I know Adil Parashar, who uses the pen name Aranya for their writing, in many capacities: poet, friend, curator, editor. One thing that’s common across all these personas is the innately polyphonic nature of both his poems and his thoughts – something that’s easy to see in his book The Map is Not the Territory. Much like separating a song from an album is to lose its surrounding richness, its place in the history of things, you cannot know a tree in Aranya’s mind without glimpsing the large forest inside. It is for these reasons and more that I made an attempt to tease out his thoughts on his poetics and his poems in this conversation for Scroll. Excerpts:
In many ways, a title is the first impression we get of a poem or a book. What moved you to choose Korzybski’s words “the map is not the territory” as the title of your book and do you think your poems deal with this title in both direct and slant ways?
The question of the “map-territory” relationship has fascinated me for years. For me, it is about representation, but more importantly, about metamorphosis. Most art is consumed by rasiks as a map – that “explains”, or helps them navigate some theme or another. I do not like this view of the work of art, or of a poem – art is not a “map”, nor is it a puzzle with an answer hidden at the centre. If we think of the poem as a map, or a cryptic puzzle – we attempt to “understand” it. We also assume that a poem can mean only one thing. The dissatisfaction comes when that “message” eludes us. This is why most people say they don’t “get” poetry. But I don’t want anybody to “get” my poems – I want them to “feel”.
When I was in college, I dreamed of a project in which I would “map” a single neighbourhood – every object, side road, residence, person, or dukaan. It occurred to me that by the time I would have finished this meticulous mapping – the territory would have changed. The “map” would cease to be the territory. As a metaphor, the “map” is perhaps one of the early derivative images that slips into poets’ affective vocabularies (like the moon, for instance). But I remember looking up this question of the map and the territory, after a poem about “migration” using that image got published in a literary journal. That’s how I chanced upon the work of the philosopher and scholar of “general semantics” Alfred Korzybski, and his brilliant work Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
The title speaks to the way I sense and experience the world, but also an intentional refusal towards certainty. The map can never be the territory, because, as Heraclitus reminds us, nothing stays the same – not in the real world, nor in the imagination, and definitely not in poetry. In retrospect, I feel the title is also a challenge, a provocation – one I’ve made to friends, who identify as not “getting” poetry or art; who find my impulse towards “poeticising” the “ordinary” alternatively awe-inspiring and infuriating. Perhaps I am telling them not to see poems as maps – as manuals for truth or self-realisation.
But in all honesty, the title simply “clicked” towards the end, almost serendipitously. After I compiled the manuscript, when I looked through each poem, with an editorial eye, I noticed in the writing, ironically, the impulse to “map”. Perhaps I got this from Kolatkar, or my belief in his “integrity”. And so, the poet’s truth, of experience and memory, might not be the reader’s truth. The poet’s lived imagination of the territory – who is to say it is less “true” or less real?
Your poems are marked by the multiple presences of folks such as the mallige-seller, the gatekeeper, the chai-coffee-wallah, the keeper of the keys, a thambili seller, and more. It reminded me of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda poems and his trademark style of writing about people like Parameshwari, the ogress, the potato peelers, the idli seller, folks we often think of as peripheral in the main-character-syndrome-ness of our lives. You have even written an abecedarian poem after Kolatkar. Tell us about this dual relationship, both with Kolatkar as well as the mallige-sellers and the gatekeepers of the world.
When poet and friend Saranya Subramanian first heard the “Alphabet” poem I wrote, after Kolatkar, at a public reading, I remember she said that she found Kolatkar “everywhere”, even in my introduction to the reading. This is an occupational hazard of being a poet, no? We are obsessive to the point of being annoying. Reading Kolatkar’s poems, I learnt how to write. Really. There’s no other way to put it. Kolatkar was a revelation for me: when I encountered his writing as an undergraduate student at St Xavier’s College, especially the Kala Ghoda poems. Imagine, if you could, a young boy reciting Shakespeare’s “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” to a beloved, or to some random person – but in the tropical heat of Bangalore or Mumbai. That was the kind of poetry I cut my teeth on! Flowery to the point of being detached from reality. If Shakespeare was one pole of influence, the Romantics were another.
But Kolatkar wasn’t melodramatic or unnecessarily sentimental. He never used words for effect – not one word more, not one word less. He wrote with the formal finesse of bus ticket text, and catalogue, invoice or calendar inventories (Arvind Krishna Mehrotra refers to this impulse as “art by invoice”). He wrote about “ordinary” things with phantasmagoric certainty – his mythic references only served to deepen the everyday, by folding it into the ordinary. Thus, the “extraordinary” city was nothing but another facet of the ordinary city. Nobody has written about Bombay (in English) and Mumbai (in Marathi) the way Kolatkar has written about the city, and while commentators, including Anjali Nerlekar and Laetitia Zecchini, have identified his writing as writing about the “subaltern” and the “marginalised”, I believe he is doing something far deeper. This is my reading. The “characters” in Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda poems showcase “main-character” energy – in the way that Kolatkar has “voiced” them. They are not envisioned the way we envision working-class heroes, or marginalised characters. They are not simply on the periphery; they are the main characters. More than that, they exist in an inventory of humans, animals and birds, and things that are all on the same level. This is a flat ontology. It is this quality of Kolatkar’s writing in Kala Ghoda poems that is deeply compelling to me. While “characters” are central to my understanding of the world – these characters are present across place and object. Sometimes people are metaphorised into an animal instinct – don’t we call people “catty”? Or “foxy”? But I sense the human even in plants, chairs, and rubble. These have fluid genders, emotions, and even intention, I would argue. This is the “working space” (to cite Frank Stella) of the poet – it is in these visions and experiences that the subjects of the real come alive, as subjects of poetry.
The city lives in each character from the Kala Ghoda poems. I grew up in Bombay, and I roamed the streets of Fort every evening when I read Kolatkar (Chitre, Eunice De Souza, Jussawalla, Surve, Dhasal and Mehrotra) for the first time. I used to believe that good poetry was about “nature” or about “mystical” things. But Kolatkar’s poems gave me permission – they said I could speak about the quotidian things that were a part of my life. There is drama and magic, even in these characters, things, and places that are my own. That’s all there is to it…
Apart from this, I must say that I sometimes have the most beautiful conversations with the dead. Living poets can be annoying – sometimes imposing their ideas on you. Dead poets – whatever your disagreements with them – allow you to continue the argument with them forever. I disagree a lot with Kolatkar’s poems, and sometimes even his own assessments of them, and of the world he lived in. But sometimes I also find answers in his poems, that he might have distorted, if I knew him, and went up to him, and asked him. I am certain of this. So, as Eunice would have it, I am glad to have met him in his poems.
What were some of your expectations as well as worries as a debut poet?
I was worried about encountering what one commentator on X called “the great silence” after publishing a first book. When I used this term while describing the feeling that comes after the initial hype around the publication – the “silence” experienced by the poet – they nodded gravely. After the book is published – it just lies there dormant. No critical or creative engagement, no reviews, or sales, nothing. I see poetry as a way of reaching out, connecting with another – communication and community. In my experience, poetry has resolved into profound comradeships that have changed me in unimaginable ways. Naively, perhaps, I expect that my debut collection will broaden such aesthetic associations, such comradeships in poetry. If you ask me, this is the singular impulse that drives most of my writing – to be able to say what I wanted to say, and to hear another exclaim – “I have felt this too”. Sometimes the best response to a new poem is also simply a quiet nod of acknowledgement – no comments about craft, or construction, no critique or praise, just a spontaneous expression of shared feeling.
But your question also makes me think about what it means to be a (debut) “poet”. I think it was in Wislawa Szymborska’s Nobel acceptance speech that I found an explanation for my early reluctance to identify as a “poet”. She cites the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky as one of the only poets she knew who carried this label with pride. He enjoyed calling himself a poet. But I used to be like the other poets she spoke about – the ones who looked at this “identity” with suspicion and scepticism. As a child, I used to believe that one couldn’t call themselves a poet without being “published”. “Poet”, I believe, is the worst answer to that dreaded question: “What do you do?” That answer is usually followed by “Where can I read you? Are you published?”
When does an artist become an artist? Their first work? Their first “show” or “reading”? The first time their work is cited? Or their first award? The label of “debut collection” allows me to recognise this book as a kind of timestamp; a milestone in my journey of writing, which began when I wrote my first “unpublished” sonnet (and called it that), in primary school. Since the book contains poems written over the last 15 years, it curates an evolutionary arc. It has been conceptualised to reflect the tread of time. But it is also freeing – since in many ways more than a “debut work”, it is a “first book”. I feel like an opening batsman, on a difficult pitch, in some legendary overseas tournament like the Ashes – unfamiliar ground, unpredictable “readerly response”, but also the unimaginable excitement of first contact.
In the section “I cannot be a silent witness tonight”, you write about state violence among other things. What does the word “freedom” mean to you – both individually and politically?
“Freedom” for me is closely tied to “freedom of expression”, even the right to express. But another kind of freedom is deeper, and can never be taken away from us – the freedom of imagination. I am constantly aware that even this is a privilege. For many, their circumstances don’t allow them the sense of release that comes with being able to “speak out”. But in a social environment that is geared towards narcissism and stifling voices of dissent, even writing becomes an act of rebellion, of practising freedom. It does not matter if it is read or not – even describing a sensation or a feeling is a political act. The reason Amar Aziz’s poem “Sab Yaad Rakha Jaega” (Everything Will Be Remembered) became a rallying call for protest lies in the implicit truth of its call to action. Writing is remembering. From a very young age, I recognised this impulse – that I write to remember. To document. When other eyes collide with that documentation, it becomes more than a poem. Even that act of communion is freeing, is it not?
I have been fascinated with the idea of “witness”. I have not experienced varied kinds of trauma that are wrought upon different kinds of human and more-than-human subjects by the state, by caregivers, by majoritarian forces, even by those who are supposed to protect us. My own experiences have, of course, entered the realms of these poems. But more often than not, I have intuitively taken the position of a “sensitive witness”. By this, I mean, the articulation of a position of exteriority – when one is “witnessing” the world through the senses. Through writing these sensory feelings in different forms, a poet could allow words to soar on the currents of empathy and identify with a situation. This soaring also requires a kind of negation of the self. The self is reborn through the senses, but also through sensitivity. I have written into people, places, and happenings that have affected me deeply. About things that don’t directly affect me, I cannot write with any integrity. I have seen artists do this, too – and the lack of sensitivity is very visible, and that kind of writing turns me off.
After reading a poem I wrote about an experience that we shared, a friend once told me, “I now understand why you are a poet. You feel so deeply”. This is a double-edged sword, of course, and I could be accused of sentimentality (over craft, for instance). But who is to say which feeling is “right” or “wrong”? Still, I am cognisant of the dangers of being a sensitive witness. My poems are not meant to minimise the experience, or the freedom of the people, things or places that are found in them.
It is simply as you have cited – I cannot be a silent witness.
What considerations did you have to make while ordering your collection? Was it an intuitively straightforward decision to arrange the book in sections or did you come to the decision after some deliberation?
This collection has seen several iterations. The first version of this collection still sits in my digital archive as a set of 125 or so poems called “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. I made this compilation in 2017. And over the years – until around 2022, it evolved into a different kind of shortlist – with most of the original poems in it, but structured according to theme. About a couple of years ago, I responded to a submission call and reworked the entire document, featuring multiple things I had written (and published in different places) in the last decade.
While making the first cut, back in 2017, the sections emerged almost organically – they also became a way of structuring ideas or domains of experience that interested me. I cannot claim to be a “love-poet” or a “political poet”, or even a “Bombay poet” – but many of my poems are seen as “love poems”, “political poems”, or even “urban poems”. Perhaps, then you could say that some of the sections contain alliances of theme, or for me, personally, are part of a series of poems written to a particular phenomenon, experience, or “event”. In this regard, some choices were natural and literally came to pass as chronological selections. In that sense, it was organic.
But often I ended up breaking both temporal and thematic rules I had set for myself while doing the final curation. Some poems find themselves next to each other for no apparent reason – but, such things as “sonic” resonance, formal equivalence, and relationships of “feeling” or ideology might be factors that contributed to the particular arrangement.
No choice is “loose”; everything is there, in that particular way, for a reason; whether that works or not for individual readers is another matter. But then, my ustād (the dhrupadiya Ustād Zia Fariduddīn Dāgar), he would always say to his audience, “Main tumhare liye nahi gaa raha hoon. Mera audience kahi aur baitha hai”. (I am not singing for you; my audience sits elsewhere). I agree with Ustād. It is not that you are not my audience, but you are not my first audience. The impulse to capture an image, or a scene with a camera, comes only after the heart frames it, right? For me, it is only after the imagination has found the language for it. That process is mysterious, and many times, the sound-images hurtle into the imagination, fully formed, the moment the image enters the ambit of my senses. And then if I don’t put down those words somewhere, even if it is in memory, I will go mad!
To circle back to your question about curation, then, the “worlds” of the poems demanded to be placed in a certain way. I merely did their bidding.
One of the things I appreciate in poetry, both as a practising poet and an editor, is the presence of local words and phenomena in poems. It says something about who we think our audience is. Tell us more about your choice of using multiple local words from different languages.
Like most people who grow up in an urban space like Mumbai, I was exposed to multiple languages as a child. Even though Tulu is my “native” language, I grew up learning what a literary scholar once called “Street Marathi”. This is not untrue; I know many languages badly. I have realised that this has had a formative influence on the way I unconsciously play with syntax in English, as well. I’m an amateur polyglot. I’m fascinated by the ways in which one can mould language to problematise meaning and nous. I am particularly interested in the “names” of things and concepts, even ideas. So inevitably, to describe experience, in the most honest way possible, words from different languages seep in. As a translator, I realise the importance of precision. Using the precise word for a feeling, a sensation or even an idea, is natural, almost organic, for me. So much is lost in translation. Calling a “kamblipoochi” a “caterpillar” would not only be wrong, it would be a lie. Isn’t “underwear” bland and unimaginative when compared to “chaddi”? I could say the same of “nargis”, “firangipani”, or “angdāi” – many times these articulations are the ways I received the image, or the phenomenon. So, they were true, even before I wrote them down. This is related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – does language come before culture? Or the other way around?
Poetry is about truth, for me, but also about difference, and “breaking” form (a poem need not only mean one thing). Behind each “local” word is a mutable context of practice, life, and creative engagement. This is true, for example, of the many words that come from my talīm in dhrupad music – how to translate the name of a “raag” – “Bihāg”, or a particular musical movement – “mīnd”, without distorting and reducing it? I do not mind that a reader may not know these words. When I encounter words I am unfamiliar with, in poetry, I take it upon myself to reach the contextual background – the lifeworld – of that word or concept. There is so much joy in that discovery – even if it is only fragmented, and as an “outsider”. Similarly, I sometimes learn new things, or different usages, when the poems collide with readers who speak languages I do not know.
Let me illustrate with a recent example. The word “hao” emerges in the context of Gondi bhasha that I have heard in Narayanpur, Chattisgarhi, but also Dakhni (in Hyderabad and around). I have used this term across all these spaces in different contexts, exchanging both similar and different meanings. This has become a part of my own amalgamated vocabulary – and I use it regularly, without realising, in places other than the ones I mentioned above. But when a friend shared the poem on social media, I was thrilled to discover that a reader responded to my friend, saying, “Hao is Bundelkhandi. I use it literally every day!”
Look at that! Isn’t this absolutely beautiful? In some senses, this is, for me, the perfect anecdote for cultural translation – a poet’s dream.
I found it unique that instead of ekphrasis which is a more direct way in which a poet writes about how a work of art speaks to them, you have written “companion pieces” to Amit Dutta’s Finding Nainsukh and Phool ka Chhand. Tell us more about this approach of writing companion pieces and how it differs from ekphrastic poems.
I feel that the term ekphrasis has come to mean so many different things nowadays that sometimes, it feels like it means nothing at all. I am grateful that you noticed how my poems to Amit Dutta’s films are different from “ekphrastic” poetry. I am dissatisfied with simply responding to, or describing, “art” or life”. I believe firmly in the notion of writing into, not writing about. When writing into his films, I was writing a space that allowed his camera, and his pen, to interact with the artist Nainsukh – his life and (art)work, the art historian BN Goswamy, and the musician Kumar Gandharva. In one of the poems, I describe how birds that came to sit on the AC panel, outside my window, suddenly went quiet when they heard the birdsong in Dutta’s film. I swear, after a few seconds of silence, they responded to those birds, and punctuated the pauses in the audio with their queries. It was a moment of epiphany, truly, and I paused the film and wrote that poem.
The “art-poems” in this book (including the “music” ones) are not merely a response to the art – they document a moment in life, and a perspective that finds it impossible to separate the work of art from everyday life. Why should there be a separation? In writing into art, I see myself as another knot in a silver chain, another artist, in a palimpsest that spreads across space and time – another listener in an eternal conversation. I shared these poems with Amit Dutta when I wrote them, and he echoed this impulse in his spirited response. It was beautiful, also, to see how poetry and art flowers in this kind of friendship – a friendship of ideas and aesthetic engagement.
I have learnt from poets like Ranjit Hoskote, Adil Jussawalla, Karthika Nair (particularly Until the Lions), Ruth Padel (particularly Beethoven Variations), even Wislawa Szymborska and Keats, whose works have taught me to read the world creatively like them. But the different hues in these writings have also taught me to disagree with them. I write into art with this sensibility – of an individual who is working within a “tradition” of writers and artists that “witnessed”, and turned their testimony into art. But the tradition evolves, and my poems simply provide another timestamp in that journey of evolution.
I have one bone to pick with you as a reader. We don’t see a lot of Aranya, the person, in your book. We see what Aranya, the poet, loves and places his acute and affectionate attention on. Would you say there is a tendency to evade or absent or mute the “I” as opposed to the other, or do you think that’s a misplaced claim?
I think that is a misplaced claim, yes. Part of my answer lies in the question. The “I” need not be placed in opposition to the other. But even before we go there, I think, perhaps it is important to address the fact that our ways of looking at the persona and the poetic self might be different. This difference is interesting to me, of course. I believe that the “I” is ever-present in these poems, even if it is not always underlined by the first-person pronoun. Though it is right at the forefront of many poems. There are things I’ve said in these poems that I have never had the courage to say out loud in public – things about myself, but also how I see or feel about other “types” of people, other things.
But the larger question you are asking – about the tendency to evade or absent or “mute” the “I” is particularly interesting. I do not see it as a “muting”. There is definitely a “vanishing”, even if it is not always deliberate. Sometimes when I write, I like to distance myself from the activity by first writing the “character” that is experiencing the thing – a kind of exteriority emerges in this. It is not deliberate; rather, it is natural. It is easier to be vulnerable when one has poetry to disguise truth as testimony.
It’s like in a relationship, if a lover would tell me – “You tell me all these stories, these vivid recollections, and ideas, these films, and texts that you love, even the things that affect you. But where are you in these stories?” But the stories are me! Each character, each thing, and each place rises up like music in my throat as I assert this. We are what we see, hear, smell, and feel. I am every film I’ve loved, every person I’ve met, every place I’ve visited. I take on that colour. I vanish into the folds of that experience – is there any other way to feel? Isn’t this also, perhaps, a kind of empathy?
This ties back to the notion of the “sensitive witness”, too. I developed this articulation of this positionality of the poet, only in the last two or three years, while studying the poetry of Arun Kolatkar – the poet who, more than anybody, I would deem an influence, or an “inspiration”. I think of Kolatkar as a “vanishing poet” – as one who vanished from his own poems. When a commentator asked him about religion, he said he did not need to take a position about it “one way or another”. And I agree with him. One just has to read his poems to understand his “politics”.
But why even seek to understand his “politics”? I think we live in an age where the “self” is weaponised into opinion and discord far too quickly. We like to put ourselves out there on display. This is fine, it is a personal choice – but sometimes I like to hide. I do not want the reader to be distracted from what I am saying because of the cult of my own personality. I believe all writing to be autobiographical and it is impossible to erase the self from one’s poetry. But I am wary of the poet or the artist who makes the claim of being a “political” poet. More often than not, it is a question of identity politics – and I respect the claim that comes from that space. The “I” is central to such claims – we see this in the poems of Kamala Das, Meena Kandasamy, Namdeo Dhasal, Lal Singh Dil, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, or even Goretti Venkanna and Gadar. These are poets and bards who have inspired my own “voice”. But I cannot speak with the same voice, because my experiences have not galvanised my identity in that way.
The literary critic who imprisons the speaking “I” of the political self with explanation or “context”, in my opinion, compromises the mysteries and nuances of the feeling, sensing, and moving “I”. That “I” can only be spoken of by describing the poetry, not by saying, “perhaps this is what the poet meant, or “this is why they said this, or even “this is why they used this form”. There is a place for interpretation, of course, but it must stay away from the controlling aesthetics of providing answers. Let us leave that to the academics and the scholars. Our poems are meant to open up the avenues of imagination, our art seeks to soar above the self, and alight on more verdant and expansive shores, does it not?
There is a place for relating the life of the poet to the writing. But I am not sure how I relate to that place either. A very dear artist friend – Ravi Kashi – had created an artist’s book called “Experiments With Truth” (after Gandhi, perhaps) that parodied the notion of “artist profiles and stories”. He took images of himself dressed up as different kinds of people (a watchman, a policeman, a teacher etc.), and short autobiographical sketches accompanied each image.
Artists and poets are experts at creating narratives about themselves. It is good if those narratives are recognised as narratives; that is all I will say.
