One piece of information about the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri appears in all biographical notes, interviews, introduction to his works on literary websites: He was born in Bangalore, India, and moved to the US at the age of five. You might imagine, for someone who grew up on mainly American literature, whose work is shot through with what might be called a quintessentially American narrative voice, and whose books (until recently) were not easily available here, that his birth and ancestry are his only tenuous link to India. But those familiar with his body of work will find signs of a deeper, lingering engagement with the subcontinent.
Take the following lines from the title poem in The Long Meadow:
The god waits there for him. The god invites him to enter.
But looking through the glowing portal, he sees on that happy plain not those he thinks wait eagerly for him— his beloved, his brothers, his companions in war and exile, all long since dead and gone— but, sitting pretty and enjoying the gorgeous sunset, his cousin and bitter enemy, the cause of that war...
Indian readers will instantly grasp that ‘he’—the son of righteousness—is a reference to Yudhisthir, although his name is not mentioned in the text. They will know, too, that the poem is reaching into the grey shadows around ‘righteousness’, which makes the Mahabharata, one of our greatest epics, so continually relevant. Ask Seshadri about his familiarity with Indian literature and myths, and he tells you an anecdote that’s almost burnt into his memory. “When I was about two years old, I got burnt on some coals. This was in Bangalore,” he says. “Later, I was in bed to recover and the Ramayana was recited to me. I still remember that.”
Seshadri, born to Tamil- and Kannada-speaking parents, did not study Indian literature or the epics, but as a teenager in the US, he did engage with mythology and some of the ancient scriptures, as he had opted for Religion as one of his classes in school. That was when he first, he recalls, read the story of Yudhisthir and his journey to heaven. “What reading Indian mythology gave me was a taste for the imaginative and the fantastic. Indian stories are so imaginative, so wild. Like the stories from the Bhagavata Purana. I’ve always had an attraction for the imaginative, even among writers.”
And what about his love for poetry, where did that come from? “There is no such thing as poetry out there,” he counters. “You fall in love with a poem. So I fell in love with certain poems. As the number of those poems kept growing, my interest in the art grew.”
In the early years, though, Seshadri thought he wanted to write fiction. He made an unsuccessful attempt at writing his first novel, and, he says, out of the failure of that came his early poetry. As his appreciation of poetry grew, he also found encouragement from his professors for his own poems. However, his vocation did lie in the realm of storytelling. There is a definite narrative running through each poem and much of it is, mercifully, quite accessible. Ask for his opinion on the more abstract works poets have produced in recent decades, and he answers cautiously. “I think there is something like a ‘difficult poem’. I understand that kind of highly intellectual poem, I enjoy it, but I don’t write it.”
What he does write is richly watered by a number of streams: Mathematics, science, ancient fables, politics, the urban experience. For instance, in the delightful poem, Imaginary Number, he draws a metaphor out of the “square root of minus 1” in the context of the soul. A regular subscriber to the Science Digest, he says he is highly inspired by fact and news from the scientific world. This is not surprising, given that he started out studying mathematics in college before switching to philosophy “of the very rigorous Anglo-American tradition, very distinct from continental philosophy”. Eventually, he did his Master’s in Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, then attended a doctoral programme for Middle Eastern studies, which took him to Pakistan to study Urdu. “I was supposed to stay for a year,” he says, “but stayed only four months. By then, I knew that I did not want to be a scholar. I wanted to be a poet.”
Yet, it is also true that poets and poems engage most crucially with the political lives of people and that of a nation. It is, as Seshadri puts it, the democractic art. “Everyone can write poems. Everyone has poetic feelings. It’s a romantic notion, isn’t it? And what is romantic is also revolutionary.”
(This story appears in the 28 November, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
\"no one ever writes the real story of their life\". This line in his poetry is excellent.
on Nov 28, 2014