Lindsay Pereira: The dead poets and artists' society

I met Dilip Chitre a little over a decade ago outside Juhu's Prithvi Theatre. I walked up to him, chatted for a while, and then interviewed him at length about his work as a poet, critic, painter and filmmaker. In any other country, meeting Chitre would have been like spending time with royalty. He was an artist of enormous value to Maharashtra. Yet, after he died at his Pune residence in 2009 following a long battle with cancer, he faded into obscurity almost instantly, his honours and awards forgotten, his books relegated to back shelves in stores crammed with badly written novels and biographies of cricketers.

Few among us know who our regional writers, poets or artists are, though we know all about our actors. It's the reason why our children fail to recognise MF Hussain or his works. Pic/AFP

Poet Arun Kolatkar passed away in 2004. Jejuri, his first collection in English, continues to be one of the most powerful collections penned by any writer in our country. It is also hard to find because no publishing house has thought it worth its time and invested in printing or publicising it. They are too busy looking for the next writer of awful fantasy novels such as the Shiva Trilogy. After Kolatkar's death, a new edition of Jejuri was published in the New York Review Books Classics series and is currently available for Rs 800 (Rs 679 if purchase on Amazon). I don't know too many students who can afford to pay as much for a book, but it's the only version of Jejuri currently available.

Nissim Ezekiel was often referred to as the father of post-independence Indian poetry in English. And yet, he reportedly paid to publish five of his seven collections, between 1952 and 1982. He received few visitors towards the end of his life, passing away in 2004 at the age of 79, after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease. There were few obituaries for him in India. The only notable one that crops up today is one published by The Guardian in the UK.

Not all our great writers and poets are dead, of course, although they might as well be considering how little attention they get from us. Our poets continue to publish for small, discerning audiences, despite the absence of any major platform to showcase their work. Some of them pay for it themselves, others publish electronic versions for free, and only a few lucky ones find small publishers willing to risk printing limited editions with no expectation for profit.

These are all poets who write in English. For those writing in regional languages, the scope for hope is lesser. Most of them live and die in obscurity, ignored by the government, compelled to take up other day jobs to survive, brought into the spotlight only on the rare occasion that someone chooses to translate their work into English.

The thing is, we allocate more space to discuss politics, Hindi cinema, soap operas and cricket than anything else in our country. Space in newspapers supposedly allocated for the arts, tend to centre almost exclusively on Bollywood stars - ignoring every other artist, writer, painter and teacher in our massive country that speaks in a thousand tongues. It's why our magazines often tend to have Bollywood stars on their covers as they believe readers won't bother to pick up the magazine otherwise. It's why few among us know who our regional writers or contemporary artists are, and why our children - who know Akshay Kumar - fail to recognise MF Husain.

We tend to idolise the wrong people, for the wrong reasons. For instance, film stars who are accused of murder. We rush to forgive actors arrested for illegal possession of weapons and place them on pedestals the minute they finish their stint behind the bars and come in front of the camera. We idolise cricketers who try and evade taxes, we revere playback singers who quite openly prevent the government from starting any developmental projects near
their homes, and we support politicians with serious criminal backgrounds simply because they hail from the same town or villages we might be from.

Our children follow this depressing cycle because we train them to idolise the same plastic heroes our parents did. It's why our writers, poets and teachers - people with the potential to shape millions of minds - fade into obscurity so quickly. They are forgotten by readers, ignored by dubious publishers, abandoned by the governments, which are unequivocally obsessed with publicity - especially that which comes with big names. It's also why so many of our finest writers and artists choose to live and die abroad.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com