Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra
Title: In Your Eyes A River: Poems
Author: Radha Chakravarty
Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic and translator and has now added poetry to her already considerable oeuvre. Her achievements as an academic are impressive. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore and edited Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Social Science Press, 2015). She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (Routledge, 2008) and Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (Routledge, 2013). She has translated a wide range of literary works by Rabindranath Tagore and works by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Mahasweta Devi. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. She has published poetry widely online and in print.
Professor Chakravarty’s second book of poems, In Your Eyes A River, brings together poems which evoke both real, travelled to and imagined worlds, aiming to bracket and highlight traces of the extraordinary within the ordinary aspects of human experience. They demonstrate a keen and keenly documented awareness of the profound realities that lie beneath the fabric of our daily lives.
The poems in In Your Eyes A River are replete with memories and infused with traces of nostalgia. Particularly moving is the seemingly autobiographical poem about her father, the titular poem: You never left Shyamsiddhi./In your heart you carried a home, / in your eyes a river, in the soles of your feet,/ the swing and shift of a bamboo sanko,/ narrow bridge of precarious crossings/…..the lost ground of your birth,/forsaken foundations of your fast-transforming self, the absent source of mine.”The poem moves towards a sense of closure as she writes: “I stand face to face with your impossible story,/ and find at last the missing opening lines of mine.” The poem is suffused by a sense of nostalgia for a place hardly visited except through the act of imaginative recreation, the mind’s eye.
Some of the poems in this collection demonstrate the poet’s experimentation with some short haiku-like forms and even single-word lines occasionally to create a sharper focus and emphasis. A lot of poems are ample evidence of her meticulous attention to details of the art and craft of poetry. Thus her poem, ‘Blue Gold’ on indigo not only unfolds not only contrapuntally[1] but also encapsulates within itself the dark history of colonialism, slave labour and human suffering.
One poem which particularly resonated with me is about the slowing down of the frenetic pace of life, presumably after years of active service: “no setting the alarm for crack of dawn/no scanning the TV for breaking news /no boiling water for morning tea/ no opening curtains, shaking out sheets/no tidying, dusting, cleaning up/no ironing creases, putting out trash/no catching the train, no rushing to work,/no chasing the tight deadline/no putting on a public mask/to face the measuring gaze.” By the next stanza, the idea of change between two different phases of life acquires an existential dimension. In a changed routine, the poetic persona finds herself moulting and changing, facing and acknowledging her ever changing, unpredictable self, “the mutating stranger that is me.”
In yet another poem, the poetic persona assumes the voice of a renowned female scholar from ancient India, Gargi ,who “thirsts to know” about the “weave of life and the warp that holds all forms of being,/ from the remotest realms of abstract divinity to the limit of human knowing ” muses about posing “the impossible question.”
The figure of the transgressive, rebellious and recalcitrant woman who breaks the mould re-appears in the next poem as well. It draws from a women’s retelling of the Ramayana, that poses a counter narrative to dominant narratives of the epic. In this powerfully and poignantly reimagined poem, ‘Another Story’, the poet draws on the narrative of the 16th century poet Chandrabati, who “questions the unquestionable”, thereby interrogating the hegemonic narrative of Valmiki and the Tulsidas Ramayana. The story narrated by Chandrabati centres around the figure of Sita, telling the reader about Sita’s miraculous birth and later story, instead. Sita’s story is not for “the men in royal courts” “but a “folk song for women in six brief parts.” a song which “shuns the epic scale.” In this version of the epic, Rama is not a divine hero, but a fallible man and a “jealous husband.” Chandrabati’s narrative questions where heroism really lies, whether in warfare and violence or the sustenance of everyday life. Moreover, even if women’s voices have been erased from history, there are women’s songs where “my version of Sita’s story lives on.” Chandrabati’s “unfinished song” also arouses the “critics’ ire” who dismiss it as a fragment, since the male critics police the boundaries of the literary establishment and often become (self-appointed) custodians of it.
Additionally, there are poems of tourism and travel, some of them set in Italy. Tourist spots are visited and reflected on, often providing fuel to fire the imagination. From sunrise in the hills of Kanchenjunga to her visit to Darjeeling, to the volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius, are all skilfully assimilated into Chakravarty’s poetry.
Chakravarty’s poetic persona is also a witness to history and its outrages. In the poem ‘Wounded Walls’, “scarred walls remember the shots/that brought down the dead.” Yet, it does not “quite go as planned” since a the past resurfaces as a commemorative “unwelcome ghost” who rises from the dead to “haunt the present with/undead questions.” Elsewhere, the poetic persona , battle scarred but resilient, documents “lingering inscriptions/on memory’s skin”, of “battles fought/wounds that healed.” Questions pertinent to the present time are raised as in the poem ‘Ceasefire’: “If captives walk free, will our hearts still/hold us hostage in wild tunnels of hate? If bombs stop dropping, will the shrapnel/of memory vanish, from festering wounds? If the bloodbath halts, will it staunch the grief/that oozes from hearts lately bereaved?”
Sensitively written and meticulously crafted, Radha Chakravarty’s collection of poems is sure to resonate with all those who have struggled, suffered loss and displacement. Her poems help define that which is essentially and indubitably human, in the middle of climate chaos and war, tumult and change. Attentive to history and mindful of its excesses, the poems assert a vision of sanity and of shared humanity, much needed at this point when the global order has descended into chaos and seems to be teetering on the verge of immeasurable destruction.
[1] A contrapuntal poem is one which can be read individually and together, vertically or horizontally simultaneously as a single harmonious or dissonant piece.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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