'poetry has lost its place'

what is 31-year old tishani doshi like? there are no easy answers to that one.

this bewilderment springs from details of her life that i pick up from sundry sources. i learn that her father, vinod, is gujarati; her mother, eira, welsh. i know she was born in chennai, educated at queens college and john hopkins university in the us, and returned a few years ago to study dance under the late, legendary chandralekha.

i am aware of the fact that she writes powerful, evocative poetry. i know this not because she received an eric gregory award in 2001 or won the 2006 forward poetry prize for best first collection — the first indian to do so. i know it because poems from her collection, countries of the body (aark arts, 2006), refuse to budge from my mind, days after my turning to its first page.

‘the day we went to the sea,’ she writes, in a poem about the 2004 tsunami, ‘mothers in madras were mining the marina for missing children.’ rarely is anything so alliterative as eloquent.

at a time when journalists publish collections of verse and proclaim themselves poets, i find it refreshing that there are a great number of people conferring the title on doshi of their own volition. she has read alongside writers like margaret atwood and seamus heaney at the hay-on-wye festival, and alongside wole soyinka, dbc pierre and david mitchell in colombia. no ordinary honour, this.

from inns in cleveland, to convents in kerala, museums in sri lanka, back to the ever-present, raucous streets of chennai, doshi’s poetry shifts constantly from the local to the metaphysical. it is an exploration of boundaries, within and without. ‘these bodies of countries,’ she writes, in the poem that gives her collection its title, ‘they are our tracks of line and dirt, our own set of timeless days in the park.’

there are clues to what she aims for when one reads about her relationship with her teacher, chandralekha: ‘in a sense, chandra’s work wasn’t concerned with dance at all. it was a lifelong quest to know the body: to decipher its many beginnings and endings, to contextualise the body in terms of space and time, to recognise the body as a source of unlimited energy and to nurture it as a medium to connect with nature, society, the cosmos.’

this is poetry of questioning; of trying to get to the heart of an observation. there are motifs running through that lend the poems a cohesion many collections lack. when you turn the final page, then, it is with a sense of coming to the end of a journey, through birth, sex, death. for me, it also led to a sense of despair.

i am told tishani also writes fiction. i assume she must be good at that too, considering the uk-based publishing house bloomsbury intends to publish her debut, the pleasure seekers. she is also at work on a biography — of sri lankan cricketer, muthiah muralidharan.

so, yes, it really is hard to figure out what tishani doshi is like. i made an attempt, presenting her with a series of questions i thought would help. these are some of her replies...

you speak of dance affecting your writing in a very profound way. is there anything, apart from the sense of discipline it demands, that makes it so important to you?
when i speak of dance affecting my writing, i am actually referring to my specific relationship with chandralekha, which for me has been profound. i am not a dancer in the ordinary sense of the word. i have never harboured any secret aspirations to be one and have no formal training. so, when i moved back to chennai after several years abroad, it was entirely through a strange series of coincidences that i met chandra and that she invited me to join her group.
at the time, i already had a manuscript of poems and the vague sketches of a novel, but i was well aware of the perils of writing. i knew i could spend five years writing and have nothing come of it. so, in a sense, it was important to be able to engage with the world in other ways. chandra’s house and the theatre offered these possibilities.
it’s not just the physicality of dance that whittles away excesses and flab and forces a kind of tautness in every aspect of your life, it is also the idea of performance — going out alone on stage in front of hundreds, with only your body and breath, hours and hours of sweat and concentration, only the energy of the musicians and the audience and my partner that allowed me to go onto the dark nothingness of the stage and make my limbs do what they had been trained to do.

despite winning the forward prize, countries of the body has been largely unnoticed. if it weren't for a recent festival of literature in mumbai, for instance, i would have had to do quite a bit of searching to locate a copy. why do you think the indian media is so afraid of focusing on poetry? i think poetry has lost its place in contemporary society. poets, who have traditionally been the prophets, seekers, soothsayers, in societies all over the world, are now very much relegated to speaking from the margins. i don’t think this fall has much to do with the media, which i think reflects trends in society rather than frames them. especially in the case of poetry, i think the change has been within societies itself. somehow, we have arrived at an age where people seem to have no need for these traditional poetic distillations or visions of the world. and even if people are interested, the numbers are few. i think people have turned to other art forms — film, photography, music — and this is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just the way things have moved. as poets, we have to ask ourselves how to make our work relevant again. the media will follow in due course, as it always does.

-- photograph: bandeep singh