MATCHBOX

Basudhara Roy, author of three books of verse and nurturer of fellow poets through her regular online guftar sessions, grapples with universal questions: if Stitching A Home (Red River 2021) deals with identity through place and culture, then broadly speaking, the poems in Blur of a Woman (Red River 2025) could be interpreted as dealing with identity (and non-identity) through gender, gendered work and a feminine experience of love.  However, this is over-simplistic, for the many and various poems and their themes deserve detailed analysis and multiple readings.  In order to help me decipher them thoroughly, I decided to write to Basudhara, asking her to clarify some of my thoughts. The following interview is organised according to  particular themes that seem to run through several poems in the collection, though these poems may be placed in different sections of the book itself.

On Talking To Trees 

Tansy Troy : In your very first poem of the new collection, you describe how you ‘have long spoken to trees to know/that every trunk yields in compassion.’

Intriguing as this concept is to me, my first question is a technical one- where do you choose when to begin and end a poetic line- by how it gets physically written on the page?  By how it looks when it’s typed?  Or by where the breath ends when you read it aloud?

Basudhara Roy : You know, Tansy, I feel that I have been through all these three phases of deciding how to work with line-break in a poem. I have moved on from considering a line as a single unbroken unit of thought, to breaking a line visually by its black length on the white page, to breaking it in terms of both dramatic intensity and breath-length. From being a routine technical necessity, the decision on line-break has gradually become to me a vital avenue of establishing the poem’s intended flow, and thereby, of setting its distinct tone and mood.

In working with the ghazal, I do try to keep a reasonably strict track of my syllables in deciding my line-length but out of the ghazal-form, my attention is preoccupied by the readability of a poem and by how easy or difficult its transferability and play of meaning become on the tongue with any particular process of breaking lines. If a particular method of line-breaking offers me both suspense and fluidity, that is my happy choice. 

Of late, this has been accomplished for me by the ear rather than by the eye, and by observing the tongue’s muscular glides in articulating the lines of a poem. If the phonological movements feel encumbered or contrived in any way, that is my beeping indicator that the line-break needs to be re-envisaged.

TT: I love how in ‘Choosing God’, you speak of how ‘Grandfather prayed to the sun/Grandmother to a tree,’ and how you yourself prayed to the fragrant magic of the scent of a sandalwood box.

Do you feel the traditional polyphony of faiths and the mutual acceptance of the many paths to god is undergoing a radical shift in contemporary India?  The gods really do seem to be running ‘pell-mell seeking refuge’ at a time when worship of particular predominant cults seems to be erasing the personal and idiosyncratic.  Would you say this has always been the case or are we loosing, rather than choosing our gods?

BR : I think you have put that last line with great poetic poignancy! Yes, we are ‘losing our gods’ and this loss will, for many, not manifest itself until we have come to a dead-end. 

When I reflect on my (Jharkhandi-Bengali-Hindu) childhood, the one thing that I remember as common to all our households was the presence of an elaborate ‘pujoghor’ (worship room/worship corner) which no matter how tiny or cramped, was always marked by the visibility of an array of deities. Crowding the shelves would be photographs and paintings; terracotta, clay, stone, marble and brass figurines, as well as books and hand-written paper inscribed with mantras, totems, and astrological configurations representing a host of deities–human, animal, spirit, natural element and so on. If you cared to know, the household elders had a story about each of these gods and how their power came to be recognized and worshipped. In the cultural matrix that surrounded us, it was possible for anything and everything to be deified and there would be shells, cowries, leaves, flowers, grass, water, pieces of ribboned cloth, bangles, vermillion, turmeric, sandalwood, incense, fruits, sweets, vegetables, and currency happily jostling with each other and with surrounding divinities as divine. 

Under such conditions, it was very difficult to deny the sanctity of any object. As children, we made our way gently through such worship rooms/niches lest we should disturb or defile something and earn thereby the vengeful ire of some remote god. 

Today, there is an abject disappearance of that diverse culture of godhood. The upsurge of radicalism with its insistence on a monolithic version of religion and a rigid godhead has deprived us of the freedom and necessity of personal experiments in faith. To receive a religion without the right to explore the various dimensions of faith can, in my opinion, only be tremendously self-defeating.

TT : And to lead on from this, as women writers, is there a certain universal goodness/goddess which protects against these vicious times?  As you say,   

‘It’s not three or five circles that I hold.

My circles are manifold like a tree.’

BR : Well, essentialist as this may sound, I firmly believe that the particular structure of women’s bodies and their biologically and historically scripted roles allow them greater opportunities to participate in and reflect upon the psycho-spiritual domains of existence. The cyclical nature of women’s activities and occupations helps to keep them away from the linearity of motion that, in a patriarchal world, stands for growth and progress. Women’s language derived from their understanding of a co-terminus self has the potential to offer a new world of cultural signification. All this can act as a counter-perspective and if, responsibly fleshed out, a counter-philosophy to a self-destructive capitalist and radical mode of being and living in the world. The universal goodness/goddess in us is this knowledge of being different and of being differently abled, along with the conviction that without this epistemic difference that we bring to the table, the world would be a poorer place.

On Technology And The Process Of Writing/Dreaming:

TT : Basudhara, you write in ‘Beyond Mourning’ that ‘Already there are too many holes in memory’s bag’ but that ‘…however sapped a sieve, not all can exeat.’

Do you feel the rapid invasion of digital language and response is erasing poetic culture?  Is the internet invading our dreams?  Can the parts of our brains that deal with subtle nuance, that retrieve deep symbols and conjure premonitions survive the onslaught of multiplatform/screen existence?  How important is it for the poet in all of us to ‘press off’ and sink back into ‘the womb of night’ in order to begin dreaming a different future to the one which seems is being pre-prepared for humanity by the multi-nationals and dictators of our current world?  

BR : One of the greatest complaints that I have against technology, Tansy, is that it has greatly altered our perception of time. Technological advancements have gate-crashed upon Time’s sacred domain and have contracted it like never before. While the fact that there is an enormous amount of work being done in little or negligible time has been a singular achievement for mankind, it has also pitted the human badly and unfavourably against the machine. Humans, at all levels and in all domains of work are being expected to perform with mechanistic speed and perfection and this unreasonable pace of activity is dearly taking its toll on our sense of being. 

All humans and not just poets and artists need refuge in themselves. They should have the opportunity to respond to the need for solitude, to step back from the necessity to perform like machine sans reflection and sans revaluation of their performance. A culture that measures performance in terms of material output will not be able to relate to the complex processes of mental work that make creative envisioning and critical thinking possible.

That said, I think technology has buttressed the human imagination in inconceivable ways. It has brought the world into the sanctuary of our minds, drawing our attention to things that we might have lived and died on earth without knowing. The potential of the internet to enhance human creativity is immense but to lose, however, our self-awareness in it would be deeply tragic.

On The Fabric Of Vision

TT : I love how in the poem ‘How I give myself away’ you exemplify how both a sari and a woman can be divided and diminished in so many subtle ways that she is in the end, anonymous and used, discarded.  Cloth, like life, can wear and tear and the images of the rain making ‘running stitches’ in the ‘soiled chemise’ of air in ‘Ubiquity of Death’; and ‘the pandiculation of a city…pleating itself/weary like a century-old sari’ are beautiful descriptions of this very fact.  Tell us more about your relationship to fabric.  Which are your favourite handloom pieces, are there any heirloom shawls or saris you particularly treasure?  What are their stories?

BR : When I look around me for material for my poetry, it is the fabric of the everyday world that strikes me, again and again, as most insistently poetic. One is struck by how ordinary things begin and end, a process that is inevitably always far from ordinary. 

In our households, for instance, clothes have a distinct afterlife. After they have ceased to function as clothes, they are sorted fabric-wise and put to a variety of secondary and tertiary uses. Cotton fabrics have the busiest afterlives and soft, well-worn cotton sarees would be in great demand to turn into rags for innumerable domestic purposes. It, somehow, kept reminding me of how women’s work was never over. To put it Donne’s way, even when they were done, they could never be done and no matter how weak and diminished they became, there would be some particular chore that was just right for them.

Fabrics and cotton fabrics, in particular, hold a deep appeal for me. Their tactile feel gives me a sense of assurance in my daily negotiations with the world. With the right fabric under my fingers, I feel that I can conquer the world. I do not wear sarees very often and own only a handful but these few are very dear to me. A couple of them belong to my maternal grandmother and every time, I drape myself in one of them, I feel I can see things just the way she might have seen them had she lived. 

Sringara

TT : One of my favourite poems in the collection, one that jumped straight off the page and danced with me is ‘Lalita Speaks.’  It reminded me quite a lot of my own ‘Hibiscus Sutra’ (in With Earth as My Witness) in as much as it retells a sacred myth from a feminine perspective, delighting in the bliss of the universal, ecstatic love so hard to define, yet so powerful and motivating.

How does the rasa of sringara permeate your own life?  How necessary is it for you as a poet to be empowered by its flood?

BR : I am so grateful for these beautiful words for ‘Lalita Speaks’. The poem grew in a moonlit forest of its own making and to know that it might have invited and admitted a sahridaya into its world, gives me immense creative gratification. The Radha-Krishna discourse with its dense fabric of sringara, becomes a starting point for several of my poems. 

As a woman and poet, the sringara rasa speaks very evocatively to me. It has royal monarchy over so much of my creative imagination andallows me the immense privilegeof participating in a reality that though immanent, forever lies beyond accessibility. It is not until I am involuntarily beckoned or ushered into it that it opens itself to me in all its riot of feeling and splendour of epiphany, urging me to find a language that will give urgent expression to this effusive diffusion of joy.

In sringara, I re-discover each time, a vibrant and inalienable intimacy between self and world. It is a powerful realization of human vitality manifesting through nature’s timeless rhythms and the possibility of finding stillness, harmony and beautyin existence despite all the chaos that deafens us. 

Eco-justice

TT : Before I begin asking the next question, I’m going to quote some of your lines back at you, Basudhara:

‘The rich are buying rivers in anticipation of wars/between the high and low-born an elite of water.’

Tell us more about how possible it is for poetry to make a case for Earth at this time of such manifest social and eco injustice.

BR : I think one of the greatest powers of poetry is its ability to see and show things in a new light–to cull attention for the neglected, and empathy for the disregarded and misunderstood. Poetry will always have the strength and ability to battle hostile forces of oppression by insisting upon the naturalness of kindness and softness in a difficult world.

When poetry sets out to address ecological injustice, it does this by its distinct method of truth-telling which whether realistic, fantastic, ironic or sarcastic, establishes the integrity of a vision where nothing is small or insignificant enough to be worth losing. Poetry that allies itself with nature, allies itself with a highly sensitive consciousness and conscience that register even the most minute readings on the psycho-moral barometer. To register these movements and to build upon what they signify for our civilization becomes poetry’s most committed task so that anyone who holds a poem in the hand or in the heart will, voluntarily or involuntarily, receive the colour of its vision. Poetry can, thus, play a vital role in endowing readers with new ways of seeing and establishing their identity with the natural world,

On The Sufferance Of A Poem

TT : ‘Six Ways to Kill a Poem’ (presumably inspired by Edwin Brock?) is both dark & funny and scary all at the same time.  Though it provides an incentive to poets never to give up, I wondered as I read whether it could equally well be named ‘Six Ways to Kill a Poet’!  

BR : You got that! The poem is as much about the killing of a poem as about the killing of the poet or one could say, about the murder of art in general!

TT : Would you say that you have personally endured ‘silencing’ or even vilification as female poet?  How aware/ influenced by/concerned are you about the silencing of many documentary journalists, both within India and internationally?

BR : There can be no denying, even by the most uninformed and naïve, that we are living in an international political system where both art and the artist are deeply suspect. They are feared for being governed by a vision that lies beyond the comprehension of contemporary structures of power and leadership, and for taking their cues of accomplishment from ideologies that lie beyond capitalistic consumerism. Art is feared for its fearlessness to countenance and proclaim the truth of the world as it sees it and the artist for undying allegiance to art. Under such circumstances, every regime wants to begin its siege of power by crushing art and the artist so that there is no truth-telling, no witness to atrocities done, and no record for public memory in art. 

As a poet and a woman poet, I have often found myself being undermined by the suggestion that what I speak of in poetry may not be of any importance, that it is pointless to interrogate gender inequality as a subject, that the Woman Question is passe, and that my poems lack a political consciousness. In general, it is common to consider women’s poetry as a category in itself, a kind of bracketing that weakens the reception of women poets’ work as ‘poetry’ and their political arguments as ‘women’.

TT : ‘Aid to Forgetting’ is another example of dark humour in which you unrepentantly hold up the mirror of truth to those who would advise us to ‘take a sedative and move on’.  To what extent is collective amnesia and deliberate cultural erasure impacting on the secret lives of poets in India at this time?

BR : I think it needs a lot of grit, not just to write poetry but also, to be a poet in times such as the ones we are living through. For me, to ‘be’ a poet is to constantly attempt to ‘live out’ one’s truth. It is almost impossible to separate poetry from life because one relentlessly feeds the other. To be a poet is both to recognize one’s limitations, and to try to overcome them. It is both to recognize amnesia and the need to counter it through memory.

I think poets are fortunate to have the support of the tricky terrain of language. A great deal of poetry’s strength lies in being able to service language to its multi-pronged enterprise of ‘telling the truth slant’. Poetry can deftly function between establishment and anarchic revolution as a form of witnessing and consciousness-raising. It can be innocuous and dissident, transparent and opaque, light and hammer-like. As a poet, my constant attempt is to harness poetry’s multiple paradoxes to the ends of beauty and fearless truth-telling.

TT : And finally, I loved ‘Notes on Arrival’, which for me was a perfect last poem.  What’s your process for choosing the first and last poem in a collection?  And how long does organising the flow take as compared to the writing and gathering of the poems themselves?

BR : In fact, ‘Notes on Arrival’ had been the first poem in my first draft of this manuscript but as I visioned and re-visioned the arrangement, certain things underwent a gradual change. 

Organising the flow of poems takes me a long while and unlike the writing and gathering of poems,this decision involves many negotiations. The first idea is to survey one’s own work with a critical eye and to make an inventory of themes handled in the collection. When arranging poems, it is often common to place them under thematic clusters but I have my own suspicions about the efficacy of such a strategy. I am almost always agonising over choosing commonality over variety and vice-versa. I have not managed, as yet, to come to any conclusion but I deeply fear being too banal or predictable in my arrangement. Just like in a rhymed poem, one has to be very conscious about one’s choices of rhyme so as not to be too predictable, in arranging a collection of poems, one must be conscious about maintaining a certain level of dramatic tension within the volume. Poems that speak to each other thematically should not be allowed to follow one another in close succession lest they should lose their individuality and converge in an indistinguishable thematic unit. 

The space between one poem and another is a space of recovery and self-discovery. It should be distinct, distinguishable, and drawn with clear lines so that it can hold the reader’s associations and reflections. Spaces between poems cannot afford to be homogeneous if the dramatic tension of a collection is to be kept up.

As for the first and last poems in a collection, I have believed that the first poem should be capable of a gentle beckoning and the last should be able to enact courteous closure. In the case of Blur, I had chosen to end with ‘Orison’ first but because the book had, in a way, begun with the dedication to Keki Daruwalla, it seemed apt to me to end with the poem I had written for him.

All said and done, I think that once the poems in a book get their arrangement, they grow into it happily like grass!