Writers on Reading. Part Fifteen, Ranjit Hoskote

Collage by Sadhna Prasad for Soup

Poet, art critic, writer, curator and translator, Ranjit Hoskote is a seminal voice in the contemporary cultural landscape of India. He has authored more than thirty books across poetry, art criticism, cultural theory, and translation, and has been honoured with Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award for Literature in 2004 and SH Raza Award for Literature in 2006.  His latest book, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs,  which is the UK edition of Jonahwhale, has just been published by Arc in the UK and has won a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2020.

I’ve found his poems to be layered with a multitude of references, whose uncovering often leads to a study of language and culture itself. And some poems, even with their simplicity and direct treatment, present images that haunt you forever.

Pavement 

Don’t walk on sharp stones, my love.

We should not die

of the necessities we invent.

(from Vanishing Acts, 2006)

In this very candid interview, he shares what it was like being mentored by Nissim Ezekiel, the shape-shifting possibilities of graphic novels, and why there is no such thing as finding one’s voice. Among many insights, Ranjit presents a compelling argument to why multilingualism is important for a writer and poetry for this world. 

You were mentored by Nissim Ezekiel, how did that shape your early years of writing? 

Nissim Ezekiel was immensely generous with his time, energy and support to a number of us, Anglophone poets based in Bombay, who were the beneficiaries of his mentorship – across four different generations, these include, to name a few, Gieve Patel, Saleem Peeradina, Menka Shivdasani, and me. I should make it clear that such a mentorship did not mean holding hands around the campfire and singing Kumbaya, or being mollycoddled or having doors opened for you before you had proved yourself. It involved a critically rigorous form of apprenticeship. You were expected to do your own hard work – of reading, working on your poems, expanding your consciousness, making your own discoveries. What Nissim expected was that you developed a self-confidence, not an allegiance to him. What he gave you was space to explore and experiment with language, and in practical terms a platform to present and share your work at readings and in print. Those of us who Nissim mentored were not obliged to subscribe to his view of poetry and poetics. As a matter of fact, Nissim’s poetics and mine were strikingly different, even diametrically opposed. During the late 1980s, when he became my guru, I was already deeply invested in myth, archetype and the deep sources of language, while his commitments were to plainness of speech, to statement and to the everyday.

Tell us more about your love for the archipelago - and how it informs your most recent book Jonahwhale? 

To me, the ocean and the archipelago are twinned, compelling metaphors, powerful images that speak of how we might lead our lives. The ocean, which is mapped by voyages rather than borders, is a space of possibility, encounter, exchange, and confluence. The archipelago – a garland of islands, each distinct yet all connected – embodies the way in which different yet related cultural forms can enjoy adjacency, dialogue, the ability to interact through translation, and the gift of transmuting one another.

I draw, in my thinking about the ocean and the archipelago, on the Martiniquais philosopher Edouard Glissant, especially his magnificent work, Poetics of Relation, and on the French poet René Char, especially his book, La parole en archipel. Archipelagic thinking is a robust way, for me, of approaching cultural experience and cultural production – whether a poem, a book, an exhibition, or a symposium. The archipelago invites us to think of life, of creativity as a montage or assemblage, which is defined as much by the individuality of its components as by the interrelationships and cross-references through which it is elaborated. We are defined, not only by our location, but also by our arrivals and departures, our journeys.

In the process of translation, where does the translator situate their own voice? 

Any significant poet would have her or his particular way of approaching language and the making of poems – but this should be more like a fishing net than a birdcage. Which means that I don’t begin with the notion of a distinctive, invariable ‘voice’ that every poet must develop and retain against all odds. This is the same error that one finds in the visual arts under the heading of ‘style’ – the idea that one should develop an identifiable signature approach, and invest one’s selfhood in it. Since I believe that we are all dividuals, rather than individuals – schismatic and kaleidoscopic within ourselves, transitive and self-renewing beings – such a unitary, centralising and static idea does not appeal to me.

One of the most enjoyable and productive aspects of translation for me – as a poet who translates the poetry of others – is the space it creates, in which I can compare my own preferences with the music, texture and flavour of the poet I’m translating. This exercise stretches and extends my own possibilities as a poet – I come back refreshed and renewed to my own writing. I am saddened by poet-translators who impose their own music on the poets they are translating, without regard to the sonic valency, the sensuous atmosphere of the originals, or their specific contexts. 

I believe strongly that translation should be a core discipline for poets, a foundational practice for poetry. In fact, when we think back to generations of English poets who wrote between the 16th and the 20th centuries, most of them had a classical education and grew up translating from Greek and Latin. Likewise, the Urdu poets of the 18th and 19th centuries were all schooled in Persian and transited between Farsi and Hindawi. The Prakrit poets knew Sanskrit and were informed by it. The Bhakti poets, even the most dissident and protestant among them, had enough acquaintance with Sanskritic norms and were at home in several robust vernaculars other than their own. The rather narrow and largely monolingual education that seems to be the norm now has, if anything, impoverished linguistic practice and the literary imagination.

What is poetics of listening? Why does it counter, if at all, the idea of finding one’s voice?

The trope of ‘finding one’s voice’ suggests that one might have misplaced it, or that it is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered. I am far more interested in the practice of constantly renewing, re-shaping and re-crafting one’s poetry – in the same way that a musician would work on her or his riyaz or sadhana. For poets, as for musicians, this involves a poetics of listening – I would go further and describe this as a poetics of transformative listening.

As you know, the metaphor of the gharana, taken from Hindustani classical music, has long been important to me. I have written elsewhere that, rather than seeing a gharana as a clannish lineage, I see it as an experimental continuity. Its members pursue their own core concerns as musicians, but they also hear, overhear, and adapt the music of others – contemporaries from other gharanas, older masters, rural tunes half-heard and pursued, forms gleaned from other systems of music, all of which are processed into their own work. The poetics of listening is vital, particularly, because it rescues us from the sterile, navel-gazing narcissism that can sometimes afflict an artist, and situates us in a larger and deeper community of practitioners, with their diverse practices and histories. 

What books have currently occupied you in this period of social isolation?

Since reading is an integral part of my life, my immersion in it during this period of social isolation has simply been a continuation of my normal practice. With one difference – I’ve had the repose to go back to books that have been lifelong favourites, some of them first read in early childhood – Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter among them. Otherwise, here are some of the books I’ve been reading or re-reading, dwelling on, circling around, during these months: Forrest Gander’s coruscating early book of poems, Torn Awake; Walter Benjamin’s encyclopaedic and incomplete work, The Arcades Project; Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch’s King of the World, a magisterial catalogue of the great Mughal album, the Padshahnama; Tony Joseph’s Early Indians; W S Graham’s Collected Poems, a Faber paperback I bought when I was 20, and which dazzled me with its highly experimental approach to language; Ruth Padel’s marvellous crossover between research travelogue and poetry, The Mara Crossing; Sandeep Parmar’s gorgeous book of poems, Eidolon; Valzhyna Mort’s startlingly beautiful volume of poems, Collected Body; Osip Mandelstam’s The Moscow & Voronezh Notebooks; and, a companion for many years, Paul Celan’s Selected Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger, a facing page edition, which I love, as it allows me to read in both German and English (or, more correctly here, given Celan’s often cryptically inventive use of language, in Celanese and Hamburgerese), savouring the convergences and gaps between the two avatars of every poem.

“The skilled restorer of porcelain will collect not only the visible chips of a broken pot but also the dust on the table where it rested - Richard Sennett” begins Central Time. We notice that quotes, dedications, footnotes and endnotes pepper your poetry. Are they an essential part of your publishing process? If your poems were an ocean, and there was a guide to this voyage, what would we find in this sailing manual?

 I love Sennett’s writing, his deep engagement with processes of artisanal making, collective life, and the relationship between the familiar and the strange, between the native, the foreigner, and the transient. The line you cite, which is the epigraph to Central Time, conveys how I feel about the relationship between poetry and the imagination from which it emerges. Every poem emerges from a larger lifeworld, which may not always be evident to the reader. 

What happens in my poems is informed and conditioned by my life as a citizen and a traveller, by my reading and my translations, by my lifelong preoccupations with cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, architecture, and astronomy, by my friendships and collaborations, by my responses to the writers, artists, musicians and architects whose work I’ve loved. The quotes, dedications, and annotations to which you refer are the traces of this lifeworld, this lived experience, which continuously nourishes my imagination. They are integral to my process, and to my poetry. If my poems are an ocean, this ensemble of references would definitely be part of the sailing guide.

Who are the young contemporary writers and poets from India whose work you enjoy?

There are so many young poets, novelists, non-fiction and cross-genre writers whose work I enjoy! It is difficult to list them all, but here are some of them – Samhita Arni, Sarabjeet Garcha, Suhit Kelkar, Mangesh Kale, Amruta Patil, Tanuj Solanki, Sumana Roy, Jennifer Robertson, Rohinton Daruwala, Anupama Raju, Sharanya Manivannan, Kanishka Gupta, Keshava Guha, Maaz bin Bilal, Pranay Lal, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar.

Ranjit recommends Amruta Patil’s stunningly illustrated ‘Adi Parva’.

People choosing books for other people are often presumptuous of another’s taste. However, every once in a while a friend/lover/relative/stranger, gifts you a book that turns out to be serendipitous. Has that happened to you? What book was it?

 Lewis Thompson’s Mirror to the Light. I received this very special book in 1998 as a gift from my friend, the scholar and artist Richard Lannoy when I was visiting him in Bath. Thompson was a mystic and poet who lived in Varanasi from 1932 until his untimely death in 1949 at the age of 40. Although reticent and preferring the company of yogis and scholars, he was a well-recognised figure in Varanasi – letters addressed simply to ‘English Sanyasi Esq.’ would reach him. Thompson left behind a collection of his elegantly phrased and deeply insightful observations, and his poems. Richard was introduced to this work in the 1950s, and himself spent a few years in Varanasi. Inspired by Thompson’s work, Richard edited, annotated and introduced it to the world, a commitment that took many years, and resulted in several volumes, including Mirror to the Light as well as Fathomless Heart and Journals of an Integral Poet. To me, Thompson’s writing has been a lodestone over these last 22 years – crystalline, luminous, possessed both of a clarity and a mystery.

Mirror to the Light embodied the friendship that Richard and I shared over many years. And it also – here’s the serendipity – re-opened a door into my own family past. Thompson had worked, in his early years in Varanasi, as librarian at Rajghat, a utopian school that J Krishnamurti had founded in collaboration with my great-uncles, the educationists Benegal Sanjiva Rao and Benegal Shiva Rao, who had been close associates of Annie Besant’s at the Theosophical Society and then joined Krishnamurti when he gave up the messianic role that Theosophy had scripted for him, to explore an independent path of teaching. I will always be grateful to Richard for introducing me to Mirror to the Light – and for much else, especially his brilliant study of Indian society and culture, The Speaking Tree, which I discovered as a teenager and have always prized.

An odd question perhaps but as a writer and an art curator, have you been interested in graphic novels? if yes, which ones?

 That’s not an odd question at all! I love the genre of the graphic novel and have been fascinated by its shape-shifting possibilities. Among my favourites are Raymond Pettibon’s Captive Chains, an early expression of the genre, which could also be read (or viewed) as an artist book; Will Eisner’s classic The Contract with God trilogy; Sarnath Banerjee’s delightfully high-spirited Corridor, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, and The Harappa Files; Marjane Satrapi’s riveting and autobiographical Persepolis and Persepolis 2; Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s forensic and ominous evocation of the Emergency, Delhi Calm; and Amruta Patil’s splendid revisiting of the Mahabharata narrative from a female perspective, Adi Parva.

A message for the uninitiated, why does poetry matter?

 Poetry opens up perspectives that we may not have anticipated, discloses aspects of our own inner world that we may have neglected. It can ambush us into knowledge, surprise you into illumination. Poetry transports us from the flattening, deadening forms of speech that surround us, and restores the magical power of language to imagine and shape new ways of being, new worlds.

Interviewed by Ankita Shah