What do these poems teach us? Certainly, we don’t get to know more about [Arvind Krishna] Mehrotra’s thinking from them; what we find, instead, is a way, a pattern, of awareness, of seeing and discovering. The poet sees himself neither from inside nor outside; instead, he finds himself in a sort of midway place, between a room and a mirror, a compartment and a window, between autobiography and history, with space on either side. What we learn of is the inexplicably multiple but limited array of locations that comprise both an existence and an oeuvre, with the question ‘Why is this so?’ left open-ended. It’s partly that accidental multiplicity, you feel—rather than strategy—that has brought the speaker to all these places, situations, and epochs, as poet, critic, anthologist, essayist, and translator.
Mehrotra’s great achievement is to let us in, as few other modern writers, into the speaker’s experience of accident and wonder. Our meeting with him, too, then becomes one of those astonishing chances that arise from the any number of contingencies out of which lives and literature are made. This is not to say that Mehrotra is not possessed, fitfully and repeatedly, by an illuminating rage about contingency, about the oddity of finding himself where he is. That rage is related to the tradition he ‘belongs’ to, Indian writing in English; his challenge to it was contained even in the name of that magazine he long ago edited, damn you, and later in the polemics of ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’. The fact of accidentality is embodied by craft and quietness in the poems; but, in the prose, it provokes a fierce eloquence. Here is Mehrotra in his introduction to his essays in Partial Recall (2012):
The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those who teach in the country’s English departments, the academic community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new introductions, histories, canon-shaping (or canon-breaking) anthologies, readable translations, revaluations . . . Little of this has happened. Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends there.
He concludes with this caveat:
After the reviews stinking of far-fetched, not to say Asiatic, phrases; after that very Indian tamasha, the book launch, which is part Monsoon Wedding and part Irish wake; after the initial print run of 1100 or 2000 copies is exhausted, the book drops out of sight . . . But do a poll today and ask the Indian reading public whether it is happy with the state of affairs and you’ll get a high percentage of yeses. Were there a literary happiness index, Indians would be at the top, the happiest people in the world . . .
It’s this wonderfully scolding, imprecatory, cutting voice that Mehrotra resurrects by inhabiting Kabir:
Easy, friend.
What’s the big fuss about?
Once dead,
The body that was stuffed with
Kilos of sweets
Is carried out to be burnt,
And the head on which
A bright turban was tied
Is rolled by crows in the dust.
A man with a stick
Will poke the cold ashes
For your bones.
But I’m wasting my time,
Says Kabir.
Even death’s bludgeon
About to crush your head
Won’t wake you up.
This is addressed directly to Mehrotra’s Indian English readership and the ‘new’ India. But, despite the scouring, taunting quality of the words, it’s in embracing the brevity of the transit described by Kabir that the pulse of Mehrotra’s poems beats; again and again, they demonstrate to us, through their sudden hiatuses and perspectives, what the academics fail to—the incredible variety of elements that lie in the ‘Little of this [that] has happened’, and the duration within which ‘Writers die . . . and the matter ends there.’
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Mehrotra’s great achievement is to let us in, as few other modern writers, into the speaker’s experience of accident and wonder. Our meeting with him, too, then becomes one of those astonishing chances that arise from the any number of contingencies out of which lives and literature are made. This is not to say that Mehrotra is not possessed, fitfully and repeatedly, by an illuminating rage about contingency, about the oddity of finding himself where he is. That rage is related to the tradition he ‘belongs’ to, Indian writing in English; his challenge to it was contained even in the name of that magazine he long ago edited, damn you, and later in the polemics of ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’. The fact of accidentality is embodied by craft and quietness in the poems; but, in the prose, it provokes a fierce eloquence. Here is Mehrotra in his introduction to his essays in Partial Recall (2012):
The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those who teach in the country’s English departments, the academic community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new introductions, histories, canon-shaping (or canon-breaking) anthologies, readable translations, revaluations . . . Little of this has happened. Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends there.
He concludes with this caveat:
After the reviews stinking of far-fetched, not to say Asiatic, phrases; after that very Indian tamasha, the book launch, which is part Monsoon Wedding and part Irish wake; after the initial print run of 1100 or 2000 copies is exhausted, the book drops out of sight . . . But do a poll today and ask the Indian reading public whether it is happy with the state of affairs and you’ll get a high percentage of yeses. Were there a literary happiness index, Indians would be at the top, the happiest people in the world . . .
It’s this wonderfully scolding, imprecatory, cutting voice that Mehrotra resurrects by inhabiting Kabir:
Easy, friend.
What’s the big fuss about?
Once dead,
The body that was stuffed with
Kilos of sweets
Is carried out to be burnt,
And the head on which
A bright turban was tied
Is rolled by crows in the dust.
A man with a stick
Will poke the cold ashes
For your bones.
But I’m wasting my time,
Says Kabir.
Even death’s bludgeon
About to crush your head
Won’t wake you up.
This is addressed directly to Mehrotra’s Indian English readership and the ‘new’ India. But, despite the scouring, taunting quality of the words, it’s in embracing the brevity of the transit described by Kabir that the pulse of Mehrotra’s poems beats; again and again, they demonstrate to us, through their sudden hiatuses and perspectives, what the academics fail to—the incredible variety of elements that lie in the ‘Little of this [that] has happened’, and the duration within which ‘Writers die . . . and the matter ends there.’
