Komunyakaa and the Kolkata Book Fair

Entry 1: The Idea of an Anthology Between September 25 and September 27, 2003, the largest gathering of Indian intellectuals ever held outside India took place at the Manhattan Center in New York City. The occasion was a conference on Indian literature sponsored by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan USA, a New York–based organization dedicated to the promotion of Indian culture, philosophy, and arts; and the Bharatiya Sahitya Academy, the central organization for letters in India. In attendance were poets, novelists, and academicians representing fourteen languages. Also present was the then prime minister of India, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who himself is a poet. I was one of three conveners for the Bengali language, the fifth largest spoken language in the world.1 The renowned poet–novelist Sunil Gangopadhaya and the academician Nirmal Kanti Bhatyachariya from West Bengal, India, joined me as fellow "Bangla" representatives.2 During the conference, I met many poets who were making their first visit to the United States. Mrs. Priti Sengupta, a fellow Gujarati writer from New York, and I were constantly attending to these colleagues, who shied away from asking simple questions of the hotel concierge because of their lack of confidence in English. However, all of them wanted to go sightseeing in and around Manhattan. I acted as a guide, helping them make sense of local maps. In the course of doing this, I had an unfortunate experience with a poet from southern India. This gentleman asked me where to go for sightseeing in Manhattan, stressing that he wanted to avoid the "Negro" part of the city. He had come to the conference with a preconceived, stereotypical image of African-American community. I had a long and heated conversation with this so-called intellectual. Then I reflected and realized that the world we live in is a "propaganda" world, where the individual's perception of reality is influenced by the news media's tendency to rely on some stereotypical image or other for every community. Of course, in the wider world, there are stereotypical images of mainstream America, too. At the time of the conference, the US war with Iraq, and related government policies, had already caused most of the world's population to feel strong anti-American sentiments. These thoughts led me to a further realization—that apart from "Hamburger-Budweiser-MTV" culture, there are many American cultures that are not represented in India. In particular, I had in mind African-American "blues-jazz" culture and African-American literature. [End Page 734] Thinking further about the man who wanted to avoid black neighborhoods, I remembered that the modern education system in India originated under British rule. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is a strong influence from white Anglo-Saxon culture throughout the Indian education system. In school, we read Eliot, Pound, Frost, Cummings, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs. But we had very little exposure to the history of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement; we learned nothing about the Beat poet Bob Kauffman, nothing about modern African-American poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Rita Dove, or the younger generation of poets such as Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, Major Jackson, Terrance Hayes, and Kevin Young. We had little reason to look beyond opinions like those expressed in the 1930s by the Bengali poet Bishnu Dey when he said, "T. S. Eliot is the only poet who can enlighten us in our search for true poetry after reading Marx and Engels." But 75 years after Dey's statement, I feel that focusing only on Eliot and his peers deprives us of another possible, even obvious, source of enrichment for Indian literature: African-American literature. There is no reason why the major African American writers should not be better known in India. This is all the more true because, in my opinion, there are so many similarities between jazz and Indian

Genealogy · Geography · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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