By Kinshuk Gupta
Managing Editor & Fiction Editor
Much like the title itself, Smitha Sehgal’s maiden poetry collection How Women Become Poets in Malabar traces her journey of ‘becoming’ a lover, a woman, and most of all, a poet. ‘This is the only language I know, the only road I walk, the only God I trust,’ she says in her short and succinct introduction. Written over twenty spasmodic years, as the socio-political context of the world changed, the geography of her inner self, tailored by life’s experiences, its jabs and jolts, beauty and cruelty in equal turns, also transforms. These poems thus become a testament to those subtle shifts, an autobiography of sorts, as the poet meditates on, and tinkers with, life and language to find herself an authentic voice. Sample this:
The word was the first to ripen
on the wrinkled skin
of a half-naked monk, his core ablaze
in the quest for freedom.
-Word
Not only in the sequencing of these poems —where the latter ones are clearer, more precise—, but also in her poetic voice and choice of subjects, one can sense a shift. This is a shift from personal to political, as the cliché goes, but while Sehgal’s overtly political poems (Kabul 2021, Peshawar 2014, In Kiev) might begin to feel labored, it is in Dream of Leaves that one can see an evident expansion in the landscape of her experiences. The poem ends with: we plant green shoots of our fingers in the kingdom of Neptune/gather the harvest of summers/so that no child ever goes to sleep hungry.
In fact, this is Sehgal’s trademark: to be able to merge two distinct cultures, people, places, time zones. From the nostalgic Malabar poems that seem to be inspired by Kamala Das’ and Tishani Doshi’s oeuvre, her later poems reference
Ezra Pound’s red lunacy or Whitman’s pale sensibility. A poem that locates her grandfather with Anna Akhmatova (Anna Akhmatova’s Lover) or where she imagines a tête-à-tête with Bukowski in her Delhi drawing room (Killing War) are interesting and skillful. My personal favorites are her witty poems, tempered with a touch of sardonic humor.
Epicurean trio
sniffing, running hypopharynx slow
on divine crust
…
Prized trio
collector’s delightz NASA in the queue,
squabble of law suits, for roach guts; I must, you must
-Moondust Trio: A Roach Poem
Or
‘Born from faux pas jab of keys’ where mynahs…missing the sharp curve of v, obliterates the memory of five brothers.
-Pandara Road
Sensorially charged, these poems are quiet, playful, and use a barrage of images that are mostly tender, but sometimes cut us deep. ‘The rain plucks the cello strings of sunlight’ in the poem Rain, but just a few pages before, talking of her brother and hinting at his deepening sense of masculinity, she uses the starking image of a ‘flamingo turned lion keeper who feeds piranhas…’
It would be unjustified to end the review without chronicling the journey of her ‘arrival’ as a woman. This is also how the book gets its title. In the titular poem, she subverts the idea of what a poem can accomplish. Instead of being used as a clarion call, a way to document injustices and show a mirror to society, it can turn into a futile exercise of beautification of narrative — an act of silencing.
Many poems in the first two sections highlight the experiences, rituals, and myths surrounding women in her culture and others such as The Chronicle of Breast Tax, Radhe Radhe, and Wood Rose. While there is irreverence in these poems (I am the trespasser, she writes in Malabar Gliding Frog), the real force of that realization is felt a few sections later in poems such as Stone Fruit.
Sehgal might feel that latecomers [should] eat mud, or that her satchel is full of unlearnt words, but she might not realize it now, with just her first book out, how her patience and the lapse of time has enriched her poetry.
5. Dimples
After creating her
God must have
gazed at his work admiringly
holding her face in his hands
thumb on each cheek.
That’s how she got
her two perfect dimples.
Deeds of the Nishadha King, Shriharsha, 1100 ce, Kanyakubja?
11. Miss Universe
The long bindi
painted on her forehead
pointing straight up to heaven
is the Love God’s arrow
that he mounts
on the arched bow of her brows.
Earth has been won already.
Heaven must be next.
What Navasahasanka Did, Padmagupta, 1000 ce, Malwa
51. Sui generis
In all the world
filled as it is with lovely women
this much may be said of her:
only her right half
is a match for her left.
Seven Hundred Gahas, 100 ce, Deccan
68. Perfect as she is
You may see her aplenty
but each time
she dazzles anew.
She has no need for a smile:
her radiance
smiles for her.
She has no need for a drink:
her limbs sway gracefully
all the same.
She has no need for words:
her eyes
do a fine job already.
Mahabharata, Vyasa
69. Words fall short
Her face is like
the moon, yes.
And yes, her lips
are heaven’s ambrosia.
But
pulling her close
by the hair
for a kiss
all fire and frenzy –
any figures of speech for that?
Seven Hundred Gahas, 100 ce?, Deccan
ABOUT THE EDITORS/TRANSLATORS
Anusha Rao is a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian religion who likes writing new things about very old things. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto and writes a column in the Deccan Herald presenting witty Sanskrit flavoured takes on contemporary issues.
Suhas Mahesh is a scholar of Sanskrit and Prakrit with a terrible weakness for good verse, rare manuscripts and arcane grammar. By day, Suhas is a materials physicist with a PhD from the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
ABOUT THE EDITORS/TRANSLATORS
Anusha Rao is a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian religion who likes writing new things about very old things. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto and writes a column in the Deccan Herald presenting witty Sanskrit flavoured takes on contemporary issues.
Suhas Mahesh is a scholar of Sanskrit and Prakrit with a terrible weakness for good verse, rare manuscripts and arcane grammar. By day, Suhas is a materials physicist with a PhD from the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
My dearest Kamala, Amy, Madhavikutty, now what should I call you?
I don’t want to call you Das… although I fell in love with someone called Das, but no Kamala, why should I call you by the name of that man who never loved you? To whom you were just possession and property…
I will call you Amy-kutty, dearest. Or simply kutty. I can, after all, imagine that you are my younger sister. Though you are the amma of all of us women in India who write English poetry.
Your parents never loved each other Amy- kutty, and neither did your husband. My parents didn’t love each other either— well, they did once– but they fell out of love. And they divorced. And I? I never married, Amy. Not till now, in any case. Growing without love etched scars on our souls.
And your father made you only wear plain white frocks!! That reminds me of Anne… Anne Shirley… Marilla only dressed her in stiff browns and Grey’s, though she yearned for “puffed sleeves”! I have always been in love with Anne, since age ten…
How desperately lonely you must have been… that man didn’t even let you attend to your own kids!! Your woman breasts felt so crushed and your sad woman heart must have felt so beaten… First father, then husband! Our lives as women hemmed in by these patriarchal figures of authority! Oh, how the heart rages against it!
And of course, when we don’t have love, we fall into Illicit love. You fell in love with your art teacher, and your English teacher. How lovely, Amy. I fell in love with my teachers too. One was my history and hindi teacher, the other was my English teacher. Both were women. I wonder what about female English teachers attracts us, Amy… how did she look… how did she make you feel, Amy… and of course you were never allowed to pursue your loves, but were made to live a loveless life! Such a catastrophe… I could never fulfill my loves either, Amy… they were my teachers, and they were married after all… I wonder if I will ever find love, Amy… it seems enormously difficult… but then I seek love in foremothers like you, who have gone before, who have written painted and sung all that was in their hearts… I will keep my heart and trust in you, dearest…
But what about that girl in the train whom you kissed, Amy? On her mouth? Wow. I never did kiss a girl… and then that mysterious girl whom you lost after just one kiss—the eyes and the lips, and the curves, and the soul… how tragic did that seem, Amy! Did she have long black hair? I love dense black curls…
You wrote so honestly Amy… I do too… and I don’t know what will befall me for this courage of truth… you led a difficult life in your time, Amy… and me in mine… and it is so difficult to write about it Amy… I try to hide it in the garb of fiction, but I am afraid I am too honest, and that my words are transparent, perhaps my fiction fails to hide anything at all… because it is truth, after all… but it is only my truth. It could be fiction, seen from the other’s perspective. That’s what Tracy Chapman says, Amy, in her song, ‘Telling Stories’.
And of course, you fell in depression. You had to, kutty, after the life you led. But why did you fall into depression after the birth of your children, dearest? I fell into depression after I was forcefully cut off from my beloved… but it was one-sided love, it was illicit, Amy… it could not last… but I write too honestly, Amy… one day retribution will befall me for this too, this act of expressing… but you tell me about your depression, Amy kutty…
I am so glad you did find love at last… in Carlo… do you think I might too, Amy? I can’t seem to love men’s bodies somehow… especially not their penises… And of course you changed your name… they say you found love in Allah… or perhaps in a Muslim man… whatever it be, I am so glad you found love at last, dearest… you said you believed in Krishna too… my grandmother once compared me loving my teacher single-mindedly in absentia to Mirabai loving Krishna… but devotion is so beautiful, isn’t it now, Amy-kutty?
Devotedly yours,
Shruti Sareen, born and brought up in Varanasi, studied at Rajghat Besant School, KFI. Graduating in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, she later earned a PhD from the same university, titled “Indian Feminisms in the 21st Century: Women’s Poetry in English” based on which two monographs from Routledge are forthcoming. Her debut poetry collection, A Witch Like You, was published by Girls on Key Poetry (Australia) in 2021. Her fictional memoir The Yellow Wall is forthcoming. She is working on a series of love-letters, Sapphic Epistles(?), as well as a collection of speculative fiction, Berserk Banshees(?). She was an invited poet at global poetry festival, hosted by Russia, Poeisia-21. She lives and teaches in New Delhi– whenever she manages to get a job! So far, she has mainly taught in Dyal Singh College, Delhi University, and at Jamia Millia Islamia.
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