Seeing the World Through a Poet’s Roving Eye: P Lal’s Composition, The Poet
This week in Daak:
1. Seeing the World Through a Poet’s Roving Eye: P Lal’s Composition, The Poet
2. Make Time for Play!
3. Daak Recommends
1. Seeing the World Through a Poet’s Roving Eye: P Lal’s Composition, The Poet
What’s common between A. K. Ramanujan, Agha Shahid Ali, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kamala Das, Nissim Ezekiel, Pritish Nandy, Ruskin Bond, and Vikram Seth? They all made their literary debut with the Writers Workshop, a Kolkata-based publisher, which has surfaced many new authors of post-independence urban literature in India.
Among its core founding group was Purushottama Lal (1929 - 2010), or P Lal as he is more commonly known, a writer, translator and professor, but more importantly, discoverer and mentor of new talent. Besides teaching and running the Writer’s Workshop, he devoted his life to translating the Indian epic Mahabharata — the world’s longest poem — into contemporary English. Unfortunately, he died before completing the final section, “Anushashana Parva.”
Lal had three non-profit-driven criteria for accepting any work for publication, namely “One: a writer sends in material that's so impossibly good that it's 10 years ahead of its time — and there are very few commercial publishers who would think of investing in such first-rate postdated creativity. Two: the work shows promise, and the writer might stop writing altogether if not discreetly encouraged through publishing. Three: the manuscript appeals to my taste, such as it is, and I enjoy bringing out stuff that I like; it's like introducing a talented friend to strangers, though some may well wonder where the talent lies."
Naturally, this meant that Lal himself had an eye for spotting the idiosyncratic genius. This rare gift is best embodied in his own poem, “The Poet” (talk about metacognition!). In the characteristically descriptive style of a poet, he follows the careless roving eye of a poet, which creates drama out of the ordinary. In this poem specifically, the poet sees a woman running her fingers through her hair and sees (or imagines) a rich inner world of unfulfilled desires and pangs of longings.
The Poet
For all his wild hair like an aureole,
Stammer at parties, slipping from a tram,
Putting off the mending of a sole,
And putting on a mock-heroic Damn!,
He notices the spider’s intestines
Claim harlot, smuggler and blackmarketeer,
And in the clicking grin his eye divines
A moody world of artifice and fear.
Above all, this: When a woman turns
Black clouds of hair, with a rhythmic hand
Weaving their silk in the possessive sun,
He sees her common eyes stretch to a land
O lost, lost; as when repentance yearns
For hope, and love, and finds that there is none.2. Make Time for Play!
It’s the time of the year when the winter chill starts to set in, and an afternoon spent sunning oneself is a perfectly legitimate activity! Why not enliven your lazy winter days and picnics with our Madhubani style Ludo and Snakes & Ladders set?
3. Daak Recommends
Read Pritish Nandy’s touching reminiscence of P Lal.
Also, read this fitting tribute to P Lal’s life and mission of shining a spotlight on emerging talent.