Arundhathi Subramaniam in Conversation with Samrita Sinha

Arundhathi Subramaniam is a leading Indian poet and award-winning author of thirteen books of poetry and prose. She has also been active over the years as a cultural curator, poetry editor and critic. Her most recent poetry collection, Love Without a Story (2019), was described as 'a breathtaking and heartwarming book' (Poetry Book Society Bulletin) and as a book by 'a unique poet of our times... in a league all by herself' (Indian Literature). Her book, When God is a Traveller, won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020, and was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the prestigious TS Eliot Prize.    

Widely anthologized and translated, she has been invited to international poetry conferences and festivals in the UK, Italy, Spain, Holland, Turkey, China, West Africa, Israel, Australia and the US, as well as various parts of India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Her work has been translated into several languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Rumanian. Other prizes and fellowships include the International Il Ceppo Prize for Poetry in Italy, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Mystic Kalinga Award, the Trinity Arts Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Homi Bhabha, Visiting Arts and Charles Wallace Fellowships.  

As a prose writer, her books include an acclaimed recent book of essays on contemporary women on sacred journeys, Women Who Wear Only Themselves. Other books include the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life, The Book of the Buddha (reprinted several times) and Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru).  As an editor, her work includes the acclaimed Penguin anthology of bhakti poetry, Eating God; a Penguin book on sacred journeys, Pilgrim's India; the Sahitya Akademi anthology of post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, Another Country; and an anthology of love poems, Confronting Love (co-edited with Jerry Pinto). An anthology of women’s voices in sacred Indian poetry, Wild Women, is forthcoming with Penguin India in 2024.  In 2004, she was invited by the Poetry International Web to be the founder editor of the India Domain of the Poetry International Web, which has grown over the years into a significant web archive of contemporary Indian poetry. In 1994, she was invited to lead Chauraha, an inter-arts discussion-based forum at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA, Mumbai). She oversaw this well-known arts hub in the city for over fifteen years. Later, she was also the Head of Indian Dance at the NCPA.  

As an independent curator, she created a widely-acclaimed festival of dance and sacred poetry in 2014, entitled Stark Raving Mad. In 2019, she curated another successful festival of music and female mystic poetry, Wild Women, at the NCPA; and the Mystic Kalinga Festival around Bhakti Poetry in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Her most recent festival at the NCPA, in November 2023, was Goddess, a celebration of the Divine Feminine through poetry and the performing arts. A longstanding journalist on the performing arts and literature, she has been writing since 1989 for various newspapers (including The Times of India, The Hindu, and The Indian Express, among others). She has also been a columnist on culture and literature for Time Out, Mumbai, The Indian Express and New Woman.  She divides her time between New York, Mumbai and Chennai.  Samrita Sinha is in conversation with her.

Samrita Sinha (SS): In contemporary times, Indian women poets are foregrounding newer ways to assert their identity and selfhood. How does your work navigate such issues?
Arundhathi Subramaniam (AS ) : I am a poet. I am also an Indian woman of a certain historical moment. And I have no doubt that these identities inform my art in many ways I am aware of, and many that I am unaware of.
My work has always been interested in exploring gender politics. That hasn’t changed. But from the conscious rage poems, ‘5.46 Andheri Local’ and ‘Madurai’ in my very first book [On Cleaning Bookshelves, 2001] to ‘Song for Catabolic Women’ in my most recent book [Love Without a Story, 2019/ 2020], the tone has certainly changed. Being a woman is consciously implicated in both sets of poems. But the recent poems seem to be closer to mastering ‘the trick to turn rage into celebration’. I was always uneasy with the victim mode. But I think the intense anger of the early work – at injustices of various kinds – has abated. What remains is the intensity. I realize that I can joyfully assert where I want to go, rather than spend my time raging at where I don’t or lamenting at all that has been lost. Joyfully singing your own song is also a way of asserting who you are, politically, morally, and spiritually.

SS: Thematically speaking, what new concerns does your poetry reflect that speak to global issues in the works of your Western counterparts?
AS: I don’t believe poetry must try to be universal. The faith of the lyric poem is that if you dwell deeply on the particular, it will lead you to the universal. I try to keep the faith that this is so. So, writing about women on a peak-hour Mumbai local, for instance, was my way of speaking my truth. The fact that this early poem has found its way to readers in other parts of the world means there must be something about this intensely local experience, and the Kali archetype it evokes, that is specific and global all at once.
When male poets write about the local, they are often believed to be implicating global issues. When female poets write about the local, they are often viewed as narrow and solipsistic. So, this personal-global divide is a convenient and specious one.
My recurrent poetic themes—the city, journeys, quest, intimacy, family, gender, cultural politics, the notion of the sacred—haven’t been the result of some self-conscious attempt to be relevant to the West. But I’ve done readings in many parts of the world, and been translated widely, and have never found I have to underscore my identity as an Indian woman in order to reach audiences. I do believe that the more deeply you inhabit yourself, personally, culturally, and spiritually, the more your work reaches others. Of course, this has to be accompanied by an attention to craft to be effective.

SS: How do you define womanhood and how is this idea reflected in your poetry?
AS: It is the journey of a lifetime to find how much of one’s gender is inherited and how much invented. Feminism, for me, is a way of questioning the many ways in which gender is constructed. I see it as a journey of self-discovery, rather than a rigid set of dogmas. Being a woman, therefore, is a journey unfolding even as we speak.

SS: According to you, what does it mean to be a contemporary Indian woman poet? Where do you situate yourself within the canon?
AS: I don’t think it’s my job to locate myself within a canon. It is my business to write, and it is for those who read to see what I bring to the table if anything at all! I will only say this: some of the best poetry I read in the country today seems to be written by women.
How then do I see my role? I situate myself as heir to many strands of world poetry. Certainly, an earlier generation of women poets, like Kamala Das and Eunice de Souza, articulated female sexuality and rage in certain significant ways in Indian Anglophone poetry. As a poet who started writing in the late 1980s and 1990s, I value their legacy, as well as that of poets like Imtiaz Dharker and Rukmini Bhaya Nair. But I am also an omnivorous reader and world citizen, and so I see myself as an inheritor of the work of poets as varied as Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, Avvaiyar and Akka Mahadevi. And there are numerous male poets too, whom I consider to be my literary ancestors—from Kabir to Basho, Annamacharya to John Donne, TS Eliot to Rilke.
Let me offer, however, some sense of the specific challenges that I felt I was addressing as a young Indian poet, which have informed the choices I’ve made today. Since I write prose on the sacred, I am often described as a ‘spiritual’ poet. I’m not sure what that means, but yes, in addition to writing about love and politics and rage and grief, I do keep returning to the theme of the existential.
When I started writing poetry, the climate of Indian poetry in English was deeply suspicious of anything that smelt ‘spiritual’. I was very much an heir to this mistrust. It was understandable because it felt like we’d had enough of these stereotypes about the mystical East. We wanted to write strong, robust, edgy poetry about the world here and now, not some fluffy other-worldly escapist literature. Besides, as an Indian woman artist, I was clear that I wanted to write about women with bodies, hormones, hunger, not ethereal sprites and anaemic archetypes.
But then, life happened. A transformative personal experience of emptiness as well as my deepening preoccupation with sacred literature meant I couldn’t remain a closet spiritual seeker any more. Not surprisingly, then, as I changed and as my breath changed, and my understanding of the gaps between words changed, my poetic form changed and my very approach to poetry changed.
So, I do think that what my work has represented is a deepening engagement with the notion of the sacred. But it hasn’t meant some kind of antiseptic, sanitized fridge-magnet poetry. It hasn’t meant the erasure of sensuality. It hasn’t meant the erasure of questions around dharma, around morality, around politics. It’s meant a lust for a deeper life, which has provoked what I see as a more energized, exuberant, sometimes erotic verse. I suppose this is the distinct timbre that my work brings to the poetry of this moment.
My literary ancestors have changed, as a result. I reclaimed the Bhakti poets of this subcontinent for myself, and have found that alongside all the modern poets I enjoy, the audacious, irreverent, and yet passionate thirst for ‘something more’ of the Bhakti literary inheritance, is something I’m grateful for.

SS: How do you see your work contributing to the discourse of feminism? Would you say that Indian women poets are crafting newer modalities of feminism that are distinctively Indian?
AS: As I’ve said before, feminism for me is a journey of interrogation, not a state of having arrived. As for Indianness, it is dangerous to define it because it is often distorted as soon as it is! But it exists and there’s no doubt about it.
Personally, my journey as a seeker has led me to explore certain archetypal Indian female figures, such as Shakuntala as well as the Tamil crone poet, Avvaiyar. But even as far back as my first book, there were mythic references to ‘Kali on wheels’ on a Mumbai train, and to the Tamil heroine, Kannagi, the embodiment of what I see as sacred rage.
These were not programmatic efforts to wave some “real McCoy Indian” flag. They were born of my fascination with these figures, and a need to understand them more deeply. How, for instance, does Shakuntala make sense of her conflicted piecemeal inheritance, as a denizen of earth and sky, forest and city, hermitage and court? It took me a cycle of eight poems to realize that she represents the great possibility of dual citizenship. She represents a way beyond the patriarchal binaries of ‘either’ and ‘or’. She represents a third way. She is the third way. She doesn’t have to choose. She is the bridge, the axis between these seeming oppositions.
Similarly, Avvaiyar, in my most recent book, becomes the protagonist of a long poem cycle. Through her, I explore questions about the ageing female body, the freedom of abandoning the need to please, to impress, to be immortal. Her wisdom isn’t heavy or sententious. She represents clarity, equanimity and inner balance, and she knows that the point of life is simply ‘a shared fruit and laughter/ and that there’s no sadly/ or happily ever after.’ She represents an aspiration. Several readers have responded to her, which proves the strength of these archetypes: you recognize them even if you don’t know them.

SS: Who or what is your source of inspiration and what motivates you to write?
AS: Inspiration varies from poem to poem, book to book. Each of my five books has had a different mainspring. The first was exuberant and varied, as first books often are. My second, Where I Live, explored the gap between where I live and where I belong. My New and Selected began to explore places that are erotic and existential all at once. When God is a Traveller was about journeys, real and mythic, including the journey of Shakuntala. Love Without a Story explores themes of intimacy, the importance of conversation in fraught political times, and of course, the underlying spiritual journey, including the story of Avvaiyar, which is a journey from ‘ageing to sageing’, as it were.

SS: What does your work stand for? What would you say is the core ethos of your work?
AS: I don’t think a poem stands for anything but itself. The core ethos? I know I’m Indian and woman and urban and a spiritual traveller and a twentieth-twenty-first century poet. These have shaped my work in many ways. My aspiration is to write poems that create quiet but significant inner shifts, that are nuanced without losing intensity, that offer an inseparable mix of insight and image, truth and beauty. That was and is still the aspiration.

SS: In what ways would you like the trajectory of contemporary Indian women’s poetry to evolve?
AS: I would like poets, whatever their gender, to write from places of real preoccupation. I would hate to see anyone write about something because they ‘ought’ to. Or because they feel that pushing some politically correct button might win them a new set of readers. That kind of writing could sometimes make for strong journalism but runs the risk of becoming bad poetry. Poetry can certainly be consciously political if it chooses to be. But a good poem, for me, is one that surprises me with its treatment of a subject. It is the how, rather than the what that interests me.
In short, I personally don’t relate to didacticism or self-consciousness in poetry. I am also uncomfortable with technical exhibitionism. I like poems that aren’t too eager to impress. I would like contemporary poetry by Indian women to evolve to a place that allows each woman to be unique. I would like it to evolve to a place where questions like the above become redundant.

SS: What are some of the challenges or difficulties you have faced while writing as a poet?
AS: All the usual stuff, I suppose. I’ve had to navigate my way through the cliques, old boys’ networks, the perennial issues of trivialisation and damning with faint praise. I have received tremendous support as well, however. I’m very grateful for that. So, both are true.

SS: Form has been integral to poetry. Would you say that form is political or personal? What according to you is its relation to poetry?
AS: The form of every poem is determined by the exigencies of the poem. I usually write in free verse, but free verse doesn’t mean self-indulgence. It means rigour, craft, precision. I see it as an attempt to find the form that a poem needs to be itself. Whether it is free verse or metre, questions of form and freedom are relevant to both.

SS: How familiar are you with the works of your fellow contemporary women poets?
AS: I’ve indicated the senior women poets who have been significant to me. I have worked for years as a poetry editor and critic, so I read manuscripts all the time. I am reasonably familiar, therefore, with what my contemporaries are doing. Among younger women, I like several, from Karthika Nair to Mona Zote and Pervin Saket, to name a random few.

 

*****

 

WHEN LANDSCAPE BECOMES WOMAN  

--Arundathi Subramaniam 
 

I was eight when I looked 
through a keyhole 

and saw my mother in the drawing room 
in her hibiscus silk sari, 

her fingers slender  
around a glass of iced cola 

and I grew suddenly shy 
for never having seen her before. 

I knew her well, of course -- 
serene undulation of blue mulmul,  
wrist serrated by thin gold bangle,  
gentle convexity of mole 
on upper right arm,
and her high arched feet -- 
better than I knew myself. 

And I knew her voice 
like running water -- 
           ice cubes in cola.  

But through the keyhole 
at the grownup party 
she was no longer  
geography. 

She seemed to know 
how to incline her neck, 
just when to sip  
her swirly drink 
and she understood the language  
of baritone voices and lacquered nails 
and words like Emergency.  

I could have watched her all night. 

And that’s how I discovered
that keyholes always reveal more  
than doorways. 

That a chink in a wall 
is all you need  
to tumble 
into a parallel universe.  

That mothers are women. 
 

SONG FOR CATABOLIC WOMEN  

(from Love Without a Story)
 

We’re bound for the ocean 
and a largesse of sky,
we’re not looking for the truth 
or living a lie. 

We’re coming apart, 
we’re going downhill, 
the fury’s almost done, 
we’ve had our fill. 

We’re passionate, ironic 
angelic, demonic, 
clairvoyant, rational 
wildly Indian, anti-national. 

We’re not trying to make our peace 
not itching for a fight, 
we don’t need your shade 
and we don’t need your light. 

We know charisma isn’t contagious 
and most rules are egregious. 
We’re catabolic women. 

We’ve known the refuge of human arms, 
the comfort of bathroom floors,
we’ve stormed out of rooms, 
thrown open the doors. 

We’ve figured the tricks to turn rage 
into celebration,
we know why the oldest god dances 
at every cremation. 

We’ve kissed in the rose garden,
been the belles of the ball, 
hidden under bedcovers 
and we’ve stood tall.  

We’re not interested in camouflage 
or self-revelation, 
not looking for a bargain 
or an invitation.  

We’re capable of stillness 
even as we gallivant, 
capable of wisdom 
even as we rant.  

Look into our eyes, 
you’ll see we’re almost through. 
We can be kind but we’re not really 
thinking of you. 

We don’t remember names 
and we don’t do Sudoku.
We’re losing EQ and IQ, 
forgetting to say please and thank you. 

We’re catabolic women 

We’ve never ticked the right boxes, 
never filled out the form, 
our dharma is tepid, 
our politics lukewarm. 

We’ve had enough of earnestness 
and indignation 
but still keep the faith 
in conversation. 

We’re wily Easterners enough  
to argue nirvana and bhakti,
talk yin and yang, 
Shiva and Shakti.   

When we’re denied a visa
we fall back on astral travel 
and when samsara gets intense 
we simply unravel. 

We’re unbuilding now, 
unperpetuating,
unfortifying,
disintegrating. 

We’re caterwauling,  
           catastrophic,
           shambolic, 
           cataclysmic, 
           catabolic women.