This book review is written by Bilal Khan of Christ University, Bengaluru. As a student of English Literature, Bilal is fascinated with book reviews and opinion pieces on poetries.
What is the English Canon? Or, to start, what is even a canonical body? To reduce it to a very general definition, a canon in a medium of art is that body considered to consist of the “best” works of that art of a particular period capable of transcending its era. Be it any medium—paintings, music, Literature—the body of canon is always there. The problem is that the canon is not the bearer of ideologies but a great medium to disseminate them. But where do we place the recently published anthology “The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets” by Jeet Thayil in this body?
The Classics
Canons are also classic makers. The classical art form has a love-hate relationship with pop culture. When things become “too mainstream”, they are considered pop culture, but classics are supposed to be infinite wells of wisdom in huge libraries. I called it “love-hate”, as some of these labels overlap. For example, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs can be considered a pop-cultural and canonical film. Italo Calvino, a famous journalist and writer, regarded classical Literature as holding on to values that have “never finished saying what it has to say”. Calvino’s ideas about the classics are reflected in many European literary critics. In his (in)famous work The Great Tradition, F.R. Leavis explains how classics or canon, in general, discuss possibilities for humanity. In his critique of Shakespeare, Johnson endows him with the highest honours for writing about the “general nature” of society. We see a form of Literature that is highly influential for its age. But a book can only cross the realms of classical Literature when it exists in contemporary times. To focus on Calvino again, it is still speaking in our times and will keep on speaking for the times to come.
But the idea of a canon rarely gives space to a subjective opinion because the books and authors present in canon are supposed to be universal. They are not bursts of emotions but axioms carved in the Sands of Times. The point of these axioms is usually to be didactic or moralistic. Matthew Arnold, the known Victorian poet, considered the foremost important thing in a canonical text to have “high seriousness” in his The Study of Poetry. Arnold wants a set of rules and instructions for everyone to understand and learn from books. Combined with his selective “touchstone” method Arnold becomes a scrutinising but one-dimensional critic. The only book considered a “classic” by Arnold was Homer’s Odyssey.
The ways of these critics primarily existed until the late 19s. Though they generally honoured poetry, prose and Literature with the highest pedestal, poetry was still considered poetry when it was written in English, read in English and critiqued in English. Hence, every canonical body or even the concept of canonisation was considered a practice that was White in its very essence. The didactic moral was faulty as it only aimed at White mannerisms and values. Other cultures were either rejected, marginalised or exoticised because of colonial practices. For example when Coleridge would write about the capital of the Yuan dynasty, Xanadu in his Kubla Khan, he would describe it as a land of magic and mystery. A canonical text that furthers the case of Orientalism. Hence, canonisation was contested and debated.
Significance of Canon
It is the supporters of canon that make up my argument, though. American critic Irwin Howe greatly supported this body and raised questions like why African-American students are subjected to only African-American Literature? It is this “only” we shall take into account. Critics like Howe place canonical Literature on pedestals that make them essential and enriching pieces of information. So, if canon was a majorly White body of Literature, why can it not be a diverse body of Literature now in 2022? This is where Jeet Thayil steps in with his anthology. Recently published, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets includes 94 Indian poets and their phenomenal works. All chosen and edited by Thayil, the book is a magnificent piece of compilation. The book has a plethora of works where all and every poet is given a personal space to sing their songs. It is not like this book is one of its kind. There have been other books that have mentioned Indian canonical writers like Nissim Ezekiel and Rabindranath Tagore. But what Thayil is doing is somewhat radical. In his own words:
[But] by the second decade of the twenty-first century, there had been a flowering, an uprising, and a new generation of poets who cared little about the usual poetry presses, who published poems on the Internet and rewrote the canon in their own performative or spoken or gender-fluid image.
Thayil’s vision for the book is simple—to colour the black and white body of canon with every voice possible. Understandably, Thayil himself has to be selective in choosing these authors and their works but to publish this anthology under Penguin, Thayil is canonising these poets. Would you have ever imagined reading a poem from Meena Kandasamy, A.K. Ramanujan or Akhil Katyal in your school book?
To answer this question, let’s take Katyal’s poem from the anthology, We were English-medium Kids
We were English-medium kids
Akhil Katyal
We grew up in Lucknow, Delhi,
Calcutta, but read in schools,
old English fools who spoke of
seasons that didn’t exist—‘Shall
I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
left us more than a little confused,
yes, of course, if you insist, but
something inside us still refused,
have you ever lived a Delhi summer,
‘coz if you do, you won’t woo with
that line unless your love’s a bummer.
Through a very quick analysis of this poem, we can see Katyal questioning the archaic Shakespearean sonnet. But where is this questioning happening? Probably an English-medium school. A school that trains Indian students to recognise their first language as English and not their Mother Tongue. A common practice that works on multiple problematic post/neo-colonial structures. The poetry is not just unrelatable but also overpowering for the student Katyal writes about. It is a testimony to our consciousness that feels…weird when we read archaic poetry. The “still refused” part happened to the students. The voice that rejected the lines never occurred in the class and was never thought about later. The inner refusal the poet has that could have been a profound understanding of canon was reduced to not “understanding” classics appropriately. Also, the poetry is written in the free-verse form. This is another canon-defying and reforming technique modern poets use.
So, does a poem have to be totally against canon or canonical norms? It might be pretty interesting to notice that these poems are not just full of Arnold’s true seriousness but also carry a didactic model. Humraaz, a poet, uses a pseudonym for the anthology as they are worried the publication of their pieces might endanger their other projects, paints a gloomy picture with his Mandi House:
Mandi House
December 19, 2019
Though we had seen what
they’d done to the students,
something changed
that day in Delhi;
the police filled bus after bus
with people like us
who had come simply
to stand for our own rights
and for those of our neighbours.
Dropped on the edge of town,
hundreds returned to be taken again.
It is worse than we thought,
but I am fine now—
many have it much harder,
is what you told the children.
Later you showed me
the boot-sized, black bruises
on both of your legs
and confessed
you had cried while bathing.
From the date that locks eyes with the reader to the title that searches for an event, the poem carries an eerie recollection of some event. What event, an Indian or North Indian citizen would understand in a blink. Again, we see no particular rhyme scheme here but still a model of didacticism is present that warns the posterity about such practices that might follow in the India they live then. Yes, it is not the particular moralistic model we are familiar with, but to sing the sorrows of police brutality victims is a moralistic duty.
Conclusion
These poems that I mentioned are by poets that might have read classical English poetry. Someone can contest that even their subjectivity is formed by reading a free verse rebellious American woman like Dickinson. And it might be accurate, but what of it? Will Dickinson or the cynical canvas of Bukowski ever be pouring out the human blood of India? In what style or form does a poem fulfil its aim? The Right to Express is one of those fundamental Rights one is familiarised with at an early age. But what of this Right if no one is there to listen to me?
I shall end this appreciation post for Thayil by considering canon an ever-flowing river. It is marked with wisdom, for it flows like the God of cosmos, time. It imparts knowledge and adds insight when needed. Yes, there have been times when wisdom was objective or the Best, but now that river matters when it reaches areas that are deprived of it. What Thayil has done is create another course for the river itself. The river is ever-flowing, which means it has to be by laws of Philosophy ever becoming.
