Paper 14; Module 11; E Text

Paper 14; Module 11; E Text (A) Personal Details Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Prof. Tutun University of Hyderabad Mukherjee Paper Coordinator Prof. Asha Kuthari Guwahati University Chaudhuri, Content Writer/Author Abdul Mubid Gauhati University (CW) Islam, Content Reviewer (CR) Dr. Anjali Daimari, Dept. of English, Gauhati University Language Editor (LE) Dr. Dolikajyoti Assistant Professor, Gauhati Sharma, University (B) Description of Module Item Description of module Subject Name English Paper name Indian Writing in English Module title Identity/Home/Space Module ID MODULE 11 Module 11 Identity/Home/Space Introducing the poet: Keki N. Daruwalla (born 1937) is a police officer by profession who has simultaneously managed to pursue the creative art of poetry. He has published twelve volumes of poetry— Under Orion (1970), Apparition in April (1971) and Crossing of Rivers (1976), Winter Poems (1980), The Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A Summer of Tigers (1995), Night River (2000), Map Maker (2002), The Scarecrow and the Ghost (2004), Collected Poems 1970-2005 (2006) and The Glass-blower: Selected Poems (2008). He has received the coveted Sahitya Academy Award in 1984 for his anthology The Keeper of the Dead. Daruwalla believes in the subjective response of the poet in producing a work of art and he says that poetry, for him, is first personal, exploratory, at times even therapeutic which helps in coming to terms with one’s interior world. He is also an acclaimed novelist and a short story writer. The striking imaginative power of his verse has established his reputation as a unique poet in the annals of Indian English Literature. Migrations Migrations are always difficult: ask any drought, any plague; ask the year 1947. Ask the chronicles themselves: if there had been no migrations would there have been enough history to munch on? Going back in time is also tough. Ask anyone back-trekking to Sargodha or Jhelum or Mianwali and they'll tell you. New faces among old brick; politeness, sentiment, dripping from the lips of strangers. This is still your house, Sir. And if you meditate on time that is no longer time - (the past is frozen, it is stone, that which doesn't move and pulsate is not time) - if you meditate on that scrap of time, the mood turns pensive like the monsoons gathering in the skies but not breaking. Mother used to ask, don't you remember my mother? You'd be in the kitchen all the time and run with the fries she ladled out, still sizzling on the plate. Don't you remember her at all? Mother's fallen face would fall further at my impassivity. Now my dreams ask me If I remember my mother And I am not sure how I'll handle that. Migrating across years is also difficult. (Keki Daruwalla) Critical Appreciation: In this poem, Daruwalla reflects on the idea of ‘displacement’ that has evolved a new terrain of thought in ascribing identity to a group of people who are categorised as migrants. The poem becomes an interesting read because Daruwalla’s concern is not just to catalogue the factors that engender migration but also to juxtapose public history with the personal. The poem can be said to be drafted in the inductive mode as we find Daruwalla oscillating between two polarities—public and private—by moving from the general to the particular in chronicling the factors of migration. The poem is fused with personal touches that give the idea of “home” which is again a contentious topic within the rubric of displacement. The poem unfolds in the manner of the speaker’s estimate of a survey of the factors of forced migration. Droughts, plagues and even the infamous year 1947 that saw the Partition of India are considered to be the prime agents of migration. The speaker also reflects upon the possibility of an inconsequential historicity had it not been for migration that have had provided the necessary thrust in carving out a history of the place and its people. The speaker then states the difficulty in retracing the past which indicates that the speaker is not just dealing with spatial displacement as the only condition of migration but is equally broadening the limits of a conceptual migration in time sequence. The politics of adaptation to newer surroundings by the migrants is bolstered in the expression “new faces among old bricks”. However, the speaker intends to amplify the idea of the “homeland” which is always a distant dream, an unachieved never land for the refugees which is highlighted in the irony implicit in the expression “This is your house, Sir”. The speaker assesses the possibility of meditating on time and goes on to engage in a philosophical digression by listing the pensive nature of a past migrant memory. It is in the last paragraph that the speaker fuses the public with the personal when he uses an instance of his childhood memory as a vantage point to reflect on the more holistic picture of “home” and “identity”. The speaker speaks of the amount of dissatisfaction that spreads on his mother’s face when he shows his inability to remember his grandmother and the fried dishes she used to prepare for him. In fact, the dissatisfaction becomes more painful as the speaker now even fails to remember his own mother. It is here that he states the difficulty of migrating back in time. The early assertion of migration and displacement being the root cause of all historical events gets a new amplification in the recent discovery made by the speaker that even personal memory is steeped in the conditional titbits of migration and that the very act of retracing it makes one eventually experience the idea of migration. In other words, the speaker asserts that geographical displacement shares an ideological corollary with the displacement engendered in an individual’s memory sequence as both are difficult to trek. Introducing the poet: Jayanta Mahapatra born in Cuttack, Orissa in 1928 was originally a Professor of Physics at Ravenshaw College. He started writing poetry when he was about forty but this late advent into the creative world further enabled him to inscribe the stoic acceptance of pain and suffering of the Oriya life as part of the cosmic agenda. He has published many volumes of poetry and that too in a rapid rate of which mention may be made of Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father’s House and A Rain of Rites (both in 1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start and Relationship (both in 1980), Life Signs (1983), Dispossessed Nests (1986), Selected Poems (1987), Burden of Waves and Fruit (1988) and The Temple (1987), A Whiteness of Bone (1992), Shadow Space (1997), Bare Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005). Apart from poetry he has also published a collection of short stories called The Green Gardener and Other Stories along with editing his Journal Chandrabhaga which ceased publication in 1985. Although much of his poetry can be claimed to bear close resemblances with the modernist poetry, yet Mahapatra himself never acknowledged any such influence of the great modernists like Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot. The early obscurity and ambiguity in his poems arise from the bold juxtaposition of abstract and concrete words and in the syntactic experiments, mostly disjunctions. Nevertheless, the reader finds a challenge in his poems for coherence which makes them more endearing. The surreal world that permeates his poetry along with the conceits and mind boggling imagery are representative of the qualitative merits of his poetic craft. He has earned the honour to be the first Indian English poet to receive the Sahitya Academy Award for Relationship (1981), an epic poem in twelve sections that meditates on Orissa’s mythology and monuments. The Exile Land’s distance. Walking where the mouldy village rests rawly against the hills the charred ruins of sun. Corpses smoulder past my night. The wind hurls the ashes of the present, to settle in the corners of my skin. I walk back, drugged, between old, ill parents. Around me, my squalid town, the long-haired priest of Kali who still packs stolen jasmines In to a goddess’s morning eye; a father’s symbols: the door I am afraid to close. It is an exile. Between good and evil where I need the sting of death. Where a country’s ghosts pull my eyes toward birth. It is an obscure relative I’ve never seen. Every time. The duty of carrying my inconscequences in Father’s house. It is there in my son’s eye up the tree. (Jayanta Mahapatra) Critical Appreciation: Jayanta Mahapatra evokes the painful awareness of the search for an identity through this poem. The poem is a brilliant espousal of the discourse of an “in-between” space as Homi Bhabha would have it in his theoretical exposition of the postcolonial condition in his path breaking book Location of Culture. Mahapatra’s prime concern is to validate the propositional base of sharing a space that is both liminal and claustrophobic. The sense of claustrophobia intensifies even further when the individual is a victim of spatial, cultural and political dislocation. The urgency of maintaining one’s cultural roots is what Mahapatra seeks to uphold and it is this urgency that poses serious questions in configuring the migrant diasporic identity which is always in the grip of a perpetual, often self-inflicted exile. The title of the poem justifies the polemics centering on the cultural embeddedness of an exile authenticated either by a deliberate choice or a condition levied by any coercive authority.

Load more