Pratik : PRATIK SOUTH ASIA SPECIAL : AN INTERVIEW WITH DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN INDIAN POET RAVI SHANKAR

INTERVIEW

RAVI SHANKAR

The Fate of South Asian Literature

Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar is the author and editor of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including most recently, the memoir Correctional called “the work of an absolutely brilliant writer” by advance reviewer and shortlisted for the 2022 CT Lit Prize; the Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 (Recent Works Press); W.W. Norton & Co.’s Language for a New Century called a “beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer; the Muse India Award winning translations of 8th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess (Zubaan/University of Chicago Press); an anthology celebrating a new poetic form and honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, The Golden Shovel (University of Arkansas Press); a collaboration with T.S. Eliot Prize winner George Szirtes, A Field Guide to Southern China (Eyewear Books); the National Poetry Review Prize winning Deepening Groove; the Carolina Wren judges award winning What Else Could it Be; a collaboration with late American artist Sol LeWitt Seamless Matter (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions); and the finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney. He has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center and many others. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including multiple “Excellence-in-Teaching Awards,” his students have gone on to publish dozens of books of their own. Granted fellowships by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island State Commission on the Arts, Shankar has been featured in The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC, NPR and the PBS Newshour. His essays have appeared in such places as the Georgia Review, the Hartford Courant, and for the Poetry Society of America. He has been featured at the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry International and he founded one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, Drunken Boat, winner of a South-by-Southwest Web Award and featured on BBC-Vietnam. He currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and for the New York Writers Workshop and is outgoing Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers Workshop. He currently teaches for the New York Writers Workshop and lives a nomadic existence centered around Boston, Massachusetts and Sydney, Australia. In addition to performances and lectures, he is available for individual consultancy, workshops, editing and mentoring services around the world.

Pratik: Being a prominent writer and literary activist possessing a wide range of infrastructure to get your work known internationally, in what special sense do you associate yourself with South Asian literature?

Ravi Shankar: In the ancient Sanskrit text and one of the minor Upanishads of Hinduism, the Kaivalya Upanishad, it is written that “Meditating on the lotus of your heart, in the center is the untainted; the exquisitely pure, clear, and sorrowless; the inconceivable; the unmanifest, of infinite form; blissful, tranquil and immortal.” I begin with that quote to underscore the fact that my association with South Asian literature is in fact universal and the wisdom of those regions that were diminished by colonialism reverberates through its civilizing lacquer. Because I was born in America, I will always be American, but because my mother tongue is Tamil and I spent good chunks of my childhood in Chennai, I feel a deep connection to the subcontinent as well. I have always advocated for those voices that are too little known outside their place of origin, which is why part of my publishing project has to translate the work of Andal, the 8th century Tamil poet/saint; to edit collections like W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century, still the most representative collection of poetry from Asia and the Middle East; and to resuscitate ancient poetic forms from the Vedas, like the pankti, to stand alongside the sonnets and villanelles that constitute the Western canon.

Pratik: What do you think binds diverse and varied traditions of South Asian literature together?

Ravi Shankar: South Asian literature is united only in its multiplicity, which is made clear just by the wagonload of South Asian literary anthologies just published in the last year alone. From Penguin India’s Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry under Lockdown to Vinita Agrawal and Ranjit Hoskote’s Open Your Eyes: An Anthology on Climate Change which tackles the au courant issue of the “anthropocene,” it is hard to generalize about South Asian poetry in the 21st century because we have a rich polyphony of voices who are Muslim, queer, feminist, classist, avant-garde, monolingual, polyglot...it’s a rich and complex tradition.The sense of community that reciting and singing ghazals in Urdu in what’s called tarannum, derived from the Persian verb to trill and to quaver, underscores the oral and performative aspect of South Asian literature while a movement like the Prakalpana in the Bengali language is truly avant-garde, creating a magazine meant to be read from back to front and frequently including graphics within the body of the work. This is hybridity before hybridity became trendy. I mention these two distinctive traditions as examples of how various South Asian poetry can be and perhaps what ultimately binds this body of work together is the seriousness of the aesthetic attention and exploration of form across the region.

Pratik: Do you have some authors writing in vernacular in South Asia in mind who you believe deserve a better, wider, international recognition?

Ravi Shankar: There are so many unknown and underrepresented authors from South Asia that it is difficult to just choose a few, but let me mention the Hindi poet Shrikant Verma who has been judiciously translated into English by Rahul Soni. I’d also add Kunwar Narayan and Geet Chaturvedi, who is a postmodern Hindi author who merges together philosophy, myth and poetry. Assamese poet Nirmalprabha Bordoloi is also too little known internationally, and I’d also like to give a nod to a few prominent female Tamil poets including Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani, each of whom has been translated by Lakshmi Holmström MBE. Finally, though Arun Kolatkar, who wrote in Marthai and English, is the only Indian poet other than Kabir to be named a World Classic by the New York Review of Books, he’s still relatively unrecognized as I feel he should be in the conversation with Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens as some of the 20th century’s greatest modernist poets. After reading his work, you’ll never look at the Kala Ghoda neighborhood in Mumbai again the same way.

Pratik: To what extent do you represent the south Asian region you come from?

Ravi Shankar: I am a TamBramAm, that is a Tamliian Brahmin American and proud of it, even as I shirk from nationalisms of any kind. My family comes from South India, Chennai and Coimbatore to be precise, and my grandfather was one of the early members of the Press Corp of India and was a journalist for The Hindu, the largest English language newspaper in India. He interviewed General Mountbatten and had tea with Jawaharlal Nehru and I owe my own inclination towards letters to him. Therefore, I can’t help but represent Tamil Nadu and am prone to saying roomba nandri instead of thank you very much when I’m speaking to my amma. Because I also went to grade school for a year at the M.A.K. Convent in (then) Madras and was rapped on the knuckles with a ruler by nuns and ate lunch with my hands out of a tiffin carrier, though in the Diaspora, I secret the color, chaos, greed and generosity within me. There are a few chapters of my forthcoming memoir Correctional that delve into those experiences in India. And given that Tamil is my mother tongue, I was grateful to co-translate one of the region’s most revered goddesses/poets, Andal, in a book The Autobiography of a Goddess published by Zubaan Books in India and winner of the Muse India translation prize. She’s a figure whose Thiruppavai is still recited at South Indian weddings today. Given that my parents still go to temple and perform pooja, are devout vegetarians who watch movies with Sivakumar and Sridevi, India still flourishes within me.

Pratik: What role has South Asia played in shaping your writing?

Ravi Shankar: I would say, in all earnestness, that my earliest memories of going to Hindu temples with my parents and listening to the Hindu bhajans reciting in Sanskrit, a language that I did not understand and yet that I responded viscerally too, was my first stirring into poetry, though I wouldn’t have known it at the time. I also devoured Amar Chitra Katha comics and developed my affinity for Hanuman from them. I particularly liked the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, a kind of Indian counterpart to Aesop’s fables. And who can forget Ravana who tore across the sky in his pushpaka vimana, a celestial chariot until receiving his comeuppance from Rama? Those stories constellated in my imagination and then later in college when I was introduced to something as spirtually erotic as Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda I was hooked. I suppose sharing the name of India’s most famous musician, which has its drawbacks, has nonetheless made me necessarily more aware of the word of ragas and rasas, patterns and moods, and as parts of the Vedas prefigure quantum mechanics and my own primary concern is the cosmic via specific manifestation, South Asia is fully present in my work. I’m also part of collectives like Matwaala, the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT) of which I am Chairman, and the Board of the IndoAmerican Arts Council and these organizations bring together South Asian writers in enlivening and supportive ways. The reading series I curate IsoBreak has featured numerous writers from South Asia and is one of the liveliest and most diverse reading online reading events around.

Pratik: To what extent the British Colonial presence is in attendance even today in the literary arena of South Asian literature? What role do you believe the British Empire, or the Colonists who came before the British played in shaping the literature of the continent?

Ravi Shankar: Well, the easiest answer remains the sustained prevalence of English! Hinglish, Tanglish, Manglish...the list goes on and the great capaciousness of the English language is that it is able to accommodate so many different tongues and I feel the legacy of the British Empire still exists in the fastidious prose and rigorous argumentation that have characterized some of my Indian students’ work. India’s political institutions owe much to the British, while its ancient culture has roots that stretch back over millennia and that concordance - some call it a conflict - has helped shape the possibilities of Indian writing, both in English and in regional dialects. Would there have been a Rabindranath Tagore or Salman Rushdie without British colonialism? We know that there would not have been a V.S. Naipaul, at least if we are to believe Edward Said he considered him a “coloniser among the colonisers. Said wrote about Naipaul’s work, “he is neither a professional Orientalist nor a thrill seeker. He is a man of the Third World who sends back dispatches from the Third World to an implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals who can never hear bad enough things about all the Third World myths — national liberation movements, revolutionary goals, the evils of colonialism — which in Naipaul’s opinion do nothing to explain the sorry state of African and Asian countries who are sinking under poverty, native impotence, badly learned, unabsorbed Western ideas like industrialisation and modernisation. These are people, Naipaul says in one of his books, who know how to use a telephone but can neither fix nor invent one.” You couldn’t manufacture that kind of self-loathing without British colonialism! It has been argued that Indians creating literature in English helped cultivate the sense of nationalism that would help rise up against imperialism. That’s one of the few good things to come out of the racist institutional practices the British implemented in India, such as Macauley’s educational reforms (1835) which basically repudiated all Indian forms of knowledge for the British; like many others in history, South Asians were able to subvert their oppressors by using their very tools, in this case, the English language, against them and to that extent, the British influence on the literature of the continent persists.

Pratik: How do you think the English language has shaped the making or unmaking current of south Asian literature?

Ravi Shankar: Here’s the thing - we can’t have a serious discussion about the English language without a corresponding discussion about late-stage capitalism, for the two forces are inextricably interrelated. The legacy of British colonialism helped shape English language writers in India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Malaysia etc. And because the soft power of American democracy is about exporting its culture to other countries, Hollywood helped accelerate this making and unmaking - let’s call it a remaking - of South Asian literature. One hardly discussed fact is that English serves as a kind of lingua franca in much of Asia so that regional communities and dialects have no direct interchange with one another. So there’s hardly a book in Tamil translated directly into Bengali, Telegu or Gujarati; instead you would have a book translated first into English and then into another language. The effect of this is to make work hew to a more Western aesthetic sensibility and likewise the books that are chosen to be translated for the English language market are those deemed to be consumable by a populace growing less literate by the tweet. Therefore, works that sensationalize and exoticize are encouraged, and books on yoga and the kama sutra, are clamored after because they provide the kind of Indian literature that the big publishing houses want. That desire can’t help but encourage writers to hoe the same furrow, in some cases very productively as in the case of Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri whose latest book That Was Now, This is Then, which refracts the facets of longing could not have been possible without his childhood in India and his education as a creative writer in the United States.

There’s sadly another way in which the allure of North America and UK publishing has inflected--indeed infected--South Asian literature. It’s created in certain circles a desperation to be seen, read and validated by the Western world, and those few will hijack any social imperative if it helps them further their self-serving cause. So while it’s profoundly important that the deeply patriarchal and in many respects backwards, even oppressive gender and racial politics in India or Pakistan gets shaken up, it’s also important to call out those who glom onto #metoo or #blacklivesmatter in a spirit of vicarious moral outrage when really their public displays of virtue signaling and being offended on behalf of someone else (often without actually knowing the facts) thinly veil their own true motives, which is to call more attention to themselves.

Traveling to India as an American boy, I always had a sense that the country existed in a kind of time warp, a few years behind what was happening culturally--Pac Man, parachute pants, grunge music--all seemed to arrive after the fact and seeing the fervent zeal with which these young writers are flinging themselves into identity politics and social justice movements with origins elsewhere, rather than concentrate on craft and study and local activism, it feels that way again. I suppose the pendulum always has to overcorrect, but I fear much of the work produced under this influence won’t last and perhaps that’s a good thing.

Pratik: India being so big in every sense of the world, geographically and demographically, do you feel smaller south Asian nations feel subdued by India’s giant literary presence in the sub- continent?

Ravi Shankar: Yes, absolutely. India is the elephant in the room, while countries like the Maldives or Bhutan barely rate a mention in our conversations about global literature, which is a shame, because that means that we have not done enough work to translate the work that is being produced there. The rise of Indian nationalism hasn’t helped because it has helped bring Brahmanical constructs of superiority back to the forefront, just as Trumpism has emboldened racism under the guise of patriotism in the US. The tension between Pakistan and India also has given rise to this sense of territorialism which is intrinsically silly since bounded together, the voices in South Asia, collectively, have a much better chance of penetrating the attention of readers across the globe. Parochialism is almost as bad as patriotism when it comes to stifling originality.

Pratik: What are your fond memories of traveling to the south Asian nations?

Ravi Shankar: Ah, as a young boy I travelled all over India and got my head shaved at many of the great temples, including Tirupati Venkateswara. I ate mangos and drank freshly squeezed sugarcane juice at my grandparent’s house in Coimbatore and toured the slums in Mumbai which is seared into my memory: we were welcomed into the home of a family of six living in shack with walls made of newspaper and no running water, and they offered us dal and chai, though they had next to nothing themselves. Then later in my life I had the great good fortune to make multiple trips to South Asia to visit family and participate in literary happenings. I would say some of the most meaningful trips I have ever taken to South Asia included performing at the Jaipur Literary Festival in front of over 10,000 readers at a Rajasthani palace; meeting the Dalai Lama on a plane to Dharamshala; staying with family in Trivandrum and a dear friend in Dhaka where I saw the Lalbagh Fort, textile mills, and ate begun bhaja and labra; launching my translations of Andal in New Delhi; and finally how can I ever forget the amazing time that I had in Kathmandu with the Editor of Pratik, Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma, where I was treated to a private performance of Newari dancers and feted like visiting royalty. And perhaps that’s the ultimate truth in the end; just as at land’s end India, Kanyakumari, there’s an enormous statue of the Tamil poet and philosopher Valluvar, so in many parts of South Asia I was treated with warmth, respect and dignity, all for writing literature and devoting myself to its propagation around the world.

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