I’ll define home, saying, Be happy where you are, it’s getting late. So “homecoming”, and let’s call it a homecoming, has been painful. And the poem[“A Place”check with Adil] was written around the same time as Missing Person, which is full of that sense of dislocation and pain...

VN: What about the motif of high-rises and houses in Trying to Say Goodbye?

SM: That continues Adil, right till the end of this manuscript.

AJ: I didn’t quite expect that. Buildings. Well it just may be that’s the reality of this city impinging on me. There’s so much construction going on, so much of the old being pulled down. It may be just...

VN: What about this poem, “The Pardon” [from Trying to Say Goodbye”]?

AJ: I think “The Pardon” is really I suppose more of an invention than anything else. It seemed to me that when one goes through a bad patch and has suicidal thoughts, they don’t last long. I’m talking about myself. So the image was that of the condemned man whose eyes are bandaged being led towards, let’s say, certain death, but at the last minute being pardoned, so the bandage falls away. It’s basically that. I suppose I’m suggesting that the temptation was to jump. But the pardon is such that the person imagines the building opposite performing that act for him, right? It doesn’t actually collapse. But, if you like, the eye follows the building opposite, window by window by window, down. He’s projecting his own possible trajectory onto the place opposite. I think it’s as simple as that.

SM: I like the poem very much.

VN: Something in the movement of it that is intense and vivid. But perhaps this is also one of the poems – and there are a number – where maybe there is some kind of a correspondence or transference between the self and the building. And maybe that also has something to do with your relation to objects that speak.

AJ: It’s interesting that you mention that. I think somewhere I make it very clear that – is this in the poem “House”? – that a building being demolished is really me being demolished at the same time. So I do have that sense, yes.

VN: Looking back on the 70s and 80s, which are periods that are kind of touched upon in some of these poems (in Trying to Say Goodbye) – “Government Country”, “An American Professor in the Seventies”, there’s a poem on the Emergency, or rather one which involves the Emergency [“Silhouette”] – how do you feel about all of that now?

AJ: You’ll see that I’ve hardly made any political statements about the Emergency, or anything like that. And what’s common to the American professor poem and Government Country is booze, drinking. So my personal response to those years, or even decades is... I think I don’t see them as important to me except in terms of my drinking, and the problems that caused in my relationships. You see, I don’t have a political view of those decades.

[...]

VN: When did you start going back and writing the poems based on your memory of childhood in Trying to Say Goodbye?

AJ: Those are very recent poems, [written] while going back [in memory] to London and my late adolescent days there – ’58, ’59. Not just London, but England. [And then] the Englishness of a time before going there, which has something to do with language and loss of language. And hence, I said, Why am I thinking of Wahab Sahab? I’m thinking of Urdu. Poona with the influence of the English very much there, the place was called Salisbury Park. I think that’s what triggered off those poems. And while trying to... you know, there was that fallow land in London which I hadn’t explored, I laid claim to that in the form of these portraits [see the poem “Londoners” in the first section of Trying to Say Goodbye] and the things that were talking to me [see, for instance, “House”, “Wristwatch”, “Radio”, and “Swimming Pool” ]. That seems to have uncovered memories of earlier childhood here. That’s why I’ve kept those poems in the first section of the book.

VN: Is research something that you’ve done for your poems? Do you have poems that emerged out of research?

AJ: I like to get some facts – if I have used a fact – right. In the poem “Freedom Struggle” [from Trying to Say Goodbye] for instance. Though I don’t mention the date, it’s more or less true, it was January 15 of a certain year, I can’t tell you the year offhand. It was the year in which [Gopal Krishna] Gokhale died and [Bal Gangadhar] Tilak and Gokhale were... well, they became enemies. Gokhale was the more moderate kind. So I wanted to get that right, you know if someone says, What are you talking about. I found a marvelous biography of Tilak. It’s very well written, and no one seems to talk about it. And there this visit of... I don’t mention the visit, but Gandhi is supposed to have been wearing this wide-brimmed turban, which I liken to a Stetson hat at that time. These are just things I want for my... To root some of the things in fact so it’s not all poetic imagination. And the “Mickey Mouse ji”, I think we all know that Sarojini Naidu used to call Gandhi Mickey Mouse, right? So that kind of thing I have to check and recheck some times.

But should I tell you where I went wrong? This will be seen as again, running myself down. But let’s find a way out of it. My poem, “Sea Breeze, Bombay” [from the book Missing Person] has been much anthologised, and no one, no one has pointed out that it’s based on a historical error, right? See, I talk of “gentlemen scissored Sind”. And then use the image of a fraying cloth, right, because of the image of scissoring and people coming and knotting themselves into... on this island. Basically thinking of the Sindhis. But Sind was never scissored, was never partitioned. And no one has really pointed that out. I found that out myself, I’ve talked to Sindhis, I’ve asked them, and they seem clueless! So I can just say, I suppose we’ll all agree to say, Oh well, this is poetic license for a good image. But in fact Sind was scissored, I would say, well, metaphorically it was. Something like that.

SM: It’s more about the emotion of that.

AJ: True, but I did imagine myself that Sind was partitioned. Arun [Kolatkar] would have disapproved of this kind of mistake!

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On “Community” and His Relationship With Other Indian Poets Writing in English: Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre

VN: Maybe this is a good point to talk about your relationship with other poets on the Indian English scene.

AJ: Well, let’s begin with Nissim. I’ve always been fond of the man. You know, I can’t... should I say that he’s a father figure? All that becomes rather obvious and perhaps even false. I don’t see him as that, because as far as I’m concerned, my poetic development, where it mattered, happened independent of him, in England. And my models, if you like, were the poets there, or the European poets, or Ezra Pound. I will say that I had been impressed – before I left for London – I was impressed by the odd poem of Nissim’s which I’d seen in the Illustrated Weekly of India. One particular poem, “Midmonsoon Madness”, I think it was, when he ends the poem by saying, talking about his marriage and the urge to break it up and start all over again... [Note this poem was included in Ezekiel’s 1958 collection, The Third 9 – the exact lines referred to are “I listen to my own madness / saying: smash it up and start again.”] Now this is not the kind of sentiment that one found in Indian poetry. And maybe this was the time when I was discovering contemporary poetry in English through Mr. Salmon and I said, Hah, this is striking. So I did always feel that, This is a poet I will respect. But it’s only because... after I came back, he was the obvious one to go to with my poems. And I must confess that I found some of the changes he suggested, one or two, not to my liking.

VN: What were the sorts of...

AJ: You’ll see in the book [see Adil’s personal copy / photocopy of Land’s End] where the thing has been scratched out. The poem “Sea Voyage”, where I say “She’ll stride across the waves” – “she” refers to the sea, old “Lady Sea” – “She’ll stride across the waves / And thrash you if you insult her: / And the gulls will still be waving like children as you sing” – so he [Nissim] said, before the manuscript went to P. Lal, “Thrash” sounds like you’re in school and you’re being thrashed, etc., but I wanted the word “thrash” to suggest the waves. So I changed it to “batter”: “and batter you if you insult her”. Then when the manuscript came back as “batter”, I said no, why did I do this, so then I restored “thrash”! There were only occasions – other people had commented on the fact that Nissim was very particular about punctuation, and they felt that he wouldn’t say anything about the poem except that the punctuation was not right, or... add a comma here. This is, I find, a repeated refrain of many people who sent Nissim their poems.

VN: A comment on punctuation is the least likely to get a vindictive response... Anything more than that might invite a backlash from the writer...

AJ: No, but I think they would want something more encouraging. Some people who developed a very lasting dislike of Nissim, it’s been during their student days, when they’ve gone to him with their poems, and he has not been as enthusiastic as they would like him to be. This also happened. But I liked the clarity of his thought. I liked his prose. It seemed he was a no-nonsense kind of person, and we got on quite well during the time I had that break period and came down from Oxford, then he helped get my book published by Lal. And he lived quite close by to where I was – he was in a flat on Warden road – so I would drop by. It’s later on when I came back, let’s say during my Marxist or Socialist period that he began to get alarmed. This is before he was alarmed by my drinking. He... I realised that politically, we were going far apart. Because I saw him as a surprisingly unquestioning warrior of the Cold War. You know, Quest, Encounter, they had that kind of agenda of being anti- communist.

So I think that’s when Nissim began to... he felt he was losing me, right, and he perhaps didn’t like it, and maybe there were times when I even showed my displeasure at his politics, but under that all, we remained friends. And he would like to... on the few occasions when he stayed over at our flat, he would definitely like to be with us, rather than anyone else. And he also admired my father and spent some time as an inpatient at the clinic. And he helped my father with his books. So he was a family friend, if you like. But then his problems with his wife caused problems within the family. Because his wife Daisy – she had her own views about Nissim and his friends. So my mother and she perhaps fell apart. Not that they were very close, but they were neighbours. But all this didn’t affect my friendship with Nissim.

VN: Nissim is sometimes spoken of as a person who was able to knit poets and poetry communities together, and it seems to me that you have also performed that role sometimes, as a link between poets.

AJ: I don’t know, Vivek. I tend not to... I tend not to think ill of poets for any great length of time. Of course, if one of them upsets me, I’ll have wicked and nasty thoughts, and so on. But this I can pass off as one of my black jokes or black imaginings... I just feel generous towards poetry. So I’ll forgive people who I feel have written, say bad poems. As long as they’re not pretentious about it, as long as they’re not making tall claims for themselves. Then that’s ok, right. So I don’t know if I’ve done any knitting together. It’s just that... but I feel close to poets. We all fumble in our art. That’s it.

VN: What about your relationship with [Arun] Kolatkar?

AJ: My friendship with Kolatkar was of a different kind. I knew of his meetings at the Wayside Inn. I think they must have begun in the 60s, perhaps. They were certainly there when I came back in the 70s. Thursday meetings. Sometimes I felt I was a bit of an outsider there. I felt that his friends would rather speak to each other in Marathi and that I was, sort of, spoiling things a bit. And also, I’m not too good in, sort of, party situations or where there are too many people wanting to have their say. Arun never gave the impression that he was at the centre of things, or that he was the oracle, but he maintained a nice distance between himself and us all, I felt. And that was also characteristic when we were working together in Clearing House. He was very clear about what he wanted in terms of designing the book, choosing the paper, all that. And there were no problems with it at all. Because I see he knew what to say and what not to say. He kept his distance. Maybe he had learned how to deal with people during his time in advertising. And during the Clearing House period he was a very much sought after creative director in advertising.

Later on, Arun began seeking me out. He would ring every Saturday and ask if we could meet, again at the Wayside Inn. I think he perhaps felt that he would like to talk about things that he – on a one to one basis – maybe about a certain poet, or something was bothering him and he wanted to talk about it. Mostly in terms of literature or scholarship. He’d ask me if I’d read this, that or the other, or where he could find something. His manner of working was a little like mine. He used to have clippings from papers which would set him off on some kind of research. For example, I remember... I didn’t know he was working on his Marathi collection Bhijki Vahi then. But there’s a poem in there about Hypatia, the – I think saint, later on, but she was a philosopher who was stoned to death by a mob allied with Cyril [the Bishop of Alexandria]. And I know that he [Arun] was doing some research into this field and had consulted encyclopaedias and so on – he spent a lot of time in the Asiatic Library. That was – I knew that was a part of his life that was going on, but I had no part in it, he would only tell me about these things.

So that was the kind of way Arun worked. And then when Wayside Inn closed down we used to meet at Military Cafe near Fountain. Arvind [Krishna Mehrotra], on his annual visits to Bombay, I think he saw Arun practically every day, which is not something I ever did.

VN: What about Dilip [Chitre]?

AJ: What drew me to Dilip was his absolutely extraordinary ability to make wonderful connections in his conversations. And to come up with extraordinary lines. I’ve always felt that if there was one person who needed to be recorded when he was talking, it was Dilip Chitre. He was a wonderful talker. And he made some really wonderful connections. So this was one of the reasons for my friendship with him.

VN: What about this idea of “community”? I know my generation has this kind of image of there having been this community of poets, Bombay poets, and there’s even a fair amount of nostalgia about that, and the sense that we have somehow fallen and no longer have that. But is that a romantic image? What was this community? Was it there, and what actually...

AJ: I think where the false image comes in is [the notion that] that we all met together from time to time, like we [AJ, SM and VN] are meeting now, and this happened on a regular basis, we were in and out of each other’s homes. It was not like that. We had – I think we all had a community of interests, and that continues, and that’s why we are here, because you want to publish, you are wanting to bring out a book – which is how the Clearing House people got together – wanting to bring out books. Apart from the other serious interests that we shared, there were certain circumstances when one had to work together that brought us together. I do remember on this occasion, shortly after I came here, there was the Bangladesh war in ’71. And just before the war broke out, the U.S.I.S. had invited Gieve [Patel], myself and someone else to read in their poet’s corner. The American Center had these regular things. And then there was the news of the US sending its fleet to the Bay of Bengal. Gieve reacted. He said This is intolerable. We shouldn't read at the U.S.I.S. So we drafted a letter and sent it to The Times of India where it was published. The American Center naturally said, We regret that politics and culture are getting mixed up, the usual thing. I mean, but they had no choice but to reply politely. So you know, those sorts of occasions brought us together, if you like. And community means, we do – all the people I’ve mentioned – meet each other individually.

SM: Adil, the fact that all of you could get together and do Clearing House, I don’t see something like that being repeated today.

AJ: I think perhaps we do have a sense of something bigger than us, because individually, in terms of politics, and even in terms of poetics, we don’t see eye to eye. And that could be a point of disagreement, but it’s never become something very hostile. Unless someone does something nasty, underhand, and you’re taken aback a bit, or something I do will upset them... That has happened certainly, I’ve lost my temper. My drunken moments and things have come to a... Well, I’ve upset people, and then of course, one feels bad and apologises and it’s over. Until it revives in some way, many years later. Someone hasn’t quite forgotten. But by and large, I think we just felt that there was a bigger purpose, that’s all.

[...]

I don’t myself feel, as you’ve suggested, that something happened after the ‘80s which made people fall silent... I just don’t see it that way. I think when people fall silent it’s for... No one will quite know why, but there are often just personal reasons for it. I don’t know why, for instance, Hubert Nazareth (H.O. Nazareth), who Clearing House published, didn’t write more poetry. I don’t quite know why Lawrence Bantleman who published a brilliant first book in the late ‘50s can only be remembered by that book. Everything he wrote afterwards – and then he fell silent as a poet – one doesn’t quite know. We could include Srinivas Rayaprol in that as well.

Kolatkar is different. Kolatkar just went on writing, but he wouldn’t necessarily show his work to people until it was ready to be put in a book. He worked on many, many different things at the same time. And he had a very clear idea that some of those things would go into a book. If ever all of Kolatkar’s work is published posthumously, and I doubt if it will, you’ll see that less than, or just about half of it [has so far been] published, or I would [even] say, one third.

VN: Even in English as well?

AJ: In English perhaps there’s not very much more. There is some prose, there are short stories. And some translations of Balwant Bua, which is something he was working on in prose in Marathi. It’s a massive Marathi manuscript based on the conversations with this Bua, this singer.

[To come back to the question of] why possibly people fall silent earlier than they should – I think perhaps a climate of disapproval, hostility, indifference can play a role there. I think it’s quite possible at a certain time Srinivas Rayaprol said, Look, I’m writing these delicate poems in English, but really, who is reading, I don’t get any critical feedback. (Dom wrote a very nice piece on Srinivas Rayaprol.) Even they [the poems] come into print, there has to be a fairly decent literary culture to accept a reprinted poet. I think people will say, But we never knew of Srinivas Rayaprol, and why are you bringing out his book now, who are the new poets? That kind of thing. So it’s... I think some people fell silent because of that, and all they have in their memory are prizes named after them. So there’s a Srinivas Rayaprol prize, which his daughter may have... I mean all you have is family, if you’re lucky enough to have a family that is interested in your work.

9 See Nissim Ezekiel, Collected Poems. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Modernity and “Being There”

VN: In the New Writing in India anthology, you make it very clear that you’re looking for a kind of peer generation that is equally interested in creating the idea of modern Indian literature. But in a talk 10 you gave in Singapore in the ‘80s, you broached for the first time – and I know Sharmistha is also very interested in this question – you broached the notion, Do we need to be modern?

SM: Or rather, he says, “What did we think we were doing when we so little questioned our own modernity?” – I’m quoting.

I’m really deeply impressed by this essay. Not because, you know... and I want to come back to it because I think it matters a lot to how we actually write, how we then approach our lives. I see it as something very real and living. So, what for me was just so impressive about the essay was that whenever you read somebody going into this area... even if you read Ananthamurthy, who’s written a lot of papers and lectures, who’s written about these kinds of things a lot, or talked about them... I keep going along with you and then I arrive at a zone of complete discomfort, because you are not saying, Well, you know we’re somehow going to try and put it all back together, or Down the road, you know, something is going to... You’re just saying, Well, it’s just disintegration, you know. And at some point you say, I haven’t found a resolution. And you say, I haven’t changed. And I find that very disturbing, because in fact, it’s true. So, a couple of related questions I wanted to ask you, that is, If we question our modernity, what does that then mean for our work? And then, how does it link to the question of originality that you and I have often had conversations about, and you told me correctly that, you know, You can’t say that we didn’t have a Kafka, because we didn’t have a history that led to a Kafka. You know, or led to a Robert Musil, or whatever. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about this. As I say, in a very living way, I’m grappling with many of these things still, I feel.

AJ: Firstly, I’ll take up the word, “We”. I think when you say We, you mean we as Indians...

SM: No, not quite. I mean “we” as many Indian writers or artists of different...

AJ: Yes, I should have said Indian artists or Indian writers. It’s just that my focus in that piece is on an Indian reality. I mean, I do say, “Aspects of an Indian Crisis”. So now, I just want to expand this a bit, and say it could be a crisis of a writer of any nationality. It’s when a person, anywhere in the world is brought up and looks and models his or her life on certain models... And those models are found to be wanting, or found to be destructive, that he or she has to find another model. And this was surely one of the crises which led to the birth of what you could call the modern movement. That earlier social models, as well artistic models, literary models were found to be wanting. So you had to switch, you had to find something else. This can also refer to a crisis in political beliefs, in religious beliefs, we have examples of this happening to writers all over the world.

So... but where I find it is specifically Indian and where I think we have been misled in our models, and our expectations of ourselves is to have a wrong notion that... It’s too... You have the wrong notion of believing that a literary history is finally universal, that it applies to everyone. I came to the realisation before I was writing this piece, or while I was writing, that it is not so, that it is futile to expect... it is futile to think of an Indian War and Peace, or an Indian Proust, which is what readers and we ourselves expect in this country as a sign of... as one of the signs of great literary achievement, that these things don’t just happen normally and universally. You yourselves have come across many examples of Western critics who do believe in this universal history of literature.

So this deeply entrenched belief [in a universal history of literature] is very, very destructive, if we think in that way about ourselves. And it probably prevents us from being free and creative in the best possible sense in areas we’re good in. That’s why I refer to the “speak-out”. That’s a word that came to me not only because so much of our culture is oral, but there’s a sense of improvisation in my use of the word speak-out. And I suppose it’s not for nothing that Indian music lends itself to improvisation, and those kinds of variations on a theme. I think we have the equivalent of jazz musicians among our folk singers, and perhaps even our folk writers – without me romanticising them as a city dweller, I’m not, I’m trying to say that if what we feel to be creative is in improvisation, where do the great structures of the realistic novel, the Russian novel come in? So we must be true to what moves us in our own writing, and what moves us deeply, and what has deep significance for us in our own writing, which may well come from sources which are not modelled on the great Western literary forms. That’s what I’m trying to say about the Indian scene.

Linked with that is the idea of modernity. But that is not specifically an Indian crisis. After all, globally there are intellectuals and people thinking, How did development go wrong? Were they the wrong models? Now, I’m a Nehruvian, I believed in the Bhakra Nangal dam and his “temples of science”, but was blind to the human cost of that, which is now really, really visible. So I don’t think that is a specifically Indian form of questioning, though when we do set about our mega-projects, there is immense human suffering that’s involved. And there is no restitution for the people who suffer; there is no justice. That’s the horror of it, the continuing horror of it. We don’t need a disaster like Bhopal, but the people we have displaced from their farmlands and other places, which goes on and on, even in the cities, and they have no restitution. What do we make of that?

SM: You’re saying that there can’t be a universal literary history, and that we are mistaken to think it. But that’s also because, similarly, we have also thought that there is a universal modernity, right, and now, you know people are starting to question that, but only very recently. And still the kind of modernity that we have seen till now is sufficiently smug, and therefore the self-justification and the self- righteousness of saying, Well, you can’t talk about a British poet – it all stems from that, you know, in a sense, right?

AJ: Of course, it’s not – when I say, you can’t talk about a British poet, we do have friends who will allow us to, but...

SM: That’s not what we are talking about... AJ: As long as that’s understood, yes...

SM: Of course. And I’m not talking about “us and them”, I’m just talking about a situation where one has to grapple with and live through and...

AJ: When I wrote this essay, Sharmistha, I hadn’t come across ideas of someone like, say, Dipankar Gupta – the idea of “mistaken modernity”. Where I think what he is saying is, To think that we have the trappings of a democracy – like a parliament, and voting booths at election time – means that we are modern democracy – it does not mean that, right. And [when] a whizkid child can get to the controls of a modern machine and learn how to drive it skilfully, we say, This is a sign of modernity, but it is not. Modernity means a fundamental change of attitude to the things that most people take for granted, consumerism, this, that and the other. Modernity would mean questioning capital punishment, changing our laws, which is not what many of us seem to be concerned with. We are concerned with the trappings of modernity. More and more, the apps on your mobile phone seem to be multiplying endlessly, as though getting more apps means you become more and more modern, I think that is what he [Dipankar Gupta] is also talking about. I didn’t have that in mind when I wrote the essay, but that is also part of it.

Now, to get back to what you are saying, that we have possibly have had our own real modernity or modernities in different ways which we have not quite seen as being modern because we have taken Western examples of being modern. Is it necessarily a good thing – I’m not being moralistic – for a country to have a very high divorce rate? Is this a sign of modernity? We tend to think it is, right? Whereas we should be thinking of making divorce possible, when it is necessary.

SM: So you were thinking about these things, you were going through these things, now what did it then actually... If we say there are no universal literary histories and we shouldn’t ask for a Proust to happen here, and yet, well at least in conversations I’ve had with you before we agree – I mean, this too can be questioned – but we agree that original work is important, originality in work is important. So what I want to get to is, as a practicing poet, what did this then mean for you, because the fact is that when you’re saying, Our models are Western, and maybe there’s something in our own structures of improvisation or folk culture that we haven’t looked at, what does that mean in brass tacks in your work. Or what did it mean... And we’re not talking about “being more Indian” – you know what I’m saying.

AJ: Yes, what I would like to see happen, and it may not have happened in my case, I’m not saying that I have achieved this, but what I would like in my own work is to have used all these elements you’re talking about, some of them to do with cultural history, some of them to do with cutting edge modernism, which we are aware of being used in our industries or space exploration... I would want to feel that I use these elements in an original way, which may be begging the question because I’m not defining what original means. I have no means of knowing myself if I have original things to say. Quite possibly, not. But I can recognise originality, I think, in another writer or another poet. I certainly recognise – and it’s not just me who recognises this – originality in Arun [Kolatkar]. And while I’ve been answering your question, at the back of my mind is Arvind [Krishna Mehrotra] talking about Arun’s, if you like, originality, that where he is original is that – or one of areas he is original in is his... what’s the word for it, I don’t want to use the word “subvert” because it’s used so often and there’s very little left to subvert, because what are we finally subverting... But that word may have to do in the absence of any other. Or where he overturns or completely jostles a historical fact or a myth out of its original framework. In other words, he gives you an original angle on a historical event. Like in his Marathi poem on Hypatia. A historical event or a religious icon if you like, or a pilgrimage site like Jejuri. He jolts the structure. So it doesn’t all fall down but it comes up again in all sorts of odd angles. The temple is no longer the temple, it has pillars going this way and that with nothing supporting the pillars. He gives it, if you like, a surreal jolt. But again, surreal is not quite the word I want to use. And that is his original vision about everything. Including the old woman who is stretching her hand out for the coins, and so on.

Now, Arvind opposed Arun’s view of history and historical events to that of many other poets. Where other poets might simply retell history – even in interesting ways –they might vivify those events in their own inimitable language, they might give it flesh and blood, they will often leave the event [itself] intact. Cavafy [however] does something different, a little like what Arun does, in that he tells the old story in such a way that you think, Why didn’t someone think of it before? Like the great poem about Antony dying, “The God Forsakes Antony”.

So, Cavafy’s is an original viewpoint, Arun’s is original in that way. I can see it in other people; I certainly cannot, I cannot dare talk about it in myself.

SM: In the introduction to New Writing in India, you talk about certain themes that emerge, or certain subterranean things that emerge. Dismemberment and death. And you also say somewhere that nobody actually commented on those things at all, it seems that there was no dialogue about that. What I wanted to ask you is, when you look at what you’re reading now, from poets of younger generations coming up, is there anything that you’re sensing as a subterranean kind of... textures, concerns, and so on?

AJ: Well, I’ll just restrict myself to poetry in English [and say] that the younger poets seem very sharply aware of language. And there’s also a certain sharpness in their perceptions. It’s like quick and very good photographs that are taken of a moment or even of a fleeting thought. [As if it were] captured on the run. I see that in your work, Vivek. Your poems sometimes feel as though they are written on the move. And not just that they are poems about you moving, about you walking, and what you see... And there is, if you like, something kinetic about the energies in your work, in Jeet [Thayil]’s work, and even when that [particular] energy is not there, I think the poets are aware of language – it happens to be English – of language, perhaps in a different way from me, or from Gieve... It’s like the reader is being told that, Here, I’m using a language which can do a hell of a lot, and that also comes through in individual poems. You know that... this is what we’re doing, and we’ll do a lot more of that. That’s what I feel. So even when you have a poet who is – one is forced to use the local clichés – less “cutting edge”, if you like, as Anand [Thakore] – I’m saying that [while] Anand can sometimes be seen as a poet writing in a more traditional mode, he also gives me the sense of saying that he is using a language which can do a lot. Not just rhyme, but it can... That’s there in Ravi Shankar’s poems. Perhaps in Vijay Seshadri’s too, talking now of people who are living abroad. It’s there in Sampurna [Chattarji]’s poems.

10 Adil Jussawalla, “Being There: Aspects of an Indian Crisis”. Reprinted in Almost Island, Monsoon 2010

contents

What Comes After

VN: In Missing Person, the only possible end seems to be disintegration. But, here you are. What I’m saying is, How do we then imagine what comes after that [disintegration, dismemberment]?

AJ: Well, I am here because, I suppose, I had to pull myself back from the brink. And I couldn’t go on writing poems like that. Even now, when the impulse for that kind of poem comes up, you know, when I feel it, I have to withdraw because it really isn’t good for my health, as I’ve said in other places. So that would just explain why I’m here.

Let me try and connect it with my silence – I don’t know about the silence of other people – my silence as a poet, say, or even as a writer of something else other than journalism. It is precisely this question, or this fact, that is also at the heart of Missing Person. Which is that, I thought I was being very modern when I did this or did that, or supported this, or supported that. But in fact, I was a monster, you know. That I cannot get away from the fact that whatever I do, I will be a kind of oppressor, a parasite, living off the fat of the land, you know.

This is not as Dilip Chitre mistakenly said [to me], guilty conscience. I don’t have a guilty conscience about myself. I may detest the class I belong to, but that is so common among many, many writers and artists – we’ve had to rebel against most of what the class represents, without destructively undermining the good institutions they have made. For the very radical, even that [latter aim] is useless. Therefore, what would be the point of my existence and my continuing as a writer when neither can I change radically, nor can I effect any radical change?

Now the second question, I’ve more or less come to terms with, saying that the kind of writing I did – and was even capable of doing, or can do in the future – can never contribute to any radical change. And even if I felt that there were writers like Zola and Dickens who did, that change is time-bound. It’s minimal compared to the huge change of attitude that we need as human beings. So in a sense I’m on the very side of the people I was against some time ago, which is the spiritual leaders, the gurus. Who are saying, You’ve got to give up all this attachment, for a radical change, you’ve got to change yourself. So, I do believe that, but if one cannot [do that], then all I can do now is enjoy the process of giving birth to a new poem, or even giving birth to a new kind of creativity, if you like, in living. Listening to music instead of reading the papers, scattering coloured handkerchiefs here and there, just because I want to see colour. It all sounds... it sounds rather trivial, considering what we’ve been talking about, but that’s where I see a positive way forward. Enjoy the difficult ride, you know, try and enjoy the difficulties of cashing a cheque. You know, these are the things that the gurus are telling us.

So, it goes back to the question of silence, my own. I think perhaps I should have learnt to put more emphasis on the enjoyment of writing, and the process of writing, than I have done. If I had, I would probably have written more poetry. I don’t think my own silence there has to do with any social or political climate. Certainly no one has threatened me with censorship... There has been self-censorship, but I’m afraid that’s happening to all of us. Nothing outside me. This may change, because you never know, you never know what someone can pick up from things you’ve written and said.

VN: Where do you see your poetry going from here? Is that something you think about?

AJ: I am, fortunately, writing and working on new poems, and I feel the direction they are taking is towards greater accessibility, if you like, and perhaps in the telling of different stories and fables without being influenced by any particular culture from my past, or by history. I feel I am subconsciously or consciously drawing on ideas like the idea of Gulistan, the rose garden, the garden of flowers, what it may symbolise to a Kashmiri, what it may symbolise to a Persian at a certain time. And being drawn to what nature is telling me, but in quite a different way from how I use nature in Land’s End. I’m not at all saying, nor do I want to give the impression, that I’m writing poems in a calm old age. There’s nothing very calm about these [new] poems, there’s a lot of anxiety in them. But without talking about Zen and philosophies like that, I think they are more poems that dwell in the moment, and take pleasure from dwelling in that moment.

[And] they [Jussawalla’s current poems] may not remain exactly the same when they are finally published, but I think I’m allowing these different elements I talked about to arise in me more naturally, without me concentrating my mind and trying to conjure them out of the air. In Missing Person, I use the idea of conjuring and magic two or three times because I’m trying to create a magic, I’m trying to create an illusion. Here I’m willing to take the risk that even a reader may find the poems, perhaps, over-simple. I still feel that this is my natural voice now, and the voice has obviously changed due to aging and... whatever. One speaks in a different way than I did before. But I’d still like to write a poem that is rich without being ornate, and even if it’s simply put, that does resonate. So I feel my line is perhaps becoming more transparent. And, who knows, that may lead to more poems that are meant for younger readers. Oscar Wilde was writing fables towards the end of his life. That may be the sort of thing that just naturally happens.

VN: Looking forward to reading that!

Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940 and went to school there. He left it in 1957 to study Architecture in London but dropped out. He read English Language and Literature at Oxford and worked in London, primarily as an English language teacher, after graduating. He has lived mainly in Bombay with his wife Veronik after returning to the city in 1970. Books of poems: Land's End,1962, revised edition 2020.; Missing Person, 1976. Trying to Say Goodbye, 2011,
The Right Kind of Dog, 2013, Gulestan (chapbook) 2017, Shorelines, 2019, The Tattooed Teetotaller and Other Winder, 2021. Books of Prose: Maps for a Mortal Moon, 2014, The Magic Hand of Chance, 2021. A book of poems, fiction, and nin-fiction: I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky, 2015.Anthologies: New Writing in India (1974), Statements (co-edited with Eunice de Souza), 1976. Honours: Sahitya Akademi Award (for Trying to Say Goodbye), Tata Literature Live Poet Laureate for 2021.

Vivek Narayanan is Co-Editor of Almost Island. He was born in India to Tamil-speaking parents and grew up in Zambia. He did undergraduate and graduate work in the United States, taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and moved back to India in 2000. His first book of poems, Universal Beach, was published in 2006. A new, revised US edition of that book was published in 2011, and a second volume, Mr.Subramanian, is also forthcoming. Some of Narayanan's poems and short stories can be sampled online at places like The International Literary Quarterly, Pratilipi, Agni, Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, and elsewhere, as well as offline in recent anthologies like The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East,Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton).

Narayanan is also interested in exploring different approaches to reading and performing poetry, and in collaborative experiments that explore technology, physical space, movement, site-specific poetry and audience interaction. In addition to his role at Almost Island, he works with Sarai-CSDS, a New Delhi-based organisation that brings together visual artists, social scientists, creative writers, public intellectuals and others to reflect inventively on new and old media forms and the contemporary global city.

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise. Her most recent work is a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. Her work has been published in several journals all over the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, and the Chinese journal Jintian. A chapbook made from a selection of poems from The Gods Came Afterwards appeared early 2020 from Ediciones Pen Presse in Spanish. The poems are translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet, Mercedes Roffe. Mohanty is the founder-editor of Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers gathering held in New Delhi. She has taught for several years at the International Creative Writing MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg. Mohanty has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany (2002), at Ledig House in New York (2004), had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France (2004), and Yaddo, USA, 2009. She is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.