‘How we love is inextricable from how we write’

Subhashini Kaligotla’s debut collection, Bird of the Indian Subcontinent , was selected by Arundhati Subramaniam for the Emerging Poets Prize. As an engineer-turned-art historian interested in medieval architecture, Kaligotla’s work is deeply visual and carefully contained. The narrator is a migrant from the Indian subcontinent who travels the world pursuing her interests, work and love. What’s striking in these poems is a sense of bereftness, which the poet doesn’t try to resolve. In this interview to BL ink , Kaligotla talks about her ethics as a writer and a lover, and choosing a book cover with an art historian’s eye.

That poem, ‘Reading Akhmatova,’ came out of an essay I was writing. The Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, like many women writers, had been criticised (actually condemned) for her preoccupation with “amorous-erotic themes,” especially in her early work, before she became known for her poems of witness. The theory goes that, while male writers take on larger, public themes — war, disaster, revolutions — women writers are busy documenting love and other domestic disasters. And that this is ultimately a selfish and limited activity.

We may consider this nonsense but, in many ways, female writers continue to battle such prejudices. My poem is thinking about my ethics as a writer but also my ethics as a lover, and though it does not explicitly state that, it is saying if we learn to love and relate to one another less selfishly, we might also write less selfishly. Another way to put it: how we love is inextricable from how we write.

Yes, I wanted to retain the conflations and associations with bird books. It should come as no surprise that many writers have accompanied me in the making of this book, but bird books have been important companions too, as have birds themselves — North American and Indian ones, and some Australian ones too.

Birds feature in many poems and are figures through which I talk about other things — men, relationships, and the internal landscape of the speaker. But that’s not all. I find birds fascinating: their movements, songs and calls, their forms, and social worlds. To my mind, they seem to have figured out friendship, community, and relationships even though this may sound like I am rehearsing the romantic idea of finding redemption in nature.

I have been fascinated by this kind of poem for a long while and have admired Jorie Graham’s ekphrastic poems in particular — they are long, complex, metaphysical meditations. Writing such poems is challenging because it is not merely about recreating or re-presenting a work of visual art textually. It is about creating an artwork in a different medium that can, hopefully, stand on its own. Most of the poems involved research into biographies of artists, into their artistic process, and I spent time in museums and libraries. But a poem like this is only successful if you are able to insert yourself and your concerns. Otherwise, why bother?

I am an art historian who specialises in early medieval India. I wanted the cover to be a work of Indian art. I painstakingly went through the collections of several museums with strong South Asia holdings, from the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cover is a detail of a painting that belongs to the Smithsonian. The original painting, a 17th-century work made for the Deccan’s Golconda court, features two pheasants. We chose this bird as it is idiosyncratic and arrested mid-action, perhaps like the birds and other creatures who populate my book.

Building the chronology only happened over years, and only by taking apart and putting the manuscript together dozens of times. It became clear that I was not writing about enduring, reliable love, but about unhappy outcomes and self-reflection, doubt, and the analysis that ensues. So it made sense to pair a poem such as ‘In Brindavan Woods,’ which presumably deals with Krishna and Radha’s relationship, with ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ one that tells a similar story of jealousy, betrayal, and infidelity using contemporary diction and imagery. This made for interesting conversations, with poems not only amplifying each other but also creating a more powerful arc for the book.

I tend to write in series or else write poems that have many parts to them. This allows me to explore the same question, concern, or wound, if you want to be more dramatic, from many different angles and through various formal means. It allows me to create different moods or voices, as with the ‘Heart’ poems; different modes of address and linguistic registers, as in the poem ‘The Lord’s Prayer;’ and diverse engagements with place, landscape, and form as in the poem ‘Fear of Flying.’

Urvashi Bahuguna is a poet living in Delhi