Beginning her career as a journalist when she was merely a student, Menka Shivdasani has certainly made a mark on the literary world with her poetry books such as Nirvana At Ten Rupees (1990), Stet (2001), Safe House (2015) and finally Frazil (2018). She has also been a powerful voice in the development of a woman and poet in the ever-evolving Indian society.
At the mere age of 16, she went to Nissim Ezekiel’s office to seek advice from the founding father of post-independence Indian anglophone poetry. She has grown to be one of the finest poets and artists alongside Ranjit Hoskote, Anju Makhija, Jerry Pinto, Vijay Nambisan, Jeet Thayil and many others.
She is also the co-translator of Freedom and Fissures- an anthology of Sindhi Partition Poetry, and editor of a SPARROW anthology of women's writing. She has also collaborated with the senior Sindhi writer Mohan Gehani on bilingual books of his poetry.
She has edited two anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry for the American ezine www.bigbridge.org. In addition to this, she is the Mumbai coordinator of the global movement, 100 Thousand Poets for Change. In 1986, she played a key role in founding the Poetry Circle in Mumbai. Menka is currently Co-Chair, of Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT).
Her four-decade-long career as a journalist and columnist includes a stint with the South China Morning Postin Hong Kong, columns for Hindu Business Line and The Pioneer, articles in The Times of India and Readers’ Digest, and 18 books, co-authored/ edited with Raju Kane, three of which were released by the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Her awards include awards include WE Eunice de Souza Award and the Ethos Literary Award.
Karina Pandya Talks with contemporary poet Menka Shivdasani.
1) 1) What prompted you to become a poet?
It happened quite naturally. When I was eight, I would compose verses on imaginary people and pets, the sea and other subjects. By the time I had completed school, I had three notebooks filled with verses, all of them in rhyme. I had these books for many years, but they have vanished now. Unlike painting, which would involve working on canvas, writing required nothing but imagination, which I had in abundance, and paper and pencil, which were always accessible.
2) Which authors did you like to read as a child and young adult?
I read everything I could get my hands on, from the books at the local library to the English textbooks that my older brothers brought home. Enid Blyton was a favourite, and her books made me dream of going to boarding school. I read recently that her work has sold more than 600 million copies; in June 2019, she held a fourth place as the most-translated author, in ninety languages. I’m quite sure I devoured all 21 books of her series, The Famous Five!
As a teenager, I read Ayn Rand and James Michener; Michener’s novel The Drifters made quite an impact as it followed the lives of young people from different parts of the world who travelled together, facing various challenges. In my teens, these journeys in which the youngsters were trying to understand themselves and figure out where they were going, resonated, with everything from the Vietnam War to drug addiction and sexual assault forming part of the story. Looking back, I think this book subconsciously encouraged me to travel around Europe by myself in my mid-20s. This was an age before mobile phones, the Internet or social media. I knew no one there but was sure I would meet people I could connect with.
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse was also quite the cult novel in my time, and took me on a different journey, inwards.
Then there was a book I picked up off the pavements at Flora Fountain for ten rupees – Turning On - One Woman’s Trip Beyond LSD Through Awareness-expansion without the Use of Drugs. Gustaitis explored Gestalt Therapy, Zen, Meditation, Hip Communes, Brain-Wave Self Control and much more, travelling to various places to describe her experiences and the people she met, including “normal neurotics” like herself. For many years, I wanted to write a similar book, travelling across India, but to my deep regret, this never happened.
I also read a great deal of poetry – Wordsworth, Longfellow, Shelley, Byron, Keats – and later several others, including Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and all the brilliant Indian writers who were claiming and reclaiming English as their own language, adapting it to an Indian tongue.
3) How did you begin writing poetry?
As I mentioned earlier, it happened quite naturally, and I continued to write prolifically throughout my childhood, from the age of eight. At 16, I met the Training Officer of the Times of India, Patanjali Sethi, who read my work and gave me a letter addressed to Nissim Ezekiel.
It was exactly at this time, in the mid-1970s, when I first opened my eyes to contemporary Indian writing in English, that the Clearing House poets’ collective began. The fresh, vibrant writing of these poets and their poetry greatly influenced me at the time. I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time.
4) Which was the most challenging book that you have written?
Every book poses a different challenge – in terms of the writing, of course, and then its onward journey through the publishing process and getting it out to the world. I suppose my first book was the most challenging, though, since I never wrote intending to publish. It was Nissim Ezekiel who kept asking me, a few years after we first met, why I was not publishing my work. I told him I would when I felt ready, but it was a good ten years after I met him that I finally felt I could do this. This later proved to be the average time between my books, though, between my second and third, the gap was 14 years! It has been more than five years since Frazil and I have been working on a new manuscript for some two years now.
In the end, these books are very slim, nothing like the huge tomes that I sometimes do for clients – books that have nothing to do with poetry. When I put these books together with my poetry collections, I realised the slimmest books among the lot were the ones that actually took the most out of me!
5) Who inspires you as a poet and literary figure?
Where do I begin? I learned a great deal about the importance of craft from Nissim Ezekiel. Many poets inspired me – among them, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, Keki Daruwalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Imtiaz Dharker – the poets who paved the way for us to write in English today. This generation of poets had to deal with the absurd question that constantly came up – why do you write in English and not your mother tongue? The poets of this generation did not use borrowed language; they adapted it to suit the Indian ethos and experience.
As a young writer, I went through a Sylvia Plath phase (Imtiaz Dharker laughed when I told her this years ago and asked, ‘Didn’t we all?’). Maya Angelou is another writer I have found inspiring.
I wouldn’t say I ever tried to write like any of them. The whole point of writing is to find your own voice, which is a lifelong journey.
6) Do you have any plans, such as publishing a book or editing in the future?
I have been working on retelling the Sindhi folk tales in my voice as a poet, and hopefully, this will become a book soon. I am also working on a manuscript of my other poems. At the moment, I do not have enough for either book that I would be happy to see published, and because the style of writing and themes are completely different, I cannot bring them together in one collection. Hopefully, this year, I will complete them both.
7) What advice would you give to a young poet?
I find everyone is in too much of a hurry to publish these days – and not just young people. With so many options available, including self-publishing, people bring out their work before it is ready to go public.
I would also say that as a poet, it is fine and sometimes necessary to break the rules. But first, you must know what the rules are, and this involves reading work by other poets.
8) How do you feel about the current poetic situation with open-mics prevalent?
I started Poetry Circle in 1986 with Nitin Mukadam and Akil Contractor because I believed poetry and poets needed all the spaces they could find. I am happy to see that so many spaces have opened up now, including open mics, which give everyone a chance and allow them to speak about issues that matter. Through all this, as always, true talent will be recognised, even though this might not always happen as quickly as one would like.
Comments
Post a Comment