By Nicholas Blair
Without artists who push the boundaries of what society deems acceptable we would have never arrived at the widespread style we now consider “modern,” says New Delhi-based English scholar Brinda Bose.
"If we’ve never been modern, we’ve never been avant-garde,” said Bose, of Jawaharlal Nehru University, at a recent UC Santa Barbara lecture. “We’re always in the process of becoming what we say we are.”
Bose analyzed the works two of acclaimed avant-garde Indian poets. Her presentation, “Looking at the Sky with Bullet-Holes Eyes: A Frame for Indian Avant-garde Poetry,” was hosted by the UCSB English Department and attended by faculty and students live in Santa Barbara and via Zoom to students in India who tuned in at 3 a.m.
Brinda Bose, an English professor visiting UCSB from New Delhi, India, presents a quote from famed avant-garde poet Hoshang Merchant’s 2016 novel My Sunset Marriage.
Bose’s talk explored what “avant-garde” means in an historical context, focusing on the works of one artist and one group of artists that played a significant part in the development of Indian poetry over the past century. The Hungryalists were a group of writers in the early ‘60s who launched the literary movement known as the Hungry Generation. It sought to overcome the oppressive morality of the Bengali middle-class by pushing boundaries both in subject matter —with their poems often being very sexual—and in poetic structure.
“Poetry is no longer a civilizing manoeuvre,” Bose said, reading from The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry. “It is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning five.”
The second half of her presentation shifted to late 20th century poet Hoshang Merchant, who published the first collection of gay writing in Indian and English. Faced with constant criticism for the openness and high shock value of his work, Merchant stressed self-expression even when that meant going against the grain.
“The land of exile is the kingdom, and the poem the humiliation and the exaltation,” Bose quoted Merchant as saying.
New Delhi-based poetry scholar Brinda Bose reading aloud two of Indian poet Hoshang Merchant’s most famous poems, at a recent talk at UC Santa Barbara.
She cited Kazim Ali, another noted Indian poet, who said Merchant found a way to inject lightness into a dark subject. “Experiences born of grief in loss have always been a part of the poetry of the region, but with Merchant were lifted with humor,” Bose said, quoting Ali’s work.
She then led a wide-ranging question-and-answer discussion about the avant-garde in other contexts as well, ranging from Irish poets to Italian filmmakers. The avant-garde in other parts of the world, she said, were influenced by these early Indian poets, who personified defiance and experimentation.
Nicholas Blair is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student, majoring in Film & Media Studies and minoring in English. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.