This Could Be a Love Poem for You by Ranu Uniyal, is her fifth collection of poems. Uniyal is a passionate bilingual poet at heart, a retired professor of English literature by profession and an inspiration to many budding poets. Across the Divide (2006), The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough (2018), December Poems (2012) and Saeeda Ke Ghar (In Saeeda’s home, Hindi, 2021) are some other significant contributions made by the poet.
“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful, you find co-existence; it breaks walls down.” A quote by Mahmoud Darwish is reflective of Dr Uniyal’s poignant portrayal of human existence layered with love, grief, crises and relationships with the One (Self) and the World.
The collection is an aesthetic delight that traverses the heart of the readers with astute directness and a distinct confessional tone. It has three segments: ‘Dust My Regrets’, ‘Be a Good Girl’ and ‘Thy Eternal Grace’. Collectively, there are 62 poems in all.
The poems start from the personal and move to the universal with their intricate details. The poetic sensibilities take us to the female imaginary of the physical, psychological and spiritual domains. If Kamala Das in the 20th century introduced the readers to her brazenness in poetry, then Ranu Uniyal in the 21st century coerces her readers to travel from the common routine to the coveted spiritual abode found in the creative doctrine of poetry. The poetic depth can also be inferred through the rhythmic structure, the play with the words through alliteration and rhymes introduce jibes in poems such as ‘The Shop and the Shutter’.
The themes of love, identity, self-expression, language and power, old age, body’s fragility, vulnerability, precarity, loss, women and domesticity, motherhood, death and memory are persistent throughout the anthology. She poetically contours the theme of human existence and its distinct flavours like WB Yeats in Sailing to Byzantium with — “That is no country for old men.”
The poetic pondering over the question of ‘Self’ or recurrent declaration of ‘I’ is developed through linguistic, racial, and geographical temporal identities. For example, the poet’s ‘Garhwali’ identity is camouflaged with the the more modern Anglophone identity. The declaration of the personal “self” and dedication to some personalities like Mohini Mangalik, S. A. Hamid and Amma takes us to the glints of the poet’s biography in the most poetic manner. Gulzar once uttered that, “we poets are errant grains of dust… life takes us and tosses us, we do not know where it will end.” The poems hail the essence of life’s evolutionary journey, especially the one of experience and the mature years of life.
Her poems present multiple binaries: of love and grief, seller and buyer, life and death, through picturesque imagery. Additionally, the poet familiarises the readers with the references to the pagan myths from diverse cultures, Christ, Nachiketa, Yama, Isis, which also introduce us to the eco-folklorists’ traditions which is a delight to explore.
She writes in aphorisms at times and critiques the personal and public crises. The poem, ‘Only Grief’, provocatively emotes the climate crisis as an apocalyptic warning through a distant voice from the future, wherein, critiquing the war-torn present world and the catastrophic space left for the progeny of the future.
We sang dangerously of the failure. Of our prodigal ancestors.
Another poem, ‘From One Life to Another’, reflects a similar concern about the cataclysmic/tragic climate situations left for the future:
Sparrows and crows have been hushed to silence. The once-green acacia shrieked as they chopped her limbs.
Nature and motherhood hold each other’s hands in sharing the identity of exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, the intricate details through the lens of the ecofeminist poetic sensibilities highlight the diversified literary corpus in the anthology. The same poem states further:
I was once a tree- all green. Very tall, bobbing in the wind. I had leaves, branches. And occasional flowers. I, too, had a name. A woman. A mother. Once a tree. I brush them aside, My tears, an upright foliage Lying heavy on my chest.
Dr Uniyal can be set alongside the “literary greats” like Kamla Das and Sujata Bhatt.
The usage of the colloquial vernacular Hindi words and phrases makes it more personal, tinctured with cultural aesthetics.
The eponymous poem in the anthology, ‘This Could Be a Love Poem for You’ is raw and personal between the one waiting for the other partner far away from a distance is the talisman of the relationship, the theme that finds its way again and again in the poet’s poetic oeuvre. This colourful and mature anthology glossed with distinct sonorous imagery could indeed be a reflective love poem for the present and for our progeny, the rightful claimants, who would reminisce over the past. It’s a love poem about resilience and human existence that shall follow the hearts of the readers for a long, dialogic course of expressions and insights.
Gazala Khan teaches in the Department of English at Doon University, Dehradun, India. She has published poetry in magazines such as Setu, Borderless, and The Fictional Café and has been consistently working on creative and literary projects.
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Contours of Him: Poems has been edited and introduced by Malachi Edwin Vethamani, a Malyasian academic of repute. The book has a rich assemblage of poetical voices — from both men and women — representing the contours and nuances of the many aspects and shades of masculinity. The poems explore the male body as a symbol of identity, art, and humanity, delving into themes of masculinity, strength, vulnerability, and beauty. It also examines the male body and psyche as the site of hurt and wounding. The book features poems that scrutinise the male form revealing or concealing it to explore these themes.
The focus on corporeality or the somatic coexists with the psychological in many poems in the anthology. Childhood innocence and curiosity coexist and yield to what could be viewed as growing pains or the challenges of maturation and understanding. There are several poems on the father-son theme, with poems that express homage to the father. Christina Yin’s prose poem ‘To My Father’ and Gopal Lahiri’s ‘My Ideal Man’ are cases in point. Sudeep Sen in the poem, ‘Baba/Father’, captures the enormous vacuum left by the loss of the father as Sen completes the elaborate death rituals as the eldest son of his dead father, performed as per brahminical prescriptions. In a gnomic and nuanced vein, Vethamani , the editor of the anthology, gives his take on father-son intimacies.
This book examines the contours of the male body and psyche at different stages of life and could be viewed as a psycho-somatic exploration of masculinity across diverse cultures. It also explores the strength and fragility of the male physique, occasionally dipping into cultural repertoires of male archetypes, human and divine. At the same time, it acknowledges societal expectations from men and their concomitant cultural insecurities, particularly regarding their identity and the search for acceptance.
A common motif in many of the poems is about the unwitting and unwillingly borne burden and baggage of masculinity. The protagonists/personae of many of these poems seem to be conscious that masculinity is but a performance, involving the display of muscles and embodying a certain swag. Yet this definition of and expectation from men within patriarchies, can be a cage and straitjacket which binds, restricts and confines the human being. If patriarchies bind women, men are not exempt from it either. It is this theme that resonates(among others) in Angshuman Kar’s poem called ‘Tears’: “When mountains cry, rivers are born/From a woman’s tears, pearls have always been born/And when mothers cry, dormant volcanoes awaken…No one in the world knows/why a strong man cries/or why, when he does/he looks so sacred and beautiful.”
The predominant focus, however, is on corporeality that has led to the exploration of its many aspects of the body in the poems. The many facets locates the male body along a spectrum of materiality, vulnerability, relationality and the transcendental possibilities of the body. In recent years, there have been a plethora of poems by women discussing corporeality in multiple registers, exploring female subjectivity, desire and sexuality. Focus on the psychosomatic aspects of the gendered body has led to numerous explorations and analyses of femininity, on being/becoming women, on trans-identities. Many poems have been written on the human-divine aspect of the female body. Kamala Das and others (including Pakistani women poets) have written evocatively about the transgressive desires and the many hungers of the female body .
Voices from the global south recording the voices of men was perhaps the need of the moment. The anthology includes a few poems on masculinity as a construct, especially focusing on the male body through various lenses — vulnerability, performance, shame, violence, and transformation. These poems offer a critical lens rather than idealising masculinity, exposing its social constructions and internal contradictions. They also highlight the relational nature of masculinity which are often traditionally embedded within family structures in South Asia. There are glimpses of guilt in Arthur Neong’s poem, “At this juncture of age, I feel like a teenager again,” where the persona/speaker seems keen to shed and slough off the burdens of masculinity and be in an escapist mode. He writes “At times I go to my wife for a little reprieve/Yet eyes open, think of ways to cheat”. Some of the poems read like love poems, like David C.E. Tneh’s poem, ‘Crossings’, that memorialises his dead friend. Tneh writes: “between the shared spaces and/ private moments come a synergy of collective memories/that I have of you.”
A writer writing on the female body once referred to it as a story discussed by men. Similarly, the anthology at hand discusses the contours of male corporeality and affect. The anxieties of masculinity, of literally not measuring up, pepper these poems and forms one of the vital themes of this anthology. Occasionally, a kind of narcissism creeps in, often giving way to musing or self-introspection. After voicing the common masculine concerns(and anxieties) of corporeal self-consciousness, the poet Kiriti Sengupta declares:
“I don’t look at veiled people anymore. It is either my age or my hormones. I now look beyond the flesh, bone and keratin.”
In the last revelatory line, there is a movement towards transcendence: “I have been told /the finer body dwells undressed.”
In a different context but similar vein, Sandeep Kumar Mishra in ‘The Canvas of Form’ writes, “The naked body, stripped of all pretence,/Breathes honesty, raw beauty, fragile strength.” The profundity of the closing lines is inescapable: “The body, bared, is neither shame nor pride/But speaks of histories, of fears ,of love. It tells of burdens carried, joys embraced/And in its stillness, whispers human truth.”
Much canonical poetry, including that of the famed icon of modernist poetry, T.S.Eliot, writing a century ago, display a preoccupation with masculine anxieties in his iconic ‘The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock’. The effete personae/protagonist , immortalised in the eponymous poem, Felix Cheong writes of ‘Middling Age’ that it’s “So unbecoming to have become so old? You’d sooner wear the ends of your frailty rolled”, lines echoing T.S.Eliot’s The Love Song of Alfred J Prufock, “I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
From Justin Baldoni’s Man Enough to Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, there are many coming of age stories in our cultural landscape-on book lists and bestseller lists. While the sociology of sex and gender has long been a part of sociology and social psychology, the growth and development of a field of knowledge –gender studies– in the last four decades or so, has thrown into relief the fact that if femininity is a construct, so is masculinity.
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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Mount Parnassus in Greece, where the muses were said to gather, was regarded as the home of poetry: From Public Domain
For the longest time, women were uncomfortable occupants of the house of poesy[1], particularly where there were existing canons of poetry established by the institutional gate-keepers and male custodians of literature. At best, they were viewed as Jane-come-latelies who sought to transgress the hitherto hallowed domains of high verse, interlopers to the hallowed heights of Parnassus who dared not “drink the milk of paradise”.
This ‘absence’ of women from the terrain of poetry is in spite of the fact that women have always written poetry, from ancient times to now. Sappho in the western tradition, was a Grecian poet from 5th-6th century BCE who was the pioneer of lyric poetry, a genre which apart from being set to music, also inaugurated the poetic ‘I’. In India, Buddhist nuns in the Mahayana and Theravadas who wrote poems known as the therigathas were early precursors of female poets. These early women poets engaged in the sometimes forbidden, sometimes lascivious charms of verse and versification. Down the ages, there were many others who joined them and kept the lamp of women’s versification lit. However, if women have always been versifiers, why has there been a resistance and grudging admission for women to the poetic domain, which becomes a sort of “No (Wo)man’s land”? Why do women poets have only a token presence in traditional poetic anthologies?
Some reasons have been offered, not least among them being the preponderance of male poets who have often also been self-proclaimed and self-appointed guardians, legatees and arbiters of poetic tradition. Canonical poetic traditions, many claim, require a knowledge and understanding of Latin and Greek in the West while a knowledge of Sanskrit/Persian in the Asian context was deemed necessary. Thus women, who, for the most part, lacked formal education and had but small Latin and less Greek, could only hover around the margins and fringes of poetry. The situation with Sanskrit and Persian was similar and women remained mostly absent from or shadowy denizens of poetic terrains. Even if and when women were writing, they were doing so in colloquial registers and in the languages of the common people and not in formal or decorative language, deemed essential for poetry, for the most part. Almost the first group of women writing poetry in India were Buddhist nuns who wrote in Pali, one of the many ancient languages in the ancient Indian subcontinent, which enshrined its own scholarly tradition. Sappho wrote in the Greek Aeolic dialect, which was difficult for Latin writers to translate.
Between 12th and 17th century, there was an advent of devotional mystic poetry called “Bhakti” and “Sufi” poetry. While the poems were uttered/written in a devotional idiom, the poems and songs were often rebellious and iconoclastic, rejecting institutional religions and social norms. This poetry was rooted in personal and unmediated devotion and rejected formal languages and established societal norms. Some of this poetry was in an informal register, colloquial language and performative with a strong dramatic quality. Thus we have lines in Kannada from Akka Mahadevi (1130-1160) who rejects her earthly husband:
I love the handsome one: He has no death decay nor form… no end no clan, no land. Take these husbands who die, decay, and feed them to your kitchen fires.(Vachanas)
Women poets for the longest time had a crisis of identity, identification and non-belonging. They laboured under the anxiety of authorship where they felt the absence of precursors and fore-mothers and the lack of a poetic tradition to which they could belong. They were often made to feel as if they lacked genuine poetic talent or that they were transgressors against womanhood and femininity.
In Aurora Leigh (1855) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the eponymous title character, considers the diverse fields of literature where women can exercise their talent and claim a space. The field of dramatic writing poses a challenge because the former demands that the woman writer be in the public eye in order to promote her plays. Further, to achieve or even aspire to the rank of Poet, Aurora must become capable of “widening a large lap of life to hold the world-full woe”. Over the course of the long epic poem, she tries to reconcile her femininity with her artistic aspirations. In both cases, she is denied emotional fulfilment. She refuses to accept the role of an obedient wife, since it would mean foregoing the intellectual independence needed to develop as an artist, but then she must also refuse the love of a husband. In Book Five, she mentions three poets, none of whom she admires for their “popular applause”. Yet she admits that she envies them for the time they can devote to their chosen vocation and the adoring women that surround them and provide emotional support and fill their days with glory.
Another issue with women’s writing and poetry is the uncomfortable positioning of women in relation to patriarchal language or male centred language. If as Dale Spender declares in “Man-made Language”, the masculine is asserted as the norm, where do we position women’s voices? While language is a universal medium of communication, man-made language is full of sexism and chauvinism and expresses reality from a predominantly masculine and patriarchal perspective. If language is a social system which women are persuaded or co-opted to use, how do they work within its confines to express their poetic aspirations? How do they stretch, bend, subvert language to express their own realities? Can we read techniques of irony, satire and other figurative and metaphoric strategies of defiance and subversion and an attempt to undermine from within?
Juliet Mitchell in her essay on ‘Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis’ states that the woman writer/novelist must of necessity be a hysteric, straddling two opposed worlds. One world is that of male definitions and conceptions of femininity and the other, a resistance and defiance of such conceptualising, accompanied by an attempt to undermine from within. Her defiance and resistance makes her character that of a hysteric, one who defies accepted notions and standards of femininity and is therefore considered transgressive. She troubles fixed gender categories, roles and definitions. She also disrupts and challenges the symbolic order of language, one which insists on rules of grammar and linguistic structures through the semiotic order which uses word play, repetitions and childish rhymes, in order to express inner desires and drives. The symbolic order deals with the denotative aspects of language and the semiotic order with the affective aspect.
Women’s poetry often houses and accommodates the semiotic, seeming psychobabble that plays with and disturbs fixed notions of femininity and binary gender identities.
What are the popular themes that inform women’s poetry? Some themes are to with women’s search for authentic self-hood and identity, their search for roots and a space of their own. As we see in Aurora Leigh, much of women’s poetry is self-conscious and self-reflexive, about the act of writing itself, the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence could never retract.”(T.S.Eliot)
Many contemporary women poets, across continents, have evinced a substantial interest in exploring their poetic self through their poems. On the one hand is the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, on the other the brief gnomic utterances of Emily Dickinson. Before the advent of the twentieth century, one hears of Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, among many others. Names like Aphra Behn and Anne Bradstreet have been included in many syllabi, often as a token inclusion in an otherwise male centric course.
Women poets have talked about the horrors of war including rape, pillage and destruction. In their critique of war and violence, we find the forging of transnational solidarities, whether it is women’s poetry from Sri Lanka or Birangona (War heroines).
In India the many names that come to mind are that of Kamala Das, Eunice D’Souza, Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt and Sunuti Namjoshi. Women poets have employed effective means to explore the entire gamut of experience.The private and the public domain, their process of self-analysis; the process of poetic creativity and a probe into poetic identities are all significant fields of exploration. For these women writers, analysing the creative process becomes much more than just a poetic theme. As they unravel the mystery of their poetic psyche in their writings, it becomes an epiphanic journey for the poets and their readers.
Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is an Associate 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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I’ll begin this brief essay by reflecting on my time in university. There was no paper on Indian writing in English when I was a student at Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati studying for my master’s degree in English literature between 1977 and 1979. Many English departments were adamant about sticking with a colonial attitude and emphasizing teaching British literature. The teachers (professors), many of whom had returned from abroad, primarily from the UK with highly sought-after PhDs, propagated this notion and fervently supported British literature. They maintained the same colonial perspective and made English departments more English-centric (British) than what is apparent today with more democratisation in the curriculum. Many of these teachers with UK training had a prejudicial perspective on Indian writing in English.
Because it was still in its infancy, these professors with UK training did not support it. The literature that had blossomed in the UK was widely believed to represent what was meant by English literature at the time. They didn’t think much of other English literature works. Within this hostile setting, Professors MK Naik, CD Narasimaiah, and KR Srinivasa Iyengar worked arduously to develop Indian Writing in English (IWE) as a subject and make it an integral part of English departments at all universities. They fervently argued for the cause of Indian writing in English through their writing and publication of several articles and speeches. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s seminal work Indian Writing in English (1984) and M.K. Naik’s Dimensions of Indian English Literature (1984), Indian English Literature: 1980-2000: A Critical Survey (1982), and Studies in Indian English Literature (1987) have strengthened the case for writings in English in India. They were all successful in having IWE included in the study of English literature. Many English departments in the universities didn’t start providing IWE as a course or even as a component of the curriculum until the 1980s. The new group of professors, which included the aforementioned three professors along with Professor P. Lal, who supported IWE, had replaced many earlier professors who had a limited perspective on it. It eventually evolved into an autonomous course over time.
In this light, I’d want to think back on a comparable experience I had in 2011, when I joined the Central University of Tamil Nadu in Thiruvarur as a regular faculty. At that time, a paper on IWE was not offered as part of the MA in English Literature. I had a terrible experience when I asked how the students could graduate from the university with a degree without having studied IWE. I claimed that such a degree lacked credence. In one of the Board of Studies meetings, I passionately argued in favour of it and won approval. The result was that it was transformed into an independent course, integrating with the core curriculum. I taught this subject, which included poems by Jayanta, until my departure from the institution in 2019.
Lal did a fantastic job advancing Indian writing in English. In Kolkata, he founded a publishing house called Writers Workshop, where he encouraged a number of new budding poets to write their works in English and submit them for publication. In his book History of Indian English Literature, M.K. Naik notes that only P. Lal published the first books of contemporary Indian poets who achieved success in Indian and international English poetry. It was true. All of the poets that Lal published under the Writers Workshop imprint became well-known figures around the globe. It was thought that any poet who was published by the Writers Workshop would become well-known in their field. Of them was Jayanta.
As a Post-graduate student, I read and studied only three Indian English poets—Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, and Kamala Das as well as two novelists, R.K. Narayan, and Mulkraj Ananad. These were all part of the Commonwealth Literature (now New Literatures) paper, which covered the full range of post-colonial texts. This was my first introduction to Indian writers who wrote in English. For reasons best known to the group responsible for formulating the syllabus, Jayanta Mahapatra was excluded from the curriculum. I had no knowledge of Jayanta and had never read any of his poetry. I didn’t read two of his widely anthologized poems, “Indian Summer” and “Hunger,” which are recognized as classics in contemporary Indian English literature, until after I had finished my post-graduation. This served as my initial exposure to Jayanta’s poems.
I was fascinated by his writing after reading these two poems, especially because of the two components of imagery and elegant diction. I looked through other collections of his poems. By chance, I discovered a venerable anthology called Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, which was chosen and edited by R. Parthasarathy and published by OUP. At the time, this was the sole anthology on the market, and all universities required students to consult it when discussing Indian poets who wrote in English though other anthologies followed later such as, Indian Poetry in English (1993), edited by Makarand Paranjape, The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994) edited by Vinay Dharwadker and A.K. Ramanujan, and Twenty-five Indian Poets in English (1995), edited by K.S. Ramamurti. The poets who were included in the anthology were acknowledged as having achieved popularity and recognition on a global scale. It was a canon-like text for reference. It contained “A Missing Person”, “The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street”, and “Indian Summer” from Mahapatra’s collection, A Rain of Rites, and “The Logic”, “Grass”, and “Lost” from other anthologies. I eventually had to look for his poetry collections after this reading. Luckily, my hands fell upon his two collections: Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), Calcutta: Writers Workshop and Relationship (1980), New York: Greenfield Review Press. I read them avidly.
At that point in time, I read Jayanta purely for enjoyment. I wasn’t really taking his poetry very seriously. I never tried to review any of his poetry books or to write an article about his poetry. Despite this, I still thought highly of him, but I never had the chance to visit Cuttack and meet him in person since I was too busy attending to my academic obligations and immersed in my career. The most wonderful news was that I had been chosen for the 2014 Rock Pebbles National Award for Creativity, instituted by the Rock Pebbles Trust, which would be presented to me in Bhubaneswar by the legendary poet Jayanta Mahapatra. I realised that my dream was actually coming true.
He was already 85 in 2014. I arrived at the location considerably earlier in order to see this poet in his physical appearance. I had heard of him and read about him in books up to that point. Now I could actually communicate with him and see him in person. I was watching him approach from where I was standing by the venue’s entrance. He arrived at the location at precisely half past ten, joined by a couple of event organisers. Despite his aged appearance, he was nimble and exuded the assurance that, due to his asthma, he would live for a few more years despite whatever happened. I did not hear any gasps as he was moving. He was hospitalised, but he managed to survive the coronavirus. The ten years that passed between then and August 27, 2023 were a tremendous adventure in his life as a writer in general and as a poet in particular. He was engaged throughout the proceedings and talked for fifteen minutes, albeit a little erratically. Even so, I could understand what he was saying. A poet with a scientific background could sound like an English professor. He had a thorough understanding of Indian poetry, and he spoke with authenticity and assurance. He was distinct from the other poets since he was not a poet from the Bombay school. Over time, he was able to distinguish himself from his peers by developing a serene, peaceful poetic voice of his own.
He acted in this manner, and I was so moved by him that I asked for his blessings at the conclusion. He generously bestowed his blessings upon me, and I was so overjoyed that I continue to treasure them for the rest of my life. I always mentioned his name whenever the topic of Indian poetry in English came up in conversation and discussion. Even though he was a poet par excellence and the recipient of numerous national and international honours, he was such a modest being that he never showed any arrogance or pride. I observed this humility in him, and I had the impression that he could communicate it not just with words but also with his actions. He was so worn out at the end of the event from travelling from his home in Cuttack to Bhubaneswar. Despite my intention, I did not continue talking to him after realising the circumstances. I recognised him, and I felt so happy that I received the award and the honour from his hands. This was sufficient for me, I reasoned. I could learn the rest by reading his poetry! I must express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Udayanath Majhi, editor of the journal, for including me in the celebration and giving me the chance to meet the great poet by conferring me with the Rock Pebbles award and honour, a wish that had been gnawing at the back of my mind for a very long time and was finally realised.
IN MEMORIAM
(A Tribute to Jayanta Mahapatra)
With the muse
who had been
with you over sixty years,
you abruptly
walked away surreptitiously
leaving the memory behind.
You have permanently
migrated to a distant land,
reconciling;
moved to another world…
leaving behind
your distinct footprints
unerasable in your poetry, forever.
Though you were not of the Bombay School
you carved a niche
distinguishing yourself from your peers
by creating a serene, meditative lyrical voice
in the world of poetry
‘after a mountain of rejection slips’.
You might be
not present in the form
yet,
I feel
your poetry
cracks and cackles with vibrant vivid imagery;
a torchbearer for the aspiring…
You have departed for
Heavenly abode
but somehow as a poet
is always a poet forever
you proved, otherwise
glistening in the firmament
as an early-morning and evening star
silencing grumbling dark clouds;
and, you still peep out
of a poem
in the book
of my living room
to ensure
that everything is fine
with Indian poetry in English
in your absence, eternally.
K.V. Raghupathi, A former academic, poet, short story writer, novelist, critic, and book reviewer, has so far published thirteen collections of poetry, two short story collections, and two novels, and edited eight critical works and is widely published and anthologised both in online and print journals. He currently lives in Tirupati. He can be reached at drkvraghupathi9@gmail.com
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The Oldest Love Story, edited and curated by Rinki Roy and Maithili Rao published by Om Books International, 2022, carries multiple voices across cultures on a most ancient bond and nurtures pertinent questions and observation, which hope to redefine the role.
‘Antara 1’
Antara rising from primordial waters
As the first sun, forever new, forever old,
You made me the universe.
History and prehistory filed through me hand in hand
In gradual evolution.
Antara, because of you
I have earned the right to enter
The tenfold halls of my foremothers.
Clutching your baby hands in my fist,
I have made the future a debtor to me
Antara, in an instant you have filled all time
By your grace I am coeval with the Earth today.
-- Nabanita Dev Sen, The Oldest Love Story(2022)
The Oldest Love Story, curated by two eminent authors and journalists, Rinki Roy Bhattacharya and Maithili Rao, is an anthology that not only describes a human’s first love, their mother, and their lives, but also explores the social and psychological outcomes and ramifications of motherhood with powerful narratives from multiple writers. They range from eminent names like the late Nabanita Dev Sen, Shashi Deshpande, Kamala Das to Bollywood personalities like Shabana Azmi and Saeed Mirza and contemporary names like Amit Chaudhuri or Maithili Rao herself.
The anthology has narratives clubbed into three sections: ‘Being a Mother: Rewards and Regrets’, ‘Outliers’, ‘Our Mothers: Love, Empathy and Ambivalence’. The headings are descriptive of the content of each section. These real-life narratives, some of which include translations by editors Roy and Rao among others, make for interesting and fresh perspectives of the age-old story that is as natural as water or air. More than two dozen diverse voices as well as Roy’s powerful “Preface” and Rao’s exhaustive “Introduction” paint motherhood in new colours, giving it an iridescence that glitters with varied shades. Stories of what mothers faced — bringing up a child with Down’s syndrome, a child who drove his roommate to suicide and yet another daughter who marries a man old enough to be her father — bring us close to issues we face in today’s world.
One of the most interesting and unusual aspects of this book is at the end of each essay is a takeaway from the narrative where the writers write about themselves. This is not a biography but a description of the writers’ perception about their mother or what they learnt from their experience of motherhood. The most interesting takeaway is given by Shabana Azmi, who wrote of her dynamic mother Shaukat Kaifi (1926-2019).
“I am cut from the same cloth as her. But who am I?
“I would say I’m a woman, an Indian, a wife, an actress, a Muslim, an activist, etc. My being Muslim is only one aspect of my identity but today it seems as though a concerted effort is being made to compress identity into the narrow confines of the religion one was born into, at the absence of all other aspects. This is not the truth about India. India’s greatest truth is her composite culture.
“The Kashmiri Hindu and the Kashmiri Muslim have much more in common with each other because of their ‘Kashmiriyat’ than a Kashmiri Muslim and a Muslim from Tamil Nadu in spite of them sharing a common religion. To me, my cultural identity is much stronger than my religious identity.”
And she concludes: “My mother taught me that identity must not be a melting pot in which individual identities are submerged. It should be a beautiful mosaic in which each part contributes to a larger whole.”
Major social issues are taken up in multiple narratives. Mirza used the epistolary technique to describe how his mother discarded her burqa forever in Pre-Partition India.
“You were emerging from the hall of the Eros theatre and were about to wear your burqa in the foyer when Baba popped the question to you.
“‘Begum, do you really want to wear it?’
“You told me you paused for a moment, and then you shook your head. And that was that. The rest, as they say, is history.
“I am trying to imagine that moment. The year was 1938 and you had been wearing a burqa ever since you were thirteen years old.”
Mannu Bhandari’s spine-chilling narrative of her mother, a child bride around the time when Mirza’s mother shed her burqa, shows a young girl punished and abused for accidentally tearing her sari. It showcases a conservative, abusive culture where women turn on women. An extreme contrast to the bold maternal outlook described by Mirza or Azmi, the narrative highlights the reason why women need to protest against accepting familial abuse bordering on criminality. That these three mothers lived around the same time period in different cultures and regions of India only goes to enhance the large diaspora of beliefs, customs and cultures within one country.
Dalit writer, Urmila Pawar’s reasserts her mother’s belief, “A woman is a wife for only a while/ She is a mother all her life.” “Screams Buried in the Walls” by Sudha Arora dwells on the abuse borne by women to pander to societal norms. Narratives of abuse of women who could not stand up to social malpractices seem to have turned into lessons on what not to do for daughters who condemn patriarchal norms for the suffering their mothers faced.
On the other hand, Shashi Deshpande tells us: “Motherhood becomes a monster that devours both her and her young; or, when the children go away, there is an emptiness which is filled with frustration and despair. I have been saved from this because of my work. My children no longer need me, but my life does not seem empty.” While Shashi Deshpande found her catharsis by writing her stories, Deepa Gahlot, justifies her stance of remaining unmarried and childless by espousing a voice against motherhood. She contends that the only reason to perceive motherhood as a viable alternative would be propagation of the species. But concludes with an interesting PS: “Does it even make sense to bring a child into such an ugly, nasty, brutal world?” As one hears of senseless violence, wars and mass shootings in the news, Gahlot’s words strike a chord. She has actually researched into the subject to draw her conclusions. But one would wonder how would humankind propagate then — out of test tubes in a bleak scenario like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)? Would humans really want such an inhuman existence?
I would rather go with Dev Sen’s outlook. While she emoted on motherhood in her poems on her daughter Antara, she has given a powerful prose narrative elucidating her own perspective. Antara, the daughter to who these poems are addressed, has given a beautiful takeaway on her mother at the end of Dev Sen’s narrative. Despite being abandoned by her husband, Amartya Sen, who later became a Nobel laureate, Dev Sen not only fulfilled herself as a woman and a mother but threw out an inspiring statement that well sums up motherhood for some: “[C]ould I do anything to make this planet worthy for my kids?”
Rinki Roy Bhattacharya, one of the editors of this sparkling collection and author of a number of books, especially on the legendary film maker, her father, Bimal Roy (1909-1966), had published an earlier collection on a similar theme called, Janani (Mother, 2006). She agreed to tell us more about the making of this meaty and gripping anthology, The Oldest Love Story.
Editor Rinki Roy Bhattacharya at the book launch in Mumbai. Photo sourced by Rinki Roy
Motherhood as a concept that is ancient, natural, and yet, not fully understood nor explored. What made you think of coming up with this collection that highlights not only stories of mothers and how it influenced women but also discusses the process of being a mother?
The present collection, titled “The Oldest love Story” goes back several decades. This is mentioned in my preface. It began when I woke up to the fact that I was redundant as a mother. By the time the children had grown up one-by-one and left home. I began to explore the situation with other women to understand, why we give so much importance to motherhood? Foolishly, I felt. Motherhood as a concept is indeed natural but taken for granted. I have a problem with that. My maid, Laxmi, is a classic example of a mother who is exploited to the hilt by her children. She is blind to their exploitation and refuses any change that will help her live with comfort or dignity. As if women are just mothers and nothing else?
Was it a personal need or one that you felt had to be explored given the current trend towards the issue where women are protesting the fact that looking after children saps them of individuality? Can you please explain?
I answered this issue as have others in this book. The deep resentment that follows after raising kids who then go away to find greener pastures, is an extremely common, and collective experience for most parents. Particularly in the Indian context. Parents cannot let go. The main reason, I think is, the parent’s fear. The fear of who will light the funeral pyre if not the son? In the event of not having a son, a close male relative takes over. Do you see the gender bias, the patriarchal assumption? Daughters are not considered legitimate enough to light the pyre?! Yet it is daughters who care for elderly parents in most cases.
This is not the case in Europe, nor the West, where children are expected to become independent very early. In fact, European teenagers seize their independence at the earliest opportunity. It is the expected thing, and no one resents that inevitable shift.
You had an earlier collection called Janani (Mother). Did that have an impact on this book?
I am glad you referred to Janani, published by Sage books in 2006. That collection is the cornerstone of our new book. In this collection, we have included eight extraordinary essays from Janani. We have retained, for example, Kamala Das and Shashi Deshpande to name two. And guess what we discovered out of the blue? In the oldest love story, we have several Sahitya Akademi winners amongst our writers, including these stalwarts. This raises our book to a huge literary stature.
How was it to work jointly on a book with Maithili Rao? Did you both have the same vision for the book?
Working with Maithili was fantastic, and it was great fun. She is the most generous of people and shares without fuss. Ours was a good partnership. I could not have produced this book without Maithili. She has been and continues to be a rock.
You have done many translations for the book. Why is it we did not find an essay from you as we did from Maithili Rao?
Yes, I did. I helped fine-tune Mannu Bhandari’s story It ranks as one of my personal favourites. Her narrative is beautifully visual. I find it cinematic. I also translated Sudha Arora’s poignant essay. Sudha is a noted Hindi writer. It was, however, difficult for me to write my personal story. But the hope is, our next reprint will carry a story I wrote on my son Aditya’s birthday in 2021. In this I have given graphic details of how childbirth robs women of their dignity in the so-called natural process of birthing children. My essay is entertaining and somewhat satirical in style.
You have written a beautiful preface to the book, reflecting your own experience with your children. Were you, like the other writers, impacted by your mother?
I take that as a compliment. Yes, I wrote a heartfelt preface. My relationship with my mother, admittedly, was a strained one. Our age difference was just eighteen years…whatever the reason, I have not been able to fathom or pinpoint it. So, I thought it was best to refrain from the troubled territory.
Would you say that Bollywood had some bearing on the book as a number of writers are from within the industry? Also, your father, the eminent Bimal Roy, made a movie called Maa in 1952. If so how. Please explain.
I do not see any bearing from Bollywood. The fact we have eminent personalities from the world of cinema, for example, Shabana Azmi, Saeed Mirza, and Lalita Lazmi do not make it a Bollywood-driven work. My father, Bimal Roy’s Bombay debut was with a film called Maa. Apparently, Maa was inspired by a Hollywood film titled Over the Hills. The main protagonist was an elderly mother of two sons. Maa bared a socially relevant issue, elder abuse, that has been globally recognised and is prevalent. My father’s empathy for the elderly is well documented in this fictional account. In day-to-day life, my father supported the elderly. His widowed aunt in Benaras was maintained by him. His brothers were educated and helped by his generosity. Compassion was his second nature. From him, I learned that a silent, discreet way to support others is the best way to reach out.
There are so many women in the anthology who reiterated the huge impact their mothers had on them, and they were quite critical of their ‘patriarchal’ fathers. Do you think this is true for all women? At a personal level, did your father or mother have a similar impact on you?
I am glad to hear that these woman are critical of their patriarchal fathers…while most women tend to overlook the patriarchal aspect. In general, women tend to ignore or even neglect, their mothers. In my case, it was distinct. My cultural upbringing was instilled by my father’s secular and inclusive vision and social values. These played a decisive part. Much more than my mother, who was a gifted photographer. My parents, by the way, were a made for each other couple. Rarest of rare in the movie industry. My father is my mentor. If you contemplate his well-loved films, let us take Sujata[1959], for one. I have yet to see another film that speaks so eloquently of social boycott. It is not just the caste issue of Sujata, which doubtless is the main thrust. It is the combined forces of class, caste, and gender that play havoc with human relationships as portrayed compassionately in this work.
Yes, Sujata is indeed a beautiful film and your book has taken up many of the issues shown in the movie through the voice of mothers, whether it is caste or religion. Was this intentional or was it something that just happened?
The voices of our contributors in the book are of individuals who write with exemplary honesty and spontaneously. Nothing is contrived in their writings. We did not brief our writers to take up any specific issue. They wrote from the heart.
One of the trends that emerged from my reading of the book was that educated and affluent mothers through the ages had it easier than child brides and less educated mothers, whose children also reacted with more vehemence, looking for a better world for themselves. Do you feel my observation has some credence? Please comment on it.
I do not agree entirely. Bearing children, and raising them in our complex, the confusing socio-economic culture is a challenging matter for all mothers. For all parents in fact. Child brides are subjected to it more intensely than others. There are no shortcuts, nor ready-made answers.
There is an essay against motherhood in this anthology. Do you agree with the author that it is a redundant institution and can be replaced by test-tube babies? Do you not think that could lead to a re-enactment of what Aldous Huxley depicted in Brave New World?
I think, you mean Deepa Gahlot’s essay. This was from the earlier collection. Deepa is entitled to her views. As are others. I think many younger women would agree with Deepa. Balancing motherhood with one’s professional life is a knotty business. I know women who have opted for one or the other to do full justice to it.
Yes, it was Deepa Gahlot’s essay. As you have rightly pointed out in your preface, motherhood can be interpreted variously. What do you see as the future of motherhood in India, and in the world?
Motherhood, remains subjective. Interpreted differently in each case. Every childbirth is a different experience. It may be life-threatening. A case to note is my dear friend Smita Patil’s. She died giving birth. But, I doubt women will stop being mothers, or abandon stereotypical mothering options that live up to that Deewar [Wall, 1975] dialogue: “Mere paas maa hain [I do not have a mother]”. There is a change, a shift, nonetheless, it is slow. Women are afraid to rock this entrenched image of motherhood. At least in India. I know successful women filled with guilt that they failed to be good mothers.
Well, that is certainly a perspective that needs thought.What books and music impact your work?
I read both Bangla and English. After leaving Calcutta where I read the children’s Ramayana, Raj Kahini, or stories by Tagore and Sukumar Ray. But there was an interruption when I got into an English medium school. Culturally I moved out of Bengal. During that phase, my mother introduced me to Agatha Christie. I was 12 years perhaps…I devoured her works. And I still do. Christie fascinates me.
I fell in love with the piano and began to learn it. As a result, Chopin, Mozart, and Liszt were my musical inspirations. I also learned Rabindra sangeet and Manipuri dance in Calcutta…. there was no dearth of cultural grooming. We are especially fortunate that our parents enjoyed the best in performing arts. Pandit Sivakumar Sharma, the great santoor maestro who just passed away, played at home. Sitara Devi danced for private programs. We were wrapped in a rich tapestry of culture.
What is your next project? Are you writing/ curating something new?
I am a compulsive writer, always itching to write. I believe that writers do not age…they mature and get better. Currently, I am compiling non-fiction episodes about some of the most celebrated artists from Indian cinema who I was privileged to meet…the collection may be titled, Brief Encounters. Writing keeps me creatively busy. Before I sign off, we have to thank our editor Shantanuray Chaudhuri for his unconditional support to make this book a reality. He has been marvellous.
Thank you for taking our work seriously.
Thank you for giving us your time and answering the questions
From Left to Right: Rinki Roy, Maithili Rao and Shabana Azmi at the Mumbai book Launch in June 2022. Photo sourced by Rinki Roy
(This is an online interview conducted by Mitali Chakravarty.)
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Indian President Pranab Mukherjee presents the Swarna Kamal Award to Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri at the 60th National Film Awards ceremony in New Delhi in 2013. Photo provided by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri
Sandman, the mythical dream maker from Scandinavia, is said to sprinkle magical sand on sleeping children’s eyes to inspire beautiful dreams. What could Sandman have in common with a much-fêted editor who has worked with many celluloid stars and writers?
They both vend dreams – one makes dreams for children and the other is tries to fulfil dreams of writers attempting to create a beautiful book. Meet one such seeker of serendipity Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, an eminent award-winning editor, who has brought out books on and by film personalities of India as well as assisted less-known writers find a footing in the tough world of traditional publishing. His magical sand is impeccable editing and an open outlook that stretches beyond the superficial glitter of fame and delves deep to look for that hidden well from which he draws out the best in a writer.
Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has worked with famed writers like Gulzar and Arun Shourie as well as Bollywood stars like Rishi Kapoor and with the prestigious Satyajit Ray Archives. He has a book called Icons from Bollywood (2005) with Penguin on films, a set of fifteen essays. And he writes wonderful pieces on films for various sites like Cinemaazi, an archival film website,and Free Press Journal regularly.
But, Ray Chaudhuri is not just a film buff as he tells the world. He has a well-kept secret like ABBA’s ‘Nina Pretty Ballerina’, who would wear dancing shoes after work and turn into a phenomenon. He emotes beautiful poetry but hesitates to publish…He does have a book of verses though called Whims brought out by the Writers’ Workshop. In this exclusive, Ray Chaudhuri, who has worked in Penguin and Harper Collins and now is the Editor-in-Chief of Om Books International, tells us how he turned from a dry accountant to a seeker of serendipity and what it takes to publish with traditional publishers.
Please tell us what started you out on your journey as an editor and writer.
I have always loved the word serendipity. It accounts for whatever good I have experienced. I loved reading of course but went on to become an accidental editor. I started very early – loved books. Went through the age-specific lists – Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators, and Tintin (which I love still), then slowly to Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, Satyajit Ray, Feluda and Shonku, Somerset Maugham, Camus and others.
In fact, I remember, during summer vacations, my mashis [aunts] would often ask to pluck grey hair from their heads and would pay me at Re 1 per hair. So, if I managed 25, I would have money to buy a Tintin. Or novels that were sold in second-hand shops at Rs 10-15. I wanted to study literature and humanities but at the time the stream was looked down upon. People whose opinions we respected kept saying, ‘Will you be a schoolteacher after studying humanities?’ I wish I had said yes at the time.
Anyway… Science I was sure I wouldn’t take. And humanities I wasn’t allowed to. So, I took up commerce, graduated, did my M.Com, studied for chartered accountancy and cost accountancy. Then for years worked in accounts and finance. And hated it. I would leave jobs and go off quite regularly.
Meanwhile, I had started writing poems and on films (as a means of escaping the drudgery of accounts and finance). These were published in magazines regularly. In fact, I won the Filmfare Best Review Award that they had every month a few times. Then, Writers Workshop published my first book of poems. And by this time, nearing thirty, I had had enough of accounts. I realised that any creativity in accounts would lead to jail! And I was damned if I could put up with another day of matching debits and credits. I enrolled for a mass communication course at XIC Mumbai, then started a magazine on cinema on my own, and subsequently moved to publishing and editorial.
What pushed you into publishing others over writing yourself for we can see you are an excellent writer too?
I have often asked myself: do I have anything to say that will make a difference to someone reading? Can I ever write an opening sentence as eloquent as Camus’s The Outsider? Or create a character like Larry Darrel in Maugham’s Razor’s Edge? Or one line like Rilke’s ‘For the Sake of a Single Poem’. Or, in fact, a draft of an unpublished novel a young friend of mine, Ramona Sen, asked me to read recently to comment on editorially – it is so good … could well be the next big thing in publishing. And the answer has always been ‘no’.
I look at what goes for writing today. It dismays me that books have become all about posting your picture with the cover and getting likes – it has to be more than getting FB likes, more than announcing your book as bestseller on social media. I would be mortified about unleashing anything as mediocre as these on anyone.
And then there’s also the question of what being a ‘writer’ means for you as an individual. Some of these authors and poets I meet are so conceited … I have doubts about myself as a person … you know, as Matthew 16:26 says: For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? These doubts about whether my writing amounts to anything, whether it says anything about me as a person have kept me from writing and more importantly publishing my writing – barring of course my columns and features on cinema.
Editing and publishing other people’s work is more impersonal – I can keep myself out of the equation. Though when you really like a book, you do tend to get emotionally involved.
You have authored a book of poems, Whims, and IconsfromBollywood. Tell us about these.
I guess both came off just like that – I wonder if there was a case of wanting to show off at the time I had published them. Today, I would think twice. The book of poems, Whims, was published by Writers Workshop, and I was rather proud at one time that Professor Lal deemed it worthy of being published. I often told myself that some of the best Indian poets began with Writers Workshop. I just sent it off to him on a whim.
Iconsfrom Bollywood was a more organised affair. I was working at Penguin at the time. Its children division was doing a series of books on icons – the arts, science, music, etc. Since everyone knew my interest in cinema, I had even met a few of the icons, the publisher, Sayoni Basu, asked me and I agreed. Eventually as no two people could agree on the ten names for the book – all the books in the series had ten icons – this ended up having fifteen names, the only book in the series with fifteen essays. It did rather well, got some good reviews in Dawn and Guardian and a few others.
Is authoring a book more challenging than editing and publishing for another? Or is it the other way? Please elucidate.
Of course, writing a book is more challenging. When you edit, you are working on adding some value to what a writer has already put down. You are not creating the world. At best, you help the author develop his work. It is challenging because often you are the first reader outside the author’s circle and your opinion also shapes the book. But writing is way more difficult. You are literally creating something out of nothing. Even writing a single line of good poetry is tougher than editing.
Tell us what moves your muse for poetry and prose?
That’s tough. It could be anything. For instance, in my college days DTC buses used to have a single passenger seat right at the front. I would often look at it and imagine how lonely it might feel. I eventually wrote a poem on that. Or when my folks narrated the story of Gulzar’s film Lekin to me, I was moved enough to write a poem. The sight of a battered old man, dead-drunk, lying by the roadside led to a story – what if that man had a past when there was hope and love in his life. Being in love has been a muse: I once wrote 21 poems for a beloved friend’s twenty-first birthday. The sight of my son’s sleeping face, his soft breathing, when I wake up at night and look at him. Even hate inspires you. The sense of disillusionment I felt about a ‘great’ poet’s pettiness and hypocrisy led to one of my best poems. My own frailties. The light at dusk, a tired day going to sleep. Lost friends … lost ideals. A good film. A bad film. Anything really.
We have read a lot of film pieces by you. When did your interest in writing for cinema start and how did it take off? Did it ever stray to film industries in other countries?
I think the love for cinema developed once I started studying commerce. The subjects bored me. Films offered me an escape. It helped that there were 4-5 cinema halls within walking distance of both my home and my college. I would often get away from college and make my way to a theatre. In the three years of graduation, I watched 169 films in halls. I watched the first-day-first-show, 12-3, and then would make my way to the evening one 6-9. I used to make a list and write down synopsis of what I felt. This was the 1980s, theatres were in awful shape, a really bad time for films and so most of what I watched were utter crap. But that was a lesson in itself. And I really enjoyed the escape to another world, even if a trashy one.
Slowly, with the coming of cable TV, there were more options. The VCR had come in and with that a few more options. Pirated prints from Palika Bazar. I had meanwhile written a few reviews for Filmfare and won a series of best review awards. That boosted my confidence in both my writing and my understanding of cinema. I also did a course in film and TV from the XIC, Mumbai. I started contributing to journals. I ran and wrote for the journal I started in Bombay, Lights Camera Action. But things took off after I started writing on Bengali cinema for Film Companion. And then with my association with Cinemaazi. I must thank Anupama Chopra and Sumant Batra for this. Couldn’t have happened without them.
I publish primarily on Bengali and Hindi cinema but write on a lot of international films for my own self. It’s tough finding time to watch, write, while keeping to the demands of a regular job and other freelancing assignments that one needs to do to keep the home fires burning. I envy the people who have money to spare, don’t have to worry about a job, and can keep churning out books.
Please tell us a bit about Cinemaazi – is it a website founded by you? It seems to be an archive, there is mention of an encyclopaedia?
Cinemaazi is the kind of serendipity I have been looking for as editor and film lover. It’s an initiative to document the history of Indian cinema across languages under the umbrella project Indian Cinema Heritage Foundation, a public charitable trust. The Foundation is also creating a freely accessible digital archive and encyclopaedia of Indian cinema and its people. No, I am not the founder. It’s entirely the brainchild and vision of Sumant and Asha Batra. Sumant is the kind of collector you can only be in awe of. I met him first at the Kumaon Lit Fest that he runs. And we shared a common love of cinema. In 2019, he started talking of a site to document the history of Hindi films, using his huge collection of film memorabilia. My only contribution, if you could call it that, was suggesting we make it a site on pan-Indian cinema, not just Hindi. He agreed and I worked on getting some material on Bengali and some other languages. Also kept contributing to it with articles and some video essays – we did a six-hour-long oral history project with Dhritiman Chatterjee. Cinemaazi got off to a very good start in January 2020. But by March 2020 we were all locking down. And it affected an endeavour taking its first steps. But it kept on working thanks to a small dedicated team. And now it’s poised to take off in a big way. I would have been very happy to engage in a bigger way with Cinemaazi, but as Sumant says, ‘he can’t afford me’, whatever that might mean. Sigh! I guess one ceases to be useful after a time. I am happy to have been a part of it in a small way in its first years.
You have worked with many icons of the Indian film industry like Rishi Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, Gulzar. Please share with us a few of your more interesting experiences.
Shantanu with film star Rishi Kapoor and his wife Neetu SinghShantanu And Rishi Kapoor Photos provided by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri
The big names I worked with like Gulzar and Rishi Kapoor and Arun Shourie were like perks of the job. Yes, they were FB like/share moments except that I seldom shared those days. I miss Rishi-ji a lot … and often go through the WhatsApp messages he sent me… With Gulzar-ji, it was all about poetry and translations. Never worked on a book of films with him, though I did commission a series of monographs on three of his films that came out after I had left the publishing house.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri in conversation with Gulzar and Meghna (Gulzar’s daughter) in Jaipur Literary Festival
The Satyajit Ray association was immensely satisfying. We ended up publishing five very rare books that I think not many editors would have dared to – imagine doing a book on Satyajit Ray’s unmade film on Ravi Shankar! The ones I really enjoyed were the first-time authors I was privileged to publish, people like Balaji Vittal, Anirudh Bhattacharya, Akshay Manwani, Rakesh Bakshi, Parthajit Baruah … and so many. They had no reason to trust me as editor and publisher. I have never been a big-name editor. But to have had them trust me with their books, books that did well, was quite humbling.
I was privileged to have someone like Vishal Bhardwaj trust me with his first book of poems in English. And through Vishal, I came to know Rekha and worked on a series of festival appearances with her – she has so many stories that she should do a book. With Sharmila Tagore, I worked on a book on Mansur Pataudi that did very well. Authors like Krishna Shastri, Sathya Saran and Gajra Kottary became close friends. Rakhshanda Jalil … whom I love and admire – she did a wonderful book on Shahryar with me and a couple of other translations of Gulzar and Kaifi Azmi. There was Nasreen Munni Kabir and her book on Zakir Hussain…
The more interesting encounters are the ones that ended badly. An author, who again published first with me and went on to publish 4 more, turned on me because I took on his rabid right-wing wife on the CAA and their obnoxious reference to ‘urban naxals’ … I was abused and received a lot of threatening messages and calls … I lost a friend and an author, but I am glad I could take a stand on a matter on which many of our ‘liberal’ friends and authors remain silent. Another ‘great’ poet, someone I considered God, turned out to have feet of clay and whose behaviour I find traumatic even today. But those are for my memoir! They taught me a better lesson than anything else could.
You have worked with big multinational names like Penguin and HarperCollins and even brought out collection of books on films. And now you have moved to working with one of the oldest and most iconic publishers from India. Is the experience any different?
Well, the best thing about not being with an MNC is that one is not part of the toxic environment they breed. It was killing after a point. And often they wouldn’t take on an idea just to spite you, even though some of the books that got commissioned were unbelievably bad, had me scratching my head, wondering what I had missed. And they can be very demeaning to authors. And short-sighted too. I remember signing up Rahul Rawail’s memoir of Raj Kapoor. And the publishing house actually reneged on its commitment after sending him an offer. It put me in such a bad place with him. Thankfully, I could get him another MNC publisher. And the book is now getting such rave reviews.
Yes, it’s challenging working in a smaller space. You have nothing going for marketing – not that the biggies do anything much on this either, unless you are already a big name which makes it easy to market. Then you don’t have budgets for advances and for marketing. So, immediately your commissioning acquires a different take. But that also makes you look for good young talent. I am glad I have found quite a few, thanks to agents like Suhail Mathur and some goodwill I might have built up in the last few years. Authors I am sure I wouldn’t have been allowed to publish in the MNCs. Now, whether they sell and work in the market is a gamble.
Writers find it challenging to use traditional publishing. In an attempt to make their writing visible, many are turning to self-publishing and publishing with independent small publishers. What do you think of this trend?
I think it does take a little more time in going the traditional publishing route. Self-publishing is quicker. But then authors also need to be patient. Traditional publishing can give them benefits of a good editor. Give them more time to polish their text. However, it seems more and more authors are in too much of a rush to publish. Getting FB likes and shares is more important than working on your text. Authors don’t feel like they need good editorial intervention. Publishing is all that matters, whatever be the quality of writing.
Unfortunately, traditional publishing too has failed to give good editorial inputs. Some of the stuff I read by the MNC publishers are atrocious. I think everyone wants a book out too quick. When I started out as an editor, we had months to work on a book. These days, authors tend to ask for a marketing plan even before they have completed the first draft of the text. And publishers are only too willing to get on the treadmill. And the post-publication efforts of MNCs also operate on the 90-10 principle: 90 per cent of marketing budget is spent on 10 per cent of the biggies. So, I guess self-publishing works. Some of the most successful mass-market writers we have today started with vanity or self-publishing, then were picked up by the traditional publishers. And the writing continues to be as bad.
Can you tell us as a publisher, what do you look for when you accept or reject a piece of writing?
I don’t think any publisher has figured out what makes a book work. Most of them go by herd mentality: mythologicals are selling, let’s do them, in trilogies, since it’s fashionable these days. Short stories don’t work. Fitness/self-help, yes, let’s do.
Basically, one looks for (i) is the content engaging (ii) is the writing interesting. Take, Akshay’s book on Sahir … I found the content wonderful. And so well done. Or Balaji-Anirudh’s book on RD Burman … the research was impeccable. And though people were sceptical, saying these people had been dead for decades, one felt that these books had that special something. Or more recently, the anthology on motherhood that Om is publishing. I was immediately interested in the theme and the variety of essays on offer – to have Kamala Das and Mannu Bhandari, Shashi Deshpande and Shabana Azmi between the same covers is…. There’s a collection of essays on the pandemic that I have commissioned, coming out soon – again, from Shashi Tharoor and Vidya Balan to an anonymous gravedigger and migrant worker – the range is incredible. The book that we are doing with Borderless Journal, for example. What a wide variety of international writing! Or the book on cybersecurity. Or for that matter, Suman Ghosh’s Soumitra Chatterjee book, which gave some fascinating insights to the director-actor relationship. I knew people would think it niche, but what if we could make it big? It has the potential.
Thank you for that. What is your vision as a publisher and writer of the future of publishing and writing?
I am too small fry to talk of the future of publishing. It’s a tough time for publishers. At the end of the day, all those 500 likes on FB won’t help if those liking don’t buy books. Social media reach is no guarantee of either good writing or good sales.
The way Westland folded says a lot about how untenable big advances are. Authors must realise that. While publishers must make efforts to sell more of the books they publish so that even if advances are small, the royalty on sales works out.
I think there’s also a lot of snobbery around English-language publishing in India. On the part of publishers, authors, translators, agents, literary festivals. I know an agent, one of India’s most successful, who doesn’t deign to pitch books to me because I am not with the top MNC publishers. Though apart from a hefty advance, there is nothing I cannot deliver that the biggies can. One of the most popular cover designers, who worked closely with me when I was at Penguin and Harper, just put me out to dry when I approached him for a cover on the Soumitra Chatterjee book. He couldn’t be bothered even to respond given that I was with a smaller publisher now. The most popular translator won’t give me time of day, though I edited his/her first book. There’s this author couple I published after both their individual books had been rejected at other publishers. But once they realised that prosperity lay in ingratiating themselves with what they perceived were other more popular and powerful editors … though none of their books have worked in terms of sales so far in the last ten years.
Most editors I have come across give off vibes like they are god’s gift to the language. I mean, not even two per cent of the population engages with the work you do. What are we so uppity about? The local cobbler attends to more people than what your average book gets as readers.
And this snobbery impacts the kind of publishing we do. We are suckers for big names, big advances. We have to move out of that. And out of this herd mentality of publishing. Give new writers, new themes a chance. At the same time, new young authors need to reflect on their work and not rush into becoming a ‘published’ author. It’s not instant noodles or coffee. Books and authors take time to develop. We need to give books that time.
Thank you for giving us your time and also taking on our anthology.
With Sandip Ray &Sharmila TagoreWith Soumitra ChatterjeeWith Amitabh BachchanShantanu at various launches and events with Indian films’ glitterati. Photos provided by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri
Borderless 