Dislocation is always productive: Akhil Katyal

The writer, poet, and translator talks about his poetic sensibility, new urban landscapes, and finding inspiration in Mumbai’s complexity after Delhi.

The poet says that he is not entirely aware of the precise contours of his own feelings till they have been typed, edited, revised. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Akhil Katyal’s poetry transports you to a multilingual heaven where English plays footsie with Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi. Now that this professor of English has shifted from Ambedkar University, Delhi, to BITS Law School, Mumbai, his poems are shot through with the sounds of the dozen tongues he hears on the local train and overlaid with Marathi and Bambaiyya. Whether set in Delhi or Mumbai, Katyal’s poems recognise you, make you glad, and sometimes weigh you down. In his 2020 collection, Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, the poet’s encounters with homophobia and bigotry are refracted through the prism of diversity etched all over the city: in ruins, in songs, idioms, sounds of people speaking.

Katyal, who is not just a poet but also a translator, has rendered Ravish Kumar’s book of Hindi micro-fiction, Ishq Mein Shahar Hona, into English as A City Happens in Love (2018). He also translates English poems into Hindustani: to hear him read out his Hindustani translation of the poems of Agha Shahid Ali or Langston Hughes is a delight.

Katyal’s upcoming poetry collection, The Last Time I Saw You, releasing in October 2024, is an exploration of loss against the backdrop of the pandemic and communal killings. Frontline spoke to Katyal to learn more about the poetics of multilingualism and the translational sensibility that informs his verse. Edited excerpts:

Reading your Delhi poems is like taking a commute through the city. You find poetry in the most ineffable things. You call ugly, unfinished Metro railway pillars “the staccato of concrete punctuating a red sky” and describe the late-night kanwar party (annual pilgrimage of Shiv devotees, who fetch water from the Ganges and offer it at local Shiv shrines) as “kaanwariyas playing red & orange songs”. Experienced this way, all the drudgery of the commute turns into an archive of what-being-in-Delhi-feels-like. Tell us about your very specific engagement with the city landscape. How does a poem begin; are they found, or cobbled together in reverie and reflection?

It is both: half fact, half fantasy, and then the surplus of reflection. Half out-there and half projection, and then the excess of revision. If someone else were to see my cities—and both Mumbai and Delhi have had deft chroniclers—they would see it, perhaps, in ways very different from mine. My city, like everyone else’s, is a city made sense of in the welter of my own experiences, little and large.

Some events, though, straddle individuals. After the period that Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue refers to, even the most ivory-tower love and longing were recast; there was the pandemic and there was communal slaughter in Delhi. These changed the landscape of emotions for me and for countless others in far more searing ways, of things we thought were possible in our heads and of things we were scared were possible on our streets. They turned you inside out. They halted the lives of so many, mainly Muslim people, suspended so many in those years.

Something called my city always cuts across that which is ours. They step into each other.

In a way it feels almost inevitable that a multilingual poet like you would move to the city of Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar. What, for you, are the poetic consequences of the change in city?

Dislocation is always productive. There are so many new things to make sense of: the endless monsoons, the proximity of the Sahyadris, the urban crush, the histories of trade by the Vasai Creek, the open compartments of the local train, the wish to spot Rahul Khanna and Abhay Deol on their morning jogs, the layers of past in the Kanheri Caves, the fishing rods propping up the city and its histories, and that ever-present talisman of the umbrella. This is all new for me. It is maddeningly complex. One will parse it slowly. One will goof up on the way but continue to parse it, slowly, poem by poem.

Katyal has rendered Ravish Kumar’s book of Hindi micro-fiction, Ishq Mein Shahar Hona, into English as A City Happens in Love (2018).  | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Did you always know you would be a poet?

Ever since my teacher Lalita Subbu, in Hindu College, took my undergraduate and amateur words seriously, I knew there was something there. She allowed me to think that there was something there.

Given the fleeting attention span of users, social media may be the last place to find a poet, but your poems make Insta bright. Does the distraction of the Internet clash with the attentiveness of the poet?

Writing helps me make sense of each bit of the world around me. I don’t know something till I have written about it. I am not entirely aware of the precise contours of my own feelings till they have been typed, edited, revised. These are all notes towards an understanding, a sort of daily riyaaz [practice, especially of Indian Classical music], with folks listening in. Sometimes I flounder, sometimes I don’t. The frequent interaction with others who read the work on social media complements the dailiness of this writing and thinking, and word-picturing. It concretises my thoughts.

In Indian tradition, poetry was indeed meant to be a dialogue, something performed publicly. Do you consciously draw upon that tradition?

The second person “you” often occurs in the poems I like and the poems I write. This is sometimes the reader, but often it is someone else, and the reader is eavesdropping. I invite her to do it. She is my compatriot, understands me and my need to address this “you”. In a poem, the rhetoric of address almost materialises that person in front of you. And that’s wish fulfilment almost to the T. Not only is it emotionally vivid, it is always therapeutic.

Sometimes this you is a larger addressee; it might be all who live in my city or in my country. Far more rarely is it larger than that. I love the implied listener of Rahim’s dohas and often recited them to myself when crossing his tomb near my former home [in Delhi]. That listener is animate in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translations of Rahim as well. I guess they inform the horizon of my more rhetorically adventurous poems and translations.

An engraving in the tomb of Rahim in Delhi. “I often recited... Rahim’s dohas... to myself when crossing his tomb near my former home [in Delhi],” Katyal said. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

You weave your base language with words from Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. I remember when I shared your poem on Gurugram with a friend who never reads poetry, he said: “[Expletive] ye kya sahi baat kah di!” (roughly: “... has said the right thing!”) But maybe the poem cannot be fully appreciated by a reader who knows just English and does not “get” all the connotations. Does this bother you? Were you always mixing languages? Which language is closest to your heart?

The languages of the poems create their own audience. I am perfectly fine if my best readers are bilingual or multilingual, who’d pick up every aspect of the play in a poem. There are always going to be enough people in the world who know English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi, in different permutations and combinations. I am one of them, so I write to them. When others bother to listen too, it is absolutely delightful. But they are incidental to me. They don’t weigh on my mind.

The sting of your English poems laced with non-English words and sounds often comes in Hindi-Urdu. It is as if by their very form they make the point that all these sounds and tongues are mine, one among many. Is this a super cool way of cutting English down to size? Making Kafka’s point that all language is but a poor translation, and so mixing tongues may be the best way?

In the cities I grew up in, and in which I came into my own, the soundscape was always seamlessly multilingual. A puritan sort of English in school, an unpredictable mix of Hindi and Punjabi, and aspirational English words at home, all working within the horizon of Urdu which informed Lucknow, and what we were sometimes trained to derisively call dehati [rustic]. The poems I write now attempt to be true to this soundscape.

As a child, at no point did I register their coexistence as extraordinary or remarkable in any way. I want to make such a coexistence of languages reach a form of ordinariness in my poems as well. I don’t think it is done to cut English down to size because English has been so crucial to many in our part of the world, especially to those wishing to exit the caste-laden schemata of non-English languages and names. It is, instead, done to register the playful and pecheeda [tangled] coexistence of all my languages.

In the 2020 collection, Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, Katyal’s encounters with homophobia and bigotry are refracted through the prism of diversity. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

You have a felicity for recreating English poems in Hindustani. How does the practice of translating into Hindi inform your writing of code-mixed, translation-resistant original poems in English?

I think one can inhabit the translator’s aesthetic and the translator’s method in everything one writes and says. To be alert always to what spaces open up between languages, rather than those only within them. There is no innate purity in any language. It is always growing, depleting, changing, contiguous, and osmotic with other tongues.

I know for certain my classrooms become that much richer for it, when this aesthetic and method are employed. I wish to do the same in my poems as well. A multilingual poem reminds the reader (in me, too) of the world that we actually inhabit, rather than the mono ones we are often made to think we do.

You do not believe in being poetically slant about dissent. Does it stem from being a queer person in a right-wing world?

If someone does not understand what you wish for your world, you are reduced to the loneliness of your own wishes. If someone understands them, you find yourself a friend and a votary, quietly or loudly, rallying for the same world. Don’t we all wish there were more people who believed in the same ideals as we do. The first condition for that sort of community is to be direct. Simple. Not simplistic.

Can you talk about your forthcoming poetry collection?

The Last Time I Saw You [HarperCollins India, 2024] rehearses coming to terms with a moment of personal loss while placing and recognising that loss within the larger horizon of the pandemic and communalism that violently stalked Delhi not too far back in the past. In a sense, all of us have gone through an experience of loss, of one sort or another, but it’s pinch is wholly individual. In the book, I try to straddle both these shapes that loss can take, both shared and solitudinal.

Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi-based writer and translator. She recently published 1990, Aramganj, a translation of the bestselling Hindi novel Rambhakt Rangbaz.