Sounding the depths

Editorial #8
Sampurna Chattarji

Be it entire species, ecosystems, or ways of life; be it civil liberties, languages, livelihoods, or even locations – we are under threat like never before.

Perhaps that is why – when Robert invited me to guest-edit this India issue – the thematic that immediately suggested itself was ‘Endangered’.

I offered this keyword as a prompt/provocation to a list of contributors that grew organically from the search inside my head. Looking for a variety of perspectives on things known, unknown, lesser-known, I invited writers (known, unknown, lesser-known) to interpret the thematic freely, from the core of their ongoing concerns and projects, both individual and collaborative.

As they began responding to my call – with questions, ideas, work in progress, and finally, finished pieces – the most interesting patterns emerged. Synchronicities that I could never have anticipated nor orchestrated.

Take Mamta Sagar’s firsthand report on the peace march in Udupi organised in response to the exacerbations of communal tensions in coastal Karnataka. She had called me on the eve of the march. I was more than a little anxious, and asked her to keep updating me en route, just in case there were any unforeseen events or emergencies. As photos, texts, and videos kept coming in from Mamta’s phone to mine, I knew I wanted to archive – in a more formal manner – those charged moments and the context they sprang from. When she got back home, safe, I asked her to write the piece you will find here. Meanwhile, in a parallel conversation, Smita Dalvi had promised me an essay on the changing shape of religious structures observed along a specific segment of the Konkan coast. That is when I began seeing them for the companion pieces they were – both inscribed from lived experience, located along besieged coastlines, unravelling complex narratives of disappearance. From their respective practices of poetry/activism and architecture/teaching, Mamta and Smita walk us through some urgent and unnerving questions – what takes the place of vanished modes of coexistence and syncretism? What counters the stridency of the majoritarian?

Similarly, Shalim Hussain’s piece found a fraternal twin in Piya Srinivasan’s. Not only in the overlap of actual terrains – the Brahmaputra River, the ‘char/chapori’ sandbars/riverbanks – but also in the idea of reclamation. The Miyah poets take back the term on their own terms; the water takes back the land, on its own terms. In between – the slippages of language, the erosions of identity, the uncertainties of rehabilitation. If water must find its own level, so too must people find the ground beneath their feet. As Shalim writes in ‘A Tribe without a Lineage’ – ‘Give us a place, the char-chapori community requests/demands. Give us a place in the land which is also our own, the government we have helped elect, the language that we, too, love and adore, the ethos which we too want to participate in.’

An issue around endangerment would have felt incomplete without Ranjit Lal’s unique blend of affection (for the creatures he loves watching and writing about) and acerbic commentary (on us humans who refuse to take responsibility for our arrant misbehaviour). As we discover some of the reasons why the Great Indian Bustard, the Siberian cranes that once flocked to Bharatpur, and the ‘immense, easy-soaring’ vulture seem to have vanished from Indian skies, we also understand what makes these ‘extinction events’ so scary.

In the creative non-fiction piece, ‘Milk, Sugar and a Model Test Paper’, Pervin Saket examines another ‘extinction event’ – one the Parsis might be on the verge of. The formal device of the model test paper signals the burden of expectation on the young Parsi woman to be a model member of her community. With limber inventiveness, Pervin exposes the rigidity of the conservative line that opposes both singledom and marriage to the non-Parsi (‘parjaat’). Palpable anger and despair at the insidious nature of ‘the JIYO Parsi scheme initiated by the Government of India to aid fertility and reproduction in a community that demographers predict will go extinct by the end of the century’ is leavened by thoughts of other species, other tribes – including, but not limited to, the writer.

The writer as a specie unto itself – combative, voluble, ineradicable. This is a strand that merits attention because this troublesome tribe is imperilled like never before. With identity politics and religious fundamentalism creating violent fissures – how can the writer heal? Avner Pariat, a Khasi from Shillong, and Goirick Brahmachari, a Bengali from Silchar, believe dialogue might be an answer. I am so glad to have a selection from their collaboration ‘Non-tribal Tribal’ here. Through poems that are un-militant and unafraid of sentiment, we are alerted to the easily blowable fuse of sanity and safety, the tick-tock of cause and effect. When Avner says, ‘I’ll wear Tribality like a grass skirt, dance around / Eat kwai, and bare my red teeth at the crowd, / Show off my tribal temper, show off my tribal spear […] Tribal rights? Mine are violated everyday, / Invite me to speak about them in Delhi’ – the sarcasm is double-edged, perhaps like the act of collaboration itself?

I can never think of this word – ‘collaboration’ – without remembering its wartime meaning. A beautiful way to resist that meaning and rescue the word from that dark place is to labour together and create a thing of beauty. Such a gift is ‘Time Trails’ by Ranjit Hoskote and Sukhada Tatke. As these two friends walk through Edinburgh, contemplating the past and the future, the here and the now, deep geological time and distant speculative time, we remember that no place is innocent of violent histories; we sense that the writerly salvaging of lost words and extinct scripts is anchored in both bedrock and blood.

Short fiction can sometimes feel like an endangered art. A special corner of my heart is reserved for those who turn their skills to the making of this particular magic. My first request for an original short story was to Angshu Dasgupta (whose debut novel Fern Road was, as it happens, first published in Australia by UWAP). Plangent with an emotion sharper than yearning, ‘The Memory of an Elephant’ offers us the enigmatic image of a boy-child making primal contact with a boy-elephant in a clearing. As the adult narrator returns to that landscape to look for ‘his’ elephant, we are lacerated by the knowledge that soon all elephants may become just that – a memory. Likewise, the spike and sagacity of a story by curator and cultural theorist Nancy Adajania had caught my eye and made me want to read more. What better way than to commission one! ‘Fin-ears’ holds in its surreal whorls heartbreaking truth and fierce critique of those who would circumscribe free speech and clobber difference to death. Where ‘once upon a time’ might have offered a chimerical languor, these two contemporary authors show us the speed at which irreversible damage can occur – one puny human lifetime is enough to witness umpteen unthinkable shifts. 

The manic obliteration of human and animal rights links not only Angshu and Nancy’s stories but also the poems of Karthika Naïr and Jeet Thayil. Jeet’s ‘Zoology’ and Karthika’s ‘Handbook for Aspiring Autocrats’ seem allied in their uncompromising integrity and authorial courage, their stubborn refusal to succumb. ‘Handbook’ is a tour de force that reveals the destructive nature of instructions (read: diktats) issued in the megaphone voice of a megalomaniac leader, disrupting and challenging all notions of an ‘easy-read’ when confronting difficult (read: insupportable) times. Jeet and Karthika warmly agreed to my suggestion of creating sound pieces as bonus material, and I’m certain you will find them compelling accompaniments to the texts.

To receive poetry as sound. Isn’t that how it was always meant to be? I heard Devika Rege for the first time at a reading in Bambai. Those poems are published here, for the first time, as she gives voice to those ‘neither green nor grey’ living through a ‘vexed and momentous era’. Nabanita Kanungo’s prose poems stitch together scream and scar; M P Pratheesh’s ‘object poems’ bring in script as image, photo as poem. Collapsing borders between forms seems to be a natural way for writers to negotiate the policing of minds. Recalling the research that led to her found poem series, ‘I found a witch’, Annie Zaidi mentions how the anthropologists she quotes ‘did the work of revelation and memory keeping, which is also the work of poets’. The vivification of one practise through another is also evident in Shalmalee Palekar’s ‘University Gothic’, which captures the existential fear and absurdity of upheavals in academia with a dark hilarity, a rumpus of informed and irreverent referencing. I had approached Annie and Shalmalee for essays/essayistic prose, and it pleases my poet-persona that both – in wildly different ways – return us through their poems to the Latin root of ‘essay’, weighing in on subjects that deserve our scrutiny, examining and setting in motion exigent explorations. While Akhil Katyal wears his multilingualism lightly on the skin, Mustansir Dalvi’s double-role as poet and translator make him rightly suspicious of ‘monoglossia’, doubly aware of the cost that silence extracts; conscience-bound to record the almost unobserved un-mourned erasure of an entire language. When he writes ‘I disguise fear in anonymity: / each morning, I wake in costume’ we hear ourselves, and shudder.

And finally – the features! The excellent work done by Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal in coediting an anthology of queer poetry from South Asia[1] brought to my attention the work of Rushati Mukherjee, Anahita Sarabhai, Rumi Harish, three poets I am proud to host on Portside Review, prefaced by a dialogue between Aditi and Akhil. Thanks to A+A we are made aware that ‘it might be more useful to think in terms of ‘idioms’ of same-sex desire rather than water-tight identity categories’ and that if queer poetry were to be co-opted by the powers, it would no longer be poetry – ‘it would just be propaganda’.

The Marathi poetry feature is a tripod on which a demanding camera is mounted, focusing – in Hemant Divate’s case – on the paranoias that run riot through our minds, stalking every waking moment; in Sanjeev Khandekar’s ‘Mutatis Mutandis’ on the normalcy of the abnormal; and – in Manya Joshi’s part warning, part stand-up comedy ‘Observe’ – on ‘the content-amplified digital world’. I am grateful to the poets and their translators, just as I am to Geetanjali Shree and her publishers for generously granting permission to feature an extract from her first novel mai: silently mother, in which we encounter something and someone beyond us – an anguished recognition of the person that we might erase in the relentless pursuit of recognising ourselves.

But fear not, dear reader: all is not gloom and doom! Hear these affirmative lines from Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights:

Surely the end of the darkness would be like waking up to the world on the day of the creator-deity when he was seen crossing from mountain to mountain carrying the fierce animals on his shoulders. They remembered being told how their ancestor, newly born, had laughed and laughed at the sight of the two elephants squirming and bellowing as the creator held them in the crook of his arm and made his way into the deep woods. Would things look the same or would they find another earth in its place?

To waking, to laughter, to seeing – this issue, from India, with love.

— Sampurna Chattarji

[1] The World that Belongs to Us (HarperCollins, 2020)

Letter from the Managing Editor

There is a bath in a town by the edge of the water. From the bath you can see the waterline outside against the sun and salt. The ships pass by, bobbing in the waves, with crates stacked aboard, with letters painted on. And the world comes here, to move on and on.

There is a port that you can see from a train, a bridge to connect us from earth to sky, a hand that shakes another in the deal of the century, to dredge wetlands, to open up channels, to forget the mangroves.

And still we survive, like we always have and always will. Remembering the memory of lice and flies, the scales that collected on our hands, like mirrors and past days, like the wings of fairies.  

To be on an island, to be in an archipelago, to be of the ocean. That is what we hope against hope might come to pass right here in these pages, with these words. To make continents of foam and spray, to pick up whispers, to cast out messages in bottles. All as a way to connect, to manifest our reality on the land’s edge, where the crabs crawl and the seaweed arrives with its own stories to tell. 

It is, as always, across the water that we find each other, meeting the horizon in our bluest moments. And so, from Noongar Country to an ancestral home, beyond, before, between nation and parent, we present to you this volume of Portside Review. Enjoy.

— Robert Wood

This issue of Portside Review is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Australian Government and Creative Australia (formerly Australia Council for the Arts).