On the cover of the book, a long-haired young man in frayed jeans and a camouflage jacket, cigarette in hand, sits against a faded door, looking away from the camera. The cover tells you these are his collected poems from 1969 to 2014, with an introduction by acclaimed author Amit Chaudhuri.
With all this information on the cover, the book should be ‘breaking news’ for those who think Indian literature in English is a straight line that runs from Vikram Seth to Chetan Bhagat. Not that you can fault them for this view. It has fallen to the lot of the Indian writer in English to be, or at least behave like, a celebrity as well. The obscurity or the eccentricity that went with literary writing for ages is no longer their privilege. So, you may well ask, how is someone who has been writing since 1969 not half as known as Altaf Tyrewala? And how could he be obscure with such dashing good looks? By the time you notice ‘Modern Classic’ written in smaller type at the bottom, you would be scratching your head.
Five years ago, when writers including Tariq Ali, Amit Chaudhuri and Toby Litt proposed Mehrotra’s name for Oxford’s new professor of poetry (held previously by the likes of WH Auden and Seamus Heaney),
The cover can beguile the simple-minded reader in more ways than one. While it declares it is a collection of Mehrotra’s poems, it doesn’t tell the reader that not all of these poems are his own. Half of them are his translations from different languages. But those familiar with Mehrotra’s art will take it in their stride. One would think this might be his way of laying claim to a tradition. His translations from Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati and Bangla of Kabir, Nirala, Muktibodh, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Manglesh Dabral and other poets would seem out of place in such a book just two decades ago. Indian-English poets used to tie themselves in knots tracing their lineages, trapped as they were in a unique cross-cultural mess.
While Indian-English poetry has mostly had a metropolitan location, Mehrotra divides his time between Allahabad and Dehradun. Yet he is the most cosmopolitan of the Indian-English writers. He can show you flashes of Ezra Pound in Prakrit erotic poetry and can spot Kabir the dude in Kabir the divine. He is not cosmopolitan in the usual sense of having made a home in different countries but in its higher sense of interpreting the local as universal. His poems are made of small-town stuff and middle-class anxieties but he finds universal drama in the daily humdrum. The letter-box is the captain of his street “...and a good acquaintance of the lighthouse./Once in a while/We get together/And change the altitude of stars.” In his poems, the pyres burn like new volcanoes and the street beggar “Walks down the road/Like a dying planet.”
Mehrotra’s poems are the concordance of a mutating world that seems still in its daily routines. He locates in still life the crevices of time, through which he gazes at a world that is forever changing. Ageing, ancestors, paternity, watches, maps and journeys often figure in his lyrical exposition of time. Mehrotra began as a surrealist poet, for he wanted a language other than the King’s English to interpret his world. But it seems his choice of this genre had a lot to do with his overall poetic vision. His surrealism could help him bend his own time and space, give him a god’s detached and distant eye, and afford him his fractal vision that invalidates the linearity of literary tradition. Since he could map the turning sky onto daily routines and look at his everyday life from across a curving space and through looping time, he felt no need to leave Allahabad. He has the poetic imagination to find the configuration of the cosmos in what may appear to us merely provincial. The literal cosmopolitanism of globe-trotting writers and intellectuals is of no use to Mehrotra, who can forge literary associations across time, space, languages and cultures.
For quite a while, cosmopolitanism for Indian-English writers was more a matter of the bio on the book jacket. Mehrotra is one of the few who have actually turned it into a convincing trope.
(Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist)