Chapter 5 Modern Indian English Women's Poetry
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150 CHAPTER 5 MODERN INDIAN ENGLISH WOMEN’S POETRY: THEMES, STYLES, PERSPECTIVES AND AFFILIATIONS. In his introduction to the anthology One Hundred Indian Poets: Signatures, (2001) K. Sachidanandan observes that, The polyphonic and often polyglot plurality of the modernist Indian text reflects the poets‘ attempt to express the new cultural ferment that far exceeded the formal resources of the prevailing modes. (xxxii) Also that, Another alternative nationhood being forged today is that of the women poets who consciously or unconsciously strive to subvert our phallocentric social order: revisionary myth-making, naked confession, the forging of counter- metaphors, the establishment of an alternate semiotics of the body, uninhibited forays into the feminine psyche – all these seem to be on their national agenda. (xxxviii) Indian women writing poetry in English have been increasing in number since the 1970s. They write from diverse cultural, linguistic and geographical spaces. They also write in the midst of many pressures and expectations. Nissim Ezekiel‘s view of the poet‘s struggle ____ One good thing about your life is that in this struggle to keep up with your writing you‘ll find that you will never have the problem of a writer writing in an ivory tower because you are so firmly earthbound, you are so firmly linked with life, think of all these many demands holding you down … ‗Perhaps that is the best kind of solution to the problems a woman writer faces, an attitude like that ___ is cited by Gita Hariharan who adds, ‗Perhaps this is the best kind of solution to the problems a woman writer faces, an attitude like that‘. (Kuortti 106) Arlene Zide writes that her anthology, In Their Own Voice, aims to focus ‗on seeing through women‘s eyes, a different women‘s-eyed view of the world in poetry‘. Zide 151 quotes Eunice de Souza‘s observation that, ‗The battle is to validate the material to begin with ___ the stuff of women‘s lives, women‘s experience, not to ‗transcend‘ being a woman.‘ (xix Zide) Although Deshpande does not figure in Eunice de Souza‘s Nine Indian Women Poets of 1997 which begins with Kamala Das, ushering in the new age of women‘s poetry, she was writing English poetry in the 1960s when Das came on the scene. In a selection of three poets for the journal Quest, (No. 74) for its 1972 issue on ‗Contemporary Indian Poetry In English: An Assessment And Selection‘ guest edited by Saleem Peeradina, Eunice de Souza chose a selection of poems by Mamta Kalia, Kamala Das, and Gauri Deshpande. De Souza notes that ‗these three women poets have one quality in common: in relation to the conventional idea of Indian women, they express themselves very freely‘. (Peeradina, 84) Having said that, de Souza flays Deshpande‘s poetry, saying that only a few of her poems are good. Deshpande had at this time, published two of her three anthologies __ Between Births, 1968 and Lost Love, 1970, both from P Lal‘s ‗Writers Workshop‘ in Kolkata. In a review article titled ‗Two Anthologies‘ in the same issue of Quest ‟74, the reviewer Eunice de Souza is scathing about both anthologies __ Modem Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo, edited and published by P. Lal of ·writers Workshop, Calcutta, in 1969, and V. K. Gokak's The Golden Treasury of lndo-Anglian Poetry 1828-1965 published in 1970. Both were ‗reckless‘ according to de Souza in their indiscriminate and wide selection of poets and scribblers. Eunice de Souza‘s observations regarding the anthologies, lay down the new and ultimately prevailing critical assessment of modern Indian English Poetry. Deshpande was anthologized in collections edited by Peeradina, Pritish Nandy and Keki Daruwala in the 1970s. Her last book of poems in English appeared in 1970, although she published a collection 152 of short stories in English titled The Lackadaisical Sweeper in 1997. Deshpande‘s work has been described ‗as strongly feminist, wryly humorous—usually at her own expense, confident yet self-critical, irreverent yet steeped in tradition, cosmopolitan yet grounded in her love for language and place. No matter who or where her audience is, she is bound to challenge their assumptions, producing both discomfort and delight‘, by Jyotsna Rege in ‗Gauri Deshpande: A Distinctive Voice‘. ( Rege 3) The article is about Deshpande‘s English short story collection and not her poetry. Deshpande worked for the Illustrated Weekly of India in the 1960s, a time when there was a lot of English poetry, good and bad, in circulation. After her three volumes of English poems, Deshpande moved on to writing in her native language, Marathi, as stated by Josna Rege in Sparrow Newsletter. SNL Number 14, August 2008: While Gauri Deshpande was unquestionably one of the most important and innovative writers in contemporary Marathi literature, and was well-known and respected throughout India and among scholars of Maharashtra, she began her career writing well-received poetry in English. She published three collections with the Calcutta Writers Workshop and edited a collection of Indian poetry in English in the late sixties and early seventies, but then switched over to writing fiction in Marathi and made her name with her novellas and her translations. At the time of her death in 2003 she was relatively unknown beyond India; however, that was changing, since her work in English had been gaining greater exposure throughout the 1990s. One of her Marathi stories was translated into English and anthologized in the important two-volume Women Writing in India published in 1993, and her first collection of short stories in English, The Lackadaisical Sweeper, was published in 1997. Several of her important Marathi-English translations were also published or re-issued in the late 1980s and 1990s, including Sumitra Bhave‘s Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell their Story (1988), Jayawant Dalvi‘s searing social critique, Chakra: a novel (1974, 1993), and Sunita Deshpande‘s …and Pine for What is Not (1995), a controversial memoir by the wife and secretary of the popular Marathi playwright P.L. Deshpande. (Rege 3) Reshu Gupta observes in ‗Gauri Deshpande‘s Poetry‘ in ‗Images of Women in Gauri Deshpande's Poetry‘ in Muse India. Issue 52: Nov-Dec2013, that, Deshpande's poetry differs from other poets in terms of conventions, experimentation, spirit, values and sensibility. Her major concerns in poetry 153 can be divided into different categories like of man-women portrayals in terms of their marital and sexual relationships, concept of death, sense of alienation and frustration, identity crisis, recognition, and urge for feminine sensibilities. (Gupta Web) De Souza‘s critical comments on Deshpande in 1972 notwithstanding, in 1980 Keki Daruwala published both Deshpande and De Souza‘s poems in his collection of eight poets Two Decades of Indian Poetry 1960-1980. That they are the only two women poets apart from Kamala Das in this volume that includes poets such as Nissim Ezekiel and the poets from Parthasarthy‘s Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, makes this according to reviewer, Alamgir Hashmi ‗what to P. Lal would surely be __ a rigorous Darwinian selection‘. (Hashmi 219) Deshpande‘s poetry in English does mark a place at the starting point of the modern trend in women‘s poetry in English. But her diction and tenor are not like Kamala Das‘s. The colloquial tone of Das‘s poetry set a trend that is found in poets such as Mamta Kalia, Charmayne D‘ Souza, Melanie Silgardo and Smita Agarwal. There is also the tone of rebellion and defiance. In Deshpande‘s poetry the defiance is not in the tone but in the acknowledgement that she and others like her compromised in personal life. She writes in the poem, ‗We Hadn‘t the Guts‘: to cut and quit when the quitting was good. Now what floundering lives we lead have got left not love nor lust. (Between Births, 15) Hers is a voice that expresses the tribulations of a woman‘s life in a different language, as she herself states in the much anthologized poem, ‗The Female of the Species‘ in the same collection : Sometimes you want to talk about love and despair and the ungratefulness of children. A man is of no use whatever then. You want then your mother or sister 154 or the girl with whom you went through school … You sit with them and talk. She sews and you sit and sip and speak of the rate of rice and the price of tea and the scarcity of cheese. You know both that you‘ve spoken of love and despair and ungrateful children. ( 12) The tone of stoic acceptance in Deshpande‘s poems in this first volume Between Births (1968) was bypassed by the younger generation of poets in favour of satiric wit or loud protest. Deshpande‘s poetry seemed spoken from a point beyond turbulence, as in ‗I wanted to weep‘, …for you And me But I had already spent All tears in useless mournings. So now I watch arid eyed As my fingers open slowly And let you go. ( 20) The poems on love, or rather lost love, convey despair and desperation as in the lines, in the four part poem sequence ‗Death‘ with which, very appropriately she opens the collection. For death is what lies between births. And becomes a sought for love whom she had left. She concludes the last poem in the sequence with these lines: I return now… Return to beg for the sanctuary not of love, only of your arms. (3) Death is unexpected, she had stated in the opening lines of the first poem in the sequence: We live and meet with death Turning a street corner.