While reading an anthology of Marathi women’s poetry titled Aahvan: Maharashtra Raajyachya Nirmitinantarchya Kalalatil Nivdak Stri Kavitecha Pratinidhik Sangrah edited by Vijaya Sangvai and Shirish Pai (1990), I was stuck by two interconnected but curious facts. The first one was that Malika Amar Sheikh (1956) who happened to be the youngest in the group of thirteen women poets was the only one who can be labeled as ‘modernist’ in terms of sensibility, style and expression. I noticed that she introduced an urbanized sensibility, a cosmopolitan world view and modernist avant-garde idiom to women’s poetry in Marathi with her collections like Valucha Priyakar (1979), Deharutu (1999), Mahanagar (1999) and Māṇūsapaṇācā bhiṅga badalalyāvara (2007). She did to Marathi women’s poetry, what BS Mardhekar (1909-1956) did to Marathi poetry in general: it exploded both the conventional romantic idiom and rather obvious and flat social realism to introduce new voice of urbanized despair, cosmopolitanism, avant-garde experimentation, existentialist darkness and utterly hybridized and maverick diction. While the second curious fact was that while I was aware of the chronological variation in inauguration of modernisms in various Indian languages (for instance, in Bangla it would be in the nineteen thirties, in Marathi it would be mid nineteen forties and in Gujarati it would be somewhere in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties), I was stuck by the time gap of modernisms across genders in the same language like Marathi. This time-gap brings to the fore the patriarchal social context of modernisms in India and also underlines the gender as a critical category in analysis of modernism in India. The feminist critique of modernism in the west and its canon have focused on what Bonnie Kime Scott terms as ‘the unconsciously gendered masculine’ in its selection of authors, styles and concerns . This applies to the Indian versions of modernism as well.
It is possible to read Malika Amar Sheikh as representing Indian modernism which is a distinctive type of modernism .This distinctiveness can be found in what the Czech comparative scholar Dionyz Dursin (1984) terms as the ‘interliterariness’ of a special kind. Her works belong to the international modernist movements, and shares some of its basic features like the metropolitan background, impact of Euro-American avant-gardes, little magazine movements, the themes of alienation, sexual agony, myths, existential angst, rebellion against the middle-class values, cultural decadence and the desire to invent a tradition and so on. Moreover, it also exhibits its affinities with other modernist poets on the Indian subcontinent too like critical engagement with the questions of caste, religion and gender repression in India.
Deploying theorization about ‘interliterariness’ of Dionyz Durisin for analysis of Indian literatures, modernism in India can be understood as an interliterary phenomenon. The western avant-garde modernist literature combined with the avant-garde literature in other Indian languages overlapped to produce the Indian version of the international modernist movement. However, the literary resemblances were not merely due to ‘contactual’ relationships but also due to ‘analogical and typological parallels in many social processes like urbanization, industrialization and the global catastrophic events like the world war II. The distinctive history of the subcontinent also created a ground for the reception of the international modernist movement.
Malika Amar Sheikh’s verse seems to be compatible with Chris Baldick’s definition of modernism discussed earlier in many ways. However, her poetics and politics are deeply informed by feminist thoughts, Dalit and working class movements in Maharashtra.
A typical Malika Amar Sheikh poem like ‘A Poem for a Dali Painting’ would reveal relationships with the western avant-garde movements like surrealism, expressionism and imagism; it would also reveal its links with disengagement with bourgeois values and cosmopolitan and urban sensibility. It is also a distinctively feminist poem.
—Earlier version published in Literary Insight (ISSN 0975-6248) Volume-7, January 2016, pp.102-107
A Poem for a Dali painting[2] These refusals Scattered everywhere These faces Pouring out of words This dead eyelash Everything is arid Even then, time is still alive Resting on it Dali’s watch still elongates The tongue of time Soaked and squirming Even then How come these black and red ants of desires Are still alive Who is alive? Time? Or is it us? Or is it this shapeless space? This throbbing of breath Or are we listening to the ticking of this watch Primitive millions of years ancient What is behind that huge eyelid? A watch A moment a silence Or a dead tear? —All translations are by Sachin C. Ketkar and are published on Poetry Sangam, Sangamhouse.org, Sangam House, Jan 2017, except otherwise indicated.
The poem, in terms of the themes, style and sensibility is markedly different on the one hand from typical ‘women’s problem’ social realist poems written by Marathi women poets and on the other hand marked differently from the Indira Sant- Shanta Shelke school of romantic lyricism. What sets it apart is its experimentalism which explicitly not only deploys surrealistic imagery and devices but is also a poetic meditation on Dali’s famous work “The Persistence of Memory”. It is valuable to see this assimilation of the western avant-garde idioms and vision, including feminist vision into Marathi is an ‘interliterary’ phenomenon, instead of seeing it as ‘influence’ because the term influence is marked by the hierarchy of the influencer and the influenced and takes away creative distinctiveness of modernist poetics on the subcontinent. The speaker in the poem refers to the dialectics of refusals and desire, death and life, time and timelessness. The poem ends with a rhetorical question about what is the actual mystery that lies behind the “huge eyelid” and points to the persistence of human suffering, silence and humanness of time. Her poem ‘Venus’ depicts a similar cosmopolitan and ‘interliterary’ sensibility. This modernist sensibility, however, is shaped by her radical feminist vision. Venus She doesn’t have arms Like me Her vision utterly dead She stands in a showcase Frozen stiff Like me With difficulty, She manages to cling To the rocky robes of culture Between her legs And stony lips Closed tight Like me Women in the cities melt Turn into statues of Venus A primeval woman Lets out a stony scream The city collapses At her feet Throwing the sky In disarray. The speaker in the poem identifies herself with the mythical goddess, portrayed as a helpless victim, handicapped, showcased and struggling to protect her dignity. The surreal vision of women in the cities melting and turning into statues of Venus is sinister. The primeval woman, the woman-within-woman, if not ‘essential’ woman, lets out a scream as the city which is the symbol of civilization collapses at her feet. Slavery of women and their primitive feminine self in the patriarchal structures will result in the collapse of the civilization itself. Primitivism of some form that emerges out of the image of ‘primeval woman’ is an important aspect of modernist art in the west. Loneliness and the angst is a common theme in her early poems like ‘Torrential, Grief-Stricken Tree of Loneliness’ that combines the surreal elemental imagery of the sky imagined as an enormous tortoise and the pervasive branching of grief and loneliness as a torrential tree: The Torrential, Grief-Stricken Tree of Loneliness The enormous tortoise of the sky Slides slowly The fluffy swabs of clouds Press against the drops of sunlight The torrential, grief-stricken tree of loneliness Grows inside me And the rains haven’t poured down yet One comes across the image of ‘ Primeval woman’ in another poem called ‘ Lush Green Girls’ (Trans. Niranjan Uzgare, Indian Literature, Sept-Oct 2000, p. 18- 19) which deals with the predicament of ‘ lush green girls’ and women, ‘ like the ripe apples eager to get sold’. The ‘lush green girls’ are ‘folded during the night/ they get up frightened at midnight and examine the wombs.’ The fear and exploitation of the patriarchal set up in a city terrify and ruin the natural ‘lush greenness’ of girls. In the last stanza of the poem, we find A primeval woman in the city Still shrieks, screams And gives birth To the same old brat Who tortures the city And is born again and again.
The same old brat of patriarchy, who is also accountable for destruction of the city and the civilization, is perpetually born to the ‘primeval woman’ who has to undergo the labour throes repeatedly. This theme of patriarchy destroying civilization because it destroys the ‘primeval woman’ is a significant one in Malika’s poetry. There is an interconnection between this primitivism, modernism and urbanization and the theorists like Monroe Spears explored this relationship in his book Dionysus in the City (1970).
Commenting on the significance of city to the modernist movement, Tew and Murray note, “Modernity is largely defined by urban experience and the city occupies Modernism’s centre stage.” In Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, Malcolm Bradbury argues that ‘In many respects the literature of experimental Modernism which emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century and developed into the present one was an art of cities’ (96).
The urban and cosmopolitan sensibility combines with the modernist device of startling juxtaposition in many of her poems in Mahanagar (the Metropolis). The sordid images from metropolitan life and combined to bring out the essential existential ‘fraud’ underlying the urban experience:
The Metropolis -3
A drowning sea
A patient suffering from venereal disease
A bored pair of spectacle
A black ugly form
You put all this together
And you have one big fraud
This existentialist angst, and surreal juxtaposition of startling and sordid images, which is typical of the modernist idiom, is rare in women’s poetry in Marathi. Most of Marathi poetry by women very often engages in a very obvious and flat style of ‘social realism’ and ‘women’s issues’ and turns out clichéd and boring.
Malika’s poetry, like her controversial autobiography Mala Udhvasta Hoichai (1984), translated by Jerry Pinto as I Want to Destroy Myself: A Memoir takes on the personal as political, though not without a comic and ironical tone, however as the following two later poems indicate:
Betrayal or What My Husband Feels Like all the husbands in the world My husband feels I love him a lot I don’t want to shatter his illusion Yet I don’t feel it is right for him To live with this illusion for his whole life In a careless moment of embrace I might tell him If I come across a more good-looking More intelligent More understanding man I might even have a fling with him Without hesitating The moment of ecstasy is a beautiful one Which men have commonly found To tell you the truth I would love to betray And I won’t even feel guilty about it later at all On the contrary I will love my husband more after that That he allowed me to betray Gave me an opportunity To have that rapturous moment An opportunity to prove my humanness. I would apply more ghee to his chapattis I would even read recipe books to find out How to make his favorite vegetables better Turn compassionate About his relatives I would become more aware Of the color of the curtains The interior design I will find greater intensity In Ravishankar’s notes Find deeper meanings and talk endlessly About Hussain’s paintings To even the clueless onlooker I will spend hours looking for my husband’s tie. With the joy of getting the right to sex Which nobody gets I will even spend the rest of my life happily Stupidly and senselessly In the four walls of domestic security In the husband’s warm embrace Remembering his breaths I will enjoy like a man The lovely betrayal Probably even my husband Would be remembering some other woman’s face Both of us in our illusions Like worms in the bad apple. Our faces would turn like those In Picassos paintings And the Pied Piper would be sitting and piping On the corner of the blank canvass of the domestic bed The musical procession of the world’s most beautiful swindle Would follow him And the violet love on the every bed Will take off its mask Let every woman get what she wants Amen. I Lick My Catness It was when I was in my husband’s embrace That all of a sudden I discovered I had turned into a cat The cat with soft fluffy fur And large sly eyes My large furry tail Knocked against my husband belly My sharp nails Cloaked in the soft pad Of my rose-tinted paws My sparkling fangs glinting I rolled happily on my back Contented My belly made purring sounds Of terrific pleasure Now I was the cat Who would unfailingly land on her all fours And return home Even if she was gathered in a sack And forsaken far away from the village I licked my husband’s ears, his cheek I wet my paws and licked his whole body clean As one would clean one’s home I hung around my husband’s feet I lapped up his kisses As I would lap up milk and cream These days he doesn’t stuff me in a sack And abandon me in the forest To get rid of me He is fed up As he is sure I would turn up Home before he would And besides, he felt That there was a greater chance Of him getting lost in the forest of people I would stretch out leisurely In the entire house ( No corner would be forbidden for me) I am loving my catness To the full He too likes it When I claw his clothes And rub my head against him He probably thinks It is better than other long-winded women Who would constantly nag For more money or jewellery For all that I would utter Was a single word, “Meow!” And be silent He pats me on my soft domesticated back As he continues to work My belly makes happy rumbling sounds In my husband’s warm sunlit shade I lick my catness
Considering Malika Amar Sheikh as a representative of Indian modernisms would allow us to analyze the phenomenon of modernism on the subcontinent in a fresh way. Using a comparative framework, it would allow us to discover striking parallels and convergences with the western modernist movements and the Indian ones. One would notice that the processes of urbanization, the avant-gardes, little magazine movements, the themes of alienation and disillusionment, sexual agony, uses of myths, existential angst, rebellion against the middle-class values, cultural decadence and the desire to invent a tradition and so on are strikingly similar to the western modernist movements. Moreover, it also exhibits its affinities with other modernist poets on the Indian subcontinent too like critical engagement with the questions of caste, religion and gender repression in India. It is far more fruitful to view these parallels as ‘interliterary’ process in Durisinan sense. The literary resemblances were not merely due to ‘contactual’ relationships but also due to ‘analogical and typological parallels in many social processes like urbanization, industrialization and the global catastrophic events like the world war II. The distinctive history of the subcontinent also created a ground for the reception of the international modernist movement. Durisin’s framework would allow us to engage with radically creative nature of Indian modernism instead of dismissing it as a merely derivative phenomenon. What sets Malika Amar Sheikh apart from other major modernist poets is lack of obsession with Bhakti, which is typical of others like Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre and Mardhekar in Marathi. This refreshing lack of enthusiasm for Bhakti tradition can be attributed to her engagement with Dalit, feminist and the Marxist politics which are suspicious of feudal and patriarchal subtexts of traditionalism of Bhakti. It can also be attributed to engagement with the international modernist vision. Located on these global and local convergences and divergences, Malika’s poetry is remarkable accomplishment not only in terms of her stylistic innovativeness, creativity, and her uncompromising radical political vision, but also in terms of her contribution to the development of Marathi poetry in general. Works Cited Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Bradbury, Malcolm, and McFarlane James. Ed.Modernism 1890–1930, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976. Print. Childs, Peter. Modernism. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. ‘Contemporary Marathi Poetry by Women Poets’, trans. Niranjan Uzgare, Indian Literature: Sahitya Akademi’s B-imonthly Journal. New Delhi. Vol. 199. Sept-Oct 2000 Dionyz, Durisin. Theory of Literary Comparatistics, Trans. Jessie Jocmanova, Veda, House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislavia, 1984. Print. Philip, Tew, and Alex, Murray. Eds. The Modernism Handbook. London and New York. Continuum Books, 2009. Print. Scott, Bonnie, Kime. Ed The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 2. Print. Spears, Monroe, K Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth Century Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Print. Sangvi, Vijaya and Shirish Pai ed. Aahvan: Maharashtra Raajyachya Nirmitinantarchya Kalalatil Nivdak Stri Kavitecha Pratinidhik Sangrah, Mumbai. Continental Prakashan. 1990
[1] Earlier version published in Literary Insight (ISSN 0975-6248) Volume-7, January 2016, pp.102-107 [2] All translations are by Sachin C. Ketkar and are published on Poetry Sangam, Sangamhouse.org, Sangam House, Jan 2017, except otherwise indicated.