When the East and West Meet Through Indian Visitors and Friends

2019 was a busy year for Danish poet Claus Ankersen. He published four collections of poetry and a literary translation in the last year of the past decade. And he also travelled across India in trains. His 5,000-km odyssey took him from Bhubaneswar to Kolkata, and from Hyderabad to Delhi, and several other places.

During this journey, he made friends, had adventures — and misadventures — and encountered the unexpected, as anyone who travels across the length and breadth of this country is expected to. The outcome of these travels is the book under review.

The 65-odd poems in this book, River of Man: Indian Poems (Red River, 2020), are divided into three unequal parts — 'I Have a Friend in India', 'Everything is Collected in One Place', and 'Always Room for One More'. The arrangement is neither chronological nor geographical, but rather, emotional.

In the acknowledgements, Ankersen writes: “the collection is a travelogue of poems”. It’s travel not only through space, but also through time. “This collection is also a testimony of a decade-long love affair between the writer and India — a relationship of constant flux that stretches through space-time…” A reader gets a good sense of this amorphous relationship in several poems.

'I Have A Friend In India' is one of these poems.

"I have a friend in Shillong
with a round head and a big heart.
I have a friend in Bhubaneswar
with a slight limp and
I have a friend in Kolkata
who can always use a blanket
and likes his joints paperthin."

What begins as a litany of curious individuals who have befriended the narrator of this poem becomes more a group selfie one posts on social media:

"I have a friend in Bangalore
and a dozen in Mumbai.
I have friends in Delhi and friends in Agra,
friends in Pune and in Hyderabad."

But Ankersen is not just a white man among his brown-skinned friends. He is aware of the complicated nature of any such relationship, and even of his literary project. “My sink embodies the double-bind of post colonialism —” he writes in 'Fair Share'.

"I get special treatment
and pay extra,
the first I never tire of and
the second gets to me."

In River of Man, he writes:

"Faced with the history of western colonialism
it would or it could be
considered improper, or merely classic
for a white man
to celebrate India:
So let’s assume
I am an Indian, I am
an Indian, aren’t we all
on this subcontinent?"

Ankersen’s rejection of a white man celebrating India as “improper” is not too dissimilar from his transformation into an Indian. Western writers and artists have been fascinated with Indian culture, starting from Charles “Hindoo” Stuart and Max Muller in the 19th century to Hermann Hesse and W.B. Yeats as well as Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles in the 20th century.

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By the late 20th century, the Beats and their followers were not only getting inspired by Indian poetry and music but were also initiating themselves into Indian religion and society — at times with rather unfortunate results, such as the Beatles’ misadventure at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

In recent years, poets such as Ankersen have tried to make East and West meet, not through the participation-observation techniques of an anthropologist (Ankersen was trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen), but by cultivating relationships and friendships in the country. Some of these friendships are with contemporary Indian poets such as Anand Thakore, Hoshang Merchant, and Nabina Das, who have cameos in this book.

In 'Peer-to-Peer', Ankersen recollects:

"Shikhandin once asked me, after a reading
with Nabina Das and Hosang Merchant
if I could make a living out of poetry
since all Indian poets have day jobs.
When I said yes, as I always do,
she pulled an ace from her sleeve,
asking if I had a car. I shook my head.
Then you cannot make a living, she concluded."

Other European poets too have channelled their love for India into their work, with some degree of success. Irish poet Fióna Bolger’s A Compound of Words, which engages with the fractured politics of India, and Ankersen’s Grab Your Heart and Follow Me (2018) prove beyond a shadow of doubt the elasticity of Indian poetry in English, and how one need not be even an Indian to write it.  

Uttaran Das Gupta is the author of a book of poems Visceral Metropolis (2017) and a novel Ritual (2020).

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