Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha
by Shruti Sareen
This essay seeks to explore the need or the intent of writing poetry for children, and to see what kind of poetry is best fitted for the purpose. A google search for “children’s poetry” reveals a wide range of poets of which Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, A.A.Milne, Sharon Creech, Kenn Nesbitt, Michael Rosen, and Naomi Shihab Nye are only a few. In the nineteenth century, poets like R.L. Stevenson and Christina Rossetti have written poetry for children, and even further back, William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ serve as perfect examples of children’s poetry. When I run a google search for “children’s poetry in India”, however, I find almost nothing at all except a few writers whom one has never heard about. Another website tries to pass off Tagore’s Gitanjali as children’s poetry. Beyond this, there are no results at all. Ruskin Bond, would, I think, probably be the only twentieth century Indian poet, who has written extensively for children, in almost every genre. In the recent past, we have seen Adil Jussawalla and Ananya S. Guha who claim to be writing poetry for children. In this paper, I try to assess what kind of poetry do we need for children in India today, and what the current scene is like.
Sayoni Basu, the editor of Duckbill Books, a publishing house for children, writes in her article ‘Let the Kids Be’ in Reader’s Digest, “But as soon as you set books up as another agency to learn from, kids—who have ‘learning is fun’ thrust on them till they realize ‘fun’ is an evil adult concept—will want to run away from them. And this will only be reinforced if you chase after them, saying learn about Our Glorious Heritage, or see the ‘fun’ way in which the water cycle is explained. It may be hard for parents to realize—because as a parent, it feels as if every moment of your waking day is taken over by your children—but children are fundamentally powerless. They are physically smaller and vulnerable, they depend on you for everything, and there are very few choices that they are allowed to make. So one very simple rule of books that kids tend to like are those that make them feel empowered. Where the child protagonist can make decisions, determine how life is going to be. If you look back at the books you liked as a child, many of them were the ones where kids had their own adventures, took their own decisions, did their own thing. Because we couldn’t, it was deeply satisfying to read of those who could.” Sayoni Basu’s words explain, for example, why Enid Blyton has been such an enormously popular writer for children all over the world. J K Rowling with her Potter series is a more recent example. The age old poetry adage is “Show, not tell”. Telling becomes a way of preaching and moralizing. It does not remain within the domain of poetry. An old college teacher disapproved of something I had written calling it too “didactic”. Literature ceases to be literature perhaps when it becomes a moral science textbook, and poetry more so, as it is a genre of subtlety. To write children’s poetry, one must become a child, one must view the world with the eyes of a child to figure out how a child thinks, what a child wants, one must try to become a William Blake. Poetry for children seems to work when it approaches the world through a child’s eyes, and also when it tries to sensitise the child to the way of the world. This sensitization however does not come about with teaching and preaching. Literature makes one feel, question, and view the world differently, in its own subtle and suggestive way, and that is what makes it good literature. Now, through this frame, I analyse some poetry by Adil Jussawalla, and then by Ananya S. Guha.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, A A Milne’s Now We Are Six, Christina Rossetti’s poems such as ‘Winter: My Secret’, ‘Who has seen the wind’, and ‘The Colour Pink’ try to create the sense of wonder in a child and to express it. They express a child’s emotions of playing on the swing or by the boats or in the mud, about children’s soft toys and their unwillingness to grow up. Indian Poetry in English however has rarely ever been about children. There are no poets who write for children per se. The ones who do, such as we see in CBT and NBT publications have deliberately set themselves up “to write for children”. They write as adults writing for children and therefore are not able to view the world as a child would. Imagination and sensitivity cannot be forced, and poetry written with such force is bound to fail. We see a similar artificial force operating in Ananya Guha’s poems, a force which says “I should write for children because nobody does” and therefore creates poetry that does not work. A poem should not neatly sit down and behave itself, a poem should fly without knowing what it may find. This is precisely what Adil Jussawalla tells Kareena N. Gianani who is reporting for the Mid-Day Magazine. He says that there are no “should” in his poems and that several meanings or interpretations can be taken out of them as often they cannot be understood fully as there is no singular meaning. He says that he allowed himself to be a little more childish than usual while writing these poems, to capture a sense of “wonder, pathos and naivete”, and tries to shirk all adult thoughts, complexities and reason. He says he tried to come close to William Blake while doing this, particularly in ‘Three Ships’. Blake’s ‘Chimney Sweeper’ is an innocent child who is thrust into a ruthless world where he begins to wonder and question. Blake never writes that “it should not be like this” or that “children should not be treated like this”, but it makes me cringe with pain and anger, in a way in which those two statements never would have. In ‘Three Ships’, Jussawalla writes:
I christen this sea ‘Ship’
Its passengers garlands and ashes
I christen this ship ‘Night’
Its black sail stretched to the limit
I christen this morning ‘Morning’
Ship without outline, glorious.
The poem is seemingly simple and yet one is not fully able to grasp or comprehend it. One is not sure what is the intended meaning. I get a sense that perhaps the poet is trying to say that morning will triumph in the end, because this ship has no outline that can be seen, whereas night still has a limit, even if the black sail is huge and stretched right till it. The sea here is being called a ship which gives us a sense that the sea itself moves, connects two places, carries things with it. It does not necessarily need a literal ship. Garland and ashes, from glory to death, the sea carries all with it. Also, if the night and the morning are being seen as ships, it suggests that they too travel and connect something, night to day and day to night, perhaps joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment are bound too in such a cycle. These are meanings I ought to take out from Jussawalla’s poem, but I do not know if my interpretations are “correct”, I do not know what meaning the poet wants me to take from this.
‘Imagination’ tells us how the world is unfixed and how much we are ourselves responsible for building or creating it. Imagination can be a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Imagination is also seen as a ship which can help us travel. History was created by somebody’s imagination, and that is how the planet will end. It is intoxication or madness like a glass of rum, it can create, or it can destroy. Yet, if imagination is freedom, if this ship is called Liberty, he tells us to keep the women and children first, to first take care of the powerless, and the less privileged.
It's a glass of rum,
a noose,
a fuel that burns the rags
round wounded heads.
It's a history, a planet's
precipitate.
Call it the great ship Liberty,
men, women and children,
women and children first.
As Jussawalla tells Nabina Das in an interview, “The title of the book refers to the autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin who writes that as a boy he felt “cast out, unchosen, rather as though I were the wrong breed of dog”…Later, he became a professional photographer. We look at his photographs now, of soldiers, of landscapes, of the people of India, and think he was the right kind of dog.” Das writes that Jussawalla’s poetry offers resistance, in a “dog-eat-dog world” in a “market economy driven bourgeois culture”. She writes that in a way, McCullin’s cast out, un-chosen, wrong breed of dog is restored in Jussawalla’s poems as the right kind. Kareena N. Gianani, writing for the Mid-Day Magazine, quotes Jussawalla in her interview with him on how his own childhood played a role in the writing of the poems, “The ethos of a school, to put it mildly, is not pro-individual creation.I also remember the constant impulse to break out, fully aware that I wasn’t fit to be a rebel. I was always regarded as the quiet one, the “very good student”. In his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour, British photojournalist Don McCullin writes that he felt ‘cast out, unchosen and the wrong breed of dog. I felt exactly that way when I was left out of football team in school. I did not know how to fill the lunch break, and took to drawing panels of stick figures. The solace of being able to outpour came at the age of 14, when I began keeping a diary. (Here, Jussawalla opens a file full of illustrations he drew from the age of 10. There’s a fiery Batman and Robin, The Fox and The Crow and Blackhawk toting a gun. Charming). He goes on to say that although his initial verse was comical and satirical in nature, the change came when he read T S Eliot, after which he tried to write a poem, imitating Eliot’s style. Jussawalla’s poems are about a baffling variety of emotions, written from the viewpoints of children, young adults, and adults, and they invite laughter, disgust, wonder, and grim acceptance as responses. . Indrajit Hazra, in ‘Poems can be pets’ in the Hindustan Times suggests by the title itself that the book can lend itself to children in yet another way. Most kids would identify with the title, with dogs, and here by extension poems, as pets. Thus the title suggests a sense of the unwanted underdog, as well as the longed for pet, at the same time. Hazra appreciates and applauds Jussawalla’s capacity to again become a fifteen year old and to see things from a child’s point of view.
‘The Thoughts Of an Eight-Year-Old Girl’ is actually the inner muttering of a girl when she is asked to eat something she does not want to. They are her murderous thoughts wishing that her Great Indian Family were nearly extinct like the Great Indian Bustard. In ‘The Good For Nothing’, he writes:
How do I learn to be good who am good for nothing, thinks the boy, rejected over and over for reasons he can’t understand.
He presses his face against glass to make it look uglier.
How do I learn to be tall who am only a dull story, never to be repeated, he wonders. Every day I grow stronger and stronger,
every day I get better and better, He tells himself over and over, as his father told him to.
Each one of us perhaps has intimately experienced the pain of rejection at some point of time or the other, and has thought that one is the worst girl, or the worst boy, or the worst student, or that nobody is going to be as bad as ourselves. And each one of us has then tried to comfort ourselves and once again pick up hope, telling us what someone has said, the external validation that has told us that we are good and that we can learn and succeed.
Indrajit Hazra writes that in‘Our Poets and Their Inspiration’, instead of taking the “pathli gali and bemoaning the fate of poetry (not to mention of poets), he lets the fluffy dog of irony out to bite poets, including himself, in the ass. After a short litany of the poets’ woes”, we get these lines:
Having served its time, a body of print,
unprisoned,
stands in the doorway,
open-mouthed, gulping fresh air
expecting a garland
and a laddoo.”
The poem suggests that the body of print is dead and the funeral garland and laddoo are ready, and yet, at the bottom of the page, Jussawalla’s satire cut even more incisively as he ends the poem with “But nobody’s there”. Totally lost and forgotten, nobody even remembers or comes for the funeral.
Nabina Das writes that the words “cast out” reflect lines in several poems where a boy is in casts or with shoes that somehow help him walk; the allusions to physical discomfort results in exploring frontiers of imaginations:
New pairs, but pointing to old journeys,
take the floor. They don’t know
what’s brought them to this shady joint,
the deformed bone or the doctor I want to avoid.
The shoes are new, but the journeys are the same, there are no new places to go to. The child seems to bemoan the misfortune of the new shoes which share his own tragedy, caught between the deformed bone and the doctor he wants to avoid. He then continues in the same poem:
The road does nothing,
its blood poisoned, your car
a nasty growth.
…
I’ve managed a few more inches this week
with a crutch I made of paper,
elastic bands,
staples,
a thimble
and a straw.
Das notes the tense, death-wished imagery in the lines from the section “On my Own Feet” in this poem. What is this paper crutch? Only a book, a sheaf of papers, or a manuscript could be tied together with elastic bands or staples. The “crutch” is a support for the real life this child will face soon.
In ‘The Way I Walked Abroad’, he writes:
I cut my nails
but winter took my toes.
Their shoes repaired,
my feet ran like wounds,
ran on, but waited for me
further up the road.
Although one cannot grasp the meaning of this poem entirely, it conveys a sense of cold, and how you run fast like the blood flows and yet how painful this running seems to be. As if the feet ran fast, but you cannot keep up with the change, you need more time to adapt.
Some poems are obviously drawn from his own childhood in pre-Independence India. In ‘A Boy in the Forties: Remembering Andrew Thompson’, he shows a rebellion against cruel fate, injustice, and imperialism, and at the same time accepts death with a seemingly matter of fact “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods”:
And when Jesus comes to his side,
he’ll tweak him with Marx Brothers’ jokes,
delight him with Zorro’s curses.
…
In one hand a cutlass,
the other high on a rope,
he spits at the King’s ships,
and as a captain tunes his telescope
kisses a slave-girl on the lips.
…
Dawn comes up like the credits:
so-and-so killed or missing.
Even in death, in front of god, he will continue to joke and curse and hold his rope and cutlass, and spit on the ships of the imperialist King, and kiss the slave girl quickly and quietly when the captain is not looking.
‘Two from British India’ are also two poems which clearly hark back to the poet’s childhood. The first one shows a boy Jack who seems to be lame, and his sister Sally has to take care of him all the time which gets to be a burden for her too. On top of that, Sally too is laughed at in school because her brother cannot walk. Jussawalla concludes the poem saying that India will soon be free, and asks when the two of them would attain their freedom.
Goodnight, Jack.
Mummy has a migraine
and Daddy’s hurt his back.
It’s forever the same thing:
‘Sing to him, Sally.’
But they know I can’t sing.
Stop that noise, Jack.
Nehru’s on his rounds.
He’ll take you away
if you stay awake.
Don’t make a sound.
In class, it’s déjà vu
‘Sally has a brother
who can’t walk.’
‘Sally’s bad news,
like the flu.’
We’ll be home soon, little brother.
India, they say, will be free.
But what about the pair of them,
and what about you and me?
The second poem shows a child scared of the crowd and the soldiers and the English teacher and the PT master and the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz but most of all from people who will take all this away from him. He’s frightened to vomit and asks his mother where his father is, “he can’t be at a war / he always has one with you.”
Hide me in the 10 o’clock show at the Eros,
Ma.
I’m frightened of English soldiers
and frightened of crowds in the street.
I’am frightened of Brown, English master,
And Pee Wee, PT master.
I’m frightened of dwarves
and the tin man in Wizard of Oz,
but most of all of Dr. Know-all Rustom
who will make me lie down
and pick them out of my system.
I’m frightened of vomit
and the things that make me vomit.
Stop hugging and kissing me.
Why is father away?
He can’t be at a war.
He always has one with you.
‘Another Dog’ takes us back to the imagery of the unwanted underdog in the streets in the title of the book. This poem is a strong and stark portrayal of being deserted, of being alone, of suffering pain and rejection, of being an outcast who is, as it were, on the edge of life, or the world. We do not know the context of the poem but it fills us with a kind of horror, as we connect with the terrible angst expressed.
Perhaps my mother died mad.
The nine o’clock siren reminds me of something like that,
so I howl and the sobs come naturally.
They don’t allow it.
I do not love them.
I merely fear another loss if I escaped,
another desertion,
another dog destroyed.
Nabina Das in Prarie Schooner writes that “ the child at the center of Jussawalla’s collection is not outright a “damaged personality”—a term that tended to come up in the conversation—but more of a “hurt eye” that is sensitive to the core and discerning in her/his perception of the larger world.” She writes that poems are about the partition of the Indian subcontinent, geographical dislocation, political chaos and volatile family relationships. The poems make it clear, she continues, that the choice of reality and literature are completely up to the reader and the reader’s imagination, as if the reader has the power to create a new reality, or at least to imagine one and in turn, a new kind of literature. Jussawalla’s collection for children, The Right Kind of Dog, privileges the marginalized and the oppressed, the downtrodden. The term “dog” in the title is meant to signify “fringe people”. Women and children are central here. Dalits and tribals are central here, as poems such as ‘Eklavya’ show.
Jerry Pinto in ‘There is a special pleasure in reading a good line’ in The Hindu writes that what makes Jussawalla’s book amazing is the fact that he never condescends to his audience, never adopts a new tone or stoops to a lower level. He does his young readers the honour of treating them like people, young people, yes, but still those who are capable of understanding matters of depth and intensity. He goes on to say that there is a lot of sense of despair and powerlessness in this book, because as children we tend to feel that a lot, as we are always acted upon, and are never the decision making individuals. Children often wonder “What have I done to deserve this?”, or why their parents gave them birth if they just to torture them. Some suffering, he writes, is incidental to one’s life, and some is accidental, and then there are the deliberate mutilations through which we hurt one another. So the question was whether he could write entertaining poetry for children, or whether it would make them feel worse, which he said was not the intention. Jussawalla says that the intention behind the poems is probably to surprise the reader, and that the children in the poems are not supposed to be taken as victims, or as powerless beings, but as people who can do something about the situation in which they find themselves. Sometimes, speaking about the hurt and the situation is an attempt to deal with it, he says. Often, one would find a poem about a child whom others would consider as a failure, but instead of being crushed by it, there is a voice of resistance and opposition.
In ‘Eklavya’, Jussawalla writes a poem which it should be natural for young kids to connect with, and yet shows this small poor Dalit boy who has his thumb cut because he is not allowed to be as good as Arjun, or even to be better than him, because Arjun has the royal blood, because “the boar must step aside for the lion”. For the welfare of the upper classes and castes, the lower will have to be servile and humble and subject to deceit. Even when he cuts his thumb, it makes no difference to anyone, except the deer, who are merely startled. This poem should make the politics of the powerful and the powerless come across clearly to young kids, showing them how unequal this world is.
“A Song of Ekalavya”
Ekalavya must cut off his thumb
the boar step aside for the lion
for the other’s Arjun
the royal Arjun
for the sake of his family
there must be humility
for the sake of our welfare
deceit, servility
Ekalavya must cut off his thumb
…
Ekalavya has cut off his thumb
now you can hear him
cry in the jungle
the deer stand startled
who fled at his step
our kitchens are empty
fasting or starving’s
the same to us
It’s Ekalavya who’s cut off his thumb.
Now analyzing Ananya Guha’s poetry for children through the same lens with which we have been examining Jussawalla’s, we find a marked contrast. His collection for children Rhyme and Reason, seems to me exactly that, rhymes and reason. But rhymes and reason are not poetry, if they are devoid of the spark which Gabriel Garcia Lorca terms as “duende”. If children can identify with a boy like Eklavya, they can also identify with Malala’s desire, or at least see her as an inspiration. However, though we are never told that the upper castes are oppressing Eklavya and that this is wrong and that they should not do so, we are definitely taught what Malala’s virtues are and what her contribution to our world has been. In ‘Malala Knows: Essay in Poem’, Guha writes:
What is the price we have to pay, for fighting for rights?
Malala knows. Who is Malala?
A young girl, fourteen or fifteen.
Is she Indian?
Doesn't matter.
Malala knows, her father knows.
London knows, the whole world.
What is the price?
Nothing much, some
bullet gun shots.
Now hospital doctors
are fighting with her
to stave her off death
and defeat.
Malala knows.
Little little Malala
with her pretty bespectacled
face.
Malala knows.
What is she fighting for?
Education rights for the girl child.
Why did they shoot her?
Malalal knows.
They know.
Who are they?
The world knows.
Is she Indian or Pakistani?
Doesn't matter.
The whole world knows.
And Malala.
Tell me, in the first place
why did they shoot her?
Damned, she wanted education
for girls like her.
If she lives, will she continue?
Her fight?
Malala knows.
I wonder if I should let the reader assess and judge the differences between these two poems according to the reader’s own responses. One may like to ask whether an essay can be written as a poem, or why one would write a poem at all if the content is better suited to the form of the essay? After all, form is decided according to the content. Let us see a poem about a dog as this is also something we can link with Jussawalla’s poems.
The dog is destitute.
When we smile, it cannot.
When it smiles, we cannot.
It wags its tail. We wag our tongues.
It looks askance. We are bohemians.
The dog is just an individual of hunger and raw meat,
boiled vegetables or eaten food. It takes away philosophy in atrophy.
When it dies, we mourn summers of hydrophobia.
The poem does not make me feel any connection with the dog. The poem rather seems to show an inherent impossibility of any communication between the two, as even smiles and tail wags entirely miss each other, and languages are not the same, and described as a bundle of “hunger and raw meat” does not make us feel much empathy with the dog. Moreover, the poem continues to use the neuter gender “it”, even though “it” is called an “individual”.
Now I look at a poem which seems to be about reading poetry. One expects that a poem about poetry should itself be poetic. Not for nothing does one remember Wordsworth’s organic theory of poetry which says that the content must be inscribed in some way within the form itself. Samuel Beckett’s art is about minimalism and the form of Waiting for Godot for example, is minimalistic in itself. But the poem instead of enacting poetry in the very act of writing seems to be teaching us what poetry is like. It could as well have been an essay on poetry perhaps. The age old flaw is the one of telling instead of showing.
Reading poetry is light.
The lamp shade witholds.
It exonerates a tight leash.
Receives passions (of words).
Reading poetry is a metaphor.
Exonerates cliches and dashes.
Reading poetry is an art (of living).
Exposition of ruthless telling.
Reading poetry is my, your thinking.
In flavour of rethinking. Words.
Reading poetry?
The poet asks us in the last line whether we have just a read a poem. My answer to the question would be in the negative. I do not feel any passion within me by reading this poem. Nor do I think that writing poetry exonerates one of clichés. Poetry is a metaphor, as the poem tells us. That alone however is not enough. The poem does not tell us that the metaphor must not seem contrived or forced, but must seem to be something that flows effortlessly and fits in seamlessly with the rest of the poem.
A poem ‘Attestation’ about an actual incident of gang rape in Guwahati is as follows:
She walked out. She walked out.
From the bar they Yelled.
She has been drinking.
Did you have any inkling?
She is an inviolate oxymoron, the cuss,
the paradox of what we profess.
She is in a mess.
Beat her, hit her,
Strip her till she cries.
No; she dies. First two, three.
In seconds, twenty or thirty.
Strip her. Rip her.
Feel her till she atones
And we condone.
Click, click, click.
The journalist had done his job.
And also, the mob.
Kill her, beat her till she cries.
And dies.
They were there,
Cageless – Animals.
The journalist had done his job.
Click, click, click.
She was flashed Everywhere.
In India and abroad.
Such is the alacrity (of the media).
Such hype we will never miss.
Overnight she garnered fame.
It was a hit or miss! (A quiet tear full somewhere.)
The government got into action.
To see the public reaction.
Their photos were flashed.
Arrest them.
Deadline 48 hours.
This was not rape.
It was body cuddling.
They called it molestation.
That, is – an attestation.
Works Cited
Das, Nabina. ‘The Right Kind of Dog- On Poet Adil Jussawalla’s Forthcoming Collection’. Prarie Schooner. http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/blog/right-kind-dog-poet-adil-jussawalla%E2%80%99s-forthcoming-collection-0 . 30th Nov.2015
Gianani, Kareena N.. ‘The Right Kind of Book’. Mid-day Magazine. http://www.mid-day.com/articles/the-right-kind-of-book/225511 30th Nov 2015
Guha, Ananya S.. BoloKids and Boloji. http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Writers&WriterID=3733&CategoryID=48 . 30th Nov 2015.
Hazra, Indrajit. ‘Poems can be pets’. Hindustan Times. http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/poems-can-be-pets/story-qIvOOmqmmrnmTNz1kM69JM.html> . 30th Nov. 2015
Pinto, Jerry. ‘There is a special pleasure in creating a good line’. The Hindu. http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/there-is-a-special-pleasure-in-creating-a-good-line/article4727017.ece . 30th Nov. 2015
Author Bio:
Shruti Sareen studied in Rajghat Besant School KFI, Varanasi and went on to do English literature from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. With a keen interest in Indian Poetry in English, her MPhil looks at the depiction of urban spaces whereas she is currently pursuing a PhD on twenty first century feminist poetry from the University of Delhi. She also teaches at a college in the university. She has earlier had poetry accepted by The Little Magazine, Muse India, Reading Hour, Six Seasons Review, The Seven Sisters Post, The Chay Magazine (gender and sexuality), Ultra Violet (gender and sexuality), Brown Critique, E-Fiction India, Scripts (LGBT journal), Thumb Print Magazine, North East Review, Allegro, , Coldnoon Diaries, Kritya, and Vayavya. She has had short fiction accepted for Marked By Scorn, an international anthology on non-normative love. She has had two papers accepted for Fulcrum: an anthology of poetry and aesthetics, an international journal edited by poet Philip Nikolayev, and one in Muse India. She is passionate about poetry, music, teaching, Assamese culture, queer love and sexuality, and super clichéd though it sounds, nature! She blogs at www.shrutanne-heartstrings.blogspot.com.
Sayoni Basu, the editor of Duckbill Books, a publishing house for children, writes in her article ‘Let the Kids Be’ in Reader’s Digest, “But as soon as you set books up as another agency to learn from, kids—who have ‘learning is fun’ thrust on them till they realize ‘fun’ is an evil adult concept—will want to run away from them. And this will only be reinforced if you chase after them, saying learn about Our Glorious Heritage, or see the ‘fun’ way in which the water cycle is explained. It may be hard for parents to realize—because as a parent, it feels as if every moment of your waking day is taken over by your children—but children are fundamentally powerless. They are physically smaller and vulnerable, they depend on you for everything, and there are very few choices that they are allowed to make. So one very simple rule of books that kids tend to like are those that make them feel empowered. Where the child protagonist can make decisions, determine how life is going to be. If you look back at the books you liked as a child, many of them were the ones where kids had their own adventures, took their own decisions, did their own thing. Because we couldn’t, it was deeply satisfying to read of those who could.” Sayoni Basu’s words explain, for example, why Enid Blyton has been such an enormously popular writer for children all over the world. J K Rowling with her Potter series is a more recent example. The age old poetry adage is “Show, not tell”. Telling becomes a way of preaching and moralizing. It does not remain within the domain of poetry. An old college teacher disapproved of something I had written calling it too “didactic”. Literature ceases to be literature perhaps when it becomes a moral science textbook, and poetry more so, as it is a genre of subtlety. To write children’s poetry, one must become a child, one must view the world with the eyes of a child to figure out how a child thinks, what a child wants, one must try to become a William Blake. Poetry for children seems to work when it approaches the world through a child’s eyes, and also when it tries to sensitise the child to the way of the world. This sensitization however does not come about with teaching and preaching. Literature makes one feel, question, and view the world differently, in its own subtle and suggestive way, and that is what makes it good literature. Now, through this frame, I analyse some poetry by Adil Jussawalla, and then by Ananya S. Guha.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, A A Milne’s Now We Are Six, Christina Rossetti’s poems such as ‘Winter: My Secret’, ‘Who has seen the wind’, and ‘The Colour Pink’ try to create the sense of wonder in a child and to express it. They express a child’s emotions of playing on the swing or by the boats or in the mud, about children’s soft toys and their unwillingness to grow up. Indian Poetry in English however has rarely ever been about children. There are no poets who write for children per se. The ones who do, such as we see in CBT and NBT publications have deliberately set themselves up “to write for children”. They write as adults writing for children and therefore are not able to view the world as a child would. Imagination and sensitivity cannot be forced, and poetry written with such force is bound to fail. We see a similar artificial force operating in Ananya Guha’s poems, a force which says “I should write for children because nobody does” and therefore creates poetry that does not work. A poem should not neatly sit down and behave itself, a poem should fly without knowing what it may find. This is precisely what Adil Jussawalla tells Kareena N. Gianani who is reporting for the Mid-Day Magazine. He says that there are no “should” in his poems and that several meanings or interpretations can be taken out of them as often they cannot be understood fully as there is no singular meaning. He says that he allowed himself to be a little more childish than usual while writing these poems, to capture a sense of “wonder, pathos and naivete”, and tries to shirk all adult thoughts, complexities and reason. He says he tried to come close to William Blake while doing this, particularly in ‘Three Ships’. Blake’s ‘Chimney Sweeper’ is an innocent child who is thrust into a ruthless world where he begins to wonder and question. Blake never writes that “it should not be like this” or that “children should not be treated like this”, but it makes me cringe with pain and anger, in a way in which those two statements never would have. In ‘Three Ships’, Jussawalla writes:
I christen this sea ‘Ship’
Its passengers garlands and ashes
I christen this ship ‘Night’
Its black sail stretched to the limit
I christen this morning ‘Morning’
Ship without outline, glorious.
The poem is seemingly simple and yet one is not fully able to grasp or comprehend it. One is not sure what is the intended meaning. I get a sense that perhaps the poet is trying to say that morning will triumph in the end, because this ship has no outline that can be seen, whereas night still has a limit, even if the black sail is huge and stretched right till it. The sea here is being called a ship which gives us a sense that the sea itself moves, connects two places, carries things with it. It does not necessarily need a literal ship. Garland and ashes, from glory to death, the sea carries all with it. Also, if the night and the morning are being seen as ships, it suggests that they too travel and connect something, night to day and day to night, perhaps joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment are bound too in such a cycle. These are meanings I ought to take out from Jussawalla’s poem, but I do not know if my interpretations are “correct”, I do not know what meaning the poet wants me to take from this.
‘Imagination’ tells us how the world is unfixed and how much we are ourselves responsible for building or creating it. Imagination can be a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Imagination is also seen as a ship which can help us travel. History was created by somebody’s imagination, and that is how the planet will end. It is intoxication or madness like a glass of rum, it can create, or it can destroy. Yet, if imagination is freedom, if this ship is called Liberty, he tells us to keep the women and children first, to first take care of the powerless, and the less privileged.
It's a glass of rum,
a noose,
a fuel that burns the rags
round wounded heads.
It's a history, a planet's
precipitate.
Call it the great ship Liberty,
men, women and children,
women and children first.
As Jussawalla tells Nabina Das in an interview, “The title of the book refers to the autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin who writes that as a boy he felt “cast out, unchosen, rather as though I were the wrong breed of dog”…Later, he became a professional photographer. We look at his photographs now, of soldiers, of landscapes, of the people of India, and think he was the right kind of dog.” Das writes that Jussawalla’s poetry offers resistance, in a “dog-eat-dog world” in a “market economy driven bourgeois culture”. She writes that in a way, McCullin’s cast out, un-chosen, wrong breed of dog is restored in Jussawalla’s poems as the right kind. Kareena N. Gianani, writing for the Mid-Day Magazine, quotes Jussawalla in her interview with him on how his own childhood played a role in the writing of the poems, “The ethos of a school, to put it mildly, is not pro-individual creation.I also remember the constant impulse to break out, fully aware that I wasn’t fit to be a rebel. I was always regarded as the quiet one, the “very good student”. In his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour, British photojournalist Don McCullin writes that he felt ‘cast out, unchosen and the wrong breed of dog. I felt exactly that way when I was left out of football team in school. I did not know how to fill the lunch break, and took to drawing panels of stick figures. The solace of being able to outpour came at the age of 14, when I began keeping a diary. (Here, Jussawalla opens a file full of illustrations he drew from the age of 10. There’s a fiery Batman and Robin, The Fox and The Crow and Blackhawk toting a gun. Charming). He goes on to say that although his initial verse was comical and satirical in nature, the change came when he read T S Eliot, after which he tried to write a poem, imitating Eliot’s style. Jussawalla’s poems are about a baffling variety of emotions, written from the viewpoints of children, young adults, and adults, and they invite laughter, disgust, wonder, and grim acceptance as responses. . Indrajit Hazra, in ‘Poems can be pets’ in the Hindustan Times suggests by the title itself that the book can lend itself to children in yet another way. Most kids would identify with the title, with dogs, and here by extension poems, as pets. Thus the title suggests a sense of the unwanted underdog, as well as the longed for pet, at the same time. Hazra appreciates and applauds Jussawalla’s capacity to again become a fifteen year old and to see things from a child’s point of view.
‘The Thoughts Of an Eight-Year-Old Girl’ is actually the inner muttering of a girl when she is asked to eat something she does not want to. They are her murderous thoughts wishing that her Great Indian Family were nearly extinct like the Great Indian Bustard. In ‘The Good For Nothing’, he writes:
How do I learn to be good who am good for nothing, thinks the boy, rejected over and over for reasons he can’t understand.
He presses his face against glass to make it look uglier.
How do I learn to be tall who am only a dull story, never to be repeated, he wonders. Every day I grow stronger and stronger,
every day I get better and better, He tells himself over and over, as his father told him to.
Each one of us perhaps has intimately experienced the pain of rejection at some point of time or the other, and has thought that one is the worst girl, or the worst boy, or the worst student, or that nobody is going to be as bad as ourselves. And each one of us has then tried to comfort ourselves and once again pick up hope, telling us what someone has said, the external validation that has told us that we are good and that we can learn and succeed.
Indrajit Hazra writes that in‘Our Poets and Their Inspiration’, instead of taking the “pathli gali and bemoaning the fate of poetry (not to mention of poets), he lets the fluffy dog of irony out to bite poets, including himself, in the ass. After a short litany of the poets’ woes”, we get these lines:
Having served its time, a body of print,
unprisoned,
stands in the doorway,
open-mouthed, gulping fresh air
expecting a garland
and a laddoo.”
The poem suggests that the body of print is dead and the funeral garland and laddoo are ready, and yet, at the bottom of the page, Jussawalla’s satire cut even more incisively as he ends the poem with “But nobody’s there”. Totally lost and forgotten, nobody even remembers or comes for the funeral.
Nabina Das writes that the words “cast out” reflect lines in several poems where a boy is in casts or with shoes that somehow help him walk; the allusions to physical discomfort results in exploring frontiers of imaginations:
New pairs, but pointing to old journeys,
take the floor. They don’t know
what’s brought them to this shady joint,
the deformed bone or the doctor I want to avoid.
The shoes are new, but the journeys are the same, there are no new places to go to. The child seems to bemoan the misfortune of the new shoes which share his own tragedy, caught between the deformed bone and the doctor he wants to avoid. He then continues in the same poem:
The road does nothing,
its blood poisoned, your car
a nasty growth.
…
I’ve managed a few more inches this week
with a crutch I made of paper,
elastic bands,
staples,
a thimble
and a straw.
Das notes the tense, death-wished imagery in the lines from the section “On my Own Feet” in this poem. What is this paper crutch? Only a book, a sheaf of papers, or a manuscript could be tied together with elastic bands or staples. The “crutch” is a support for the real life this child will face soon.
In ‘The Way I Walked Abroad’, he writes:
I cut my nails
but winter took my toes.
Their shoes repaired,
my feet ran like wounds,
ran on, but waited for me
further up the road.
Although one cannot grasp the meaning of this poem entirely, it conveys a sense of cold, and how you run fast like the blood flows and yet how painful this running seems to be. As if the feet ran fast, but you cannot keep up with the change, you need more time to adapt.
Some poems are obviously drawn from his own childhood in pre-Independence India. In ‘A Boy in the Forties: Remembering Andrew Thompson’, he shows a rebellion against cruel fate, injustice, and imperialism, and at the same time accepts death with a seemingly matter of fact “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods”:
And when Jesus comes to his side,
he’ll tweak him with Marx Brothers’ jokes,
delight him with Zorro’s curses.
…
In one hand a cutlass,
the other high on a rope,
he spits at the King’s ships,
and as a captain tunes his telescope
kisses a slave-girl on the lips.
…
Dawn comes up like the credits:
so-and-so killed or missing.
Even in death, in front of god, he will continue to joke and curse and hold his rope and cutlass, and spit on the ships of the imperialist King, and kiss the slave girl quickly and quietly when the captain is not looking.
‘Two from British India’ are also two poems which clearly hark back to the poet’s childhood. The first one shows a boy Jack who seems to be lame, and his sister Sally has to take care of him all the time which gets to be a burden for her too. On top of that, Sally too is laughed at in school because her brother cannot walk. Jussawalla concludes the poem saying that India will soon be free, and asks when the two of them would attain their freedom.
Goodnight, Jack.
Mummy has a migraine
and Daddy’s hurt his back.
It’s forever the same thing:
‘Sing to him, Sally.’
But they know I can’t sing.
Stop that noise, Jack.
Nehru’s on his rounds.
He’ll take you away
if you stay awake.
Don’t make a sound.
In class, it’s déjà vu
‘Sally has a brother
who can’t walk.’
‘Sally’s bad news,
like the flu.’
We’ll be home soon, little brother.
India, they say, will be free.
But what about the pair of them,
and what about you and me?
The second poem shows a child scared of the crowd and the soldiers and the English teacher and the PT master and the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz but most of all from people who will take all this away from him. He’s frightened to vomit and asks his mother where his father is, “he can’t be at a war / he always has one with you.”
Hide me in the 10 o’clock show at the Eros,
Ma.
I’m frightened of English soldiers
and frightened of crowds in the street.
I’am frightened of Brown, English master,
And Pee Wee, PT master.
I’m frightened of dwarves
and the tin man in Wizard of Oz,
but most of all of Dr. Know-all Rustom
who will make me lie down
and pick them out of my system.
I’m frightened of vomit
and the things that make me vomit.
Stop hugging and kissing me.
Why is father away?
He can’t be at a war.
He always has one with you.
‘Another Dog’ takes us back to the imagery of the unwanted underdog in the streets in the title of the book. This poem is a strong and stark portrayal of being deserted, of being alone, of suffering pain and rejection, of being an outcast who is, as it were, on the edge of life, or the world. We do not know the context of the poem but it fills us with a kind of horror, as we connect with the terrible angst expressed.
Perhaps my mother died mad.
The nine o’clock siren reminds me of something like that,
so I howl and the sobs come naturally.
They don’t allow it.
I do not love them.
I merely fear another loss if I escaped,
another desertion,
another dog destroyed.
Nabina Das in Prarie Schooner writes that “ the child at the center of Jussawalla’s collection is not outright a “damaged personality”—a term that tended to come up in the conversation—but more of a “hurt eye” that is sensitive to the core and discerning in her/his perception of the larger world.” She writes that poems are about the partition of the Indian subcontinent, geographical dislocation, political chaos and volatile family relationships. The poems make it clear, she continues, that the choice of reality and literature are completely up to the reader and the reader’s imagination, as if the reader has the power to create a new reality, or at least to imagine one and in turn, a new kind of literature. Jussawalla’s collection for children, The Right Kind of Dog, privileges the marginalized and the oppressed, the downtrodden. The term “dog” in the title is meant to signify “fringe people”. Women and children are central here. Dalits and tribals are central here, as poems such as ‘Eklavya’ show.
Jerry Pinto in ‘There is a special pleasure in reading a good line’ in The Hindu writes that what makes Jussawalla’s book amazing is the fact that he never condescends to his audience, never adopts a new tone or stoops to a lower level. He does his young readers the honour of treating them like people, young people, yes, but still those who are capable of understanding matters of depth and intensity. He goes on to say that there is a lot of sense of despair and powerlessness in this book, because as children we tend to feel that a lot, as we are always acted upon, and are never the decision making individuals. Children often wonder “What have I done to deserve this?”, or why their parents gave them birth if they just to torture them. Some suffering, he writes, is incidental to one’s life, and some is accidental, and then there are the deliberate mutilations through which we hurt one another. So the question was whether he could write entertaining poetry for children, or whether it would make them feel worse, which he said was not the intention. Jussawalla says that the intention behind the poems is probably to surprise the reader, and that the children in the poems are not supposed to be taken as victims, or as powerless beings, but as people who can do something about the situation in which they find themselves. Sometimes, speaking about the hurt and the situation is an attempt to deal with it, he says. Often, one would find a poem about a child whom others would consider as a failure, but instead of being crushed by it, there is a voice of resistance and opposition.
In ‘Eklavya’, Jussawalla writes a poem which it should be natural for young kids to connect with, and yet shows this small poor Dalit boy who has his thumb cut because he is not allowed to be as good as Arjun, or even to be better than him, because Arjun has the royal blood, because “the boar must step aside for the lion”. For the welfare of the upper classes and castes, the lower will have to be servile and humble and subject to deceit. Even when he cuts his thumb, it makes no difference to anyone, except the deer, who are merely startled. This poem should make the politics of the powerful and the powerless come across clearly to young kids, showing them how unequal this world is.
“A Song of Ekalavya”
Ekalavya must cut off his thumb
the boar step aside for the lion
for the other’s Arjun
the royal Arjun
for the sake of his family
there must be humility
for the sake of our welfare
deceit, servility
Ekalavya must cut off his thumb
…
Ekalavya has cut off his thumb
now you can hear him
cry in the jungle
the deer stand startled
who fled at his step
our kitchens are empty
fasting or starving’s
the same to us
It’s Ekalavya who’s cut off his thumb.
Now analyzing Ananya Guha’s poetry for children through the same lens with which we have been examining Jussawalla’s, we find a marked contrast. His collection for children Rhyme and Reason, seems to me exactly that, rhymes and reason. But rhymes and reason are not poetry, if they are devoid of the spark which Gabriel Garcia Lorca terms as “duende”. If children can identify with a boy like Eklavya, they can also identify with Malala’s desire, or at least see her as an inspiration. However, though we are never told that the upper castes are oppressing Eklavya and that this is wrong and that they should not do so, we are definitely taught what Malala’s virtues are and what her contribution to our world has been. In ‘Malala Knows: Essay in Poem’, Guha writes:
What is the price we have to pay, for fighting for rights?
Malala knows. Who is Malala?
A young girl, fourteen or fifteen.
Is she Indian?
Doesn't matter.
Malala knows, her father knows.
London knows, the whole world.
What is the price?
Nothing much, some
bullet gun shots.
Now hospital doctors
are fighting with her
to stave her off death
and defeat.
Malala knows.
Little little Malala
with her pretty bespectacled
face.
Malala knows.
What is she fighting for?
Education rights for the girl child.
Why did they shoot her?
Malalal knows.
They know.
Who are they?
The world knows.
Is she Indian or Pakistani?
Doesn't matter.
The whole world knows.
And Malala.
Tell me, in the first place
why did they shoot her?
Damned, she wanted education
for girls like her.
If she lives, will she continue?
Her fight?
Malala knows.
I wonder if I should let the reader assess and judge the differences between these two poems according to the reader’s own responses. One may like to ask whether an essay can be written as a poem, or why one would write a poem at all if the content is better suited to the form of the essay? After all, form is decided according to the content. Let us see a poem about a dog as this is also something we can link with Jussawalla’s poems.
The dog is destitute.
When we smile, it cannot.
When it smiles, we cannot.
It wags its tail. We wag our tongues.
It looks askance. We are bohemians.
The dog is just an individual of hunger and raw meat,
boiled vegetables or eaten food. It takes away philosophy in atrophy.
When it dies, we mourn summers of hydrophobia.
The poem does not make me feel any connection with the dog. The poem rather seems to show an inherent impossibility of any communication between the two, as even smiles and tail wags entirely miss each other, and languages are not the same, and described as a bundle of “hunger and raw meat” does not make us feel much empathy with the dog. Moreover, the poem continues to use the neuter gender “it”, even though “it” is called an “individual”.
Now I look at a poem which seems to be about reading poetry. One expects that a poem about poetry should itself be poetic. Not for nothing does one remember Wordsworth’s organic theory of poetry which says that the content must be inscribed in some way within the form itself. Samuel Beckett’s art is about minimalism and the form of Waiting for Godot for example, is minimalistic in itself. But the poem instead of enacting poetry in the very act of writing seems to be teaching us what poetry is like. It could as well have been an essay on poetry perhaps. The age old flaw is the one of telling instead of showing.
Reading poetry is light.
The lamp shade witholds.
It exonerates a tight leash.
Receives passions (of words).
Reading poetry is a metaphor.
Exonerates cliches and dashes.
Reading poetry is an art (of living).
Exposition of ruthless telling.
Reading poetry is my, your thinking.
In flavour of rethinking. Words.
Reading poetry?
The poet asks us in the last line whether we have just a read a poem. My answer to the question would be in the negative. I do not feel any passion within me by reading this poem. Nor do I think that writing poetry exonerates one of clichés. Poetry is a metaphor, as the poem tells us. That alone however is not enough. The poem does not tell us that the metaphor must not seem contrived or forced, but must seem to be something that flows effortlessly and fits in seamlessly with the rest of the poem.
A poem ‘Attestation’ about an actual incident of gang rape in Guwahati is as follows:
She walked out. She walked out.
From the bar they Yelled.
She has been drinking.
Did you have any inkling?
She is an inviolate oxymoron, the cuss,
the paradox of what we profess.
She is in a mess.
Beat her, hit her,
Strip her till she cries.
No; she dies. First two, three.
In seconds, twenty or thirty.
Strip her. Rip her.
Feel her till she atones
And we condone.
Click, click, click.
The journalist had done his job.
And also, the mob.
Kill her, beat her till she cries.
And dies.
They were there,
Cageless – Animals.
The journalist had done his job.
Click, click, click.
She was flashed Everywhere.
In India and abroad.
Such is the alacrity (of the media).
Such hype we will never miss.
Overnight she garnered fame.
It was a hit or miss! (A quiet tear full somewhere.)
The government got into action.
To see the public reaction.
Their photos were flashed.
Arrest them.
Deadline 48 hours.
This was not rape.
It was body cuddling.
They called it molestation.
That, is – an attestation.
Works Cited
Das, Nabina. ‘The Right Kind of Dog- On Poet Adil Jussawalla’s Forthcoming Collection’. Prarie Schooner. http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/blog/right-kind-dog-poet-adil-jussawalla%E2%80%99s-forthcoming-collection-0 . 30th Nov.2015
Gianani, Kareena N.. ‘The Right Kind of Book’. Mid-day Magazine. http://www.mid-day.com/articles/the-right-kind-of-book/225511 30th Nov 2015
Guha, Ananya S.. BoloKids and Boloji. http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Writers&WriterID=3733&CategoryID=48 . 30th Nov 2015.
Hazra, Indrajit. ‘Poems can be pets’. Hindustan Times. http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/poems-can-be-pets/story-qIvOOmqmmrnmTNz1kM69JM.html> . 30th Nov. 2015
Pinto, Jerry. ‘There is a special pleasure in creating a good line’. The Hindu. http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/there-is-a-special-pleasure-in-creating-a-good-line/article4727017.ece . 30th Nov. 2015
Author Bio:
Shruti Sareen studied in Rajghat Besant School KFI, Varanasi and went on to do English literature from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. With a keen interest in Indian Poetry in English, her MPhil looks at the depiction of urban spaces whereas she is currently pursuing a PhD on twenty first century feminist poetry from the University of Delhi. She also teaches at a college in the university. She has earlier had poetry accepted by The Little Magazine, Muse India, Reading Hour, Six Seasons Review, The Seven Sisters Post, The Chay Magazine (gender and sexuality), Ultra Violet (gender and sexuality), Brown Critique, E-Fiction India, Scripts (LGBT journal), Thumb Print Magazine, North East Review, Allegro, , Coldnoon Diaries, Kritya, and Vayavya. She has had short fiction accepted for Marked By Scorn, an international anthology on non-normative love. She has had two papers accepted for Fulcrum: an anthology of poetry and aesthetics, an international journal edited by poet Philip Nikolayev, and one in Muse India. She is passionate about poetry, music, teaching, Assamese culture, queer love and sexuality, and super clichéd though it sounds, nature! She blogs at www.shrutanne-heartstrings.blogspot.com.