Passages #2: A Borrowed Voice Sets The True One Free
A conversation with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
PART I
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (b. 1947) is a poet, critic, and translator based out of Dehradun and Allahabad. In the early 1960s, when writing in English was not considered a serious literary activity in India, he pioneered the little magazine as a way of giving his work a platform. He also collaborated with the poets Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, and Adil Jussawalla to found the small press Clearing House, which published some of the finest works of Indian poetry in any language. His work as an essayist and anthologist has helped foster a critical environment for literature in a country where most academic departments, have for too long, remained in a somnolesent stupor.
Recently, Mehrotra published his first book of new poems in 25 years, A Book of Rahim & Other Poems, under the Literary Activism imprint. Last week, I interviewed him and his long-time friend and collaborator Amit Chaudhuri, who started the imprint, and has also published an essay On Being Indian, at the same time as Mehrotra’s book. This conversation however took place a few days before that. We begin with the topic of houses, which features prominently in Mehrotra’s latest book, and revisit his mother’s journey from Lahore to Dehradun around the time of Partition.
NJ. Arvind, I was wondering if we could perhaps begin with a few basic biographical details about your life. I gathered from your book that you were born in a house in Lahore, a few months before partition…
AKM. My mother had gone to Lahore, probably in early 1947, for her confinement. I was born in April. Independence wasn’t supposed to happen until the following year, so I presume the city was relatively peaceful. By May things must have gotten pretty bad and she had to return to Dehradun in a hurry when I was just a few weeks old. Her father sent his other children to Bombay. I think Ved writes about this in Face to Face.
Mehrotra is related to the writer Ved Mehta, who is his mother’s younger brother. Their ancestral home in Lahore features in an essay in his most recent book.
NJ. And was it a dangerous journey for your mother, from Lahore to Dehradun?
AKM. I don’t know, I never asked my mother and now wish I had. She died two years ago.
NJ. What about the house in Dehradun that you live in now, has it been a part of your family for a long?
AKM. It was bought by my father’s father, so it comes from what you might call the spear side of the family. My grandfather was a civil engineer from Thomason College of Civil Engineering, Roorkee. He worked in the public works department. I didn’t quite grow up in this house, because my father moved from Dehradun when I was two years old. He set up his dental practice in Allahabad and that’s where I grew up. I also lived in Bhilai, where the steel plant is. My father went to Bhilai when I was in class 8. I had a sister, who became a paediatrician.
NJ. And do you have happy memories of your childhood, shared between Bhilai and Allahabad?
AKM. I certainly do, especially of Bhilai, which I write about in an essay in Partial Recall.
NJ. I think you refer to it as a ‘city designed by a pencil stub and a six-inch plastic ruler’.
AKM. Oddly enough, Sunil Khilnani quotes this line in The Idea Of India. It was a new city then, in 1959-60, when I was growing up. Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur were the first steel plants to come up in independent India. Bhilai was built by the Russians. They were there for years, for a decade and a half, I think. We would knock on their doors and ask for postage stamps, coins, and badges. These were heavy Soviet era badges with images of Lenin or the Soviet flag. I even tried to learn Russian, without making much headway. The Russians were our neighbours in Sector X. They lived a few streets away, but never really mixed with Indians. I do however remember the very distinctive smell of Russian cooking. House after house had the exact same smell coming from their kitchens. It could have been meat or cabbage, or the two being cooked together. I am not sure. That was my first introduction to people who were from another country. They were exotic, three times the size of your average Indian. You did not see many foreigners in India in the 1950s. When they left, they sold us their cameras and binoculars.
Mehrotra writes about Bhilai in the following passage from ‘Bharatmata’, a long poetic sequence written in 1966, and later published in the journal ‘Mahfil’. It’s a blistering, unforgettable work, dedicated to the Bengali ‘Hungryalist’ poet Malay Roy Chowdhury, and in a slightly more tongue and cheek manner, to Indira Gandhi. Here is an excerpt that refers to Bhilai, through a collage of sharp, pitiless observations -
desert bulldozered
into a festival-coloured thorn.
steel town
shrub in the sand dune
town of red streets
and endless parallels
temple of modern india
where anglo-indian women teach
newrich couples in the ballroom
houses
isolation wards
male : is engineer
doctor
administrator
age 30
female : part-time wife
age 25
children : 4 yr old son who recites
little jack horner
learned at
English primary school +
2 yr. old daughter
each house complete
with
refrigerator
transistor
telephone
car
record player
a newly married sofa set
burshane
lawn
ayah
flowers
papaya trees
chilli and tomato plants
each night
each house rattles
from the first brick to the roof
burns like a falling meteorite
as the orgasm takes place and the loop
is thrown in the teapot
later
bed sheets and night suits
decorated and starched
are quietly bundled to the washerwoman
then the silence
of something gone
an early dawn
sprawls slowly
the blast furnaces
open hearths
rolling mills
continue turning out
pig iron
slag
steel
girders
angles
children
NJ. What an extraordinary passage this is, a cascade of objects, people, and streetscapes, that describes a kind of provincial modernity that you have often written about. From Bhilai, and later Allahabad, you moved to Bombay for your MA. What was that like?
AKM. Like a lot of middle-class Indians, my parents, when they were in Bhilai, had fallen under the spell of a guru. That these gurus are also swindlers is something that you come to know later. Anyway, my parents were very involved with one such person, a lady called Brijmohini Sarin. She had built an ashram in Agra Road, Mulund, and that’s where I lived when I was studying in Bombay. Among others living there was an incredibly wealthy widow, whose family owned a building opposite Churchgate station. She slogged all day in the kitchen, cooking meals for the ashramites. She worshipped her, and gave her the money to buy this rather large piece of land in Mulund where she built the ashram. I stayed away from the place as much as I could, but I could not escape it entirely. It was my postal address, and that of the ezra-fakir press. In my first few months I hardly had any friends in Bombay. By and by I met Arun, Nicky Padamsee, Rochak Pandit, Nandkishore Mittal, all of whom, I now realise, were much older than me. My wife Vandana and I were in the same class. I got to know her brothers, Jyotindra Jain and Pavankumar Jain, who wrote in Gujarati. Pavankumar and Saleem Peeradina were a year junior to us.
NJ. You have translated one of Pavankumar’s poems ‘Stroller’. It’s one of my favourite poems from your NYRB collection-
My parents go out for a walk.
They are wearing their best clothes,
Made when they got married,
And are pushing a stroller.
I’m sitting in the stroller
And look at the world
With small thirty-five-year-old eyes,
Through thick glasses.
AKM. I’d like a translate more his work. After finishing his MA he went to NID, and would have been among the first batch of students there. He did not take up design as a profession but continued to write. When he finally got round to gathering his poems after 45 years of writing, the book had only 65 poems, and that’s what he called it, Pasath kavyo. Eunice reviewed it in her column. It came out in 2012 and Pavan died the following year. He was my age. There’s barely a two-month difference between us. Things may be changing now, but given the diversity of Indian poetry, the long period over which it has been written, and the many languages it is written in, we don’t have nearly enough translations.
END OF PART I
In the second part of this interview Arvind and I move on to discussing his practice as a translator, the distinction between translating and writing, and whether it matters at all to a poet. We talk about the ebb of multilingual literary cultures in a country that was once defined by them. I also get a chance to delve deeper into his new translations from Ghalib and Rahim, as well as his earlier work translating Kabir and the Prakrit ‘Gathasaptasati’.