Ravi Shankar: “Writing to me is no mere vocation but an identity”
The Pushcart prize-winning poet and translator on his new book, Three Indian Poets, racism and criminal justice in contemporary America in the context of his prison memoir, Correctional (2022), and his book of essays, Tallying the Hemispheres (2023)
Jhilam Chattaraj: Three Indian Poets. Does the book emerge from a postcolonial desire to re-present India as a nation?
Ravi Shankar: Yes, precisely. Indian writing in English constantly pushes perceptual knowledge forward in new and interesting ways. We published Three Indian Poets with a nod to Bruce King, who published a book by the same title in 1991 with Oxford University Press. He chose Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and AK Ramanujan as the era’s representative Indian English poets and we wanted to bring a different vision to the 21st century. In doing so, there’s always a been postcolonial push to penetrate the canon. India’s contributions to the American cultural landscape are limited to Bollywood, caricatures like Apu on The Simpsons or Raj on Big Bang Theory, and the occasional Jhumpa Lahiri or Padma Lakshmi, who despite their diversity still fulfil the normative model of acceptable — dare I say exoticised? — representation.
I am curious about the process of selecting poets for Three Indian Poets.
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s work shimmers with spiritual insight and lineated wit, Anand Thakore reimagines classical verse forms with a mordant chisel, and Deepankar Khiwani is that relatively unknown poet who marries dramaturgy and poetry in an utterly inventive way. All three poets align with Drunken Boat’s (https://drunkenboat.com/) vision for this project; it is meant to inaugurate a global series of contemporary classics that will span the world. Ultimately, considering the exigencies of publishing, we chose Indian poets we admired who were a) writing directly in English b) were doing something original that could resonate with an American readership c) whose work we could republish without a large permissions budget; and most importantly, d) were decent human beings with whom we could have a productive working relationship.
How did you feel about finding Correctional as one of the Finalists for the Memoir Prize 2023?
Correctional was a memoir I never imagined I would write; it was traumatic to revise and even now, sometimes hard to read from publicly. It sounds hyperbolic but because I was the first professor in American history to be promoted to professor while being incarcerated, the personal and emotional fallout was immense. I was scurrilously covered by the local media and I felt compelled to tell my side of the story. What I learned on the inside made me feel that we should be protesting on the streets. The United States is the world’s greatest jailer, an irony in “the land of the free,” incarcerating more people than China, North Korea, and Iran combined. Modelled on punitive Puritanical practice, I didn’t find rehabilitation in the correctional facility but rather a concerted effort to re-traumatize and demean the men.
What’s the role of Correctional in the context of the present political scenario in America?
While I was writing my book, the murder of George Floyd happened and my publisher agreed I needed to encompass that, which I do in the Epilogue of Correctional. I was recently on a panel with Suraj Yendge who writes persuasively about caste, the concept that Isabel Wilkerson uses to understand the “origin of our discontents.” We queried why there was not more South Asian solidarity with Black Lives Matter, for example, and of course that’s in part because South Asians earn more per capita than anyone in the US — including white Americans. We are incentivized not to rock the boat and from Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, and Vijay Ramaswamy, Indian Americans are notably more visible on the political landscape. But as my memoir shows, discrimination persists. We can’t forget Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the affable Indian-American engineer from Hyderabad shot dead in Olathe, Kansas by a bar patron who mistook him for an Iranian, shouting “Get out of my country terrorist” and “Are you legal?” less than a decade ago in 2017. I hope Correctional adds to the critical debate surrounding the trouble with the extant model of criminal justice, which perpetuates more harm than good.
How is your life ‘post-Correctional’?
Overall, I am in a good place, teaching creative writing to great students at Tufts University, a dog owner and proud father of one daughter who finished her first year of college at Northeastern University and another who is a tennis player and amateur geologist in high school. In the last year alone, I gave a TEDx talk on #impuritanthinking, published new poems in Penguin and Knopf anthologies, saw my dramatic monologue about Laloo, the Healthy Happy Hindoo turned into a one-act play, published an interview with conservative African American political scientist Glenn Loury for Brown Alumni Magazine, won a residency to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I began work on my new book of poems which intends to bring 50 extant, Asian and invented forms of poetry into English. I went to India, where I saw my aunt in Chennai and then relaxed in the Maldives Islands. I have been blessed to have had the good fortune to visit 75+ countries, using literature as a bridge to bring the planet together.
In the context of Tallying the Hemispheres what is your take on the future of Humanities?
Even as we promote Three Indian Poets, I feel that the book as a commodity will begin to fade. Most of my books are in storage and I will probably donate them soon. This is not all bad news; hopefully, this means attention to the book as an artefact will increase (which is why we intend the Drunken Boat series as a collectible set of limited release). It also means that more and more people will come to engage with texts on a digital medium, which is why we should be encouraging e-books among young readers. Their use and reliance on devices is near ubiquitous and irreversible, unfortunately, and that has surely altered the future of humanities. The humanities of the future will bear an enormous responsibility to preserve the divergent voices of the past; to provide us with much-needed critical apparatus; to tell a wide array of stories in a variety of media; to provide an ethical, empathetic framework for reasoning and discourse that is not found in any other discipline. It’s a heavy mandate and one I consider seriously as a professor and hope to pass along to my students.
How important is it for writers to create a field of praxis — beyond the printed page?
Writing to me is no mere vocation but an identity. I constantly seek new challenges whether it was the collaborative chapbook I did with the late American artist Sol LeWitt or convincing DJ Spooky to judge Drunken Boat’s PanLiterary Awards. Based on my own experiences, I’ve become an advocate for criminal justice reform and teach in correctional facilities in Massachusetts, believing in the empowering principle of bibliotherapy. I’ve interviewed writers ranging from Pulitzer Prize-winning poets to Nobel prize-winning physicists to the winner of the Ocean Race, the world’s longest sailing competition, curious about their obsessions and interests. I support as many young writers as I can and recently blurbed new books by Brandon Lamson and Vinita Ramani.
What suggestion would you give to young writers, especially if they are from India?
I still sense in the young writers from India I meet today a desperation to be published abroad and a tendency to digest Western models of craft without enough critical reflection. They tend to ignore the 2000 years of history of Indian poetry from the Vedic hymns and corpus of Sangam poems to the Puranas and bhakti. I would advise young writers to read widely and curiously, everything from popular science to steampunk, reverse engineering what you find, imitating and then outgrowing the imitation. If you want your voice to have a lasting impact, you must cleanse your lens of received wisdom and current fashions to lean into the vulnerable, raw, contradictory spaces, the realm of what the Romantic poet John Keats’ called ‘negative capability,’—“…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Stay there for a while and then report back.
Jhilam Chattaraj is an academic, poet and author.