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Resistance, Romance and Resignation Ft. The Kandasamy Phenomenon by Abhijeet Singh
In my days of navigating lives of fugitives and refugees around the world, I found Assata Shakur, the current political exile, former member of the Black Liberation Army, convicted in the first-degree murder, also the first woman to be on the list of FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists, who also happens to be the godmother of Tupac Shakur. In her autobiography, which she wrote after escaping to Cuba, Shakur wrote:
People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
(pg. 262, Assata: An Autobiography)
On 12th of March, in an air-conditioned hall, at the illustrious Jaipur Literature Festival, thankfully saved by the horrid heatwave and anxiety that scurrying footsteps emulate, I am listening to Dr. Meena Kandasamy for the first time, in realtime, echoing the ditto of what Shakur has to say. My senses were too smitten to have observed a brief outline of her appearance, but keywords for her character-sketch could be: fiery, motherly and definitely a familiar voice if one pays attention.
To do what hosts are asked to do at such events: Meena Kandasamy is a poet, translator, novelist, essayist, and Bahujan activist-cum-scholar, based in Madras, India. Her writing aims to deconstruct trauma and violence, while spotlighting the militant resistance against caste, gender, and ethnic oppressions. She explores this in her poetry and prose, most notably in her books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), as well as her three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). Her latest work is a collection of essays, The Orders Were to Rape You: Tamil Tigresses in the Eelam Struggle (2021). Her novels have been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Hindu Lit Prize.
Unlike anyone visiting a festival as big as this one, Meena offends way too often, makes the audience click their tongues, makes them shake their heads in disbelief or admiration or whatever, in the most subtle manner with obviously, a child-like giggle. In fact, by the end of one of these sessions, as I was exiting and eavesdropping, I heard a girl say "What is a Dalit activist anyway, huh!" in disgust and uff-it's-hot-outside tone. Meena comes from a place where she has countered worse commentaries and even more bitter reactions. Meena remains unapologetic. Unfettered. Like a Tamil mother, as she herself said with a smirk, whose "curses are very coarse" but loves in a "devout manner".
To say that she is an emerging representation of resistance in Indian English Poetry is not only a mediocre thing but such an insult that I had to alter my title to this article, and put it the way it is. To say, that she is the raging expression in the now upheaving Dalit-Bahujan discourse, getting some recognition in this era of social-media reformation, is again an understatement and an act of negligence. I call her a phenomenon, because she cannot be compartmentalized in any sense. Her subject-matter is clearly transfixed at the ethos surrounding her state, her country and her people, but her meditations carry universalism similar to Habba Khatoon, the peasant-queen-poetess from the late 16th century Kashmir, who paved a new way for the revival of Kashmiri Poetry. Not one sentence from any page of Meena's writings is carrying guilt of the trauma that she bears. She owns it. Her writings, though dipped in molten lava of rage, are untouched by the dictation of arrogance or perils of ignorance. She spares nothing and none.
In her rewriting, of the diabolical and so-called Hindu (i.e., Brahmanical) moralism, through her verse, she brings what has been missing in the history of Bahujan activism for long, since Dr. Ambedkar: Anger, laden with long bouts of personal grief. The sheer lack of firsthand accounts in Dalit-Bahujan activism has led to easy manipulation and thus a centralized and systemic brahman'splaining of triumphant, but disturbingly painful journey of Bahujan history. Meena keeps it simple: Breathe in, Breathe out. One might think of Manto, if I say, that Meena writes what she sees and feels and gets out of it. Although, to understand it that way would be too naïve and unjust, because it ain't that simple, anyway. To put the angst of almost three thousand years of subjugation and oppression at the hands of Aryan supremacists, on paper, is not that simple. To put it as a poet, is even more heartbreaking.
At the core of her sensibility (or let's say, at least by the looks of it, if I can claim nothing else) and as a poet myself, while trying not to be biassed, I'd still say, that Meena is essentially a poet, and other channels of articulation follow as the means of dispersed convenience. But that could be true for any poet, that they are essentially a poet first, so what is so distinguished here? The answer is rather a cliché: Meena is vividly, and profoundly transparent. In her utterance and on the page. In her speech and her report. On the podium, and with the ink. A downright confessionalist. Although, she has a problem with the idea of 'confessional poetry' and rightly so, because she says, and I recall clearly in her voice, that it is like saying 'I have committed a sin'. Nevertheless, the poet we are looking at here, is too easy and that makes her too difficult as well, and that right there, is the first and the greatest sign of resistance.
In her debut book of poems, Touch which comprises of poems dealing with giants like casteism, feminism and sexuality, what she has maintained, like a carpenter at work, is the language. Poems, plaited and coiled with ever-young love, rectitude, warmth, and the unadulterated attentiveness are nevertheless unforgivably rebuking. The structures and devices that Meena employs are unusual. The diction stays predictable, but one can never get enough of her choice of terminology. The fact that the foreword for Meena's first book of poems has been written by another sensational poet who wrote in English, Kamala Das, is self-evident of the tone that our poet sets from the first page. Kamala Das has been an undeniable influence and that is apparent when you go through the initial love poems of Meena, coming from the place of deep-seated politics of belongingness and identity. Alongside, a surprising figure, the demigod of literary theory of Deconstruction, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Yes! who does cameo in all three of Meena's novels. In her own words, he is mostly there for 'intellectual masturbation', although 'his profundities are hidden' beneath and beyond those instances. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses fame and The God of Small Things author Arundhati Roy are two people close to Meena's conscience. Her taste for complexities tucked in between her poetic pauses and the usage of imagery intensely associated with human anatomy is something she inherits from these two of her favourite litterateurs, respectively. Although ― add three cheers to that ― she was quick to say in her interview to The Guardian that the later Rushdie became 'more formulaic', which he did!
Liberation is the be all and end all at Kandasamy's, be it from the moral policing, the ingrained trauma (as a result of physical or psychological abuse), or from being robbed of one's individuality and one of the poems from her debut collection sums it up
i want you to be living on the edge i want you to learn the thousand one ways in which you can melt the boundaries of saturation called death and the emptiness of life and the fidgetiness of what might be called love i want you to lose i want you to win but someday i want you to be free
('A breathless counsel', Touch)
Meena remembers. A long and tiring past of caste atrocities and history of cruel fanaticism is her memory's forte. Her images are haunting. Her shivering voice is the evidence. I have seen shocked faces myself. At the Seventh Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture in 2015, 30th of October for the Marathi Patrakar Sangh, in Azad Maidan, Mumbai, she delivers her lecture titled No One Killed the Dalits, where she begins by saying,
“Today, we are haunted and outraged by what has just happened a few days ago in Faridabad. Two little children, two-and-a-half-year-old Vaibhav and eleven-month-old Divya were burnt to death. These are the latest victims, in a long list of victims that caste has consumed.”
The reference is to the incident that took place only ten days prior to this lecture, On 20 October 2015, a Dalit family’s hut was burnt by Rajputs in the village of Sunpedh in Faridabad near New Delhi, killing the two children Vaibhav and Divya, and seriously burning their parents Rekha (23 years) and Jitender (31 years). The oppression of the Dalits by the landowning Rajputs was well-known, and seven police personnel had in fact been directed to provide protection to Jitender’s family for the previous months. They failed to protect the family.
Meena adds,
What are our most stark memories of the Gujarat genocide in 2002 where thousands of Muslims were killed by Hindu mobs? Can we ever forget the row of dead bodies of children, arranged one next to the other, lined up endlessly? It is not only something that exhibits itself in these inter-religious clashes, but let us realise that this is something that constitutes the caste mindset, the Hindu mindset.
Furthermore, and in evermore slanted tone, she reads:
It would do well to remember Kilvenmani. On Christmas Day 1968, 44 men, women and children were burnt alive to death—all of them were Dalit and landless, all of them from the village of Kilvenmani, striking for higher wages, demanding their little, immediate rights. 23 of those burnt to death in Kilvenmani were infants and children. Even as we talk of this atrocity, I want to tell you a story that is repeated again and again, by all those who have survived the massacre in Kilvenmani, by those who are their descendants. Almost everyone who has stayed in the village has taken refuge in Pandari Ramayya’s hut. When the mob of landlords comes to burn them to death, a young mother tries to save her one year old son by throwing the little boy out of the hut, hoping, in that moment of complete, total despair, that someone in the mob will take pity, that someone will at least spare the life of the child. That does not happen. That child is caught by the mob, hacked into pieces, and its body is thrown right back into the burning hut.
This happens again and again, all through India’s glorious history of killing Dalit children. It happens in Villupuram, it happens in Bathani Tola, it happens in Laxmanpur Bathe.
On 25 July 1978, 12 Dalits are butchered in broad daylight by a mob of caste-Hindu Mudaliars who attacked the Dalit settlement of Periyaparacheri in Villupuram. Among the dead was a 12-year-old boy.
On 11 July 1996, the private militia of dominant caste landlords, drawn from the Bhumihar and Rajput castes, went on a carnage murdering the women and children in the village of Bathani Tola in the Bhojpur district in central Bihar. They killed 12 women, six children and three infants. Reports speak of how the abdomen of a pregnant woman was slit open, of how an infant’s tongue was cut off before the child’s head was chopped off, and how a baby’s fingers were severed from his hand. In the endless list of horrors, a child nestling in the mother’s lap was butchered, their hut was burnt. Watch Kumud Ranjan’s documentary After the Aftermath, on the Bathani Tola massacre to understand the horror in greater detail.
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar remarked, which is rather alarming even more now, that “if you want to destroy a society, destroy its history and the society will get destroyed automatically". The fact that Meena has refused to forget her history, i.e., the refusal to forget the ground rules of humanity is something that makes her the unlikeliest writer, and consequently, excessively prone to threats, online and offline. Meena has grown like a militant. Evolved. The evolution of her being as a 'fierce, fiery and firebrand' thinker isn't something that happens in the course of one bad day. The angst we cherish today bears the burden of red-hot metal-like beatings through the agency of lifelong and quondam and on-going caste discrimination, entwined with casual misogyny which is shamefully the regular meal in the cuisine of our great Indian culture-kitchen.
Her second book of poems, Ms. Militancy that came in December, 2010 nearly after four years of her debut collection, is way more assertive and impressively so. The blurb of this stiff hardcover says:
Meena Kandasamy's full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporary Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, depoliticised, neatly sterilised.
The title of the book Ms. Militancy bears its connection to a Tamil legendary woman, Kannagi, who is the central character of the South-Indian epic 'Silapathikaram'. She is worshipped as a goddess and stands as an idol of a brave woman who fought against injustice courageously. Kandasamy posits her as a paragon of revolt she wishes to see in the Bahujan female persona. She declares in the poem entitled “Ms Militancy” that:
Vending vengeance, she made a bomb
of her left breast and blew up the blasted city
(Lines 21-22)
A certain M S writes for ‘Feminism in India’ reviewing the book wrote,
“Meena Kandasamy’s poetry is a powerful testimony to anti-caste feminist literature. She re-constructs the images of women inherited from upper-caste patriarch literature. The dichotomy between the literary and the social context diminishes in her works, and offers an alternative image of women. And most importantly, she empowers through words, bringing out the strength of language.”
The Meena you get to witness in these later poems is definitely crude, typically enraged for obvious and right reasons, but what the layman eye should take care not to miss out on is the sadness that every verse bears and moreover, carries forward to the next poem. To me this sadness is the most essential part of this budding Bahujan canon of angsty writings. The sadness will keep our madness in the line of practicality and save us from becoming what humans are turning into.
cunt now becomes seat,
abode, home, lair, nest, stable,
and he opens my legs wider
and shoves more and shoves
harder and I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth
and I can take it no more.
Pinned down that way,
I cannot walk away.
I am frightened.
I turn frigid
I turn faker.
(A cunning stunt, Ms. Militancy)
Meena offers us a spectrum of questions that we have to put up with. Why do we have to be unapologetic in response to who we are is the first lesson in her masterclass. Poetry is as much a flesh as it is the conscience at Kandasamy's. It is alive and very much in motion. Like a fish just out of the water. Like the Big Bang. Like the outbreak of sun at the first hour of incoming dawn. Like the thirst stuck in a loo-stricken throat. (Loo is the typical hot dust-bearing wind found during summers in the regions of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and the Punjab, in India)
Before I leave you, my dear reader, with yet another excerpt of a Kandasamy poem, after which you would be gasping for breath or if you are an intimate reader, probably cry a tear or two, I must inform you that Indian society is marred with ills one cannot wonder of, let alone acknowledge. In such light, we must listen to those who have something to tell us. We must document. Picture. Write. But, listening comes before anything. We must develop the tarnished virtue that we had as the collective human race ― that we were once ― which is the virtue of listening. Every moment a killing is held at a chauraha (crossroad). Every minute a child is abandoned. Every hour hell knows what number of women are molested. Every month our ignorance witnesses the slaughtering of caste-hindus for reasons such as keeping a moustache, entering a temple, riding a bike, marrying a girl of another varna (class), or marrying in general, living a life of respect, or living in general. Every year, the Untouchables of this India Untouched, are pushed to even more remote margins from where the return is unimaginable and almost fatal. Every second is a struggle and this is our reality. The least we can do now is confront. The least we can do now is extend a palm. The least we can do now is listen and love and let live.
I wish I could've put the whole poem here, but here's an excerpt from my personal favourite by Meena. The poem is called '#ThisPoemWillProvokeYou' from a 18-page digital chapbook published in 2015 by Harper21.
This poem is not a Hindu.
This poem is eager to offend.
This poem is shallow and distorted.
This poem is a non-serious representation of Hinduism.
This poem is a haphazard presentation.
This poem is riddled.
This poem is a heresy.
This poem is a factual inaccuracy.
.
This poem does not culture the jungle.
This poem jungles the culture.
This poem storms into temples with tanks.
This poem stands corrected: the RSS is BJP’s mother.
This poem is not vulnerable.
This poem is Section 153-A proof.
This poem is also idiot-proof.
This poem quotes Dr.Ambedkar.
.
This poem is pornographic.
This poem will not tender an unconditional apology.
This poem will not be Penguined.
This poem will not be pulped.
(#ThisPoemWillProkokeYou, 2015)
Zindabad Meena, Jai Bhim.
Credits
Abhijeet lives in Lucknow, and considers the city to be the only essential element of their evolution as a poet. He has a Master's in English Literature with a dissertation on Nemat Sadat's The Carpet Weaver. He is an atheist who loves to watch plays, eat kebabs, sing aloud, and at times, sit idle and do nothing.