General English I Yr

Unit I
Introduction to Sukirtharani
Sukirtharani is a Dalit poet and teacher with five publications to her credit, including kaip pattri
yen kanavu kel, iravu mirugam, Kamatthipoo, Theendapadaatha Muttham and Avalai
Mozhipeyarthal. Through her poems, she has taken up the cause of the caste system and the
plight of women who are oppressed by it. She has won many awards, including the Thevamagal
Kavithoovi Award, the Puthumaipitthan Memorial Award and the women’s Achiever Award by
the Pengal Munnani (Women’s Front). In addition, many of her poems are part of syllabi in
collage across the State. Sukirtharani has completed her Masters in Economics and Tamil
Literature. She lives in Ranipettai district of Vellore and teaches Tamil at the Government Girls
High School. She is an active feminist and social activist. She is currently writing a novel on
Dalit life.

Kaimaaru (Debt)
[Translated into English by Vasantha Surya]

A piece of hide
sewn into the base of the basket
she sets out.
The blunt-edged, scrap-iron sheet
piled with gathered ashes
is heavy in her arms.
Behind a house that’s fit to split
with too many people in it
she goes–stops there,
her eyes falling on a square
iron sheet
swinging from a nail.
Raising it with one hand
she throws a handful of ashes
inside.
And then,
scraping her forearm on the hole’s
jagged edges, she
sweeps and scoops, sweeps and scoops
from left to right
tilting it
into the basket.
And when
it’s full, and heavy on her head
with the back of her hand
she wipes away
yellow water
streaming down her brow.
And then,
with easy grace
she goes her way.
What I can do for her,
is
not to defecate
once.

Phallus I Cut
-Kalki Subramanian

No Transcendental Yoga
I performed
to transform myself
in to a woman.
I cut my phallus,
Soiled in blood
and
transcending death
I became a woman.
“O, you do not have
ovary,
woman, thou art not.”
said you.
Well.
“ Lo, behold!
as thou have severed
thy manhood,
thou art now
a desolate tree
with
decayed barks.
Thou have dug
the grave of
thy own lineage.
Live, thou may
Till thy roots last.
The earth that bears thee
Shall give up
one day
as thou have not
planted thy branches
below.”
Said, you.
Well.
I do not want that ovary
to carry your excretions
of caste and religious
fanaticism.
And I do not want
In my ovary
the gestation of
those seeds
to grow in to a
tyrannous tree.
Many a woman
as she carried
the seeds of your
discriminations,
made her ovary
your lavatory.
Luckily,
I am not a woman
by birth.
And that you refuse
to accept me as one
is, in fact,
my real emancipation.
I do not recite
the gyno-grammar
you have crafted.
Call me
an error of nature.
Call me what you will.
I know it myself
for sure
who I am
at any given hour.
Renouncing religion,
casting away caste,
united as the rejected,
can you live
this life we live?
Can you become a mother
without carrying a womb?
Can you become a daughter
without sucking at
your mother’s breast?
I can.
Cut the phall-us
of your chauvinism
and then you will know
who you are.
And then,
and only then,
you tell me
that
I am not a woman.

Imtiaz Dharker
Dharker is a poet, artist and video film-maker. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for
Poetry in 2014.She received the Cholmondeley Award and an Honorary Doctorate from SOAS,
and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she became the Chancellor of
Newcastle University. Her collections include Purdah (Oxford University Press), Postcards
from god, I speak for the devil and The terrorist at my table (all published by Penguin India
and Bloodaxe Books UK), Leaving Fingerprints, Over the Moon and the latest, Luck is the
Hook (Bloodaxe Books UK). Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English
syllabus, and she reads with other poets at Poetry Live! events all over the country to more than
25,000 students a year. She has been Poet in Residence at Cambridge University Library,
worked on a series of poems based on the Archives of St Paul’s Cathedral as well as projects
across art forms in Leeds, Newcastle and Hull. The inaugural Poet of the Fair at London Book
Fair, her poems have been broadcast widely on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as the BBC World
Service. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings in India, London, New York and
Hong Kong. She scripts and directs films, many of them for non-government organisations in
India, working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children.
‘Whether she writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each
subject dazzlingly into focus. She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her
deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.

If there were to be a World Laureate, then for me the role could only be filled by Imtiaz
Dharker.’

Purdah I
One day they said she was old enough to learn some shame.
She found it came quite naturally.
Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
much like the earth falls
on coffins after they put the dead men in.
People she has known
stand up, sit down as they have always done.
But they make different angles
in the light, their eyes aslant,
a little sly.
She half-remembers things
from someone else's life,
Perhaps from yours, or mine -
carefully carrying what we do not own:
between the thighs, a sense of sin.
We sit still, letting the cloth grow
a little closer to our skin.
A light filters inward
through our bodies' walls.
Voices speak inside us,
echoing in the spaces we have just left.
She stands outside herself,
sometimes in all four corners of a room.
Wherever she goes, she is always
inching past herself,
as if she were a clod of earth
and the roots as well,
scratching for a hold
between the first and second rib.
Passing constantly out of her own hands
into the corner of someone else's eyes…
while doors keep opening
inward and again
inward.
Purdah II
The call breaks its back
across the tenements: ‘Allah-u-Akbar'.
Your mind throws black shadows
on marble cooled by centuries of dead.
A familiar script racks the walls.
The pages of the Koran
turn, smooth as old bones
in your prodigal hands.
In the tin box of your memory
a coin of comfort rattles
against the strangeness of a foreign land.
***
Years of sun were concentrated
into Maulvi's fat dark finger
hustling across the page,
nudging words into your head;
words unsoiled by sense,
pure rhythm on the tongue.
The body, rocked in time
with twenty others, was lulled
into thinking it had found a home.
***
The new Hajji, just fifteen,
had cheeks quite pink with knowledge
and eyes a startling blue.
He snapped a flower off his garland
and looked to you.
There was nothing holy in his look.
Hands that had prayed at Mecca
dropped a sly flower on your book.
You had been chosen.
Your dreams were full of him for days.
Making pilgrimages to his cheeks,
You were scorched,
long before the judgement,
by the blaze.
Your breasts, still tiny, grew an inch.
The cracked voice calls again.
A change of place and time.
Much of the colour drains away.
The brightest shades are in your dreams,
A picture-book, a strip of film.
The rest forget to sing.
Evelyn, the medium from Brighton,
said, ‘I see you quite different in my head,
not dressed in this cold blue.
I see your mother bringing you
a stretch of brilliant fabric, red.
Yes, crimson red, patterned through
with golden thread.'
There she goes, your mother,
still plotting at your wedding
long after she is dead.
***
They have all been sold and bought,
the girls I knew,
unwilling virgins who had been taught,
especially in this strangers' land, to bind
their brightness tightly round,
whatever they might wear,
in the purdah of the mind.
They veiled their eyes
with heavy lids.
They hid their breasts,
but not the fullness of their lips.
***
The men you knew
were in your history, striding proud
with heavy feet across a fertile land.
A horde of dead men
held up your head,
above the mean temptations
of those alien hands.
You answered to your race.
Night after virtuous night
you performed for them.
They warmed your bed.
***
A coin of comfort in the mosque
clatters down the years of loss
***
You never met those men
with burnt-out eyes, blood
dripping from their beards.
You remember the sun
pouring out of Maulvi's hands.
It was to save the child
the lamb was sacrificed;
to save the man,
the scourge and stones. God was justice.
Justice could be dread.
But woman. Woman,
you have learnt
that when God comes
you hide your head.
***
There are so many of me.
I have met them, meet them every day,
recognise their shadows on the streets.
I know their past and future
in cautious way they place their feet.
I can see behind their veils,
and before they speak
I know their tongues, thick
with the burr of Birmingham
or Leeds.
***
Break cover.
Break cover and let the girls with tell-tale lips.
We'll blindfold the spies. Tell me
what you did when the new moon
sliced you out of purdah,
your body shimmering through the lies.
***
Saleema of the swan neck
and tragic eyes, knew from films
that the heroine was always pure,
untouched; nevertheless
poured out her breasts to fill the cup
of his white hands
(the mad old artist with the pigeon chest)
and marveled at her own strange wickedness.
***
Bought and sold, and worse,
grown old. She married back home,
as good girls do,
in a flurry of red the cousin -
hers or mine, I cannot know -
had annual babies, then rebelled at last.
At last a sign, behind the veil,
of life;
found another man, became another wife,
and sank into the mould
of her mother's flesh
and mind, begging approval from the rest.
Her neck is bowed as if she wears a hood.
Eyes still tragic, when you meet her
on the high street,
and watchful as any creature
that lifts its head and sniffs the air
only to scent its own small trail of blood.
***
Naseem, you ran away
and your mother burned with shame.
Whatever we did,
the trail was the same:
the tear-stained mother, the gossip aunts
looking for shoots to smother
inside all our cracks.
The table is laden
and you are remembered
among the dead. No going back.
The prayer's said.
And there you are with your English boy
who was going to set you free,
trying to smile and be accepted,
always on your knees.
***
There you are, I can see you all now
in the tenements up north.
In or out of purdah. Tied, or bound.
Shaking your box to hear
how freedom rattles…
one coin, one sound.
Imtiaz Dharker

ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM is the award-winning author of thirteen books of poetry

and prose, including the recent poetry volume, Love Without a Story, and a book of essays on
contemporary women on sacred journeys, Women Who Wear Only Themselves. Her other
work includes the acclaimed sacred poetry anthology, Eating God and the bestselling
biography of a mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life. A well-known prose writer on Indian
spirituality, she has been a long-standing arts critic, anthologist, performing arts curator and
poetry editor.
She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the Sahitya Akademi
Award, the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s
Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga
award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others. She
has written extensively on culture and spirituality, and has worked over the years as poetry
editor, cultural curator and critic.

Home
Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
never worrying
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside.

A home that I can wear lightly,

where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to fill in the crevices.

A home, like this body,

so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting.