I began this sequence of poems after the terror attack in Mumbai on 26.11.2008. Thirteen years ago. Today, on the eve of its being published, there have been tragic iterations of that attack by white men in America and New Zealand, by powerful governments — and by a virus that had brought our turning world to a standstill. It is not clear to me that poetry can work its traditional enchantments in this torn world. Yet, listening to the African American poet, Amanda Gorman, all of twenty-two years old, read at President Joe Biden’s ‘masked’ inauguration in January 2021 my attention was drawn to other not-so-traditional poetic virtues such as its marvelous capacity for verbal activism.  

My present book, Shataka: The Quarantined Tongue, is addressed, in the main, to the Sanskrit grammarian Bhartrhari, who also doubled up as aactivist poet, maybe — and then again, maybe not. Some online notes:

Bhartrhari: (born 570? Ujjain, Malwa, India — died 651?, Ujjain) Indian Hindu philosopher, poet, and grammarian….Vakyapadiya is his major work on the philosophy of language. Also ascribed to him are three collections of poetry, each containing 100 verses: Shrngara-shataka (on love), Niti-shataka (on ethics and polity), and Vairagya-shataka (on dispassion). 

Going back to more recent history, it is a matter of record that the city of Mumbai went up in flames between the nights of 26 and 29 November 2008, while an entire country watched, mute witnesses to terror disseminated via glassy television screens. Later, in my insubordinate mind, this shocking event somehow became paired with other events, other losses that occurred in decade and more since the fateful attack in Mumbai. These assaults included the impossibly brutal public rape in Delhi of the young woman named ‘Nirbhaya’. The outrage aroused by Nirbhaya’s rape lay in the fact that it was one with infinite echoes, replicating multiple forms of unrecorded violence against the vulnerable all across our ahimsa-chanting country. 

In the past decade, we’ve observed exactly how electrifying the desire for ‘change’ can be in a country with a youthful populace that simply wants to get on with it minus all the boring history lessons involving endless layers of memory and metaphor. Pandemics, polarisations, hate, hunger. What in hell’s name can poetry do in such urgent circumstances? Is it not the law, campaigns for social justice and political participation that really matter? But of course! That goes without saying. Poetry, however, is off course. It records emotional turbulence and unfinished business. 

 

Fact is, Nirbhaya wanted to live. Despite the horror that happened to her, despite the callousness of the public who passed her by, despite police indifference, she wanted to live. Tragically, she did not, as in another faraway land in 2020 George Floyd did not, either. Yet their will to survive present terror signaled an absolute, undeterred faith in the future. It is the same with the labor trekking in 2020 out of the city of Mumbai to far outposts in Muzaffarpur and elsewhere. 

 

For me, poetry as a genre registers something of this ‘triumph of hope over experience’. Poetry gives us a lexicon that bears witness to the unspeakable. It improbably yokes despair to hope and quarantine to freedom. That, I believe, is a prime reason for the continued existence of this ancient, indelible form.  

As for the 21st century, the rise of very powerful electronic media has in recent times brought to our attention endless explosions of violence and terror, often gendered and state-driven. At the very moment when a triumphalist narrative of ‘liberalization’ and ‘development’ has boomed in one ear, the great noise of cruelty, injustice and social divisiveness has reached us in the other. If we are confused, it is with reason. I believe that the manifestations of poetry today, not to mention its manifestos, enable us to respond to these many schizoid confusions without necessarily buying into a linear and temporal order of things. 

Here I return to the history — and to Bhartrhari the poet-grammarian. How, I ask in these counterfactual poems, could I ever explain to someone like Bhartrhari — who lived in an age before mobile phones, automatic weapons and RDX — what modern ‘terrorism’ amounts to or how modern medicine works its mysterious, covert magic? He spoke of life and death in terms of eternity; we focus now on the everyday. How might a language-terminus be built between Bhartrhari’s sage, leisured meditations and our frenetic age of 140 twittering characters where even our most important messages seem to tend towards ludic doggerel and limited telegraphese? 

In the process of this confused questioning, I discovered, too, that Bhartrhari was a near contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad, also born in the sixth century. So how would these wise, erudite figures from the past have conversed with each other? What thoughts on mankind’s obsessive violence would they have exchanged? It is out of these out-of-time and, very possibly, out-of-line questions that my present, quite unanticipated, inspiration has emerged. 

The verses in this book attempt to convey to the sharpest of pre-modern minds some of the most intractable of the dilemmas confronting us in the fraught 21st century. Looking back at my three previous volumes of verse, I realize now that I might have been struggling in all of them to describe precisely those strained relations between poetry, prophecy, philosophy and personal experience that Muhammad and Bhartrhari had in their wisdom mastered so long ago. Bhartrhari’s poems present these conflicts as the three-fold social plait of niti (law), sringara (love) and vairagya (giving up, in both senses!). I have learnt much from him — as I have from Prophet Muhammad. 

In Shataka, I continue to be puzzled about the role that poetry plays in our lives. I think I may have come to believe over the years that poems are somehow secular prayers, a sort of primal muttering while going down on our knees with shuttered eyes. Exactly why we indulge in this odd behavior is hard to fathom. Archibald MacLeish once famously wrote that ‘a poem must not mean but be’. Living in the rapidly mutating 21st century, I am persuaded by a simpler thesis: a poem should not be mean. Just that. To me, complacency, meanness and intolerance seem terrible traits in a person, though many would deem these lesser flaws than, let’s say, uncontrolled rage. Conversely, the limited ‘virtues’ I prize in my muddled fashion include generosity, curiosity, empathy, egalitarianism and, importantly, irreverence. Good poems, I feel, foster the latter set of attitudes because they enable better conversations with our other, less familiar, fantastical and sometimes even fantastically evil, selves. My hope for this collection of Bhartrhari-style ‘shataka’ (the word means ‘one hundred’)* is that it is in keeping with the always unfinished human project of un-quarantining our fettered selves and our imprisoned imaginations. 

                 From the Introduction to the forthcoming collection, Shataka: The Quarantined Tongue 

o cow against the yellow calendula

you do not need another poem

a poem is the last thing on your mind

if I can call that rocky space between the almost paisley

tall tender patterns, the tendu leaves of your ears, a mind

but if it is a mind, and this is a huge, a cosmic, if

it is a buddha mind, carrier of sorrow, unmoved by fear

any one can see that pain, it moves in your bony rump

it shows in the large, dark jewels of your eyes

full of unshed longing

cow, you carry your gender

like a calf, within

so why would you need a poem, cow?

you are the soul of any lyric

you are a poem

yourself, swayambhu

like poetry, you remake yourself

broken and bloodied, and then

milk-fresh 

in every calving

a lethal dose of pain and fearlessness

that's poetry

and it was with you in the Geeta

and when you ambled with Yagnavalkya

all through the Brihadaranyaka, making legends

and it is with you now

just watch you walk

in the death's-head traffic

honks and roars and blazes on all ten thousand sides

teetering on your small black patent high-heeled pumps

old-fashioned, dainty, calm as a grandmother among frisky kids

great matriarch in the huddled mists of winter

skittish young thing in summer, wiggling

your frilly dewlap, always the complete 

woman, following the herd

being driven

by a man

you remember him, child and god

oppressor, exquisite in blue

o cow with the black mouth and champaka body

what centuries speak in your silence, what old flute

blows

his poems still lilt through the boulders of your mind

agonize in its leafy groves, whispering

nothing has changed

though you march with the herd, you are alone

though you are sacred, you are not beloved

thrusting your nose into city garbage

unembarrassed, a fly-blown beggar

driven from the dusty villages

how do you stand it, cow?

you have lived too long with fear to feel afraid

survived Gopala and his antic idylls

nothing disturbs you, nothing

destroys

your peace

your hulking grace

your buddha somnolence

a bulwark against action

but I ask you why, impassive cow?

is this reward enough

is this what it means to be a poem

is this why you grieve, revengeful queen 

why you breed and why you just will not die?

o cow in the golden godhuli alo

among the hay-ricks, among

your knobbly calves

jingling home

contented

those horns you wear

what for, cow?

ornaments?

moons on your forehead?

just one other poetic embellishment?

certainly I cannot imagine you using them in self defence

but would you not use them in a war, a hold war

would you not use those horns in battle 

that rocky head, those swishy

appendages and sinewy feet?

o cow against the yelow calendula

so immobile, so still, so bloody

beautiful, you could win

anything you wished

everything

you may insist you are a mother, cow

and that you would prefer gentler tactics, but it has

come to this, a fight, a mettlesome tossing of heads

a charge

and now what?

it is not only bulls that charge

that is a myth, an absolute myth

it is the story Gopala got away with

those killing horns, cow, belong to you

and poetry

that is yours too

because you are a poem, and because

you have been a poem, and bred poems, for so long

a poem is always a charge

Gopala’s dharmakshetra, flashing

battleground, place of terrible victories

if you are charged with poetry, cow

if you flaunt on your head

its perfect crescent

if you are

in charge

there is no going back, cow

o cow against the yellow calendula