आकाश दो तिहाई ‘काश’ है
आसमां आधा ‘आस’ है

Q-A WITH AKHIL KATYAL

Inklette: What does the experience of being a contemporary Indian writer mean to you? What is it like to occupy this space?

Akhil: These are very, very strange times. Professor Gopal Guru who opened the lecture series on Nationalism recently at JNU, after the terrible sedition row, said the “benign, egalitarian state” has gone missing. Imagining it back into being seems such an uphill task. Think of this – a small university event on 9^th February whose very name was the name of a poetry book, ‘The Country Without a Post-Office’, an event which raised legitimate concerns about the miscarriage of justice at the highest levels, an event which brought Kashmir – which has never known India as either ‘benign’ or ‘egalitarian’ – shattering back into the mainstream Delhi imagination, that one event, could kick-start a most unfortunate series of events which landed up three university students in jail and hundreds others finding themselves demonised in their own city. A false bogey of ‘anti-nationalism’ was raised to scuttle deep and searching questions this country needs to ask, that its writers and artists, its teachers and students are asking.  

Speaking on these series of events, in the same lecture series, journalist P. Sainath said to JNU students – ‘Welcome to the rest of India’. You’re only experiencing, he told them, what non-Delhi has been experiencing for decades, the repression, the arrests, the elusive bails, what Bastar or Jagatsinghpur feel in their marrows every day. What Kashmir could give all of us masterclasses in. Look at Hyderabad. Look at what is happening in the university, to its students and teachers, who are, against all odds, carrying out a most strident struggle for all of us. Look at the utter casteist and MHRD-backed forces at work against them.

It is important, and inspiring, to note that at the centre of both these rows, in JNU or HCU, is a boundless literary imagination, one that has shown the way to wed that which is ‘political’ with that which is ‘imaginative’ – there is no other way, there can be no other way. Rohith Vemula’s reaching for the stars in that gut-wrenching last letter which has become the fable of our times, and Agha Shahid Ali’s searing and sorrow-laden transcription of the horrors in 90s Kashmir in his book ‘The Country without a Post-Office’ are what we have at the centre of these debates. These documents anchor these debates, fuel them, and keep them alive. It tries to keep at bay a government that is afraid of its artists, teachers and poets – that pushed Vemula to his death, that was flummoxed by Ali’s metaphors. To be an Indian writer today is to recognize such power in the literary, in such urgent and poignant voices such as Vemula’s and Ali’s. To appreciate what conversations it can create, what old, rigid forces it can upset. To be a writer today is also to recognize the differences between literary folks working in different settings – of language, of caste position, of location. The anti-caste songs of the musicians and poets of the Kabir Kala Manch in Maharashtra landed them up in jail, whereas I largely write from the relative safety of Delhi, of a job, of a caste-position that shelters me, of cultural capital that has so far ensured nothing untoward happens.

At a recent event in Delhi University, where some of us were called to read poems on the occasion of Women’s Day, there was a threat that the BJP student wing ABVP would interrupt the event and cause trouble if any anti-Sangh sentiment was expressed at the event. They had done it in the past on many, many occasions. We noticed some of them were hovering around. This is our times. The space of the literary finds itself surrounded, sometimes vulnerable and sometimes strident, in this BJP-backed anti-intellectual, anti-artistic climate that is systematically being built one arrest after another, one denied bail after another, one sedition row after another. But my contemporaries – in and outside Delhi, writing in Hindi, in Marathi, or in Telugu – continue to write in situations million times more vitiated than mine. So what excuse do I have. I draw inspiration from them and get on and write.    

Inklette: We’ve heard you’re learning Urdu these days. Could you talk more about it? Also, as a translator, what is your relationship with language?

Akhil: You know it is incredible. One of my students, Abdur, is teaching me. He is walking me through a language that had always felt so intimate but never looked it. Now each letter is being caressed out of incomprehension. And brought into meaning. You know I learnt to write ‘dil’, ‘ab’, ‘aarzu’, ‘suno’ and other such short words in the last class. It was quite overwhelming when I could recognize the ‘gulon’ of Faiz’s ‘gulon mein rang bhare, baad-e-nau-bahaar chale’. As a translator, what do you want – you what to know how a language breathes, sits, dreams, gasps, orgasms. You want to make the dreams of one language be realized in another, you want one language touch the viscerality of another. Learning the Nastaliq at this late stage – I am 30 – not as someone who is learning it by rote but as one for whom each curve and nuktah is a thing of beauty, is a thing of surprise, I cannot thank Abdur enough who is helping me in this. He is opening the door and letting me enter a language. I am looking forward to the day – hopefully not too far – when I would write a letter, all right to left, all curves and dots, that would express the appreciation I feel. Also, to a translator, a third script means your world has just exploded open. New texts, new authors, new loves, new noise, new worlds to inhabit.

Inklette: You’ve written and spoken about sexuality on various platforms and occasions. Poetry has a body, a form, through which language flows. How would you compare this experience of poetry with the experience that is shared between the body and sexuality, at large?

Akhil: I know there are nights when to be able to write a poem is also to be able to sleep that night. That the poem produces that very visceral, that very physical response – of calm, of rest wrenched out of restlessness. Of the place which the body reaches with that ability to transcribe in words that precise thing which is happening inside and around you. I know that there is something somatic about what the poem does – when you write it, when you read it to yourself, when you share it with others. You know that feeling, when you’re reading something on stage, when you’re reading it among hundreds of listeners, you hurl your body into the audience as much as you hurl your words. Think of Habib Jalib reciting ‘Aise dastoor ko, subah be-noor ko, main nahin maanta, main nahin jaanta.’ Think of his body trembling at each word, think of each word finding a limb. That’s my ideal, I wish I was able to write and sing like that. For the very specific of your question, as far as the ‘body’ of the poem is concerned, its ‘form’ which allows language to flow through it and find meaning in it, and the connection of this with our own sexualness, I guess there is a quirky allegory there somewhere but I don’t know what it is.   

Inklette: Finally, we come to the toughest question: do you have any favourite poets or writers?

Akhil: It is not tough at all. Agha Shahid Ali for his searing embrace of sorrow, Dorothy Parker for her pathos and self-deprecation, Mangalesh Dabral for his gentle inventiveness and bringing alive mountains for me, Uday Prakash for his hope in the darkest of times and insight, Rene Sharanya Verma for her joy and resistance, Aditi Rao for her vulnerability, Anannya Dasgupta for letting pain know rhyme, Vikramaditya Sahai for wrapping words around heartbreak, Dushyant Kumar for letting me know what places of love Hindi can find, Gorakh Pandey for his imagism that is possible only in the welter of the political, Parveen Shakir, for letting me stake a claim on Urdu, and finally, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, for telling me that there is a vocabulary in which one’s desires can speak to the desires of one’s time.