Article
‘Even in my most intense moments, I’m me.’
January 18, 2006
PN: No, I see myself mainly as a poet. I do have collections of essays I’ve written for magazines, and yes, there is a book of short stories. But poetry is more primary. It’s the way I relate to the world. Only half the poetry I write gets published.
AS: While your poetry deals with several themes, it makes no attempt to disguise the fact that the author is a woman. It seems to be an integral part of the poetic voice, and one that is consciously acknowledged. Would you agree?
PN: In my last book of poems I published a preface. I don’t usually do that, but I felt I had to on this occasion. I wanted to discuss an article by a male writer about ‘emerging women poets’. He had used several terms like ‘feminine’, ‘female’ and ‘femininity’ to categorise these writers, and I found this whole approach objectionable. My point was, who gave you the right to pigeonhole women writers like this? A simple four-line poem can implicate such a variety of feelings, thoughts, historical eras, personal shades, mythic layers. This is completely overlooked. I don’t think most male readers know how to read a woman. That’s what my poem, ‘Magnitude’ is about – the impossibility of containing the self within the confines of narrow categories evolved by critics.
AS: You’ve been writing and publishing poetry in Kannada since the early 80s. Have there been any significant changes in the way you approach your poetry over the years?
PN: When I published my first book, Navu Hudugiyare Heege (We Girls Are Thus) in ’83, I had no idea that there were other women poets around me who felt the same way I did. I realised later that I actually belonged to a wider context of women poets like N.V. Bhagyalakshmi, Sa Usha, Kamala Hemmige, and others. We stormed the scene in the early 80s with a fresh, daring and adventurous poetry about what it meant to be a woman. We wrote about life as we saw it: inequality, love, yearning, adultery, motherhood. In the process we were redefining Kannada poetry, though we weren’t aware of it at the time. And we were travelling our own singular paths. We were like a cluster of islands, unaware at the time of our common concerns.
The pity of it is that some truly promising women poets just disappear and become voiceless. It’s usually marriage or some social constraint that silences them. Somehow or the other, I kept writing. As one critic has remarked of me, “Her pen never rusts”. I’ve led a very intense life, and I have always poured everything into my poetry: marriage, children, my problems with marriage, my fire accident, my relationships, all the joys and calamities. Poetry has always been a way of being honest with myself. My poetry is, in fact, just a tiny fragment of my life. Later I wrote an autobiography when I decided I wanted to be even more transparent. I didn’t want to write anything even in my most private letters that I couldn’t shout from the top of the Eiffel Tower!
I believe I’ve always said what I wanted to say. That made me somewhat unpopular at a seminar on censorship sometime ago. I got the distinct feeling that the foreign organisers would have preferred a sob story from the Indian woman artist. I refused to play the role of victim just to suit their tastes. I can honestly say that when I write I’m nobody’s wife, mother, daughter or neighbour. I’m a hopeless romantic, but even in love, I can never merge into someone else. Even in my most intense moments, I’m me.
AS: What about your approach to form?
PN: Kannada has an innate rhythm that I draw on all the time in my work, often unconsciously. I’ve experimented a fair amount with form – I’ve worked with three line and six-line units, with couplets, with prose poetry. The act of crafting or sculpting language is important to me, though this goes frequently unnoticed by critics!
AS: A feminist consciousness is something that seems to have pervaded your work over the decades. Would you agree?
PN: I don’t mind the word ‘feminist’. I’m not scared of tags. But I believe we’re all too complex to be accommodated within a single ‘ism’. I’m feminist and feminine as well as a stupid idiot. After all, I’m still silly enough to fall in love with the wrong man time and again. I do that all the time!
April 2005
Kannada poet Prathibha Nandakumar, in conversation with Arundhathi Subramaniam, talks about her refusal to be contained by six-yard saris and readymade blouses.
AS: While poetry constitutes the bulk of your oeuvre, you have also written books of essays and fiction. Do you feel equally drawn to all these genres? PN: No, I see myself mainly as a poet. I do have collections of essays I’ve written for magazines, and yes, there is a book of short stories. But poetry is more primary. It’s the way I relate to the world. Only half the poetry I write gets published.
AS: While your poetry deals with several themes, it makes no attempt to disguise the fact that the author is a woman. It seems to be an integral part of the poetic voice, and one that is consciously acknowledged. Would you agree?
PN: In my last book of poems I published a preface. I don’t usually do that, but I felt I had to on this occasion. I wanted to discuss an article by a male writer about ‘emerging women poets’. He had used several terms like ‘feminine’, ‘female’ and ‘femininity’ to categorise these writers, and I found this whole approach objectionable. My point was, who gave you the right to pigeonhole women writers like this? A simple four-line poem can implicate such a variety of feelings, thoughts, historical eras, personal shades, mythic layers. This is completely overlooked. I don’t think most male readers know how to read a woman. That’s what my poem, ‘Magnitude’ is about – the impossibility of containing the self within the confines of narrow categories evolved by critics.
AS: You’ve been writing and publishing poetry in Kannada since the early 80s. Have there been any significant changes in the way you approach your poetry over the years?
PN: When I published my first book, Navu Hudugiyare Heege (We Girls Are Thus) in ’83, I had no idea that there were other women poets around me who felt the same way I did. I realised later that I actually belonged to a wider context of women poets like N.V. Bhagyalakshmi, Sa Usha, Kamala Hemmige, and others. We stormed the scene in the early 80s with a fresh, daring and adventurous poetry about what it meant to be a woman. We wrote about life as we saw it: inequality, love, yearning, adultery, motherhood. In the process we were redefining Kannada poetry, though we weren’t aware of it at the time. And we were travelling our own singular paths. We were like a cluster of islands, unaware at the time of our common concerns.
The pity of it is that some truly promising women poets just disappear and become voiceless. It’s usually marriage or some social constraint that silences them. Somehow or the other, I kept writing. As one critic has remarked of me, “Her pen never rusts”. I’ve led a very intense life, and I have always poured everything into my poetry: marriage, children, my problems with marriage, my fire accident, my relationships, all the joys and calamities. Poetry has always been a way of being honest with myself. My poetry is, in fact, just a tiny fragment of my life. Later I wrote an autobiography when I decided I wanted to be even more transparent. I didn’t want to write anything even in my most private letters that I couldn’t shout from the top of the Eiffel Tower!
I believe I’ve always said what I wanted to say. That made me somewhat unpopular at a seminar on censorship sometime ago. I got the distinct feeling that the foreign organisers would have preferred a sob story from the Indian woman artist. I refused to play the role of victim just to suit their tastes. I can honestly say that when I write I’m nobody’s wife, mother, daughter or neighbour. I’m a hopeless romantic, but even in love, I can never merge into someone else. Even in my most intense moments, I’m me.
AS: What about your approach to form?
PN: Kannada has an innate rhythm that I draw on all the time in my work, often unconsciously. I’ve experimented a fair amount with form – I’ve worked with three line and six-line units, with couplets, with prose poetry. The act of crafting or sculpting language is important to me, though this goes frequently unnoticed by critics!
AS: A feminist consciousness is something that seems to have pervaded your work over the decades. Would you agree?
PN: I don’t mind the word ‘feminist’. I’m not scared of tags. But I believe we’re all too complex to be accommodated within a single ‘ism’. I’m feminist and feminine as well as a stupid idiot. After all, I’m still silly enough to fall in love with the wrong man time and again. I do that all the time!
April 2005
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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