End of the road for Mumbai’s poetry scene?

The grapevine says the city’s English poetry scene is obsolete. On the contrary, says poet Arundhathi Subramaniam.

Someone told me recently that the Mumbai English poetry scene is dead. That things changed when the illustrious troika — Ezekiel, Moraes and Kolatkar — passed on. He even informed me that Delhi’s where it’s currently at.

Frankly, I’m not sure what ‘it’ is anymore. I suspect we all have different notions of what constitutes a ‘scene’. And proclaiming Delhi as a literary rival sounds like a trite ploy to equate poetry with Lakme Fashion Week. A ‘scene’ is not just demographics. It’s not merely about the concentration of poets in a place. Not just about readings, organisers, listeners. In any case, Mumbai has its fair share of the above. There are still several senior poets and younger writers. There are literary forums — from the Poetry Circle to the PEN, Chauraha to Loquations — that organise events ranging from public readings to more intimate workshop-based programmes. And February promises to bring a blitzkrieg of literary events to the city — a poetry month at Prithvi, the Kitab Festival and the Poetry Live festival. Certainly not a sluggish state of affairs.

But a ‘scene’ is about something more atmospheric. It’s about invisible transactions, synergies, ecosystems. It’s about creative practice vitalised by breathing the same air. And Mumbai smog is tenacious: its asthmatic legacy scars you for life. I’m deeply ambivalent about the place; and yet, the farther I travel from it, the more I find my poetry returning to the scene of the crime. I suspect you can take a poet out of Mumbai, not the other way round.

It’s not cohesive, not necessarily harmonious, not quite a geo-poetics. But the Mumbai scene is about a web of allegiances, acknowledged and unacknowledged; about debts and apprenticeships, conscious and unconscious. I barely knew Kolatkar, but his Kala Ghoda Poems have irrevocably altered my map of the city. He’s as much part of my Mumbai poetry landscape as, in her own way, is Charmayne D’Souza (whose engaging collection was published in 1990). Or Gautam Nadkarni whose poem turns up annually in my inbox. Or Maria, who takes that Bandra local to attend virtually every reading I know.

Literary circuits are about power equations, about plugging in, about expedient manoeuvres. A scene is less instrumental, more inclusive, often subterranean. It’s about all those people who’ve ever thought, talked, read, written and rewritten poetry, drawing on a shared inheritance rooted in a shared geography. Nothing to do with royalties, book-signings and cocktail parties. More to do with quiet, dogged, non-glamorous activity.

And it doesn’t live on mere nostalgia. Even as you read this page, someone in this city is spending her weekend making a poem. Is making the memories of tomorrow. Is, in fact, making the ‘scene’.