Autonomy of Things: Poetry’s De-Aestheticising Outreach
by Akshaya Kumar
As things—old or new, broken or repaired, recycled or just reduced into scraps—overwhelm and inundate the space, poetry undergoes a discernible scalar shift. Drawn into the vortex of a thingy surplus, new Indian poets no longer hide behind facile figurative tropes; rather, they retain the tactile materiality of the world with bold descriptive directness. Things permeate in non-hierarchal, non-stylised, and non-disciplinary ways. Poetry turns into a thick thingy statement, with no claims of hitting high notes of metaphysics, morality or metaphoric indirections. Vijay Seshadri, for instance, reiterates, the non-allegorical autonomy of things:
[They] . . . don’t resemble anything. They’re just themselves, they’re only
themselves.
They might multiply across the universe, but they don’t correspond
to anything, neither do they
symbolize anything, allegorize anything,
they embody nothing but themselves, . . .
(“Personal Essay”)
Enamoured by the “unstoppable garrulity of things”, Arundhathi Subramaniam too celebrates the “rabid wilderness / of matter”. Things are in a mess, disorderly, and strewn all across the landscape, and the poets, happily waylaid by them, revel in this carnival of chaos.
To disturb the order of things, Vivek Narayanan goes to the extent of inviting a thief to throw his room into disarray: “When you’re done, come upstairs, and find, /on this desk, its solemn arrangement /of papers. Disturb them” (“Thief”). C.P. Surendran discovers harmony in the chaos of things inside the kitchen. As “Toppled sugar / Spreads mutiny / Among ants”, “The flies feast / On the visible” and the “one-eyed / House lizard turns transparent / In its intent”. The poet is happy to see “So many meals cooking in the Kitchen” (“Harmony”). For Aimee Nezhukumatathil too, “the kitchen is a riot / of pots”, and she prays: “let us never be rescued from this mess.” (“Baked Good”). The new poets de-aestheticize things to break free from the disciplinary cultural regimes. Karela (bitter gourd) is graphically recalled as a “grenade-shaped / okra-green” gourd, “a Mummy-bound with string”, roasting in the “mustard-popping” frying pan (Daljit Nagra, “Karela”). The conflicting aesthetics of a ‘grenade’ and a Mummy’ do not allow any easy aestheticization of the vegetable. Sumana Roy completely inverts the role of the umbrella; it becomes “a spittoon collecting the sky’s / sadist sweat” (“Umbrella”).
The chosen sites of new poets are often the dumping grounds, the garbage bins or the graveyards. As they chance upon these shady sites, they discover the underbelly of civilization—its excremental past in terms of its rejected things. Priscila Uppal, acting almost like a small-time archaeologist, curates a host of wantonly abandoned items recovered from Homer’s wastepaper basket:
Kleenex, Q-Tips, a pamphlet on cancer,
A broken dish, a token clip, three packs of sugar,
Shavings and a signet ring, a photograph, a finger.
A name tag, a porn mag, an amulet in amber,
A string of pearls, a blonde curl, the belt from a sander, . . .
(“Items Recovered from Homer’s Wastepaper Basket”)
The inside of the grave is dug open to explore the things placed around the dead body: “Underground we went / The basement littered with your papers. / Your things” (Uppal, “Grave Robbers”). Vivek Narayanan could be seen hovering around the dump which according to him is a “Half animal, half machine, half sapient” heap; it is “a drowsy interlocutor” between things as diverse as “itchy newsprint, smeared fat, pitch smoke, / carburettors, potash alum, fruit husks” (“Dump”). More than a thing, what fascinates Sudeep Sen, is the scraps of a disused safe: “Scrap metal never held such fascination and beauty in my eyes” (“Heavy Metals”). The saving grace is that no attempt is made to put the scraps back into any taxonomic order.
Places turn into heat maps of things, heterotopias of thingy coalitions and collisions. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s protagonist goes to Sialdah Station every evening neither to receive anyone nor to travel anywhere; the very site excites him:
. . . coolies in red uniforms and polished brass armlets carrying enormous khaki hold-alls on their heads; vendors pushing wooden carts stacked with everything from
yellow mausambi fruit to the latest film magazines with Amitabha on the cover; newspapers boys crying Amrita Bajaar, Amrita Bajaar; the departure announcements, thick with static; the tolling of the station clock whose minute-hand moves in slow heavy jerks. And then suddenly everything is drowned in the shriek of an incoming train.
(“Train”)
In Ritika Vazirani’s “The Rajdhani Express”, the railway station is partly a cricket ground, partly a vendors’ pavement where “[u]niformed children with cricket bats” approach hawkers selling “roasted nuts / in newspaper cones— / and the clatter of money in cans!”. For Anjum Hasan, the buzz inside a beauty parlour suggests the possibility of “genuine sisterhood”: “Hot wax and curling tongs. /The vulgar, aching need to be beautiful / is out in the open: it sits with jars of cream” (“Afternoon in the Beauty Parlour”). Each item inside the parlour—human as well as non-human, serves as an actant, accentuating the sense of togetherness among all involved, workers as well as clients.
The closeness with things generates kindred feeling of eros, engendering an unmistakable haptic textuality in the new poetic idiom. The touch with even inanimate things such as a quilt, book or pillow triggers a kinesis of emotions. Jeet Thayil’s patchwork quilt with its many “unsayable colours / one for every man” for instance, lends a sense of “the hardness of men’s bodies” (“The Quilt”). Vivek Narayanan winks back at a ladle as its “arch” reminds him of “her neck, so lickable!” (“His Own Obsolescence: 3”). The “pillows” stand transformed into “muted percussion / of a lover’s breath” (Arundhathi Subramaniam, “Prayer”). The carpet turns into an animate landscape: “A worm embedded in each tuft / There’s a forest moving.” (de Souza, “Landscape”). Aimee Nezhukumatathil likes “the sting of the heated chrome” of the Harley motorcycle that touches against her calf” (“Motorcycle”). A stockpile of books acquires, what Lacan terms, a “copulatory force”: “I’ve had orgasms with books, alone and in unison. / . . . . / Stayed tight to the chest in the dark” (Uppal, “Books Do Hold Me at Night”).
The new poets “follow the things” even as they grow secondhand. As Anjum Hasan walks in the clothes of her mother, she is “relieved / of the burden of being” (“In My Mother’s Clothes”). Arundhathi Subramaniam, on the other hand, while wearing her mother’s sari, seems to retain her identity—very distinct from that of her mother: “She [mother] lusted after Dev Anand, / I after Imran Khan” (“Sharecropping”). As Tanya Mendosa puts on a secondhand nightgown bought at a street market, she begins to imagine the life of its previous owner: “I put on her secrets with her silk, and tie her ribbons / with my scratched and sunburnt hands.” (“The Secondhand Nightgown”). Revathy Gopal chances upon the oddest treasures on the city pavements in the form of secondhand books, put on display for sale: “This time / it’s books of poetry bought secondhand / and I exult” (“Family Secrets”). Even things abandoned, broken, thrown or rejected are re-habilitated in newer ways. Sujata Bhatt goes on to sing praises of a driftwood tribal artist Philemon, who “fish[es] for wood” (“Meeting the Artist”) sitting by the river for hours together.
In the poetry of the post-’90s, things are thus fished out of their collective and abstract manifestations, and spilled out in all their particularities through intimate micro-detailing, long-distance cataloguing, genealogical unravelling, palimpsestic mapping, and through many other ways. The talkative things, as they free-float with an untethered waywardness, defy easy grammar, and other protocols of aesthetic regularity. Instead of hankering after some speculative origins, new poetic imagination is mired in everyday materiality, its spatial spread, and its affective entanglements.
[They] . . . don’t resemble anything. They’re just themselves, they’re only
themselves.
They might multiply across the universe, but they don’t correspond
to anything, neither do they
symbolize anything, allegorize anything,
they embody nothing but themselves, . . .
(“Personal Essay”)
Enamoured by the “unstoppable garrulity of things”, Arundhathi Subramaniam too celebrates the “rabid wilderness / of matter”. Things are in a mess, disorderly, and strewn all across the landscape, and the poets, happily waylaid by them, revel in this carnival of chaos.
To disturb the order of things, Vivek Narayanan goes to the extent of inviting a thief to throw his room into disarray: “When you’re done, come upstairs, and find, /on this desk, its solemn arrangement /of papers. Disturb them” (“Thief”). C.P. Surendran discovers harmony in the chaos of things inside the kitchen. As “Toppled sugar / Spreads mutiny / Among ants”, “The flies feast / On the visible” and the “one-eyed / House lizard turns transparent / In its intent”. The poet is happy to see “So many meals cooking in the Kitchen” (“Harmony”). For Aimee Nezhukumatathil too, “the kitchen is a riot / of pots”, and she prays: “let us never be rescued from this mess.” (“Baked Good”). The new poets de-aestheticize things to break free from the disciplinary cultural regimes. Karela (bitter gourd) is graphically recalled as a “grenade-shaped / okra-green” gourd, “a Mummy-bound with string”, roasting in the “mustard-popping” frying pan (Daljit Nagra, “Karela”). The conflicting aesthetics of a ‘grenade’ and a Mummy’ do not allow any easy aestheticization of the vegetable. Sumana Roy completely inverts the role of the umbrella; it becomes “a spittoon collecting the sky’s / sadist sweat” (“Umbrella”).
The chosen sites of new poets are often the dumping grounds, the garbage bins or the graveyards. As they chance upon these shady sites, they discover the underbelly of civilization—its excremental past in terms of its rejected things. Priscila Uppal, acting almost like a small-time archaeologist, curates a host of wantonly abandoned items recovered from Homer’s wastepaper basket:
Kleenex, Q-Tips, a pamphlet on cancer,
A broken dish, a token clip, three packs of sugar,
Shavings and a signet ring, a photograph, a finger.
A name tag, a porn mag, an amulet in amber,
A string of pearls, a blonde curl, the belt from a sander, . . .
(“Items Recovered from Homer’s Wastepaper Basket”)
The inside of the grave is dug open to explore the things placed around the dead body: “Underground we went / The basement littered with your papers. / Your things” (Uppal, “Grave Robbers”). Vivek Narayanan could be seen hovering around the dump which according to him is a “Half animal, half machine, half sapient” heap; it is “a drowsy interlocutor” between things as diverse as “itchy newsprint, smeared fat, pitch smoke, / carburettors, potash alum, fruit husks” (“Dump”). More than a thing, what fascinates Sudeep Sen, is the scraps of a disused safe: “Scrap metal never held such fascination and beauty in my eyes” (“Heavy Metals”). The saving grace is that no attempt is made to put the scraps back into any taxonomic order.
Places turn into heat maps of things, heterotopias of thingy coalitions and collisions. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s protagonist goes to Sialdah Station every evening neither to receive anyone nor to travel anywhere; the very site excites him:
. . . coolies in red uniforms and polished brass armlets carrying enormous khaki hold-alls on their heads; vendors pushing wooden carts stacked with everything from
yellow mausambi fruit to the latest film magazines with Amitabha on the cover; newspapers boys crying Amrita Bajaar, Amrita Bajaar; the departure announcements, thick with static; the tolling of the station clock whose minute-hand moves in slow heavy jerks. And then suddenly everything is drowned in the shriek of an incoming train.
(“Train”)
In Ritika Vazirani’s “The Rajdhani Express”, the railway station is partly a cricket ground, partly a vendors’ pavement where “[u]niformed children with cricket bats” approach hawkers selling “roasted nuts / in newspaper cones— / and the clatter of money in cans!”. For Anjum Hasan, the buzz inside a beauty parlour suggests the possibility of “genuine sisterhood”: “Hot wax and curling tongs. /The vulgar, aching need to be beautiful / is out in the open: it sits with jars of cream” (“Afternoon in the Beauty Parlour”). Each item inside the parlour—human as well as non-human, serves as an actant, accentuating the sense of togetherness among all involved, workers as well as clients.
The closeness with things generates kindred feeling of eros, engendering an unmistakable haptic textuality in the new poetic idiom. The touch with even inanimate things such as a quilt, book or pillow triggers a kinesis of emotions. Jeet Thayil’s patchwork quilt with its many “unsayable colours / one for every man” for instance, lends a sense of “the hardness of men’s bodies” (“The Quilt”). Vivek Narayanan winks back at a ladle as its “arch” reminds him of “her neck, so lickable!” (“His Own Obsolescence: 3”). The “pillows” stand transformed into “muted percussion / of a lover’s breath” (Arundhathi Subramaniam, “Prayer”). The carpet turns into an animate landscape: “A worm embedded in each tuft / There’s a forest moving.” (de Souza, “Landscape”). Aimee Nezhukumatathil likes “the sting of the heated chrome” of the Harley motorcycle that touches against her calf” (“Motorcycle”). A stockpile of books acquires, what Lacan terms, a “copulatory force”: “I’ve had orgasms with books, alone and in unison. / . . . . / Stayed tight to the chest in the dark” (Uppal, “Books Do Hold Me at Night”).
The new poets “follow the things” even as they grow secondhand. As Anjum Hasan walks in the clothes of her mother, she is “relieved / of the burden of being” (“In My Mother’s Clothes”). Arundhathi Subramaniam, on the other hand, while wearing her mother’s sari, seems to retain her identity—very distinct from that of her mother: “She [mother] lusted after Dev Anand, / I after Imran Khan” (“Sharecropping”). As Tanya Mendosa puts on a secondhand nightgown bought at a street market, she begins to imagine the life of its previous owner: “I put on her secrets with her silk, and tie her ribbons / with my scratched and sunburnt hands.” (“The Secondhand Nightgown”). Revathy Gopal chances upon the oddest treasures on the city pavements in the form of secondhand books, put on display for sale: “This time / it’s books of poetry bought secondhand / and I exult” (“Family Secrets”). Even things abandoned, broken, thrown or rejected are re-habilitated in newer ways. Sujata Bhatt goes on to sing praises of a driftwood tribal artist Philemon, who “fish[es] for wood” (“Meeting the Artist”) sitting by the river for hours together.
In the poetry of the post-’90s, things are thus fished out of their collective and abstract manifestations, and spilled out in all their particularities through intimate micro-detailing, long-distance cataloguing, genealogical unravelling, palimpsestic mapping, and through many other ways. The talkative things, as they free-float with an untethered waywardness, defy easy grammar, and other protocols of aesthetic regularity. Instead of hankering after some speculative origins, new poetic imagination is mired in everyday materiality, its spatial spread, and its affective entanglements.
Akshaya Kumar is chair professor at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. He has authored several books, including Poetry, Politics and Culture: Indian Texts and Contexts (Routledge, 2009), which was recognised by World Literature Today as one among 60 “essential” books to read on Indian writings since 1947, and A.K. Ramanujan: In Profile and Fragment (2004). The volumes he has co-edited include Cultural Studies in India: Essays on History, Politics and Literature (2016) and Dialogues across Languages: Theory and Practice of Translation in India (2016).
