This review of my Indian poetry book is full of patronising cliches - Jeet Thayil
In his review of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Fresh air and Chanel No 5, December 6), William Radice takes it upon himself to give quick workshop-type pointers to 73 Indian poets on how to write (magically!) and what to write about (happy subjects!).
As the editor of the anthology, I cannot help feeling that a disservice has been done to many distinguished poets who are no longer in a position to defend themselves. The list of dead poets includes AK Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolaktar, Agha Shahid Ali and Dom Moraes.
Radice's orientalism would be quaint enough to be endearing - if it weren't so annoying. He tells the reader (breathlessly, I imagine) that my anthology lacks "the colours, the light, the heat, the skies, the crowds and the birds" of India, not to forget "family relationships", "children" and groups of enthusiastic "Indian university students". What a happy picture must be playing in Radice's overheated 19th-century imagination! What elephants! What tigers! What heat and dust and palanquins!
His main objection to 400 pages of poetry is that it is too contemporaneously gloomy. He laments the fact that Nissim Ezekiel and Vikram Seth dared to write in iambics when they should have been using a "tabla beat". "To any Indian poet in English I would say: close your eyes, think back to the songs and rhymes you heard on your mother's or grandmother's lap," he says, managing to be both patronising and reductionist at the same time. ....
As the editor of the anthology, I cannot help feeling that a disservice has been done to many distinguished poets who are no longer in a position to defend themselves. The list of dead poets includes AK Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolaktar, Agha Shahid Ali and Dom Moraes.
Radice's orientalism would be quaint enough to be endearing - if it weren't so annoying. He tells the reader (breathlessly, I imagine) that my anthology lacks "the colours, the light, the heat, the skies, the crowds and the birds" of India, not to forget "family relationships", "children" and groups of enthusiastic "Indian university students". What a happy picture must be playing in Radice's overheated 19th-century imagination! What elephants! What tigers! What heat and dust and palanquins!
His main objection to 400 pages of poetry is that it is too contemporaneously gloomy. He laments the fact that Nissim Ezekiel and Vikram Seth dared to write in iambics when they should have been using a "tabla beat". "To any Indian poet in English I would say: close your eyes, think back to the songs and rhymes you heard on your mother's or grandmother's lap," he says, managing to be both patronising and reductionist at the same time. ....
posted by temporal at 12/10/2008
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