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20 yrs after the independence
unwinding - end of everying the writer is done with everything
The City, Evening, and an Old Man: Me modernist poem
By Dhoomil
I've taken the last drag
and stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray, nothing matters to him
and now I'm a respectable man
with all the trappings of civility.
When I'm on vacation
I don't hate anyone.
I don't have any protest march to join.
I've drunk all the liquor
in the bottle marked
FOR DEFENCE SERVICES ONLY
and thrown it away in the bathroom.
That's the sum total of my life.
(Like every good citizen extraneous information, which is not absolutely necessary, it has
I draw the curtains across my windows a touch of irony {qning the conformity}
the moment I hear the air-raid siren.
These days it isn't the light outside
but the light inside that's dangerous.) that air raid people will notice. light inside - enlightenment and knowlege - it make you
dangerous or make you challenge norm - subtly - but a qning happen within you -
dangeous - modernist movt critique the society - a sense of frustration
sense of disillutionment with yor sense complimented by irony
I haven't done a thing to deserve
a statue whos unveiling personal space and public space come together.
would make the wise men of this city
waste a whole busy day.
I've been sitting in a corner of my dinner plate waste or what we don't want to eat
and leading a very ordinary life.
What I inherited citizenship governance,
in the neighborhood of a jail everything that makes you civilized is actually trapping
foucault - discipline and punishment
and gentlemanliness
in front of a slaughter-house. violence that is there in the society but people wish to rather not know
I've tied them both to my convenience
and taken them two steps forward.
The municipal government has taught me
to stay on the left side of the road. bathetic
(To succeed in life you don't need
to read Dale Carnegie's book "how to make friends and influence people"
but to understand traffic signs.) metaphor for when to stop , to be alert and to go - when to fight and how to and what to fight
Other than petty lies world is caught in a sense of apathy - rebelled by modernist poets, the people doesn't
care about the world affairs.
I don't know the weight of a gun.
On the face of the traffic policeman
doing his drill in the square
I've always seen the map of democracy. give space for everyone to go
And now I don't have a single worry,
I don't have to do a thing.
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I've reached the stage in life
when files begin to close. end of life,
I'm sitting in my own chair on the veranda space neither inside house or outside but relaxing - colonial image
without any qualms.
The sun's setting on the toe of my [Link]
A bugle's blowing in the distance. air raid
This is the time when the soldiers come back,
and the possessed city
is now slowly turning its madness
mad was outside
modernist poems move away from villages and country sides to cities
but inside into windowpanes and lights.
no change in the madness = there is always madnes in the city dispite - slaughterhouse, asylums, etc
(Translated from Hindi by Vinay Dharwadker)
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No Amnesiac King
A K Ramanujan
One knows by now one is no amnesiac
king, whatever mother may say or child believe.
One cannot wait any more in the back But the speaker says he can no longer indulge in such hopeful
of one's mind for that conspiracy myths that sit in the subconscious
of three fishermen and a palace cook
to bring, dressed in cardamom and clove,
the one well-timed memorable fish, fish in many folk tales that holds something precious — like fate
so one can cut straight with the royal knife or forgotten identity.
to the ring waiting in the belly,
and recover at one stroke all lost memory,
poem’s tone becomes personal and melancholic. The
make up for the years drained in cocktail glasses speaker dreams of recovering lost time — years that
among dry women and pickled men, and give back were wasted or “drained,” possibly referencing
a life lived in urban, alcoholic disillusionment, surrounded
by jaded or emotionally empty people.
body to shadows, and undo the curse
that comes on the boat with love. reverse the metaphorical curse — possibly the price of love or a relationship gone
awry. The “curse” evokes myth again, but it's also symbolic of emotional baggage.
Or so it seems,
as I wait for my wife and watch the traffic This stanza shifts from myth and memory to present reality. The speaker is
now grounded — waiting for his wife, watching traffic, and observing life in
in seaside marketplaces and catch seaside marketplaces. This return to the mundane contrasts sharply with the
earlier magical imagery.
my breath at the flat metal beauty of whole pomfret,
round staring eyes and scales of silver
in the fisherman's pulsing basket,
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and will not ask, for I know cannot,
which, if any, in its deadwhite belly
has an uncooked signet ring and a forest the speaker resists indulging in these fantasies; he acknowledges the futility of
searching for hidden meanings or miraculous symbols in the ordinary. The poem
thus contrasts nostalgic longing with mature resignation, revealing a quiet
legend of wandering king and waiting acceptance that life, unlike myth, rarely offers neat resolutions or magical
innocent, complete with fawn under tree recoveries.
This final portion evokes the full myth — a wandering king, a waiting innocent, a
and inverse images in the water fawn, and the dreamy inverse reflections in water — all traditional fairy-tale or epic
of a stream that runs as if it doesn't. motifs. But the stream that “runs as if it doesn’t” suggests illusion, stagnation, or
even self-deception. It’s beautiful, but unreal.
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To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian
Arundhati Subramaniam
You believe you know me, Orientalist
wide-eyed Eng Lit type
from a sun-scalded colony,
reading my Keats – or is it yours – weish is also colony of england
while my country detonates
on your television screen.
You imagine you’ve cracked
my deepest fantasy –
oh, to be in an Edwardian vicarage,
living out my dharma
with every sip of dandelion tea
and dreams of the weekend jumble sale…
You may have a point.
in cricket
I know nothing about silly mid-offs,
I stammer through my Tamil,
and I long for a nirvana
that is hermetic,
odour-free,
bottled in Switzerland,
money-back-guaranteed.
This business about language,
how much of it is mine,
how much yours,
how much from the mind, natural
how much from the gut, acquired
how much is too little,
how much too much,
how much from the salon, upper
how much from the slum, lower
how I say verisimilitude,
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you decide my id based on international markers
how I say Brihadaranyaka,
how I say vaazhapazham – soft power
it’s all yours to measure,
the pathology of my breath,
the halitosis of gender,
my homogenised plosives
about as rustic
as a mouth-freshened global village.
Arbiter of identity,
remake me as you will.
Write me a new alphabet of danger,
a new patois to match
the Chola bronze of my skin.
Teach me how to come of age
in a literature you’ve bark-scratched
into scripture.
Smear my consonants
with cow-dung and turmeric and godhuli.
Pity me, sweating,
rancid, on the other side of the counter.
Stamp my papers,
lease me a new anxiety,
grant me a visa
to the country of my birth.
Teach me how to belong,
the way you do,
on every page of world history.
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imaginary homeland - rusdie
id related to language
he had exhausted every
thing and came back return to tamil - filled with misconnection
sense of estrangment
reached limits of dravidian roots
inadiquate
prolonged use od english result in disconnection with tamil
tamill tired lang - faded memories
distance make a idealized image struggle to articulate tamil - english priority
parthasarathi was outside
india now the tamil he is speaking is different
dichotamy between =classical tamil and the celluloid tamil - celluloid
decides the lang tongue is unable to make the ascent
superficiala and commodification of modern world is
tamil of kurali is sleeping criticized.
tired lang can't represent reality theatre
fragmentation due to colonisation, alienation
Remembrance
By Mamang Dai
Why did we think it was trivial
that it would rain every summer,
that nights would be still with sleep
and that the green fern would uncurl
ceaselessly, by the roadside.
Why did we think survival was simple,
collective memory is proven wrong
That river and field would stand forever
invulnerable, even to the dreams of strangers,
for we knew where the sun lay resting
in the folded silence of the hills.
This summer it rains more than ever.
The footfall of soldiers is drowned and scattered.
In the hidden exchange of news we hear subaltern mobilization - horizontal
that weapons are multiplying in the forest.
for both past and present so put separately
The jungle is a big eater, armed conflict happens here, even pre-conflict time wild animals
hiding terror in carnivorous green.
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Why did we think gods would survive
deathless in memory,
in trees and stones and the sleep of babies;
now, when we close our eyes
and cease to believe, god dies.
fire - man-made For as long as remembrance
water - natural men stared at fire and water. shamanism
man's war with nature
division between vally and mountain, mountain - indegenious community
We dwell in the mountains and do not know
what the world hears about us.
Foragers for a destiny,
all the days of our lives
we stare at the outline of the hills,
lifting our eyes to the invincible sky. original mother comes from the cloud, so the line reaffirms a
Indigenous future
© 2004, Mamang Dai
From: River Poems
Publisher: Writers Workshop, Kolkata
