Human Society as the Grist to the Ever Grinding Mill of Poet’s Imagination: An Interview with P.Raja

Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal

P.Raja is a prolific author from Pondicherry, who has authored 21 books in English and 7 in Tamil. One of his books A Concise History of Pondicherry is still in the best seller list. Some of his significant literary works are From Zero to Infinity, To a Lonely Grey Hair, To Live in Love, The Blood and other Stories, Kozhi Grandpa’s Chickens and For Your Ears Only. On the back cover of his To The Lonely Grey Hair, Raja has outlined his motive behind creating literary works: “Primarily I am an entertainer. The eighteen years of experience I have on my back as a language teacher has taught me the art of entertaining others. My secondary purpose is to show you the world through my eyes, perhaps with a tinge of imagination. I want to show you something that you have failed to see. It matters little to me whether you nod your head with a smile or grit your teeth in contempt. Either way I have succeeded in evoking a response from you.”

Currently, he is in the Department of English, Tagore Arts College, Pondicherry. He has published articles, short stories, poems, interviews, one-act plays, reviews, skits and features in more than 300 newspapers and magazines, both in India and abroad. He is a recipient of Literary Award (Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, 1987), Michael Madhusudan Academy Award (Calcutta, 1991) and Best Poem of the Year Award (Una Poesia Per La Vita, Italy, 2002). This literary artist of versatile genius from Pondicherry talks to Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal about the nature of his poetry, themes of his short stories, translation of literature, other literary voices from his region and several other issues in a pedantic interview.

NKA: In your essay ‘My Poems and I’, you have likened the poetic process to the virginal conception. The same idea is to be found in the poem ‘The Birth of a Poem’, where you have enumerated that a poem is conceived out of “Copulation of an/ incident/ accident/ with the five senses/ of a fertile poet.” You continue with the conception imagery in the above-mentioned essay, “A minimum gestation period is a must for giving birth to a poem. And I don’t opt for either an abortion or Caesarian.” You are suggesting that poetry is the spontaneous reaction to the situations, events and incidents. It emerges as naturally in the human heart as flowers emerge out of buds. The poetic process can never be a forced one. The poet feels a particular emotion, keeps it in his heart for some time and the result is the vomiting/drainage/exit/overflow of that emotion in the form of poetry. My question is-- what factors have fathered poetry in you? The sensitive poetic heart in you has delivered a number of issues. You have 19 in English and 5 in Tamil. The umbilical cord of your creative writing is in your heart and brain. But the question is –who or what has fertilized the eggs? Who is the father? You have a presented the poetic process through a maxim. As per that maxim,

A Fertile Poet+ A Fallow Idea= A Good Poem.

What is the origin of this idea in you? I mean to say what factors are responsible for poetry in you? I suppose, they must be subjective emotions and experiences. Or, is there anything else? Please make a statement.

PR: Lovely questions that speak for your curiosity to know about poets and their creative process. Poets are sensitive people. By poets I mean only genuine poets and no poetasters or those who write for the sake of writing without any urge to put pen to paper. To these genuine poets, all things are grist to their ever grinding mill.

To me every face is a book. I try to read it in my own style. And to me every feeling is a painting. I try to catch the painting in words in my own way, of course.

“Smile and Tears are considered to be the best couple in the Universe. Rarely do they meet, but if they meet that will be the most gorgeous moment forever”. I remember to have read it somewhere. I do not remember who said it. But whoever has said it said it right. I for one wait for such a gorgeous moment which is never rare in my life. It is just positive attitude that makes life sweeter than before. I hope I have answered all your three questions.

NKA: Poetry is called a curved statement. There is always a hidden or metaphorical meaning behind the obvious and manifest meaning. Texts are not without concealed or latent subtexts. In your poetry too, beneath some jovial mood, there is an undercurrent of deep philosophical mood. Under the garb of a comic piece, you are hinting at certain grave philosophical and social issues. For instance, the poem ‘To The Lonely Grey Hair’ humorously talks about the hair. But, its hidden agenda is in a discourse on inevitable changes in human life. The philosophical strain is seen in the expression-- “Why then did you turn unfaithful?/ Who bribed, O hair,/to change your colour?” Do you like this type of indirect communication? Or should poetic expression be direct? Should poetry be simple or symbolic? Out of the two, which form of poetry is closer to your heart? Please elaborate your preferences.

PR: Mallarme, the French symbolist poet, was once told by his admirer thus: “I think I am able to understand this particular poem more easily than the ones your have written earlier.” The poet said: “Show me that poem. I will put more obscurity into it.” Robert Browning too in answering a doubt raised by one of his readers about a poem said: “When I wrote God and I knew the meaning. Now God only knows.”

I do not belong to this school of poetry. It was the Tamil poet, Mahakavi Subramania Bharati who said: “Poetry should be written in such a manner that it should be understood even by the man in the street”. I belong to this school of thought. This is to say that poetry should be simple and direct with easy to understand symbols. Yet if critics like you want to read between the lines, you are most welcome to do so. And you have every right to.

I hate to write brainteasers. The more your torture the mind of your readers the less they will read you. I want to be read and remembered.

Take for example the very same poem you have delved deep into – ‘The Birth of A Poem’. Almost every word is a symbol there. Yet the sense is made clear. And the readers too enjoy reading such poems. One more example would be my much anthologized and more appreciated poem ‘Disturbed Flowers’. I can give you any number of examples from my three collections of poems – FROM ZERO TO INFINITY (1987), TO THE LONELY GREY HAIR (1997), and TO LIVE IN LOVE (2003) and also from my forthcoming fourth volume THE FIVE HEADED ARROW. Poems like ‘Toes and foes’, ‘Desires’ immediately come to my mind. The very titles sound like symbols and the poems too read like riddles. Yet who will fail to understand what I am talking about? And this is my style of writing.

NKA: Sometimes, your tone is satirical. The poems like ‘Indian Gods’ and ‘Refresher Course’ exhibit certain Indian situations ironically. In the previously mentioned poem, you are laughing at the over credulous Hindus for their superstitious nature: ”In India God’s needs are greater than ours./ Who can incur the wrath of hungry gods?/ Their very appearance/ drives a chill down your bones.” The lines are marked by reformative fervour. At another place (flap of To The Lonely Grey Hair), you have declared yourself “an entertainer”. How will you describe yourself-- a social reformer or an entertainer? What should be the purpose of art-- reformative or aesthetic enjoyment? Or should there be a union of the two in a gem of a literary writing? Your comments, please.

PR: Can you see dance with no dancer around? How to bring in social reformation without entertaining people? Was not RAMAYANA written to tell the world how man should live and MAHABHARATA how man should not live? And as you know the very purpose of street drama is to bring in social change.

There are no takers for any kind of advice from anybody. And so what has to be said has to be said in a different way. Entertainment is the best medium. ‘Refresher Course’ or ‘Seminar’ or ‘Quiz Master’ or any of my poems about God have a tinge of satire in them. First of all they are entertainers before they can be classified under the form ‘satire’. And as you know every satire is a whip to lash the society only to purify it. This is the very purpose of art.

NKA: The poems in To Live in Love display your deification of a particular woman. I think that woman is none but your own poetic creation. Pygmalion of your heart has created the Galatea of poems. In my view, your pen has infused life too in this literary Galatea. That Galatea/ the perfect woman/ the spirit of poetry is “an oasis” for you in “life’s vast desert.” Is my hypothesis (poetry being the woman of desire in the collection) right? Or are the poems addressed to someone really present in a palpable form? In the introductory remark to the collection, you have smartly evaded the question. There, you have made a statement that “the woman of my dreams is mainly an amalgam of many women.” Have you met such a woman in your life? Is she possible on the earth? Or does she love in some utopian heaven? Please make an emotional statement.

PR: Thank you very much for the accolades you were kind enough to shower on my love poems. To be very frank with you, Lord Krishna and I are governed by the same star, Rohini. And you know what Rohini is capable of.

I have made it very clear in the Introduction I wrote for my book of love poems – TO LIVE IN LOVE, that the poems are not addressed to any one woman. Yet some of my readers believe that it is a lie. They ask me one hundred and odd questions to bale the truth out of me. Some even go to the extent of identifying a few women. I laugh it off. I consider their Holmesian ideas as fiction of diseased minds.

Who can unravel the dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets? Who can ever unravel the lady, ‘the long short story in my life’, lying embedded in the depth of my heart? To confess, she is not my poetic creation. In fact, she pulled out the genuine poet of love slumbering in me. Please wait for my next book of poems THE FIVE HEADED ARROW. You may get some more clues.

NKA: What are the major themes of your short-stories?

PR: So far three collections of my short stories – THE BLOOD AND OTHER STORIES (1991), KOZHI GRANDPA’S CHICKENS (1997) and MY FATHER’S BICYCLE (2005) have come out. Many of my short stories that have seen the light of day through major newspapers and magazines both in India and abroad have yet to be gathered between covers.

I am a traditional storyteller. In all these stories I have tried to portray what I have seen, heard or experienced. I find pleasure in writing short stories, though I experience joy in writing poems. No two stories of mine have the same theme. That is why I write less than six stories in a year. And most of my short stories are written for AIR, Pondicherry and there is time constraint. I should read out my short story within twelve minutes. And so they have to be real short short stories. Later I add or delete wherever necessary and make it suitable for the print medium.

My short stories have variety in them. No critic will ever be able to label them. I am very finicky about not portraying stereotyped characters.

NKA: Tell us something about your Encyclopaedia of Pondicherry.

PR: Years ago Doordarshan Kendra, Delhi assigned me with the topic ‘Pondicherry: City of Peace’, to be telecast in their ‘States of India’ series. I did a lot of research before I wrote the script meant for a twenty minute telecast. It was only during this period of research I found that I was hitting at a gold mine. I had enough material that would bulge into a book. I do not know what divine force pushed me to write my book A CONCISE HISTORY OF PONDICHERRY (1987). It proved to be a mini-classic and is always on the bestseller list. It is this mini-classic (now in its third edition) written with tourists in mind that encouraged me to go ahead with my further research on Pondicherry. And that paved way for my upcoming ENCYCLOPAEDIA PONDICHERRIANA.

Major part of the work is over. And this Encyclopaedia will come out in five volumes: 1. Historical, 2. Political, 3. Cultural, 4. Literary and 5. Religious Pondicherry. In this project I am assisted by many of my students. The volumes are co-authored by Dr. Rita Nath Kershari, a creative writer, critic and Translator, and above all an illustrious colleague of mine.

NKA: Any other writing project in the near future?

PR: Projects keep coming to me. And I do not say ‘no’ to any Institute or any Individual. First of all, I feel honoured when the project chooses me. Secondly, my wife feels honoured when paycheques choose her.

My next major project would be LITERATURE OF PONDICHERRY: AN ANTHOLOGY, starting from the earliest period to the young writers writing today. It will be a compendium of Pondicherry writers and their works.

NKA: You are also a translator. Translation of Bharti Vasanthan’s ‘Thambala’ proves your translation /transcreation capacities. Sujit Mukherjee in his essay ‘Indo-English Literature’ has mentioned ‘fidelity to the original’ as an essential requirement for a work of translation/transcreation. However, if one follows the above instruction blindly, there may be a certain pause to one’s creative faculty. Imagination is somewhat strained, when a translator is disallowed to deviate from the original. Did you find an obstruction to you imagination, while indulging in the work of translation? Or can a translated work also be imbued with the imaginative flights of the translator? What do you prefer – writing a piece of creative writing or transcreation of another person’s creativity? Please illumine.

PR: I translate out of love for a particular writer or a particular work. This I do only when the work really touches me. This is why I translated Veerama Munivar, Subramania Bharati, Prapanjan, Bharathi Vasandhan, Girija Ramachandran and several others into English.. When a work touches your heart, translation of that work becomes very easy. I should say I choose the work to give it a garb of different culture.

At times the works choose me and I translate them for money. These are projects from Institutes and from individual writers who have faith in my language and ‘translation capacities’ as you have called it.

I consider ‘translation’ as an exercise for my healthy creativity. Searching for the right word or expression, finding an equivalent idiom, fishing for the sense and above all regularizing the thought process are excellent exercises for any creative writer. And one supports the other.

While translating a work, be it from Tamil into English or vice versa, I feel I help its author to be known in another language. It is just a help from one writer to another writer. I too get such a help from unexpected quarters. Some of my works are available in Chinese, Korean and French. A few Bengali and Oriya writers have rendered my works into their language.

Translation, according to Dr. Johnson, involves the process of “change into another language, retaining the sense”. I am a sincere follower of that Great Cham of Literature. I also see to it that readability is retained throughout.

And now to your last question… Charity begins at home. I want to be known as a creative writer rather than a translator. A translator’s name does not appear on the top. It only finds its way at the bottom of the publication.

NKA: You are a versatile writer. How has your teaching career helped you in this creative world of writing? Please tell something.

PR: Every good teacher should necessarily be a good reader. My profession as a teacher of English literature demands a lot of reading. I am a voracious reader and my reading habit has transformed my house into my personal library.

Every good writer should necessarily be a good reader. It is said that if a writer wants to write for an hour or so, he should read for three hours at least. And so it is this sort of reading that helps me writer a lot and speak a lot both in the classroom and also on the stage.

NKA: Which language of poetic/literary communication do you prefer-- English or Tamil? Please enlighten the readers about your linguistic preferences in your literary works.

PR: I had my early education in a missionary school in Pondicherry. I had the privilege of learning English under dedicated priests who with a swish of a cane made us dedicate ourselves to the learning of that language.

In the beginning of my writing career – I started writing in 1975—I found the shaping hands -- K.D.Sethna, M.P.Pandit and Manoj Das, who wielded their pen in English from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. All of them were editing English magazines and they invariably gave a bog boost to my literary career.

As a professor of English language and Literature, I prided in writing in English. I want to be read all over the English speaking world. The publication of my works in various such countries made my dream a reality.

To write in Tamil was not anywhere on my mind. But for my wife, a postgraduate in Tamil literature, who insisted that I should write in Tamil also, I would have written in Tamil at all. After I started writing in Tamil, I realized that the best way to communicate is only through one’s mother-tongue. Yet my first love is English.

NKA: What are the other contemporary poetic voices from Pondicherry? What do you say about the current literary scene in Pondicherry?

PR: Pondicherry may be a speck on the map of India. Yet you will be surprised to know that fifty five languages are spoken in this Union Territory. We have writers in all these languages here. But coming to English language, Ashram and Auroville are blessed with excellent writers.

In fact, in the history of Indian English writing, a whole chapter has to be allotted for the literature of Pondicherry. In 2003, I edited a volume of poems from the Women poets of Pondicherry for Busy Bee Books. It was titled IN CELEBRATION and I have included the best of poets writing today in Pondicherry. These poems from the women poets of Pondicherry belonging to various countries, states and cultures reflect the multifarious hues of their inner mindscape conforming the adage ‘unity in diversity’, and that is the enviable Pondicherry.

Some of the major contemporary poetic voices in Pondicherry are M.L.Thangappa, K.D.Sethna, Maggi Lidchi Grassi, B.V.Selvaraj, Maria Netto and Rita Nath Keshari.

Starting from Sri Aurobindo and his School of Poetry to the major voices in fiction like Manoj Das, the literature of Pondicherry is hale and hearty. No good critic worth his salt can ever afford to ignore it, as no tourist can ever think of skipping Pondicherry while traveling in south India.

NKA: As a senior teacher of English Literature, what are your views about the curriculum of English Studies in India? The syllabus of English Literature in most of the Indian Universities is marked by colonial hangover. The very basis of English studies in India seems to be Macaulay’s statement-- “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” The teachers and scholars of English Literature in India have taken the statement of Macaulay as something very auspicious. Hence, we go on studying the irrelevant authors of England. Some authors are highly insignificant and irrelevant to Indian psyche. Why should they be prescribed here in India? Should not our regional authors in English translation be prescribed in our syllabi? I feel there is a great need to decolonize English Studies in India. Your comments, please.

PR: You are very right. I fully agree with your view. The colonial hangover still continues even after sixty years of India’s independence. Macaulay’s views were stupid for they were based on his biased thoughts. Perhaps he had no opportunity of reading the ancient Tamil literature in English. Had he been alive today, he would have changed his views on the native literatures of India. Thanks to Sahitya Akademi for its excellent work of publishing Indian literatures in English translations.

Indian English literature too has become the beloved of many foreigners. I feel for certain that many of the textbooks prescribed for English Literature students should give way to Indian texts giving importance to literary figures of eminence who are the real torchbearers. This is possible only when the old crones of the Academic world pop off giving rise to like minded academicians like you and me who are real patriots both in their body and soul.

The interviewer Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal is Senior Lecturer in English at Feroze Gandhi College, Rae Bareli.