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Making room for the young
Updated On: 17 April, 2022 10:51 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Jeet Thayil’s definitive new anthology of Indian poetry breaks open the closed club of veterans to give voice to new-age poets, whose passion to articulate the changing political climate of our time he envies
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Aditi Nagrath was born in 1994 in Delhi. Her family has lived, variously, in Moscow, Washington, Mandalay, London, Baku and Geneva. She is trained as a clinical psychologist. Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay 1940. His jagged, deadpan lines, particularly in the poem Missing Person embody the city in which he was born and where he continues to live. Pics Courtesy/Madhu Kapparath, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets
It’s kind of a “poetry year” for Jeet Thayil. He tells us this, when we get on a call with him—our first one, despite having interviewed him twice before. On the first two occasions we connected over email to speak about his novels, The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017), and the more disruptive Names of the Women (2021) that turned the Bible on its head. Considering this writer has always been partial to Thayil’s fiction, we are looking out for more. “I was working on a novel,” he shares, “... and I thought I had finished, but I clearly wasn’t. I have a lot more to do [still].”
For a better part of the last many months, it’s poetry that has consumed him. It started with The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, an anthology that’s also the subject of our conversation on this call; it’s not just massive in size—a nearly 900-page volume—but also in scale, comprising works of 94 poets. This was followed by work on a new edition of his book, These Errors are Correct, which has been out of print since 2010. “Meanwhile, I am writing new poems for the first time in 15 years. It’s just such a pleasure [to write poems] compared to fiction, which feels like work, you know. There’s nothing joyful about it, it’s like a 9 to 5 job, full of anxiety. And the pay-off is so far away. It’s years before you see it in print, whereas with a poem, in a day or two you have at least something.”
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