One never knows
where a poem may end up. The poems in Skin,Spam and Other Fake encounters, (Poetrywala, Mumbai 2012), began in
Marathi, an eight hundred years old language of the western India with millions
of speakers. Now they are also illegal
immigrants into English. However, these outlying Anglicized cousins of the
Marathi poems display no symptoms of guilt.
The poems
attempt to confront innovatively the new cultural material of the globalized
Third World society I inhabit. The cultural
politics and traditions within which they are located in Marathi are obviously
very different from the cultural politics and traditions in which they are
placed after translation. During the late nineteen fifties and sixties, the
little magazine movement in Maharashtra gathered momentum out of a need for
alternative poetics and politics. They were often avant-garde and were closely
associated with the leftist, the feminist, the Dalit, the grameen,
nativist politics and activism. The entire thrust of these movements was to
decolonize, democratize and debrahmanize literary values. The movement gave
Marathi the poets like Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, and Namdeo Dhasal. The
movements lost force during the late seventies and the eighties due to altered
social structures and values.
The little
magazine movements resurfaced during the nineteen nineties, largely in response
to the powerful forces of globalization rapidly altering the social and
cultural landscape after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of
the Indian economy. The digital revolution, explosion in newer forms of media
and outburst of cable television played a decisive role in altering the ‘semiosphere’
we occupy. These new little magazines
acknowledged the importance and influence of the precursor movements, but
insisted on moving on. The little magazines like Abhidhanantar, Shabdavedh
and Sausthav in the nineties provided a platform for fresh poetic practice
along with critical voices which demanded a new conceptual framework for
studying this poetry. This, however, does not mean that the older dogmas of the
sixties have completely given way to the newer ways of writing and conceptualizing
literature. The resistance to the new and the emergent has stubbornly persisted,
but it has not succeeded in blocking new creativity. Seen in this context, my Marathi poetry
contains both residual and emergent cultural material, used and abused for
poetic purpose. The selection presented here is from my Marathi collections, ‘Bhintishivaichya Khidkitun Dokavtana’ (2004) and Jarsandhachya Blogvarche
Kahi Ansh (2010). I am a Maharashtrian born and educated in Gujarat.
English was the medium of instruction and Gujarati was the medium of social
interaction. Marathi was largely confined to domestic conversation. Hence, one
can say that my poems have emerged from the liminal in-between cultural spaces.
Marathi poetry
like mine, influenced by the international modernist poetics, is marginal in
the mainstream of Marathi poetry which is socialist realist, if it is not
sentimental and popular. On the other hand, the status of Indian poetry in
English translation is secondary compared to Indian poetry written in
English. It is from these double
marginal spaces that I double cross both the traditions.
The
translations appeared in New Quest, India.poetryinternationalweb.com,
cerebrations.org and Museindia.com. I wish to thank all the publishers of my
Marathi originals and the English translations. I specially want to thank
Hemant Divate, editor of Abhidhanantar and the publisher of this volume. I wish
to thank my colleagues Dr Deeptha Achar, Dr. Susan Bhatt and Dr. Aarati
Mujumdar for going through my poems with a critical eye and making invaluable
suggestions.
No comments:
Post a Comment