Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
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Analysis of his works, in brief
An overview by Ranjit Hoskote, 2014
Ranjit Hoskote, Jan 5, 2015 India Today
A memorable year for poetry publishing in India, 2014 has brought us a harvest of individual volumes, anthologies and translations. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Collected Poems, the most recent of these books, must be celebrated for mapping the poet's 45-year-long career. A member of the 1970s poetry collective, Clearing House, Mehrotra has also made a distinctive contribution to the Indian literary scene through his translations of Hala and Kabir as well as his benchmark anthologies, Twelve Modern Indian Poets and the Oxford India History of Indian Literature in English.
Prefaced by a discerning introduction by novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri, Mehrotra's Collected Poems is a banquet. It brings together poems from his four published volumes, Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998), as well as selections from his translation of the Prakrit love poetry of Hala, The Absent Traveller (1991), and from his Songs of Kabir (2011). Additionally, it includes a rich vein of recent poems, and a trove of previously uncollected translations of poems by Nirala, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, Dhoomil, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Manglesh Dabral from Hindi, and by Pavankumar Jain and Adil Mansuri from Gujarati, among others. Significantly, Mehrotra's practice of translation is presented as an integral aspect of his imaginative project, not a detour pointing away from his poetic itinerary.
During the 1970s, together with his confreres Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre, Mehrotra charted an avant-garde departure from the classical explorations of an earlier generation of Anglophone Indian poets that included Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and A.K. Ramanujan. He favoured surrealist techniques of shock, estranging the reader from everyday reality through a language of displacement and enigma. The objects were recognisable, their actions and the relations among them were not. In 'Eleven Cross-sections', restored in this edition to its original title, 'Songs of the Good Surrealist', Mehrotra writes: "Clouds cannot always be trusted/ This one broke into my house/ Went behind the cupboard, barked/I left the city/ And like any hunting dog/ It picked up the scent."
As a young poet who began to publish in the late 1980s, I found myself exhilarated by the hallucinatory enchantments of Mehrotra's early poetry. By this time, he had long completed his apprenticeship to the surrealists. He was working on the poems that would come to fruit in The Transfiguring Places, meditations on place and memory, evocations of childhood retrieved through the prism of adult disquietude, expeditions into the multiple ancestries that shape us, and which we must defend against those who would flatten them in the name of a singular past.
I first saw some of these poems in typescript, marked with revisions in pencil, when Mehrotra passed them around Arun Kolatkar's table at the Wayside Inn at Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. Shortly afterwards, they appeared in Vilas Sarang's lively but now long defunct Bombay Literary Review. Mehrotra had also, by then, replenished his imaginative range through translation, engaging with Kabir, Nirala, Muktibodh and Dabral, among others. In one of these poems, 'Borges', he records the memorable observation, "And a borrowed voice sets the true one/ Free".
Over nearly five decades, Mehrotra's ambition has been to retain the "sharp-edged quality" that he foregrounds in the introduction to Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Like a classical musician whose discipline elicits a resonant thrum from a taut string, his emphasis on craft achieves percussive effects through minimal gestures. A self-portrait, prompted by the revelations of a mirror, conveys this compressed intensity, as the poet confronts three faces: "His own/ The grey-haired man's/ Whose life policy has matured/ And the mocking youth's/ Who paid the first premium."
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet and cultural theorist.
