Nearly nine years ago, on December 20, 2013, Vivek Narayanan performed a few poems from his work-in-progress on the lawns of the India International Centre Annexe in Delhi, during an international writers’ dialogue organised by the literary journal Almost Island (which Narayanan co-edited then). It was an aggressively cold evening, so much so that the lawn had been lined with these mini-fireplaces that glowed an angry orange even as Narayanan started a poem called “Rama”. I was one of the handful of people in attendance.
Every second line in the poem was the refrain, delivered in a low staccato by Narayanan: “Your son is not your son”. The refrain alternated with lofty proclamations about Rama (“Rama that hero’s hair dark as a crow’s wing”) that soon gave way to darker and darker imagery (“Rama that forest torn from the heart”, “Rama that empty gaping dark”) until finally, it ended with
“Rama that reason beyond reason
Your son is not your son
Rama that sleep beyond sleep
Your son is not your son”
This poem is part of After, the latest poetry collection of Narayanan, whose bio introduces him simply as “Vivek Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University.” After is inspired by Valmiki’s Ramayana. The poem, “Rama”, as read by Narayanan that December evening rushed back to mind as I went through After and I was struck anew by the quiet power and subtlety of the verse.
“Your son is not your son” is, of course, what the citizens of Ayodhya use in their insinuations when they urge Rama to make Sita undergo a “purity test” after her return from Lanka. But by the end of the poem, you realise that “your son is not your son” isn’t necessarily the literal, paternity-doubting statement it looks like. It might actually be a blessing for the child in question; he won’t grow up to have a warrior’s blood-soaked hands, nor will he have presumptions of being a moral exemplar for the masses.
Radical translation
“Rama”, which appears at the 20-page mark, sets the tone for this wildly ambitious book. Over a decade in the making, After is a grand literary experiment, an act of “radical translation” and a major critical text, all rolled into one. Across 600-plus challenging and deeply rewarding pages, Narayanan teases out subcutaneous layers of meaning, psychological depth and cultural commentary from Valmiki’s epic. Narayanan’s dominant mode here is a hip, hyper-literate, frequently ironic commentary on Valmiki’s epic tonality (“apes Simians whatever you call them/ bribed begged cajoled drafted or just wrenched from their honey-drunk orgies”).
Cover of After.
But there’s also a second, much more sly voice that keeps its laser-focus on questions of historiography: why was Ahalya so thoroughly condemned? Did Surpanakha (who gets several poems here, including the magisterial first-person “Aranyani”) really deserve the mutilations visited upon her body by Rama and Lakshmana? How ethical was Rama’s meddling in the affairs of Kishkindha, in the slaying of Vaali? How were these questions “flattened” in the most popular versions of the Ramayana?
The malleability and limitless intellectual curiosity of these voices means that Narayanan is well-equipped to connect his “source text” to all manner of real-life goings-on over the last decade. ‘To Shaheen Bagh, In Absentia’ begins with an epigram from Faiz (“Bas naam rahega Allah ka”) and ends with a translation of “Maitreem Bhajata”, a Sanskrit song once performed by M.S. Subbulakshmi at the United Nations. A fiendishly clever poem called “Silk Smitha as Surpanakha” finds common ground in the lives of two misrepresented “scarlet women” (“everywhere she went/ certain men were in charge”).
Daring innovations
This is Narayanan’s third poetry collection, after Universal Beach (2011) and The Life and Times of Mr S (2012). It is not difficult to spot the seeds of After in the techniques and themes explored by these earlier works (some of the first poems in After were written around 2010). Mr S, for example, has a poem called “Mr S, On First Looking Into Parthasarathy’s Cilappatikaram”, where Narayanan riffs off R. Parthasarathy’s translation of the Cilappatikaram, an ancient Tamil epic. Silk Smitha, likened to Surpanakha in After, is the subject of “Three Elegies for Silk Smitha” in Universal Beach (“Foil to the gangster’s drink, / blackmailer’s bait, the woman/ you never brought home/ to mother, she is/ and is not/ the salt of what she is”).
During email and Zoom conversations with Narayanan, I asked him about the makings of some of the most daring and formally innovative poems in After, like “To Amar Chitra Katha”, which uses ACK-style speech balloons and lettering on the page. The Amar Chitra Katha title called Vali featured Rama in the moment of slaughter, as he shoots his arrows into Vali out of sight, from behind a tree. This image, of a man hailed as morally upstanding, killing a stranger via treachery, made quite an impression on the 10-year-old Narayanan when he read the comics for the first time.
Narayanan said: “As a child I saw Vali on the cover of the comic and assumed that he was its hero, and he was—and then at the end Rama kills him. This was so disturbing to me at age 10, I never forgot it. Little did I know that the scene had also haunted and troubled traditional commentators on the Ramayana for centuries. To the ACK comics’ credit, it does actually channel some of that ambivalence in the source text.”
Other poems take the form of “multimedia” experiments, suggesting visual and sonic landscapes that provide additional context (this is one of the many ways in which this collection often resembles a top-of-the-line art exhibition). “Kumbhakarna Sound System”, for example, appears on the page as a song, a contemporary orchestral chorus set to music by Maarten Visser, complete with x-y graphs where x represents time and y pitch.
La Mort de Ravana, a painting by Fernand Cormon, prompts an eponymous poem in After
An 1875 painting called La Mort de Ravana (by Fernand Cormon, who taught Van Gogh) prompts an eponymous poem, while ‘Rama’s Weapons’ includes a chart where the different weapons used by the warrior-prince are introduced by their contemporary names (Varunastra is “heavyweight torpedo”, Sagarika is “submarine-launched missile”).
Not one of these interventions feels forced or gimmicky, simply because of the close attention Narayanan has for “the sound and the strategies of the original”, as he says in the introduction. Again and again, a phrase or a verse or a fragment appears on the page that will change your relationship with the Ramayana forever. To my mind, After is the most accomplished book of poems published in India since Karthika Nair’s Until the Lions (a similarly monumental effort directed towards the Mahabharata).
Poetry and violence
One ofthefascinating literary conversations in After is with poet and politician Shrikant Verma (1931-1986), specifically with his magnum opus, the 1984 poetry collection Magadh. Guilt-ridden over his role in the Indira Gandhi government’s excesses, Verma wrote an elaborate allegory woven around the fall of once-glorious city-states to tell his truth. Like Calvino’s Marco Polo, who is always describing Venice in Invisible Cities (no matter which city he’s claiming to talk about in the moment), Verma is preoccupied, always, with Delhi. In ‘To Shrikant Verma’, Narayanan speaks directly to Verma (“Then you’d ask around like you/ were one of Rama’s courtiers / what people thought / of the reigning monarch etc.”) but also to his poems, like the searing, unforgettable ‘Corpses in Kashi’.
During our interview, Narayanan spoke at length about Verma’s work and the historically unwieldy convergence of nationalism and poetry. “Nationalism likes to simplify, while literature complicates things, makes them messier,” Narayanan said. “Of course, Verma, while writing such beautiful and morally courageous poetry, was also a Congress functionary writing Indira’s speeches during the Emergency. Valmiki seems to show us a link between poetry and violence from his ‘founding scene’ where a lovemaking bird is pointlessly killed and the shloka metre is born—and I kept exploring that link throughout. I often found myself thinking about the poet’s relation to power; the relation of poet to king (remember also that Rama’s sons are bards who then inherit the throne). We’d like to believe that the poet is always against power, but often poets are complicit with power as well.”
At one point during the poem, Narayanan quotes a pre-Magadh line, something Verma wrote in the 1970s: “Fools! It was only/ after losing/ the nation /that I found this poetry.” Did Narayanan feel something similar while working on After, especially since India voted in the right-wing BJP government in 2014 (four years after he began working on this book)?
“When I first started to work on this, in 2010, the subject felt controversial but not at all dangerous,” Narayanan said. “It was such a different era. We were naive and disastrously wrong about so many things. By the time 2014 happened, I was four years in—I realised the context had changed, but I was now so deep in I didn’t have the option to stop. Still, I just kept doing what I was doing, exploring Valmiki line by line—I didn’t immediately bring in or pivot to contemporary events because I wanted to try and make something lasting. By 2018 or so, the change wrought by authoritarianism had become so thorough, so radical, the politics of Islamophobia and hate so naked and all-encompassing, that I knew it would be ethically wrong for me not to face it and present it head on in the book.”
Indeed, After does confront India’s slide into authoritarianism, Islamophobia and other assorted horrors, especially in the 150-page “Poem Without Beginning or End”, which juxtaposes Valmiki’s scenes of war with scenes (taken from real-life news articles) of “killing and torture performed by the Indian state, mostly in the past 20 years of or so”; bloodbaths in Kashmir and Chhattisgarh feature prominently.
I recently came across an April 1988 interview with the historian Romila Thapar where she says something interesting about the Ramayana: “It is important to remember that the epic tradition is one in which a number of ‘floating poems’ about various situations and personalities are brought together by a single poet or a group of poets to constitute a longer poem that becomes the epic.” This perfectly describes the polyphonic achievements of After. This is a collection that deserves to be read by every curious Indian reader, regardless of their interest levels in mythology.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer and journalist working on his first book of non-fiction.
The Crux
- After is the latest poetry collection of Vivek Narayanan
- After is inspired by Valmiki’s Ramayana
- Narayanan teases out subcutaneous layers of meaning, psychological depth, and cultural commentary from Valmiki’s epic
- Narayanan’s dominant mode here is a hip, hyper-literate, frequently ironic commentary on Valmiki’s epic tonality
- He connects the epic to events from the last decade, like the Shaheen Bagh protests
- Not one of these interventions feels forced or gimmicky, simply because of the close attention Narayanan has for “the sound and the strategies of the original”
