Devashish Makhija: “I don’t hold back at all”
The maker of the critically acclaimed film ‘Joram’, on ‘Bewilderness’, his debut poetry collection and how different streams of his work influence each other.
Devashish Makhija’s poetry explores systemic violence, political positions and personal relationships. It has also allowed him to explore what he cannot in movies – the erotic. Here, he talks about how his filmmaking and poetry fertilise each other
What are you working on?
A Netflix original. It’s my first ever mainstream film. I have always only made my own kind of films, which the industry calls ‘independent’ cinema although I have had different kinds of entities backing them. They have mostly been political films or human drama films. It’s the first time I’m venturing into the mainstream, with a film that has Taapsee Pannu in the lead.
It’s an action thriller. The producers and the studio, Netflix, are allowing me to take it in a direction that has my signature on it.
I believe you once said that you want to say things that people don’t want to hear, at least in your films. How does that pan out in this poetry collection?
I’ll go beyond this collection and speak about poetry for starters.
I’ve dabbled in almost every medium that exists because I’ve been hungry to express myself. For example, I came to Bombay to make films 22 years back but nobody was willing to put money into my films. They kept getting shelved. So, I continued to do a little bit of graphic art; I kept writing my stories as prose. Because I wanted the things inside me to come out, like all of us artists do. And poetry was the only medium where I didn’t have to think about my end consumer. I could just put out, without filters or censorship or backward extrapolation, exactly what I wanted to say or how I felt.
Poetry has been my oldest medium of expression, since the age of about seven. I have always turned to poetry when the world has not allowed me to be heard.
(But) Bewilderness is my first and only collection. Between 2010 and 2017-18, I used to read out my work at poetry circles and literature festivals, and more than once at Kala Ghoda. All the contemporary poets were there too and I realized I am nowhere close to them. I felt insecure and not ready to put out my work. In 2017, I had almost signed with Hemant (Divate of Poetrywala) for publishing the collection but I chickened out because I felt my poetry sucked.
I actually shunted half the poems out of that manuscript and brought other poems in. I took, I think, seven years to find those roughly 50 poems that I thought I wouldn’t kill myself for sharing with the world.
So, it took me a while to arrive at this first anthology manuscript.
What tilted the balance for you in favour of publication?
It wasn’t any one moment of reckoning. In the last five years, especially since the pandemic, I have seen the deaths of friends and family. Also, I came to Bombay when my mother passed. I’ve been defined by her death. My voice has also been defined by my close association with her slow demise over four years when I was in my teens.
So, I’ve been sensitive to death and I’ve been obsessed with the idea of death. During the pandemic, I was out in the field doing a lot of relief work and I may have seen about 150 deaths in those few months. I thought I might as well put this book out, if for nothing else then at least for this – that I might die, and these poems will then never have found any readership.
Also, my poetry is the work that is my purest. I don’t hold back at all.
What is it that you are not allowed to say on film that you can in poetry?
I have not second guessed, and I have not been shy -- there are some erotic poems in there, and I don’t think I can ever put that kind of erotica in my cinema. Nobody will allow it in this country, and I will be reviled for it. But poetry is a medium where you are celebrated for being this unfiltered. Also, I’d like to explore violence in a certain way. I’m never allowed that in my feature films because there are so many stakeholders and decision makers who either are standing shoulder to shoulder with me or are above me in the pecking order because they put the money in the film.
So, whether it’s erotica or violence or my political stance or my rage against the machine or how deeply I want to plumb the depths of human relationships and just the ugliness of the human soul and its desperation, I am not allowed to explore it as freely in cinema in India as I can in my poetry.
How then do your film making and writing practices stand in relation to each other?
I don’t have a clear answer to that. I came to Bombay to explore the possibility of film making. I am not a trained film maker and never went to film school. When my films weren’t getting made, I started exploring other avenues, like my children’s books. Those are my most successful expressions, because I didn’t expect to find the kind of readership they found. So, I pushed myself to come up with one children’s picture book every two years or so. All such things happened by default. They are like multiple tributaries of the creative river of filmmaking that I actually set out on. But now it feels like my film making has become a tributary of my other artistic pursuits.
It happens without me consciously trying to, but one affects the other. Maybe it’s helping me arrive at this voice that people can discover across all my works. My poems seem cinematic and visual to most who read them, but I never set out to write them visually. The more I made films, the more my writing relied on imagery perhaps.
Your films and poems share a few geographical settings and themes. There is a certain coming to terms with loss of relationships and with death. There is the theme of the big guy preying on the small guy, among others. But are there some others that appear only in this collection?
Like I said, one primary theme is the erotic. There is something about the human body transcending its limits that society puts on us. That is one, and the other is art. I am obsessed with art, but I am not a great artist. So, my passion for Van Gogh or MF Husain and other artists’ images is something that I can pay tribute to with my poetry but I can’t do that with any of my other work, whether it’s children’s books or a novel or short stories or film, because they are all heavily narrative based. Only poetry allows me the freedom to do that.
Other tender places are explored in your collection – love, grief, loss, coming to terms with life’s rites of passage, coming to terms with death. Did writing these poems transform these themes for you?
Most of those points of loss and grief have to do with either my mother and her death or my father and his death, because they both had very difficult deaths. My mother had many years of cancer, my father had many years of Alzheimer’s.
Also, the death and loss that I see of the marginalized for which I hold all of us privileged people responsible. All of this comes with a modicum of guilt. I have tried to shake off that guilt. I have been in therapy… and it reduces but it doesn’t really go away. All of these poems are some kind of way to alleviate the guilt.
So, is it transformative then? I guess so. Because sometimes poetry does for me what 10 sessions of therapy can’t. It just releases a little bit of that dead weight so that I can move on to the next day.
Just reading poetry written by others, or you writing it and being read by another person, makes the reader and the writer feel like we are all in this s*** together.
In fine art and poetry, you can just rip your bleeding heart out and place it on the table. This is something that other mediums of expression don’t allow as much.
This collection doesn’t have one overarching theme. What, then, was the organising principle for you?
That’s why I think I went through that process of finding my influences and my inspirations. They helped me with what I wanted to include in the anthology. So I chose the ones that I felt were my stronger poems. But then there were some that were confusing me. So, I went back to (cherished lines written by) Sylvia Plath and Billy Collins and Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood. I let them talk to me. I had a bit of a conversation with all these voices and that helped me home in on this selection.
This confusion led to the title of the book also – Bewilderness.
How do you feel now that the collection is out?
I don’t know if it’s really an answer, but the fact that almost nobody reads poetry any more is also why I pulled it back from Hemant in 2017. I was like, why am I even putting an anthology out. At most 120 people who are also poets may buy it. With Indian English poetry, 300 copies sold is a best seller. What is this serving? Is it a vanity project? I put this book out there to close a chapter in my life.
In November 2019 (came) the last poem I ever wrote. I have not written poetry now in over five years. This too gave me the impetus to make this book and put it out there because I don’t know if I’ll ever write poetry again. I think. We never know though, do we?
Are there one or two poems that you especially cherish?
I would say it’s a poem called There Are No Poems. I was deeply moved by Hindi poet Alok Dhanwa, who wrote a poem called Janta ka aadmi. It was an epic poem about the political state of our country. It took me three months to write that poem. I went back and forth with it a lot. I really cherish that poem because I put a lot of me and all my belief systems into it… everything I care intensely for, and get angry about. I put all of that into that one last epic poem. And then I was done.
Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala.