English recordings of Indian poets in the ’60s reveal links with other languages, countries

Rare 1969 audio recordings of Indian poets in English, preserved by Adil Jussawalla, are now available online, showcasing the era's rich literary connections.

Twenty four rare audio recordings of well-known Indian poets in English have been made freely available for the first time by a private, Mumbai-based initiative. These recordings of a poetry session in London in 1969, preserved by poet Adil Jussawalla, are remarkable for illustrating two characteristics of Indian poetry in English: one, its deep connections to other regions and languages and the taste of poetry of that period.

Poet Adil Jussawalla handed over the old poetry recordings to city-based writer Saranya Subramanian, who digitised them and put them up on the online group Bombay Poetry Crawl that she runs. It was made live last week.

The recordings were digitised and posted recently by city-based poet and writer Saranya Subramanian to an online group she helms titled, the Bombay Poetry Crawl (BPC). BPC holds poetry addas along with other activities such as exploring locations in Mumbai such as Kala Ghoda that have inspired major poets. The forum also has a small but growing online archive of audio recordings of poets.

Notwithstanding the website’s Mumbai-themed name, the 1969 London recordings feature works by poets from various places in India and writing in English or translations from regional languages. The poems are by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Adil Jussawalla, Dhoomil, Farrukh Dhondy, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, Go. Vi. Karandikar, H O Nazareth, Lawrence Bantleman, Malay Roy Chaudhuri, and others. They were taped in the voices of many of the above.

Explaining the origins, Jussawalla said that a group of Indian poets and writers met at the London home of journalist Ratnakar Kini, Jussawalla’s friend, who had organised the taping there. Jussawalla said, “The meeting was a one-off. Both of us [Kini and he] were living in London and meeting each other from time to time.” It so happened that other writers such as Farrukh Dhondy and his wife Mala Sen, an activist, were passing through at the time. The idea for taping came from Kini, who, Jussawalla said, had “an archival streak himself.”

The poems were selected by Jussawalla, he said, in the period when he was working on a poetry anthology which would be published as New Writing in India in 1974. The anthology, as per its publisher Penguin, challenged “the colonial notion of Indian literature as a collection of exotica as well as the terrible misconception that modern Indian writing is an inferior mimicry of Western forms”. New Writing… proved hugely influential among its readership, including many well-known poets of today who have mentioned it in their writings or speeches.

Listening to the 1969 recordings felt like hearing part of “an early draft of the anthology”, said Subramanian, who was gifted the recordings by Jussawalla for archiving. She said, “Some of these poets are not very accessible today, such as H O Nazareth or Lawrence Bantleman; it’s really hard to find their poems.”

She pointed to the diverse nature of the ‘playlist’, which shows a wide ecosystem of poets, “very connected to other languages and other art forms. They were reading Bengali, Marathi and south Indian writers as well as the British writers closely. I think it was just the nature of the time, this post-World-War-II Cold War era.” She said the recordings underscored the literary “connections between Bombay, London, New York and San Francisco.”

Jussawalla, a meticulous archivist of various media himself, told HT he was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the recordings. He said, “Video tapes are very bad in preserving things, but audio tapes seem to have had a longer life.” Jussawalla, who would have been 29 or 30 at the time of taping, said, “All of us sound very youthful, but I think that may be part of the recording. Our voice sounds a little higher than the normal voice we had.”

Besides parting with the cassettes, Jussawalla has, in the past few years, has given away many books from his personal collection. He said, “At my age there is no point in holding on to these things. They’ve given me pleasure and they should go somewhere.” Such conservation efforts, Jussawalla added, would be less than optimal as long as “we don’t have a centralised library for such things”. He said, “I would just like archives to be responsibly and more freely available to everyone.”

Speaking of the 1969 recordings, he added, “It’s a good thing that these recordings and texts are being spread and shared. That’s the main thing, isn’t it? To share things.”