I Remember My First Encounter with a Clearing House Book of Poetry As If It Were Yesterday
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I remember my first encounter with a Clearing House book of poetry as if it were yesterday. I was standing, hunched up and sweaty, on the mezzanine floor of the New and Secondhand Book Centre, in Kalbadevi, South Mumbai (now defunct). I had just been converted to poetry by a stray encounter with Wilfred Owen‘s ‗Futility‘ in my state-sponsored school‘s English reader and at the Elphinstone College, I had been told that if I liked that kind of thing, I might want to check out Indian poets as well. I could not afford new books and the second-hand market for books was crowded with bestsellers and self-help books. There was very little poetry, except for the text book discards of young brown subcontinental students studying dead white European men. So New and Secondhand Books, which had a section devoted to poetry, was itself a find. I began with Hymns in Darkness by Nissim Ezekiel in the Three Crowns imprint (now defunct) of the Oxford University Press and had come back, looking for more. Those memories are more than thirty years old but I can still recall the delicious ache that every bibliophile feels when one picks up a book artefact that is beautiful and finds also, to one‘s surprise, that it is a book one will want to buy and keep. It was the shape of the book, the oddness of the cover, its design in other words, its design that drew me to pick up my first Clearing House book. And then I was reading ‗Sea Breeze, Bombay‘: Surrogate city of banks, Brokering and bays, refugees‘ harbour and port, Gatherer of ends whose bricks beginnings work Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,i. This was about my city and it seemed to contain echoes of what I had felt about Bombay. I could see someone lurking behind this poem, someone like me, someone dispossessed but longing to belong. I did not notice then the colophon or even the name of the publishing house. I was more concerned with whether I would be able to afford the book and was delighted when I found that I would be able to and that the man at the counter would be happy to keep other books aside, when they turned up. (I do not think he ever did but I did eventually get all my Clearing House books from New and Secondhand Books.) That was in 1982. One day in 2012, I happened to be sitting in Adil Jussawalla‘s Cuffe Parade flat and he pointed at a blue Rexine bag that was lying on the floor. ―That contains all the Clearing House correspondence,‖ he said. My heart missed a beat. For as long as I can remember, I have bewailed the absence of archives, the lack of any information about how anything cultural happens in India. Every so often one hears another terrible story: a photographic studio in Mumbai that had a treasure trove of theatre photographs closes down and all the negatives are sold to the rag-and-bone man, a library‘s records flooded, a complete lack of interest in the contents of a poet‘s office. And here was someone saying that there was a complete record of a poets‘ cooperative of the 1970s and early 1980s that had brought out some of the most important works of Indian poetry in English—some might even call them canonical now. ―But surely you wouldn‘t have your own letters?‖ I asked. Jussawalla responded coldly, ―This was not personal correspondence. It was a business and I kept copies of my own letters.‖ This was more than exciting, I was to discover. Accidents of biography and geography and the nature of the Indian state had made it a veritable treasure trove. There were many candidates, it would seem, who were considered to be the first members of Clearing House. But eventually there were four of them: Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Arun Kolkatkar and Gieve Patel. (At a later stage, they woul.d be joined by three other poets: Dilip Chite, H O Nazareth and Jayanta Mahapatra.) ―There was no first meeting as such,‖ Jussawalla said later. ―We had been discussing the idea for a while, the problem of all the manuscripts that we had lying around and which weren‘t getting published because there were no publishers. When the group finally coalesced into the four of us, I could feel that there was some considerable heartburn among other poets. I didn‘t want it to be that way. I thought we should have a larger group eventually, so that if there were six or eight of us, each poet would look after his own manuscript and help out with one or two others. At least, that‘s the way I envisaged it.‖ At one of the first meetings it was decided that all decisions would be unanimous. This was in the spirit of the 1960s and the spirit of the cooperatives. But this was also the 1970s when telephony was a government monopoly, a trunk call to another city had to be booked a day in advance, and the Internet was still a couple of decades away. To make things a little more difficult, only two of the four poets were in Bombay. Adil Jussawalla and Arun Kolatkar both lived in the southern tip of the island city, almost within walking distance of each other and so this means that there is very little left of what they said to each other. Gieve Patel who had just started his career as a medical doctor was working in Gujarat, where his practice among India‘s poor would produce a life-long aesthetic sympathy with the human body in distress and under duress. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was moving to Allahabad, and settling a young family down in a new city. (One of the guilty pleasures of the blue Rexine bag was the way in which the poets, all of whom were friends, mixed the personal, the political and the poetic. The baby was to be burped, a wife was to be escorted to the hospital...and no one could be sure that the visa was going to come through on time.) This meant that it would fall to Adil Jussawalla to keep everyone informed of what had been said in Bombay. Kolatkar was, by his own admission, not much of a letter writer. And since Jussawalla kept copies of his own letters, it is possible to reconstruct much of the back-end of the publication of some of the finest poetry in Indian English. First they needed a name. A list of names was drawn up in order of preference: 1. CLEARING HOUSE 2. COMMUNICATOR 3. MINIMUM 4. IMPULSE 5. INTERCOM 6. POETRY 7. LINES 8. TOUCH AND GO 9. OFF-PRINT 10. THE INDEX 11. NARROW MARGIN 12. THE OFF-CHANCE 13. TEMPO 14. CAPACITOR 15. TEXTS 16. CONTEXTS Another list offered four more possibilities. On this one too, Clearing House, like Abou Ben Adhem, led all the rest. DYNAMO TRANSMITTER INDICATOR POINTER This second list also had a section called ‗Names to consider‘ THE NEEDY DRAGON THE LESSER EVILS PRINTER‘S DEVILS THE WAITING ROOM LIFERS THE SUCHMUCH PRESS Another small list indicated that there had been another set of choices too. New to the list were: DOGMA PAPER TIGER ―Clearing House won in the end, I suppose, because we were all sick of being told that there was no room for poetry books in the lists of publishing houses. If they wanted to have anything to do with poetry, it was in the form of anthologies. Of course, they would either pay the poets nothing—the assumption being that you should be so honoured to be included that you would not think of asking for money—or or they would pay in copies of the book in question,‖ says Jussawalla. ―The name seemed like a crisp clear statement of purpose.‖ On 9 February, 1976, the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate‘s Office, then at the Esplanade, Bombay, wrote to Sri Adil Jussawalla to say that the Registrar of Newspapers in India had intimated the court that the title Clearing House was available as a bi-monthly newspaper. He should therefore ―attend this office on any working day at 10-30 am (except on Saturdays) within 10 days from the receipt of this letter to get your declaration declaration (sic) authenticated. A bi-monthly newspaper? That was indeed the original idea. The idea is explained on a single undated sheet of paper, titled ‗Publishing Possibilities‘ which seems to have been minutes of an early meeting but no one is quite sure. The publishing house, at this point in time working under the working title of New Book Co, was to raise money, preferably by advance subscription. The idea was to approach well-off artists, writers, sympathisers and their equivalents in the Indian languages and ―foreign presses and groups, blacks‖. The advantages were to be that the poet loses nothing, has greater control over his work than if s/he were to hand it over to a commercial publisher, and would get royalties too. The note ends with a list of ‗Poets to be published‘: Eunice D‘Souza/Rahul d‘Gama Rose/ Adil [Jussawalla} Arun [Kolatkar] / Arvind [Krishna Mehrotra]/ Santan [Rodrigues]/ Darius [cooper]/ Saleem [Peeradina] It has a section marked: Ideal beginning Arun/Arvind/ Adil Eunice/ Rahul/ Santan Darius/ Saleem/ Nissim [Ezekiel] And another one called: Likely beginning Eunice/Rahul/ Adil Nissim/ Arun/ Dilip [Chitre] It is again unclear whether the original idea was to put three manuscripts together and publish them or whether it was to put out a manuscript per poet and each set marks a ‗season‘.