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‘. Jussawalla does not remember but some clue may be seen in the publication of 3 Poets which brought together the work on Rahul da Gama Rose, Melanie Silgardo and Santan Rodrigues. Jussawalla wrote an elegant introduction in which he heaped scorn on the publishing industry for ignoring poetry. He lists many of the Indian poets writing in English who published themselves and after mentioning Clearing House, he ended with a triumphant: My intention is really to show that the phenomenon of poets publishing themselves and other poets is not a secondary feature of Indian publishing, but the chief one. We are not and never have been the poor cousins of big publishers. We have been the only means by which poetry has been kept alive while the big publishers slept. The three poets in this volume are, I believe, the youngest group to attempt this. They are correct not to wait in line for older poets to discover them. Readers of their published work and those who have heard them read their poems have done that already. We may realize, however dimly, that it is the hard work of the poets and the existing conspiracy that has found us out. We would be correct in anticipating a great deal of pleasure from this volume. Those new to the work may also be new to poetry. They are part of the new ground that is broken; in this way new readers will continue to be found. Welcome to the conspiracy.ii Over several letters and meetings, the idea of Clearing House was refined. Each book would be treated as the issue of a magazine. If the books could then be brought out on time, they could benefit from reduced postal tariffs for magazines. (‗Book post‘ is still one of the best ways to send or to receive books in India, as many small presses will tell you. Books do not get waylaid and they do arrive, sometimes somewhat rain-worn and battered. However the system works only if you‘re not in too much of a rush.)

It took a while to settle who would actually be published first. As anyone who has readied a manuscript knows, it isn‘t done until it‘s done. This was probably also the reason why the magazine idea was not a good one. You simply had to meet the deadline and it was impossible for a collective of poets, working in as democratic and non-hierarchical a manner as possible, to bully and chivvy each other into meeting schedules as far as producing the manuscript went. And then there was the editing process. This was also a matter of mail. There are many letters which simply suggest grammatical changes, emendations of language and line breaks and each of these would take a couple of weeks to make its way across the subcontinent, to be read, fumed over, and responded to, reconsidered, redrafted, typed out and posted again. Meanwhile, paper prices were going up and down and each delay meant a change in the precarious finances of the new publishing house. None of the principals is very sure how much was put in and by whom. The seed money came from Adil‘s father, Dr Jehangir Jussawalla, a naturopath. Gieve Patel says: ―but I do remember that I put in some money and I even got a refund.‖ Clearing House was however listed as a proprietorship. |Filing income tax returns was always a tedious business but there didn‘t seem to be any other way out. The four of us together as a partnership was also suggested but it was never seriously discussed. How would we manage that with Arvind away in another city? I tried to make things more formal. I suggested a contract, a very basic one but each one of the others was opposed to it in his own way. Arun was chronically opposed to any form of contract. I had suggested that out of all the money that came to the poet, a small percentage should be set aside for the house. That would help build the corpus. It had become clear, even after the first set of books, that we could not rely on pre-publication subscriptions alone. As all little magazines soon discover, subscribers dwindle. But no one wanted a contract.‖ Gieve Patel remembers, ―There was a bit of a conflict because at that time Oxford University Press had just started its Three Crowns imprint and Nissim [who had published Gieve Patel‘s first book of poems] was keen that I should be published with them. But I finally chose Clearing House. I think that my first few meetings with Ravi Dayal had not been memorable. And with Adil, Arvind and Arun, I was comfortable. They were my friends. I did feel like I was abandoning Nissim but when I told him he was gracious. ‗You must publish with them if that‘s what you want,‘ he said and made it smooth and comfortable for me.‖ In a long letter dated 16 March 1976, Adil wrote to Arvind, informing him that he was to go first. A problem with the order and a surprise. You‘re first. I‘m second and Arun and Gieve can battle for last place. Don‘t shout. It‘s like this. Arun would like to have time to prepare the manuscript of his Marathi work too, so that it can be published as a book about the same time as Jejuri1. Can‘t say No to that. I‘d be willing to come out first if I could just have one day to myself, just one day, to type out the ms in fair. Problems right now, not just ones connected with CH, make that impossible. So be brave. Remember, even if you have to face the bullets first, we‘re all behind you. Meanwhile the books were being designed by Arun Kolatkar. He had long believed that the book should follow the lengths of the lines in the poem and no line in any poem should ever be broken simply because the book was not broad enough. And so the square format, Jussawalla maintains, the format that made these books into fetish objects, was based on the line lengths one sees in a poem such as ‗Between Jejuri and the Railway Station‘. Then there were the cover illustrations. When Patel‘s first book was to come out, he had suggested to Ezekiel that one of his [Patel‘s] paintings could go on the cover. Ezekiel had said that no one would take a book of poetry seriously if it had an image on the cover. Patel was now in a quandary. ―Well, all three of them were going to have an image on the cover. Arun would read the poetry of course and then he would also talk to the poet so he could get the right image. I think that statement of Nissim‘s was at the back of my mind somewhere so I announced one day that I want my book to have a plain cover. I think I wanted my book to be ‗taken seriously‘. I remember there was a bit of a silence. Then Arun said ‗Okay‘ but it was distinctly cool. I went back to Sanjan with this thing playing away at the back of my mind. I was already beginning to feel a bit left out of all the fun and the working together. Meanwhile, Arun had cast me into outer darkness. He said that if I wanted the book to have a plain cover, he didn‘t need to be worrying about it and he wasn‘t going to design it and so on. So I went away to Sanjan, mulling over all this, and after a while, I came back and said, ―I think I want a cover with an image on it‖. Arun did a bit of grumbling and said that the work was already underway. I said, ―I‘m a poet and artists have the right to change their minds.‖ That went down quite well. So we sat down to look at ideas for the cover. I said that my favourite colour was reddish-umber and so perhaps that could feature somewhere. But the central image of the book was the human body under conditions of stress, but it was also the body trying to liberate itself. I directed him to the poem in which I am examining an old man and I ask him what I could do for him but throw him up in the air after laying him out like a child‘s game of sticks and coloured paper, a kite2. So it‘s a man far gone, perhaps beyond help, but throwing the man up into the air like a kite also makes it a crazy sort of a liberating image. I said, ―Could we get all this into a cover image?‖ and when he showed me what he had done—well, it was just superb.

1 As everyone knows this did not happen. The Marathi work did not materialize at the same time. 2 Rural, p 30, HDYWB The books did make it out eventually. There is a handwritten list of those who had ordered, many from small-town India. On 16 October 1976, Gopal Honnalgere wrote asking for a check list. ―That was the power of the mail order idea. It brought in inquiries from small towns in India, taking Clearing House to places other brews couldn‘t reach. I cannot be sure if this was the first time Honnalgere wrote3 but I do know that it was around this time we made contact. And that is how I came to know of this fine poet and how I began to build my collection of his poetry, a collection that has come in handy for other people later,‖ says Jussawalla. But the libraries, for instance, did not support the collective. ―As the list of subscribers makes clear, the libraries didn‘t support us. The libraries had, and I suppose still have, their own system of ordering, their own book suppliers, their own book shops with whom they do business. Unless a member of the staff of the College or University makes a very strong recommendation, a book from an independent publisher is not going to get into the library. But then I should have understood that we wouldn‘t have been an alternative publishing house, had we been accepted by the libraries. By and large, they were not interested in buying books of poetry. We should not have been surprised that professors of English literature didn‘t buy our books either; nor did most poets.‖ The reviews were generally positive, if sometimes a little perplexed. The poets didn‘t seem to fit. Their diction seemed odd, their meaning obscure. They did not seem to be uncomfortable in the language of expression and this made many nativist critics think of them as ‗inauthentic‘, an accusation that still follows much writing in English that comes out of India. The collective had its major success when Jejuri won the Commonwealth Prize. It was a unanimous decision and Soonoo Kolatkar, Arun‘s wife, remembers that he was issued a white passport, which allowed him many privileges. The second set of books came out after a hiatus. The poets were different—only Arvind Krishna Mehrotra would bring out two books in the time of the collective—and so the struggles were different. Jussawalla‘s name no longer appears as the publisher. ―It was not my idea that I would go on publishing other

3 It was not. In the file on Honnalgere that Jussawalla maintained, there is a letter dated 28 July 1969, in which Gopal Honnalgere introduces himself as a 27-year-old science graduate of Mysore University, who once ran a second-hand bookstore and was then looking for a job. He had heard of the anthology that Jussawalla was editing— this was to become the magisterial NewWriting in India, Penguin, 1974—and wanted to submit poems for it. On 11 September 1985, he introduced himself again, saying that he had had six volumes of his poetry published. He wanted to have a volume published by Clearing House. The correspondence between Honnalgere and Jussawalla ends with a letter from the latter which included a cheque for the Collected Poems, an advertisement for which had caught Jussawalla‘s eye. Whether such a book of poems was ever published is moot but it should have been. A final note: Jussawalla‘s file on Honnalgere has saved him from unwarranted obscurity. His inclusion in Jeet Thayil‘s anthology, Sixty Indian Poets, Penguin, 2008, is owed to this file. ―I would never have found enough Honnalgere material if it weren‘t for Adil,‖ Thayil wrote in an email (14 May 2010) to me. poets, specially as Clearing House was conceived as a cooperative,‖ says Jussawalla. ―Dilip was working in an ad agency run by Osbourne D‘Souza and he had an office in the Eucharistic Congress Building, once it was decided that the publisher for Dilip and Jayanta‘s book would be Viju Chitre, a new account was opened at the Bank of Baroda branch near Ozzie‘s office. ―Dilip (Chitre) did not believe that there should be any breaks in his poetry; that his life and his work were a seamless whole,‖ says Jussawalla. ―This meant that his poetry should be published as it stood. When we were in Iowa together at the Paul Engel‘s International Writing Program, he would often speak of how Sanskrit shlokas were written without breaks or pauses or without the full stop that came later, he said. It was an article of faith that the poems should flow as his life had flowed. This made it difficult for any publisher since he was a prolific and uneven writer. I took it upon myself to organise the sequence of poems called ‗Travelling in a Cage‘. ―To him the order I made was unsatisfactory. He said, ―That isn‘t what I would have done‖ when he saw it. To which Viju replied, ―Well, why don‘t you do it then? Don‘t go on about it, just get down and do it.‖ He would not and so my ordering of the poems stands. ―I did feel however that I needed to explain Dilip‘s idea of ―seamlessness‖; so I wrote a rather long blurb. I wasn‘t sure how Arun would take that. He didn‘t believe in blurbs4. I don‘t remember him actually saying it in so many words but I think he believed that a book of poems was self-explanatory; any introduction to it should be minimal. I had to tread carefully but Arun took it well. He seemed to understand and he found a way to fit the blurb into the look he wanted for the book.‖ When those eight books were out, the cooperative ended. ―I like to think, a little facetiously, that the original idea was Marxist: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need,‖ says Jussawalla, ―but then the abilities were markedly different because the lives of the founders were also markedly different.‖ That the lives and the skills and the poetry of the founders was remarkably different is testament to their ability to accept each other‘s work on its own terms, rather than setting the agenda for what is or is not poetry. That the cooperative lived on, long after it folded up, can be seen in a number of books that followed which took the shape or the design of the Clearing House books.

4 In the Pras Prakashan edition, the blurb reads: Arun Kolatkar was born in 1932, in Kolhapur, and works as a graphic artist in Bombay. Although his poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies since 1955, Jejuri, published by Clearing House, was his first book. It was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 1977. Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, a collection of his Marathi poems, was published by Pras in 1977. But more than that it is in the poetic lives of the next generation of poets that these echoes resound. The poet Arundhathi Subramaniam notes, ―The first time I read Jejuri was during my first undergrad year in a dusty nook in the St Xavier‘s College library in Mumbai. I recall being impressed – something I continued to be on subsequent readings. But when I revisited it last year during a remarkably quiet and hermetic writer‘s residency in Scotland , I felt something more than just admiration. Here, I felt, was writing from a guild at which I‘d be proud to owe allegiance, glad to do apprenticeship. ―Jejuri is, quite simply, a book that never seems to date. The words seem to spring out of even the most battered and dog-eared copy with an alert and invigorating freshness. There is obviously a keen sense of craftsmanship in the deliberate sparseness of the aesthetic, but the end result is anything but mannered. The voice that emerges from these pages is casually sophisticated, wry, colloquial, with a slyly dextrous ability to turn a line in all sorts of unexpected directions.‖ Ranjit Hoskote, poet and cultural theorist, remarks: In all, Clearing House published and distributed eight books...Some of these books have been reprinted numerous times; others, long out of print, circulate in the form of photocopies; yet others have been issued in fresh and annotated editions. They have entered the annals of postcolonial literature, are studied in India and overseas, and have influenced succeeding generations of poets and readers. How could – or perhaps, why did – eight books of poetry transform the nature of Anglophone poetry in India as they did? I would hazard at least four key reasons. First, the Clearing House books marked the emergence of a new generation that was politically aware, linguistically inventive, playfully alive to the variousness of rhetoric. These new poets did not share the UK-centric, Eliot/ Auden/ Larkin-oriented approach of their immediate predecessors such as Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes. Clearing House presented poets like Adil Jussawalla, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who aligned themselves more strongly with the teachings of Pound and Joyce and the literatures of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Their diction drew strength from the Hollywood road movie and the hymns of the Beats, and whose poetic strategies (especially for Chitre, Gieve Patel and Kolatkar) were nourished by cinema, painting and surrealism. Second, whether through bilingual practice or translation commitments, the Clearing House poets immersed themselves in English as well as other languages such as Marathi (Chitre and Kolatkar), Hindi and Prakrit (Mehrotra), Gujarati (Jussawalla), Spanish (Chitre). The experience of being, as it were, in a constant condition of translating and being translated, informs the work of these poets; and in the case of Jussawalla, this resulted both in a pathbreaking anthology of contemporary Indian literature as well as a distinguished career in literary journalism, built on a sensitivity to polyglot contexts. Third, these poets deliberately pursued an engagement with what we would today recognise as a local that was already opening itself out to, and being powerfully reshaped by, a sense of the global: in their poetry of place, Patel, Jayanta Mahapatra and H O Nazareth all offer rich examples of such a layering of lifeworlds.

Fourth, and indeed quite crucially, Clearing House offers an early example of that paradigm that we have, in recent years, come to describe as the ‘collective’ or the ‘collaboration’. The example of Clearing House candidly demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of a collaborative experiment at a time when funding was not readily forthcoming for cultural enterprises. Much may be learned of the early history of collaboration in the Indian cultural sphere, in terms of how writers began to ‘self-organise’, as we would now say, in the 1970s and 1980s – the skill-sets in design, editorial art, publicity and fund-raising that they pooled together, the negotiations they conducted with other sections of the cultural and political formation (painters, academics, activists and so forth), and, as always, the fine textures of dialogue, dissensus and mutuality that hold such a collective together, however briefly, and enable it to achieve contributions of lasting importance.”

BOX 1 CLEARING HOUSE BOOKS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE 1. JEJURI BY ARUN KOLATKAR (1975) 2. NINE ENCLOSURES BY ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA (1975) 3. HOW DO YOU WITHSTAND, BODY BY GIEVE PATEL (1975) 4. MISSING PERSON BY ADIL JUSSAWALLA (1975) 5. TRAVELLING IN A CAGE BY DILIP CHITRE (1980) 6. THE FALSE START BY JAYANTA MAHAPATRA (1982) 7. DISTANCE IN STATUTE MILES BY ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA (1982) 8. LOBO BY H O NAZARETH (1982)

i Missing Person, Adil Jussawalla, Clearing House, 1975, p39 ii 3 Poets, NewGround Press, 1978, Bombay