A Preface: Archives of Belonging
Ashoak Upadhyay
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hepherding poets’ creative works into one limited set of pages can almost feel like trying to compress the Muse of possibilities into a book of sand or the library of infinite longings. How does one explain the reasons for banding together poets with differing sensibilities writing in different languages into a collection the reader can hold in her hand and flip through its enchantments riding on the bus to work or in bed before sleep takes over? So the editor has to play god of all things. Arbiter of multiple creations, choose and pick and unlike the supreme arbiter, explain the choices as outcomes of premeditated thought. More often than not, these reasons are routinely thematic: War, love, death or their absences, pandemics, motherland-worship, flag, nation, memory, food.
Ashwani Kumar, as Editor of the present compilation, slides into this temptation by referencing the pandemic. But he quickly slips out and not before time because the volume is anything but about the pandemic’s enormous costs expressed in terms of desolation and loneliness. Heaven knows there are enough of such collections from around the world.
Kumar returns to the title to indicate the compulsions guiding this volume of verse from a host of languages. The metaphor of rivers has been used often enough in poetry and most notably, for the south Asian reader, Tagore used it often enough even in his songs, verses, essays; the river with its hard turns and difficult pathways, the “queen of water” as the symbol of humanity itself overcoming obstacles. Much later and in an elliptically related context, philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi used the metaphor of multiple rivers feeding into and nurturing the mighty river on its way to the ocean, in Sita’s Kitchen. Geography as the symbol of the spiritual quest for oneness.
In quite a different way but resonating with that sentiment of diversity and oneness, Ashwani Kumar talks not of “mighty ancient rivers” but “an extended family of small rivers…” rivulets, creeks as signifiers of the glorious creative project of dipping into the heritage of our linguistic multiverse on the way towards that ocean of song: roaring, gurgling, tranquil anguished but ever flowing each “reflecting ourselves and our histories.” A more apposite term might be used to suggest a reflection of our multiple selves because the compilation contains self-translations that embody the poets’ capacity to speak and communicate sensibilities in more than one language, to engage in that dialogic imagination where multiple cultural contexts jostle each other for articulation. Translations in this context are not transliterations or transcriptions and much as the English-only reader may not know or realise, the rendition requires a unique sensibility to portray the emotional content of the original in another language; a fluency of fluid sensibilities not unlike rivers meeting at confluence points.
So Rivers….is also about translation. Not in the obvious sense of rendering accessibility for an English reader; that is fairly obvious. Kumar suggests “translations are million-tongued conversations…” Enchanting as that idea may sound, it becomes difficult for a reader of this volume to assay forth into that frothy dialogic river; considering the collection is in English she can only surmise that the poet/translator would have engaged in that samvaad, particularly when a poem is self-translated, as some, in this collection are. But stick to that excitement with the information Kumar provides us that the seventy odd poems in this collection do represent voices of a million mother tongues, rendered accessible in a language that, by virtue of its long, centuries-old presence here has been appropriated by us, become ours as well. As many poets in this collection bear testimony. As Arun Kolhatkar did
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The Editor’s Note
Rivers Going Home is a fluid mirror, reflecting many languages, and landscapes, that serve as a witness to the fluctuating fortunes of individual and collective destiny of the poets we present here. The poems become the ‘remnants of yesterday’, which also become a reminder of the renewal of life in the present and future- inseparable as twins. We are aware that poetry can birth anywhere; from pomegranate seeds, garlic pods, wild eyelids or even from the vanishing footprints of pilgrims in the desert. But the poems in this anthology have birthed in a strange locale – they bring forth the memory of a collective chilling experience, from the times, when the world was suddenly collapsing around us, leaving us stranded, through hallucinatory experiences of lockdown and social isolation.
While many of us struggled in trying to comprehend, a new grammar of life and death, the only language that we had in common was that of poetry. It became a primal prayer of humankind, expressing our deepest fears and hopes in its most basic forms. In this very vein, the poems in this anthology originated from ‘Poetry Live’- a curated experience on social media platform, Instagram, where poetry readings were led by the Indian Novels Collective and Mumbai’s much-loved bookstore Kitab Khana. Poet and critic Arundhathi Subramaniam, who inaugurated the series on 31 March 2020 with a reading of The Tent by Rumi, described the initiative as, “an act of faith in poetry in troubling times”. Given this background, it was natural for poets in the anthology to shine through this ‘immaculate choreography’ in verse- miracles and mirages of poetry waiting to happen, now and in the future.
Rivers Going Home is not about mighty ancient rivers; but about an extended family of small rivers, rivulets, and streams of speech, and its experiences-each reflecting ourselves and our histories- our separate, yet entangled lives that flow together through familiar and unfamiliar neighbourhoods and villages. They are like ‘grandmother’s riddles’-basking in the local dialects of green parrots, and grey dolphins. In this anthology, more than seventy leading poets blur generations and genres, in languages ranging from Assamese, Bhojpuri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Oriya, Marathi, Manipuri, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu. They speak through ‘the paddy’s twisted throats’- radical forms of our mother language, quenching the thirst of hungry water birds. Adding missing alphabets to the tangerine tongues of Indian rivers, American poet Brian Turner, and Indian diaspora poet Robert Wood from Australia, have given us a joyous taste of borderless waters flowing across continents.
Rivers Going Home is neither a Covid diary, nor a documentary of isolation pangs. For us, rivers are everywhere, ‘in our holy prayers of Eid in the masjid, in the temple festivals, in the syllables of our metres, in the costumes of our forests, and in the rain’s percussions’ (K. Satchidanandan) Thus, the anthology has a much larger vision of poetry- an overarching ecological and feminist way of seeing the world and using metaphors for water, to seep deep into the earth, and into our bodies, into our memories. It is the merging of ‘me’ and ‘we’ in a collection that I think, has something unique to offer to the world. Each poem in the anthology is like an adolescent river- hushing, gushing, leaping, and heading home to meet and mate with waiting lovers on a promenade, lined with banana leaves. Travel through these rivers, enjoy catching whistling gold fish, or hilsa with ‘moon- dipped fingers’, making love ‘like a silkworm weaving her house with love from her marrow, and dying in her own bodily thread”( Mahadevi Akka) When you are done with this, take a heaving sigh in the dying sunset, I promise, you will become a poem unto yourself.
Rivers Going Home is also about translation. Admittedly, poems from Indian languages in this anthology, wouldn’t have been possible without the generosity of the translators who have worked with us here. Translations are million -tongued conversations. Gossiping, quarrelling, and brokering peace amongst themselves, and their siblings. Which is why translations, like rivers, are perpetually in a travel mode, meandering and migrating across contexts and cultures. Savour this rare confluence of poets and translators, and experience a harvest of languages in human and non-human voices.
Rivers Going Home is ultimately a homage to the memories of our dearest friend and mentor, poet Mangalesh Dabral who lives and lingers in our poems like ‘a love letter went missing’, in his own words. From Mangalesh, we have inherited a living, the breathing language of poetry, and courage for speaking truth to power- every grain of our present and past is illuminated with his presence and his absence. Remembering him, these rivers pass through his home, while his favourite Raag Maulkauns plays on.
Ashwani Kumar
Parel, Mumbai, 21 December 2022
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Ashwani Kumar in The Beacon
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