Quest for Home and Cultural Identity
TABISH KHAIR: QUEST FOR HOME AND
CULTURAL IDENTITY
by
NAMRATA PRERNA
HORO and R.K SINGH
Indian
poetry in English today has overcome the subjugation to the influence of
English, American or Western poets and post-colonial temperament. The whole
range of contemporary poetry projects the inner self of poets. Their history,
experiences and surroundings are expressed through a web of symbolic
representation. They display genuine love for culture and heritage with
“comfortable control on universal themes”1, just as they explore “new
horizons in contents”2 and maintain the Indian spirit. Obviously,
they are conscious of the country’s multi-lingual and multi-religious reality
and seek to present a synthesis of the nation’s diversity and differences. They
share the common nationalistic spirit irrespective of belonging to any
sub-categories such as metropolitan, cosmopolitan, regional, migrant, or diasporic.
Expatriate
poets such as Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Alexander, Saleem Peeradina, Vijay
Seshadri, Ravi Shankar, Jeet Thayil, Mani Rao, Debjani Chatterjee,
ReetikaVazirani, Bibhas De, Shanta Acharya, Sudeep Sen, and Raman Mundair etcetera make a
considerable contribution to the growing oeuvre of Indian English poetry. The
themes of their poems demonstrate regional/national/multicultural
sensibilities.
For
instance, some of Saleem Peeradina’s most
successful poems in First Offence (1980) are “those dealing with Bombay life, and
its sights and sounds with understanding and admiration.” 3 Sudeep Sen’s
poetry seems to have varied number of setting which ranges from “India to
Italy, and America to South Africa and he moves with effortless ease from
Mathura to Hiroshima, and Kali to Dali, perfectly at home with all.”4 Sen negotiates the settings of a
Mediterranean country in the poem ‘Mediterranean’ recalling his own earlier
experiences at home: “A bright red boat/Yellow capsicums//Blue fishing
nets/Ochre fort walls….//My lost memory/White and Frozen//now melts colour ready
to refract.”5
Raman
Mundair is another expatriate Indian poet who recounts her Indian background
using English as a medium with time to time input of Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi
terms. According to Cecile Sandten, her collection Lovers,Liars,
Conjurers and Thieves is “centred around themes such as a strict
patriarchal hierarchy which is criticized, child abuse, domestic violence, a
child’s sexuality, love, desire,the body, wounds and blood. It is also about a
Muslim boyfriend, immigration to Canada, immigrant disillusionment or racist
murders, and it is also inspired by the Hindu epic the Ramayana, and accounts and aspects from the Indian religious and
everyday life.”6
Against
such a perspective, commonly noticed in migrant poets, an attempt has been made
to analyse the quest for identity inTabish Khair’s poetry. At a recent event, to
a question from Bill Ashcroft “whether he is an ‘Indian’ writer, Tabish Khair
said that he is an Indian writer who comes from Patna , Bihar.”7 His
poetry testifies to this statement. It is also the migrant sensibility which
compels him to return to his roots via memory. The past which holds the present
and the future determines his poetry. Despite living in Denmark, he is
nostalgic for the original homeland.
The poet unwraps the sights, scenes,
senses of small-town from the treasure of his memory. In ‘Summer Senses’ he
writes:
The
soft, sweet smell of his hookah,
The
starched smell of her sari,
The
smell of mangoes ripening in the straw,
Of water cooling cement roofs, of khus,8
(WPLM.15)
In
the “winters and immigrant wilderness of snow,” that is, Denmark, he misses this olfactory sense, which connects him to the
lifestyle of the small town.
The
unfading memory is also unchainable, flowing with the current of consciousness.
The childhood experiences, culture, tradition, religion, faith, myths,
folklore, history, space, ancestors, and ancient authors in a web of symbolic
representation form a metaphor of memory.
Khair through his narrative poems
recreates his childhood. He recalls flying kites and related preparation and
fun, as a small boy:
Roofs were the runaway of our
flights, the cockpit
From which we monitored our
dogfights of paper
And tight skeletons of wood. Danger lurked
In the corner of the eye with no computerized
beep
Of warning, and sometimes trees
jumped at our kites. (WPLM.76)
Here,
the poet mourns over the present day children
who miss such games of adventure and learning. The childhood made mechanized
with video games which “Are the mythical
cursors, the dots, dashes and demons, /of your computer screen?” is now
deprived of the fun he had at home.
He
intensely collects the strings from the past to restore what is lost. The
re-construction of ancestral home and relationships helps him negotiate his
traumas as a beleaguered migrant, who is conscious of exile, alienation, unacceptability,
dislocation, hostility, and homelessness. He seeks to find relief by recreating
the concept of home.
In
poems such as ‘Amma’, ‘Kitchen’, ‘Their
World’, ‘To My Father, Across the Seven Seas’, and ‘Almost a Ghazal for My Grandfather’s
Garden’, he explicitly shows his yearning for an ideal ‘home’ which provides
him the desirable feeling of homeliness, love, care, security, and belonging.
The poetic presence of his ancestors soothes the painful soul. He remembers his
grandmother “In a starched and white sari, the fragrance of soap around you” in
the poem’ Amma’. In ‘Kitchen’, he seeks to present the unity in the diverse
society of India. According to the poet, it is his mother’s kitchen “where
parallel lines meet”. The life lines of the people from different generation,
religion, caste, and class run parallel to each other regardless of their
origin, purpose, and destiny. The poet
had been a witness at one such point/stoppage, that is, the mother’s kitchen, where
all these lives come to contact to blend, share and be in peace with all. The
kitchen is a universal symbol of a united nation which provides the family
atmosphere to every individual whether Hindu or Muslim, tribal gardener’s
grandson or old servants.
The poems like ‘Poem from Outside
Muharram Procession’,’Shobraat’, ‘Ganesh Stuti’, ‘Ashvatthaman’, ‘Krishna’,
‘Snakes, Outside the First Book of Moses’ reveal that his mind or observation is
not confined to the context of Muslim religion only, but he is essentially
secular, trying to explore logic from
every religious source. He writes in ‘Shobraat’:
Festival of graves; festival of
ghosts
That
could not exist for a Muslim, but did;
Festival not of the past but of
memories (WPLM.13)
In
the last line of this poem he regrets his inability to remember “Festival of
rolls I cannot read, names forgotten”, so his agenda in the poem is to
celebrate “memories”, “death in life, and life/In death” through the festival.
Tabish Khair is philosophical in the
ways he replicates the thoughts of the masters and maestros like Kalidasa, Kabir,
Ghalib, V.S Naipaul, Rumi, Karen Blixen,and H.C Anderson. In the poem ‘Such
Richness Fills The Aspects Of This Earth’ he writes:
Such richness fills the
aspects of this earth,
Each man’s a beggar seeking alms of worth.9
(MOG.45)
The poet perceives the world is so rich that in its comparison
man is a beggar--rich or poor—ever in
search of ‘alms’ that is worth satisfying. This poem is a transcreation of the
couplets of Ghalib, perhaps recalled by the poet from memory. The poet frames
himself with the spirit of Ghalib while mediating between his inner self and the
missing homeland. He demonstrates that the opinion of Ghalib has a similar kind
of persuasion in him. As a spiritual
soul he turns to these maestros, testifying to his personal disenchantment
while living abroad.
The things which are beyond his reach as
a physical being is acquired by configuring self in the spiritual unification
with Ghalib, Kabir, and Rumi, etc. Khair’s active personal voice and expression
is transmuted with the shared experiences/feelings of the classics. This is done through translation or
transcreation , a mode in which the source text is as important as the target text. Translation which Khair does
is always in accordance with the original author and his sensilbility. The selection
of these verses, couplets, or stories is purposely made as part of his search
for identity. In ‘No Hope In The Morning Light’, he writes:
No hope in the morning light.
All faces hidden from sight.
The
day of death is fixed:
Why
can’t I sleep at night?
I know the way to heaven,
But prefer to turn aside. (MOG.40)
The
lines clearly state the helplessness and restlessness of the poet. Ghalib in
the 19th century may have written it in a spiritual context but here,
if we notice the mindset of the translator, then we find the transparency of
agony Khair feels a là Ghalib.
Similarly, deriving from Kalidasa’s play
Abhijnana-Shakuntalam in the poem ‘Arrival’,
the poet reconstructs the story of Shakuntala in the hardship of an expatriate
who is afflicted by a sense of dislocation, alienation, displacement, loss, and
regret:
She
sees for the first time those eyes outside the lost home.
She
hears for the first time the streets of her lost town.
Soon
their absence will fill her with the nectar of nostalgia,
a
glass of half-lies she will have to drain to the dregs before
She sees reflected in its
emptiness the truth of her loss: how
…
how
memory can be either opium or the forge of anger. (MOG.19)
Khair
voices his grief as Shakuntala does when detached from her home.The unexpected
difference between the desired imagination and the actuality of world
complicate the position of Shakuntala as well as of Khair in the acquired
society.
The
historical sense, myths and folklores occupy a decent part in his poetry. Poems
like ‘Three Tribes’, ‘History’, ‘mohenjodaro: bric-à-brac’, ‘The Vanished
Dravidians’, ‘Gup-Shup(Gossip):Siddharth Becoming Buddha’,
‘Pomegranate(Anaar)’, ‘Birth and Marriages’ evince the Indian history and
ethos.
Tabish Khair is an Indian English poet
whose concerns are about India. He is a cosmopolitan whose poems deal with
small-town culture, sights, shared experiences, history through a burning
nationalistic spirit. His style is simple, rich in metaphor and irony.
Sometimes he may lack clarity in the images and expressions but, as a migrant
he effectively negotiates the factors of exile, homelessness, rootlessness,
dislocation, disillusionment, and despair.
He views himself first and foremost as a
human being, not allowing any lesser identity to narrow his self-perception:
I who am not of the East
Nor of the West, un-Christian,
Not Muslim or Jew, neither
Born of Adam nor Eve,
What can I love but the world
itself,… (WPLM.104)
But
included in this primary identity he also has various concerns—or other
identities—that he identifies himself with. He conveys the cry of Rumi, in an
attempt to match his personal response with proximity to the Persian poet’s
sensibility.
Khair
writes poems in free verse. He declines the forms of “chopped-up prose”10 for
poetry and prefers the pattern of “chop up narratives.”11 His narrative verse which appears to be very
simple in form and content consists in multiple layers of themes rooted in
Indian culture and heritage.
Apart from migrant sensibility, he
possesses a refined mind as obvious from his attempt to identify himself with
classics and great names in literature, religion, philosophy or arts. This also
reflects his choices that are elevating the mind and the soul in an otherwise
demotivating environment of the West.
In his verses he reflects with imagery
that are typically bound to his ‘home’ culture/tradition markers, for example
‘Ganesh Stuti’(with which begins the collection WPLM), “Boarsi”, “Ya Hassan,Ya Hussain”, shobraat-“halwa”, “Murgh Musallam,
Shahi Korma, Seekh Kabab, Pulao, Makuti.”, “Mango Recipes”- “Tarkari,
pickle,chutney”, “pauroti”, “Ramphal”. “Kishenbhog”, “bangles of glass”, “magical,
medicinal, sacred” – turmeric, “muezzin”, “Bara- singha”, “ Khaki shorts”,
“dupatta”, “Biharichokkra”, “Banarasi
sari”, “the trunk of kathal”, “dhaba”, “ Padh-kéPhook-Na”, “peepul denote
/divinity of sorts”, “school-darbaan”, “table”,
“chulha-smoke”, “mud village”, “cowdung fuel”, “rickshaws”,“terracotta”,
“Ammi”, and “Amma”. Khair’s sensibility is more inclined to the local than higher
aesthetic aspects except when he looks towards the great classical minds for
inspiration and motivation.
To sum up, the poet demonstrates a migrant sensibility with a peculiar vision
for his ‘home’ and ‘culture’. In his vision, he is determined to restore the
connection which identifies him with those he loves. He seeks inner freedom,
equality and unity, the inner realities of his self, and enriches the larger
collective life. His search for identity is his search for oneness – ekatva—with the rest.
References
1. Prem, P C K. English Poetry in India: A Comprehensive Survey of Trends and Thought
Patterns. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2011. ix. Print.
2. Ibid.
3. Naik, M.K. Narayan, Shyamala A. Indian English Literature 1980-2000: A
Critical Survey. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001. 167. Print.
4. Ibid., 173
5. Sen, Sudeep (ed).The Yellow Nib: Modern English Poetry by Indians. Belfast: Seamus Heaney
Centre For Poetry Queens University, 2011.
6. Sandten , Cecile. “Looking Beyond The
Surface.”Kavya Bharati 17 (2005):
187-188.
7. T,Vijay Kumar. “Indian Literature –At
Home in the World.” Muse India Issue 48: Mar-Apr 2013.Web. 11 mar 2013.
8. Khair, Tabish. Where Parallel Lines Meet.New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000.
Print. Abbreviated as WPLM in subsequent quotations in the text.
9. Khair, Tabish.Man Of Glass. New Delhi: HarperCollins and The India Today Group,
2010. Print. Abbreviated as MOG in subsequent
quotations in the text.
10. Khair, Tabish. “Preface.”Man Of Glass. New Delhi: HarperCollins
and The India Today Group, 2010. xi-xii. Print.
11. Ibid.
-- Namrata Prerna Horo, M.Phil, ISM, Dhanbad
--R
K Singh, Professor, Dept of HSS, ISM, Dhanbad
____________________________________
The article published in Poetcrit, Vol.
26, No.2, July 2013, pp. 83-87
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posted by Ram Krishna Singh at 11:37 PM
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