HYDERABAD: How beautiful it is when an artiste wakes up in the middle of the night to watch lotus buds open their petals one by one and incorporate the nebulous delicate moments in dance movements? And the artiste in question is none other than iconoclastic Chandralekha, who passed away in 2006. Ten years after her death, her disciple, poet and dancer Tishani Doshi pays tribute to her in a talk at HLF, 2017. Dance flows rhythmically in her poetry that has a sense of arriving at a crescendo while time remains suspended. She takes us to places where poetry begins. Excerpts from the interview:
You have Welsh roots, your guru Chandralekha asked you to be an ancient woman. How much of that ancient woman have you found inside yourself?
I am being flippant here. (Smiles) I always call myself a grandmother. I think it’s a very powerful concept. Essentially she was telling me that I can reach back in time.
This sense of ancestry, I don’t feel particularity in my family because I come from a very bi-racial all over the place mix family (Laughs). I feel very rooted in that. With that idea, you feel you can reach back to that area of past, try to understand where you are.
'Dancing Girl' of Mohenjodaro fascinates me about sense of time. It’s about harnessing qualities that come from the past. It’s very poetic. It works in this emotive way that actually you are not alone as a poet or writer there are these figures from the past whom you can bring into your present.
How did you meet Chandralekha?
Dance was not something I wanted to do. It happened. I had to review her poetry book ‘Rainbow on the Roadside.’ The copies weren’t available. I had to go to her house for a copy. After the review was published, I was told she liked my review the best and wanted to meet me again. That’s how it all began.
How much dance has seeped into your
poetry?
A lot of my life as a writer has been shaped by dance. Many of the things that I have learnt come from dance. For example, the idea of discipline. You can cheat a lot as a writer pretending that you are working. You can be quite fragmented. With dance you can’t do that. You have to be in the moment.
You have to show up everyday for the practice. There has to be a particular lifestyle for everything. If you are going to write, then you must write everyday.
The whole concept of rhythm and time is so important. The concept of poetry is held in the body before it comes to the page. There is real internal sense of time and rhythm inside the body which is heightened in my work as a dancer.
Do you think poetry is search for truth?
On one level it is trying to arrive at some kind of truth. I certainly feel that poets are the people we certainly can trust because there are no reason for them to lie to us. You are a poet because you have to be. There’s no hidden agenda in being a poet.
I still think that it’s true that the poet is a seeker, is a prophet. Poets see what others can’t, their language is different from others. The language of poetry is about distillation arriving at something that we never saw.
Do people believe in poetry?
If someone tells you that your poem has changed their life, it is very special. The audience for poetry is a struggle. The role of a Modern poet is partly evangelist. I want to go and talk to people. People don’t know that they need poetry, but they do. Poetry has that power to change something. I believe in it. Poetry offers optimism in the middle of war, negativity. It transforms.
How important is it for a poet to slow down? What’s your idea of slowness?
For a long time I used to go to hills in Kodaikanal for about a month or so every year. I’d go alone and I’d write. It is very important to have this time because the world is basically kept at bay. It’s a big luxury to be able to disconnect like this.
But I think, it’s not just writers everyone needs to be able to disconnect. Urban life forces you for a lot of things you don’t want. There’s this joke about the poet that he takes one day putting the comma and then another day removing it. (Laughs). It seems pointless to other people but as a poet you need to spend a lot of time with your work. You can’t afford to be in a hurry.
Personally, I have moved out of the city, Madras. I have moved to this quiet coastal place which is very very rural. It’s constant slowing down of time. I don’t have a newspaper or TV. When I go in the city I embrace it. When I am not in the city, I go to this place where I have created an oasis for myself where I can read, work and think. We all have to create such oases no matter what our surroundings are. Literature is an oasis.
Do you really think poets can touch time?
I think, yes. One of the most beautiful things about being a poet is that you get to choose your chronology or ancestry or lineage which is basic touching time in a way, but choosing the people you want to read if they are dead, you are reconnecting to them.
And as a poet you are continuing that process, you leave something behind the posterity will read after you are gone. Since poetry is vocal, there’s this sense of timelessness that it came before pen and paper hence, it will exist long after.
In one of the interviews you said that poetry is first stage of love, novel is marriage and
journalism – one-night stand. How?
There’s obsessive quality about the writing part. Love, especially, first love stays with you with all its passion of waiting, the fire. Journalism, in its nature is bound to a certain time. One day you work so hard on a story, the next that piece of paper is used for wrapping a fish. There’s a different approach for that kind of writing. Poetry has to have that timelessness, so you need to give it that much of time. Novel requires stamina the way you infuse it in marriage.
How do images arrive to you?
Sometimes the whole poem hinges on one image. That’s a great thing about poetry. Living in India I feel we are surrounded by very strong images all the time. It’s very mysterious how images work. Sometimes, they stay with you for a long time, sometimes they emerge in a poem and you don’t realise that. Images can be very surprising or very mundane.
Your next book…
It’s a poetry collection named ‘Girls are Coming Out of the Woods’.