Ranjit Hoskote tells me that as a child he was fascinated by the power of naming. “I remember hearing the word ‘rhombus’ for the first time, and thinking it was round and sugary and ready to burst.”
In Hoskote’s stunning collection of poems, Central Time, there’s a great sparking of words against other words—“kerf, stroud, adze, spigot… brocade, palimpsest, persimmon, jade.” Words rescued from history, from the earth, from eclipsed Norse, Germanic, Saxon and Sanskrit origins. “I love the possibility of returning to the magic, the enchantment, the mantra-like incantatory power of the name,” he says. And so, in his poems there are “butterflies of meaning”, “rain-rivered spaces” and “satraps of the night”.
“I wind all things up, give them names/ and beginnings that haunt them to the end,” he writes.
There’s also great movement in Hoskote’s poems—a “shuttling between was and is.” Walls, houses, people, art, all seem to be up and going somewhere. “It’s absolutely amazing that you’ve focused on the leap as a gesture in my poetry!” he says. An unenthusiastic sportsman in school, Hoskote tells me that the only disciplines he excelled at were karate and gymnastics—for their grace and movement, fluency of gesture, the ability to let go and arc across distances. In his poetry too, this movement is palpable, but it’s not merely physical, it’s ancestral too.
A descendant of diasporic ethnic Saraswat Brahmins, who migrated from Kashmir to the West Coast, Hoskote says, “I’ve always felt enabled and empowered by having no simple answer to the great Indian question, ‘What are you?’… The answer involves leaping across borders, regions, languages; it embraces migrations and detours…”
“This tension between staying and leaving, being earthbound and achieving flight, has always been in me,” he says. And while Bombay might be the centre of Hoskote’s cosmology, his poems flit from Anuradhapura to Berlin to Kabul. “Archaeology, as a forensic art of reconstructing lost narratives, is something I’ve responded to always—it’s a form of overcoming amnesia, of retrieving parts of ourselves that we never knew existed, or had only vague glimmerings of. Zameen and khwab are powerful and related opposites in my work—earth and dream, ground of belonging and territory of desire.”
And central to all these meanderings is art itself—painters, sculptors, poets—to whom Hoskote dedicates his poems. Bhupen Khakhar, Masaki Fujihata, Richard Serra—it is a diverse and heady list of the dead and living—mentors, inspirers, friends. And with each poem written to these spirit ancestors and trans-cultural wanderers, Hoskote is attempting what he calls “experimental continuity,” a conversation carried across time and space. “Ekphrasis, to me, is one of the most ancient gestures by which poets have borne witness to the reality of art.” In “To the Sanskrit Poets,” he exhorts, “Leave us these threads to unravel, embroider/…Leave us the jigsaw of previous lives.”
It is this remarkable reach for inter-connectedness, coupled with Hoskote’s flair for the surreal (“the croaking of a crumpled Mondrian” and a “garden gate swung free of its hinges”) that makes Central Time such a glorious poetic affirmation. Does poetry matter? “Absolutely,” he says, “it is the river where the unsaid and the unsayable might find fluency.” One might even say it is “a name for absence”.
info@tishanidoshi.com