Sujata Bhatt. Courtesy- Dickinson.edu

Intellectually stimulating, deeply sensuous and fearlessly sensual, Sujata Bhatt’s poems are rich with powerful sensory images — the comforting smell of tomatoes and garlic, the warm desirous touch of bodies, the vibrant plumage of parrots, and the sharp, intense physicality of the blue irises, the feeling of ‘indigo pulsing to violet…deep inside’ the body of the woman artist in communion with Nature where “dreams become lizards” that “lingered on the walls; /…Their black eyes: round mustard seeds glistened.” Textual representations of corporeal specificities in her poems challenge and subvert the prevailing masculinist notions of a passive ‘selfless’ womanhood contained within ‘traditional’ norms and affirm a feminist tradition of recognizing the body as an explicit part of female experience. By positing the body as central and integral to the female experience of self—a source of pleasure, creativity, and empowerment—Bhatt’s poems not only posit a grounded corporeal location for the erased and exiled female body but also construct a textual space that allows the hitherto silenced women’s bodies to be heard. Her poems abound in images of touch—concrete and tangible—powered with a physicality that is warm, self affirming and homely on one hand and sensual on the other—thus breaking away from the derogatory connotations of physicality—the limiting binaries of physical/transcendental. The vibrant, sexuate female body alive and responding with all the senses serves as an antithesis to the fragmented, disproportionate female body as an object of male pleasure.

The violence, which is systematically perpetrated on the objectified, ‘homeless’ female body to curb her potentials, is vividly delineated in Bhatt’s writings. Raped when a mere child and compelled to bear her ‘secret’ silently, the girl in Straight Through the Heart feels helpless, insecure and alienated in her own ‘home’, unable to link to the human world that surrounds her as ‘family’:

Straight through the heart, she knew she would be shot.
She knew too much for a girl of eight.
She knew she was being raped, and she knew
that if she spoke, if she spoke out and named that sin,
she would be killed.

She has become wise; she knows “the meaning of violation /of the sacredness of the body”. In her emotional exile she feels utterly lonely, for “she could turn to no one. /She had to be her own mother, her own father”. She has no one except for “a murdered sister/who showed her the way” As she had “seen a sister killed” she knows the price she would have to pay for speaking out against such a heinous crime perpetrated on her bodily self possibly by her own closest kin. A dutiful, obedient daughter living abjectly in mundane domesticity, she finally gathers courage to speak out:

she would persuade them, convince
father, mother, brother, that her soul was pure.
I am still innocent, she wanted to say.
She simply wanted to live.

In her courage the battered girl becomes akin to mythical figures of power, Shakti and Medusa; the woman poet, herself a powerless witness to a sanctioned brutality, summons the Chorus and the Furies, she implores the great Demeter to save the girl as a mother would, but yet, in the tradition of ‘honour killings’ rampant in India, the young girl dies, shot through the heart. She pays for the crime perpetrated on her body, for the crime of others, with her own life:

the bullet went straight through her heart.
It was perfect, his aim. No mistake…
Even though she had asked for their forgiveness
for having been raped.

In More Fears about the Moon Bhatt voices the anguish of a woman who suffers multiple miscarriages. In her pain and helplessness the female persona experiences dislocation of her ‘inner voice’ from her body, which seems to her as an empty receptacle that cannot retain her beloved children. She becomes numb and mute as she loses ‘fetus after fetus’. She experiences a life shattering rejection as her girls and boys, who “couldn’t wait/to leave …they didn’t want /to become children” ‘slip away’ from her. Her ‘inner voice/dares not speak’ to her as with her corporeal eyes she witnesses the tiny bodies of the premature fetuses ‘my crooked fishes/ my sea horses’ lying limp and trembling in the ‘dish’. She yearns to see their faces, but the tiny bodies are smothered in blood:

Each time I looked
there was always too much blood.
I could never see the face.
Only the fins: limp,
but they glistened and once,
the curved spine seemed to tremble
in the dish.

The contrary experience of a mother choosing to abort her girl child and practicing the heinous crime of female infanticide is movingly addressed in Voice of the Unwanted Girl. The aborted girl child interrogates her mother and forces her to remember the dire facts.

Mother, I am the one
you sent away
when the doctor told you
I would be
a girl—– your second girl.

The scathing, yet painful, irony of the poem lies in the phrase ‘your second girl’— hinting at a society that renders girls valueless –‘unwanted’ –and compels a mother to abort her own daughter to escape persecution, the shame and guilt of bearing girl children, displacement, even death. The unwanted daughter recognizes the rejection meted to her by the society yet refuses to let her mother go as she repeatedly questions her ‘untouchable’ status. The destroyed fetus, when murdered mercilessly, had already acquired a taste for life. Her senses were alive as she desperately tried to clutch the ‘neon blue’ in her mother’s ‘beloved Mumbai,’ the icon of progress and urban affluence, in order to survive, but no one, not even her mother ‘wanted to touch’ the body of the dying girl. But after death her tiny head was ‘measured /and bent and cut apart’ as her ‘mouth would not search for’ nourishment from the mother:

no one wanted –
No one wanted
to touch me – except later in the autopsy room
they knew my mouth would not search
for anything – and my head could be measured
and bent and cut apart.
I looked like a sliced pomegranate.
The fruit you never touched.

Bhatt’s A Black Feather speaks of a different emotion altogether. In this complex poem the female persona experiences disintegration as she tries to ‘relearn’ the ‘geometry’ of her own body ‘after the surgery’. Wearing her ‘grandmother’s camisole’, with ‘a black feather’ guarding her body she consciously divides her body into ‘halves’ – the ‘right’ and the ‘left half of my torso’. She literally dismembers her body trying simultaneously to externalize and come to terms with the pain of loss of the left breast after a debilitating surgery that must have been ‘life saving’. The poignancy of the matter-of-fact assertion that her left breast, along with the left half of her torso, has become ‘invisible …hidden by violet shadows’ visible only to the ‘man who loves’ her is touchingly rendered by Bhatt. After the surgery, presumably for healing breast cancer, her body is disfigured, ‘the buttons are lost,’ yet desire is not lost, it survives the onslaught of death, disease and disfigurement: “This is my right breast, full/of a seventeen-year-old girl’s memories”. The touch of her lover rouses her desire and she understands the power of desire to integrate, to heal the body, to make it whole again. The heart still gets ‘distracted by the light on the roses’ as the man who loves her caresses her tenderly: “He touched the lace, the worn out buttonholes/ and my breasts, still guarded by a black feather.” Through recognizing and validating her desire she learns to re-integrate her bodily self with her soul.

Sujata Bhatt subversively associates the concept of jouissance of the female body as a feeling of pure bliss arising out of the fulfillment of desire, with poems that deal with the lived experiences of the female body that are not overtly sexual. In the poem The Need to Recall the Journey from her selection Point no Point, Bhatt evocatively portrays the experiences of a woman giving birth. In the poem the female persona reminiscences about the moments of giving birth as she suckles her child.
I drift back
to the moments when she was
almost out
still part of me

In this poem Bhatt narrates the process of actual birth, even the ‘unspeakable’ details of the physical experience of birthing—the body in throes of labour pains as the child is ‘about to slide out’ and open, unhealed, bleeding wounds. With subtle art Bhatt delineates the connection between the female body and the living text that it produces/writes—a creation that she can affirm and validate by ‘touch’:

but already I could reach down
and touch her hair.

For Bhatt, ‘touch’ is of primary importance: to ‘touch’ is to validate an experience, to acknowledge the existence of a being, to affirm the self with all its senses and experiences. As a creator, the fertile female body ‘touches’ her creation, the wet sticky hair of the child just out of her womb; as an artist, she wants to understand the moment of the birth of her daughter, the moment of creation and the process involved; to prolong it, to analyze and remember every detail, to unravel the mystery that shrouds birth, to ‘retell’ it again and again and thus validate the experience for all women.

I want to return
to her moment of birth.
It was too quick.
I want it to go on –

Bhatt describes the crucial moment of separation of the just born child from the mother in telling terms— it is like ‘seeing a beloved one off’ to a long journey ‘destined to go/ to a far away place/ you’ve never been to …’
When the pain was suddenly
defined by her head,
when she was about to slide out
safely
all by herself – I felt my heart
go half-way out with her …

Moments such as these have rarely been written about before, and by speaking the ‘unspoken’ Bhatt expresses a vital but neglected truth of female experience. By retelling the lived experiences that have been distorted, discredited and denied space, Bhatt connects bodies and memories through texts. It is in its longing to touch reality, to unite the body and its experiences, that Bhatt’s writing becomes sensually rich in colour, smell, touch and texture. The physical details of birth, the tactile feel of the just born daughter is rendered palpably:
But I could touch
her hair –
a thick, fuzzy heat.
Sticky feathers clung
wet to runny whites of eggs …

The precious moment of birth becomes the ‘best story’—the story of the fertile female body and its creation of a new life, ‘a little person’ who already has an identity of her own— ‘a favourite sleeping position.’ As the ‘story’ of female creativity it needs retelling. Significantly, this story of birth, the birth of a girl child, is both timeless and temporal, both universal and uniquely personal, a story that is nuanced across cultures, across time, a story that arouses strong feelings. It is a story “that can only live /in your heart/not on paper”. The story is as rich in detail and as multi-dimensional as its creator and thus will not lose its essence even after countless re-tellings:
And still there is this need
to recall the journey,
retell the story.
The urge
to reopen every detail

Bhatt’s political stance of writing the body is best illustrated by a number of poems that celebrate female desire and eroticism. Spotlighting “the space between / the tone between, the kiss and the come”, these poems ground the female body as the site of female pleasure thus subversively doing away with the male dictum that female sexuality is ‘unmentionable’. The tantalizing, unspoken eroticism of the short poem Love in a Bathtub shows Bhatt at her best as she challenges the taboos surrounding female sexuality and steps into the forbidden arena of female fantasies and heterosexual love-acts. The images of water mixing with predominantly phallic symbols— “the position of the taps/ the water, slippery/ as if a bucketful of eels had joined us ...”— take the reader into a ‘naughty’ reverie, so to speak, of an act of love that is unconventional to the point of being ‘scandalous’, full of adventure and mischief, but that remains as an eternal, pleasurable ‘secret’, a happy, yet nostalgic, memory, shared between the lovers. Significantly the mutual reciprocity of the experience is highlighted throughout the poem:
we’ll be old, our children grown up
but we’ll remember the water sloshing out
the useless soap,
the mountain of wet towels.
‘Remember the bathtub in Belfast?’
we’ll prod each other -

In The Kama Sutra Retold, one of Bhatt’s stirringly erotic love poems, Bhatt breaks ‘the long silence’ that shrouds female sexuality and eroticism. It speaks of an adolescent girl’s awakening to sexuality and recognizing her desires. When the lovers come close to each other by their unspoken, spontaneous desires, they both discover new facets of their beings, novel aspects of feeling and response they were unaware of till then:
When he touches her nipples
he doesn’t know who is more surprised
(years later he remembers that look,
the way her eyes open wider).

In a celebration of natural, spontaneous sexuality, as opposed to the convoluted, socially decreed artificiality of the original manual that she ‘retells’, Bhatt locates the lovers as part of Nature, as part of Life itself. In acknowledging her physicality, the responses of her body, the girl feels the stirring of the mysteries of nature within her. She feels akin to Mother Earth, partaking of Nature, involved, responsive, the great powers of creativity surging within her— as if she has acquired the immense power to hold heaven and earth inside her. In a triumphant image that contains symbols of both freedom and birth in the last line, of ‘wings…rushing to get out’, Bhatt delineates the fluidic, multifaceted experience of the desirous female body; a body that inherently opposes the imposed binaries and the stratified hierarchical linearities of the phallocentric structural processes. Instead of charting sterile rules aimed at bodily gymnastics, Bhatt’s Kama Sutra proposes a new definition of the act of love as powerful, creative and liberating, a new sutra that sees love as a union with nature, an integration with self, an integral part of the mighty cosmic creation. In her first act of love in the lap of nature, a realm where lines demarcating the physical and the metaphysical get blurred, where body and spirit convenes to give rise to pure pleasure and creation starts, Bhatt’s adolescent persona experiences bliss —‘ananda’ – the pure spiritual ecstasy of jouissance:

the blood inside
her groin swells

while wings are rushing to get out,
rushing.

Breaking of one of the strongest surviving taboos about women’s bodies and sexuality, Bhatt gives voice to the overpowering desire of a pregnant woman to indulge in the sexual act in White Asparagus. The female persona, by expressing surprise at the strength of sexual desire she experiences in pregnancy, cunningly subverts patriarchal censure as she puzzles over its natural purpose or ‘logic’ as well:
Who speaks of the strong currents
streaming through the legs, the breasts
of a pregnant woman
in her fourth month?

The desire for the male lover as ‘a suckling lion-cub’ problematizes the notions of role playing and hierarchy in heterosexual love making while positing a reversed, fluidic and more egalitarian relationship.

Oh come like a horse, she wants to say,
move like a dog, a wolf,
become a suckling lion-cub —

Come here, and here, and here —

This poem is celebratory in its delineation of the ‘white asparagus’ as an overtly phallic symbol—as the physical appearance of asparagus suggests, its voicing of food and sexual obsessions in pregnancy, the erotic connection of lovers with animals, its evocative delineation of -

the green coconut uterus
the muscles sliding, a deeper undertow
and the green coconut milk that seals
her well, yet flows so she is wet
from his softest touch?

By speaking of “the rushing tide/ that awakens/ her slowly increasing blood —?” Bhatt simultaneously defies patriarchal logic that sees women only as units of reproduction and thus fails to account for the surging desire that courses through the body of the pregnant woman and celebrates the unspoken sensuality of the woman’s body— the touch, the smell, the colour, the texture that make up the fluidic motions of desire.

the shape of asparagus:
sun-deprived white and purple-shadow-veined,
…the fat ones, thicker than anyone’s fingers,
she strokes the silky heads,
some are so jauntily capped…
even the smell pulls her in —

The singularity of the asparagus inspires fascination and fantasy. Through the open-endedness of the poem Bhatt seems to be suggesting the possibilities of satiety of “the hunger/ raw obsessions beginning/ with the shape of asparagus” through autoeroticism, a subject that has even stronger taboos associated with it. White Asparagus is unique in Indian women’s poetry not only because of its powerful eroticism, but also because of its delineation of a powerful female agency that not only dares to express but also fulfils its bodily desires. An agency that subverts the age old dictum of silence, erases the negation of the female body, cleanses the negative associations of sexuality and promiscuity and posits a celebratory image of a sexuality that gives pleasure to the female self and body thus legitimizing the notion of female eroticism that has always been heavily burdened with associations of guilt and sin.

Notes & References:

• Bhatt, Sujata. Bruzinem. Carcanet Press, Manchester,1988.
• Bhatt, Sujata. Monkey Shadows. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1991.
• Bhatt, Sujata. The Stinking Rose. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1995.
• Bhatt, Sujata. Point No Point. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1997.
• Bhatt, Sujata. Augatora. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2000.
• Bhatt, Sujata. A Colour of Solitude. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2002.
• Bhatt, Sujata. Pure Lizard. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2008.
• Katrak, Ketu H. Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2006.
• Khasnabish, Ashmita. Jouissance as Ananda: Indian Philosophy, Feminist Theory, and Literature. Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2006.

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