As you know, I’m currently in India on a trip for publishers organised by The British Council. We’ve spent the last few days at the Jaipur Literary Festival - an absolutely wonderful experience, about which I’ll write some more later. For now, while internet time is short, I just want to share one writer who I’ve been introduced to, and was fortunate enough to meet.
Nabaneeta Dev Sen is a Bengali poet and writer whose work has, for decades, dealt with the most complicated issues in Indian life: the role of the intellectual, the cultural divides of language and the caste system, child labour, women’s rights, sex, homosexuality and transgenderism, AIDS, immigration and exile. At the same time, her tales of single motherhood, and independent womanhood, are widely read for their warmth, humour and humanity. Her poetry has been written in Bengali, her prose mostly in English, and translated into many languages.
At Jaipur, I heard her speak, together with her daughter, the writer Antara Dev Sen, where she talked about her writing, particularly her writing about AIDS and homosexuality, which, she said, she undertook because “writing about homosexuality is a way of challenging the system.” Almost all of her writing has been undertaken in a similar spirit, whether it’s her family tales, which challenge the Indian ideal of the male-led household, her travel journals, championing women’s independence, or her retellings of epics from the Mahabarata from a decidedly female perspective. “When you write from a woman’s point of view,” she says, “you use a different gaze, which changes the meaning of what you are writing about.”
I was privileged enough to meet her later in the festival, and was treated to a warm and generous retelling of some of the friendships that led to many of her books, of personal experiences that drove her to focus on the many issues her work covers. I’m going to spend the rest of the trip looking out as much of her work as I can find.
THE JUNGLE STORY
my exile is over, mother,
no more living in the jungle for me
come, mother, underneath this matted beard
feel the familiar cheeks of your child
open up your breasts, mother, and watch how
the seven streams of milk
gush towards my parched tongue
look at these feet, mother, the tiny feet
where your golden bells had jingled
look at this arm
upon which you had tied your talisman
when I was born
now look at this chest where you had planted
the sapling of a heart
in a soft green stretch of sun
in the hidden mesh of this dark jungle,
impenetrable,
has grown a hungry tree…
with toothy leaves and sharp claws
and fierce flowers
it chews on other hearts
a fine flesh-eater
my time in the jungle is over, mother,
now the jungle lives in me.
Nabaneeta Dev Sen (b.1938). The above photo and poem are taken from her website. More at Wikipedia.
