Indran Amirthanayagam

Abhimanyu Kumar

I.  

I first chanced upon Indran Amirthanayagam’s prose, instead of his poetry.  

It was a foreword he had written, for a good friend and fellow poet’s first poetry collection, a generous foreword for a new poet starting out. The other thing that struck me was his invocation of Allen Ginsberg, while commenting on my friend’s poetry, the Beat poet whose poetry I love.  

Upon checking with my friend, I learnt that Indran knew Ginsberg personally and had learnt from the Beat poet. I heard of the phone call Bob Dylan once made for Ginsberg who was then staying with the Amirthanayagams, and which a young Indran picked up. I learnt, as well, about his father, Guy Amirthanayagam, also a poet, who was friends with the Beat poet.  

Over the years, as I started to read Indran’s poetry, I began to notice that his generosity of spirit shines like a watchtower over the choppy waters of the sea of life. It imbues all he writes with a certain light, which illuminates his lines, allowing them to inhabit a texture which is warm and thick like wool, but breathes like the soft muslin of old Dhaka. In its soft whisper like breathing, we hear an echo, a solitary muffled cry, a long scream, a primal howl even; we hear incantations to the muse, to the spirit within that moves us and sends us places to roam like Ulysses, always in search of a homeland.  

In Indran’s work, boundaries dissolve. Souls are exchanged. They live in the tower of Babel which is his brilliant mind. In many tongues, his poems leap at us like fire at our ignorance and prejudices, taking them down, turning them into embers that glow as a recollection, a remembrance, as well as a premonition of what the world can be: a place of hope and succour for all, full of love and kindness and wisdom.  

Of course, there is politics in his poetry. How can it be otherwise, for someone who learnt from Ginsberg? But his politics are not a sledgehammer that use blunt force to drive home his point. It is more like the beak of a woodpecker which persistently, doggedly, makes a hole in the thick trunk of a tree, which it then proceeds to make into a nest. It knows that a nest is what we all seek when faced with the fury and devastation of nature – which he addresses in his collection The Splintered Face: Tsunami poems; or when the hand of the State turns oppressive and violent – which he writes about in his poems about the Sri Lankan Civil War, aptly termed Uncivil War by him. 

In a poem called ‘Interpretation’, he writes in pithy verse about the tsunami hitting the coast of Sri Lanka, using universal metaphors that allow us to view the tragedy with perspective; a wry take that does not diminish the impact it had on the lives and economy of a small nation but, for the want of a better word, humanises it.  

Mass 
at Our  
Lady of Matara  
was  
interrupted  
that Sunday  
morning,  
her doors  
flung  
open  
to greet  
the  
prodigal  
son.  

In terms of craft too, this poem is remarkable – a single sentence broken into multiple lines that make up the poem.  

In the collection Uncivil War, he starts off with the poem, ‘Aflame’, about the riots against minority Tamils in Sri Lanka, collectively remembered as the Black July of 1983. The poem starts with a philosophical meditation on the importance of poetry itself in the presence of clear and present danger to human lives, in the face of brutal and unjust oppression that insists on annihilating the Other. It takes a poet of great wisdom to know that life’s urge for survival is always more important than poetry, and that poetry cannot fulfil the basic bodily needs – food, safety, physical shelter – of human beings. Knowing and accepting this makes the poem even more potent, in my view.  

(Remembering Black July, 1983) 

What is a poem  
to a man hiding  
in the cellar  
of his neighbor’s house,  

breathing the way  
his hostess spices  
lentils and mutton,  
while son and daughter 

keep quiet,  
not one word  
allowed  
in the mother tongue,  

and wife strokes  
her neck,  
the golden wings  
of her thali,  

and across the lane  
a mob, ruffians,  
tontons macoutes,  
lynch squad, a few  

holy men, politicians  
in white vershtis,  
light rage  
and sew pestilence  

in summer fires… 

In these searing verses, Indran sketches the whole anatomy of a riot, common in South Asia. The connivance of State, the role of so-called men of religion, the fright felt especially by women and children. It is impossible to not be moved reading these lines.   

At a recent event, where I had the chance to host Indran online reading from his new and previous collections of poetry, I asked him about this poem, about the impotence of poetry in a certain sense. After all, poetry did not prevent Auschwitz, a critic might say. We are also aware of Plato’s objections to poets making up things they did not know about. Indran started off by citing Auden’s famous dictum: Poetry makes nothing happen. But he says he is not in agreement with Auden on this. As an activist-poet, a badge he wears with pride, he says it is his job to make things happen through poetry, in whichever way possible, howsoever small. He also acknowledges the warmth and beauty poetry brings to the life and world of the poet and its readers, which is akin to a debt one owes to the form. As he writes in the poem ‘Word’, from another of his newer collections Coconuts on Mars, published in India, something which brings him pleasure:  

You cite Maslow, the hierarchy, basic needs first, then  
security, love, and up on the top, poetry. I say. No! No!  
No! Turn that pyramid over. Spin it on the apex, the fine  
tip of the antenna. Dance on a pin, baby. You can do it.  
This is the New Year, mother-laden cold, everybody  
hopping around the bus stop and strolling along  
once public-filled gardens. Gardens, my dear! Snow.  
Ice. Freezing wind shards. Meanwhile you cite Maslow?  
Food, rent before the mind! Do not succumb to false  
advertising. Life and faith will balance you. Allow  
yourself to fall, sway, glide, pirouette, write, fight. 

— —

 II. 

The remarkableness of his oeuvre is also established through the multitudes that he, or his poetic self to be more precise, contains, through his travels in South America for example, and his work as a diplomat, living in the greatest empire human civilisation has seen. An empire for which everyone else not its citizen is automatically an Other. But in Indran’s poems, the Self is never too far removed from the Other. Both are extant in a fine balance – their concerns become one, because they are one. His linguistic abilities allow him to explore all the nooks and crannies of this delicate, exquisite architecture. He strolls about in its fragrant gardens at ease, taking in all the nourishment it brings to his pen.  

In Indran’s work, the same spirit travels, from Blake to Whitman, to Ginsberg and to Bob Dylan. But the adaption of this spirit remains entirely true to his own sensibilities, and is transmogrified through a tremendous dedication to craft. Like a potter with his wares, Indran chisels his lines to glorious perfection, till all that is superfluous falls out and only that which matters remains. It is through this rootedness to his craft that his work achieves its transcendence.  

In the introduction he writes to his latest collection, Migrant States, which contains a number of odes to Whitman, he lays down his manifesto, and poetic credo. ‘Two hundred years after Walt Whitman set off from Paumanok, this is what his descendants find along the road: Democracy sputters, stutters. Can we survive the current, surreal comedy where words, the raw material of poetry, have been spun, propagated as propaganda that threatens, as Orwell predicted, to make lies into truth, war into peace? I would add the jobs of reporter, poet, witness – as suspect now as they were in Plato’s mind when he tried to create his exclusive Republic. Yet I admire Plato because I champion free speech, the free mind.  Let him have his Republic: only let me state my poetry,’ he writes.  

Once again, Indran produces a poem so rich in self-awareness, and irony that it immediately catches the eye at the start of this collection too. It is as if the poet inhabits the poetic self so completely, accepts it so irrevocably, that perceived flaws in the ability to versify also become fodder for more versifying. He writes, in the poem called ‘This Is No Time For Criticism’:  

I realize my lines are not lyrical. They have no surprising leaps,  
or rhythmic epiphanies. They are flat, a body shot on the street  
visited by paramedics, wailing young men and women. We do   
not  discriminate in 2019. We are witnessing birth of a revolt,  
a rejection, and you say my verse is agitprop, an unfit exercise  
for poetry. I reply writing, that the body must be buried with dignity,  
and surviving family paid; as for the healing of decades-old wounds  
opened up again by a tank trundling into the center of the city,  
I offer my pen as a bullet-proof vest, immune to criticism,  
resistant like an ear of wheat in the wind, an eagle brushing  
off the fur of a mouse from its wings.  Who is looking down  
on us now, my friend? Who is saying shut the  
bloody fuck up and write truly hermetic poetry?  

In terms of ideas as well as craft, the poem is a remarkable specimen of his style, and his confidence in it as the vehicle for his expression. It tells us that lyrical beauty of a poem is a subjective thing and should not be the only way to judge it. Some poems are better seen as mirrors, that reflect the times we live in, without embellishment or manipulation. The poet who has the courage to stand in front of a tank and speak his lines, no matter how ‘flat’ is no less than the poet fixated on crafting each poem to perfection, like a diamond with every edge polished to perfection. In the world we live today, big changes are afoot. The discontent of the oppressed and marginalised is writ in large letters on the walls. Time is running out. There will be a time for beauty again, the poem suggests. But it is more important now to take sides and say what needs to be said (I am reminded again of our online interaction, where Indran said he has written poems even while bombs fell around him in Sri Lanka, during the civil war).  

To Walt Whitman, his literary father, he pays rich tribute, like in this poem ‘Stop By’:  

You said stop by, spend the day and night and I would possess the origin  
of all poems. Well here I stand, and I am willing to pay any price, give  
of the apple, sign a mortgage, a revolving credit line,  
and jump on the disaffected bomber about to set off his vest. Let’s roll.  
“Damn doors. Damn jambs.” “Raise high the roof beams.” “Call me Ahab.”  
“I have seen the best minds.” “When I from black, and he from white cloud free.”  
I am in your debt, Walt, and to all the poets who gave birth to you and to those  
you have sired in turn. Thank you. The word is good and in our hands now. 

Other than Walt Whitman, Indran pays his debt to others in his work, and this collection. The references to Ginsberg are obvious, here (I saw the best minds…) and elsewhere. He also invokes his father, the poet Guy Amirthanayagam, in the poem ‘Until Death.’ 

Mingle with dust and find the lost poems  
of 1976, when you began  
to compose verses at a fevered pace,  

every day a new poem, and your father  
correcting each one, and his friend  
Reuel Denney said you had mastered  

the four-beat line, and three years  
later you were fronting a punk band  
screaming four-beat boogie, and  
I think that is enough autobiography  
for this poem which cannot end  
but in writing or dying. 

The poems in this collection give us glimpses of Indran as a person too: his interest in cricket, for instance, about which he writes in ‘Batting, In Love,’ where cricket becomes a metaphor for lost innocence –  

Amazing to try and recreate  
that sensation of wholeness  
before inevitable infatuation,  
leaping desire, love and attendant  
heartbreak and loneliness.  
If we could just play cricket 

In another poem, ‘When I Left Punk and Took Holy Orders’, we hear of his fling with Punk Rock, as a frontman for a band that dropped him later on as they would rather play covers than his original compositions. One could say this is the story – more or less – of many bands and many musicians (it comes to mind that the poet Arun Kolatkar from India was also keen on a career as a frontman which did not work out).  

The poem also gives us a delicious glimpse into the politics of the times, mentioning Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, whom the young loved to hate back then.  

I had Kissinger, the Lone Ranger, to throw  
off his horse, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron  
Maiden, to stomp upon with my adolescent  
yearning. I was a Laborite, of course, committed  
to the working toff, not some Conservative  

blue nose smelling Maggie’s bum.  

While his identity as a Tamil from Sri Lanka informs a lot of his work – he has written two other collections on Sri Lanka, Elephants of Reckoning which speaks evocatively of his growing-up years in Sri Lanka, and Ceylon R.I.P. – it also brings concerns about not being an authentic voice or impartial about the country. In the preface to his book Uncivil War, for example, concerns are raised by the citizen blogger Sanjana Hattotuwa, about this very issue: ‘Those better trained in literary criticism will prise open Indran’s corpus of verse. The poems in the following pages (are) obviously partial, subjective, incomplete brushstrokes on a canvas framed by, inter alia, Indran’s identity, selection, location and language. It is certainly possible to critique Indran’s focus, partial to Tamils, seen by him as victims even post-war. In the following pages, we do not often see a critical scrutiny of the LTTE and its mind-boggling violence, often against Tamil children, women and men. Yet the poet makes no excuses for this, and is no apologist. It is a delicate balance. Indran is unafraid of writing from the contested space of the marginal, the violated and the victimised. In other words, a more general commentary of violence is eschewed.’ In his online conversation with me organised by the Prakriti Foundation, Indran noted the peculiar position of ‘prodigal son,’ always vulnerable to complaints from the brother who stays behind, of being treated more favourably than the latter. As a well-paid member of the Tamil diaspora, he has not had to face the kind of danger those living in Sri Lanka faced. But this does not mean there was no danger at all. In fact, as Hattotuwa notes in her foreword, Indran writes in the poem ‘Riot’ of how his father was saved from a lynch mob by his Sinhalese friends, an event to which his own identity becomes intimately connected as he was yet to be born.  

When the mob  
assembled  
in the plaza  
outside  

the Law Courts,  
at the Galle Fort,  
1958, friends  
spirited  

the Assistant  
Government  
Agent, my future  
father, out  

of its hands.  
Without friends,  
he would not  
have lived, 

married; I would  
not be here  
to remember  
this. 

In just two pithy sentences, the poem, instead of theorising endlessly like academics on violence and victimhood, lays bare the trajectories of two lives, intimately affected by violence, one directly, one indirectly, and how the love and goodwill of the Other, here from the majority, shaped them. This is where the human ability to transcend trauma comes in: in the possibility of love and reconciliation, in remembrance of good deeds done by members of each community to those from the other side, in a refusal to fall prey to the poison that is spewed by majoritarian leaders against minorities, in deciding to not let go of our humanity for anything; as the credo made famous by E. M. Forster says: friend over country. 

Perhaps, it would be ideal to finish this review with the poet’s own words, his last poem ‘Living Will’ from the collection Coconuts on Mars, which gives us a sense of how the poet sees himself at this stage in his life, and how he plans to pursue life and poetry further:  

One day I will sit down with my soul  
and write that I have loved every bird  
that flew, every monkey on the branch,  
every elephant charging through the grass.  
 

I will say I love you as much as the baby  
gecko scampering past my foot, the snake  
rustling under the wood cut and stacked  
in my yard. I will say I have loved every  

creature, every song, every turn in the road.  
And I will be lying with my eyes open  
and my eyes closed. I am not God. I am not even  
the dog loyal to his master, who misses him  

blind, like his daughter in Lima which I call  
at night until the next time we meet, in dreams,  
via chat, cheek to cheek, remembering always 
that in paradise there are no trains, or roads,  

or seas, or death, no going away, no arriving,  
doors and garden open, souls who come and go,  
smiling, and all the angels, all birds, all dolphins,  
all men and women in song, dancing; and, why not,  

reciting the Song of Solomon, the epic poems,  
the love songs that consoled when we set off  
on the roads, hopped on trains and aero planes,  
got caught in traffic, in our head, said goodbye  

before saying hello? Did I know you down there?  
You were the greengrocer I walked past going  
to school in London? Oh my dear, how beautiful  
you are, Pauline, with ripe, red hair, who shared  

the religion prize with me at St. Vincent’s  
on Blandford Street. But you may be alive still,  
and I am not ready to meet my Maker, to be plucked  
from the cycle of rebirth, not yet. I have poems  

to compose, children to raise, earth to cultivate.  
Come back later, Angel, I have my will to revise.