Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the first poet from this part of the world to
be nominated for Oxford's Professorship of Poetry, the most high-profile in
British poetry after the laureateship, and, for many, a more serious position
than the latter. Former Professors include Matthew Arnold, W H Auden, and Seamus
Heaney. Mehrotra's supporters include some very distinguished writers and
scholars from every part of the world, such as Tariq Ali, Amit Chaudhuri, Tom
Paulin, Charles Taylor, Toby Litt, Wendy Doniger, Adil Jussawalla, Shahid Amin,
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and various others. Charles Taylor, one of the most
considerable of living philosophers, has said: 'I see what a boon it would be if
Mehrotra were elected professor of poetry. The issues he raises are so central
to language, and so little explored or understood - although often evoked.'
See this
page on the Oxford University website to do with details of the
professorship and voting. Voting takes place on 16th
May.
Noted writer Amit Chaudhuri and Peter D McDonald (Fellow at St Hugh's;
author, The Literature Police) explain why they took the initiative in
nominating Mehrotra
***
A few months ago, Peter D McDonald and I decided to nominate Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra to Oxford's Professorship of Poetry -- clearly not for nationalistic
reasons, or even for reasons to do with prestige, but because of our admiration
for the work of this remarkable poet-critic, and its significance to literary
discussion today. This is the first time that a poet from this part of the world
(India; probably Asia) is being nominated for this very significant position.
The 300-year-old post has been held by poets like WH Auden, Paul Muldoon,
Matthew Arnold, and Seamus Heaney, and, most recently, by the critic Christopher
Ricks.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of the leading Indian poets in the English
language, and one of the finest poets working in any language. Influential
anthologist, translator, and commentator, he is a poet-critic of an
exceptionally high order. We believe that Mehrotra has much to say of value - of
urgency - on the matter of multilingualism, creative practice, and translation
(in both its literal and figurative sense), issues that are pressingly important
in today's world. He is not an easy 'post-colonial' choice, for he emerges from
a rich and occasionally fraught world history of cosmopolitanism; but he is
proof - as critic and artist – that cosmopolitanism is not only about European
eclecticism, but about a wider, more complex network of languages and histories.
The paragraphs below are taken from the Vintage/ Picador Book of Modern
Indian Literature:
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in the year that the nation-state we
presently call 'India' also came into being. According to some, it was a year of
portents, of angels and monsters with peculiar gifts coming into the world. One
wonders how Mehrotra fits in with that creation-myth, born as he was in Lahore,
brought into India in the time of Partition in a train when he was a few months
old, and growing up in Allahabad, a colonial centre of education and culture
already in decline, the son of a dentist. His childhood, unlike Saleem Sinai's,
was not immediately prophetic in any way, but was outwardly tranquil, inwardly
agitated by the imagination, and in location suburban, as these lines from his
poem 'Continuities' reveal:
At seven-thirty we are sent home
From the Cosmopolitan Club,
My father says, 'No bid,'
My mother forgets her hand
In a deck of cards.
I sit on the railing till midnight
Above a worn sign
That advertises a dentist
As a young man, he discovered, with some friends, Corso, Ferlinghetti,
Ginsberg, and the French Surrealists, and, negotiating these paradigms, made it
his purpose, in his poetry, to renew and to impart a fresh, sometimes
mysterious, sometimes threatening, gleam to the 'worn signs' of which a suburban
existence in a declining colonial city is composed. His latest book of poems is
the The Transfiguring Places (1998), and he has also produced an
excellent anthology of Indian poetry in English.
Mehrotra has emerged as a hyphenated mutation, the poet-critic, of
exceptional quality, in a country among whose several unremarked calamities is
the unhappy state of its criticism; in this, at least, he is a miracle. He
teaches us, as in 'The
Emperor Has No Clothes', which began as a riposte to a
fellow-poet on the subject of A. K Ramanujan's poetry, and developed as a subtle
exploration of the issues of bilingualism, translation, and 'Indianness' in
contemporary Indian English poetry, that it is possible to write criticism of a
high order about Indian writing in English without either entirely abandoning
the world of 'English literature', or fully belonging to it, or without
situating oneself exclusively in the politics of postcolonial theory.'
***
Also do look at a selection of Mehrotra's poems from 1976 to the 2000s,
from the early, surreal 'The Sale', with its unique account of world history as
memory ('French surrealism was one of the ways available to me of escaping the
King's English,' Mehrotra has said) to the other poems with their characteristic
but always unexpected mixture of luminosity, transfiguration, and magical
compression. There are also selections from the wonderful new poems, about
vanished historical figures, about reminiscences and transmutations of a
post-Independence suburban existence.
Links:
These websites also offer a small selection of some of the poems:
This link to Smith
College contains both a biographical note and further links to some
poems, including the excellent 'Continuities'