When reviewing something outstanding, it is best to be upfront. Ranjit Hoskote’s Hunchprose is fit to be put alongside the best of Dom Moraes. The poetry and its subterranean voice, ambivalent in the sense they speak in different tones, snare the reader. The very first poem, ‘Man with Parrots’, situates the man in this age:
“He is the residue of his finger prints. He is who his iris says he is.
He has been recorded as his wavering image.”
The man is waved through his years, the age, the airport and he goes through life dragging ‘his minefield around with him.’
Ranjit Hoskote
Hunchprose
Penguin Hamish Hamilton (March 2020)
It must be mentioned that Ranjit Hoskote is one of the most respected art critics around. This book is also testimony to his wide reading of arcane subjects.
A poet can retell his stories, but the manner has to be unique, the path to the event must not have been tread earlier. His poem on Homer starts with the lines “Tell them at home he has been taken hostage by his fictions.’’ The poem barely touches on Medusa, the ‘snake-haired girl’. Since he is talking of the sea, ‘a schooner snags on the burning horizon, a whinnying horse/ breaks the slate line between surf and rain’. Later there are two lines again on wind and rock and island, and you guess he is probably thinking of the Odyssey all the time. And it ends aptly with the lines where he is ‘strapped to the mast’ and the poet says
Tell them no one is safe
from the hurricane of his story.
In the earlier poems, Hoskote lets himself go. He talks of comets, the horizon being trapped, desert, sand – primal pillars of the poetic imagination. ‘He measures the dunes/ by what’s left of meteor trails.’
A hallmark of a good poem is that it makes you change your mind. When first I read ‘Market’ I was bowled over. When I read it again the next day, I thought of it as a good poem, nothing beyond. I dread reading it a third time! Then I looked at the notes and found the inspiration came from a book by Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s on the conquest of New Spain. The sentence that sparked the poem goes: ‘I am forgetting the sellers of salt and the makers of flint knives, and how they split them off the stone itself.’
The volume is littered with some very short poems, like ‘Stepwell’, ‘Mnemonym’, the latter of which has 29 words. I leave it to others to judge whether they are thoughts, notations or poems.
There are two protest poems together, ‘Fury’ is screaming hot lava, you feel Vesuvius has just exploded, and the poem ‘Protest’ for Sudhir Patwardhan is well crafted and as strong as the painting on which the poem is based. Incidentally, Patwardhan’s painting on Pokhran blows the mind.
A poet must have a way with a turn of phrase. The poem ‘Trapeze Artist’ starts with the lines:
‘The man who’d lost his parachute
picks a knife laid out in a tray of light
the way a lesser man might pick a fight.’
And how does the poem end? The poet watches him negotiating the wire as he balances, ‘on his spectator’s raised eyebrows.’ Nothing more need be said.
Hoskote’s phrases remain with the reader, the python is ‘night-long’, a goddess gets ‘draped in (or is it by) a lost river’, ‘a jagged wave of a song stabs the creek’, he talks of ‘plucking sunsets from the water’. The Bonesetter’s sutures are ‘an embroidery/of carbon dust’, how splendidly put. Like any old poet, he knows that the last line must carry a punch. For instance in his poem ‘Musk’, dedicated to the painter Ranbir Kaleka, the deer running from burning forest to forest, ‘cannot escape the musk it carries.’
The last of a dying line of lions, broods:
‘Celebrity breeds
Flickering avatars, not seed:
I’ll soon be a phantom of the archive.’
The three poems, ‘Ending’, ‘Emperor’, ‘Sovereign’ are all about power and kingship dying away, the fading away of absolutism, but Hoskote makes it hard for the reader. Take the lines in the poem ‘Sovereign’, a bit of a strain on the mind:
‘What washes up
Is drilled shale lost static parsed from gulf to strait
plastic whorls in whose wake gagged dolphins trail
scarred humpback whales whose shadows
will drift unmoored up thawing glaciers’…
I find this a bit chaotic, especially the whales going up glaciers.
We need to read the long note on the poem ‘Lemuria’ and ‘Ugarit’, the Bronze Age port on the North Syrian coast, attacked and destroyed by unknown ‘Sea people’. It reminds me of Mohenjo Daro, destroyed by people mounted on horses, according to one of the theories.
Ranjit Hoskote. Photo: Twitter/@ranjithoskote
It needs to be mentioned that one side of the page out of 44 have been left blank, perhaps to add body to the volume, which it must be said, is beautifully produced.
Lastly, in the poem ‘Cave’, Hoskote brings in Varaha, the boar incarnation of Vishnu, who saves the earth which is hidden in the primaeval waters, as he lifts the earth with its tusk. The poem ends with the lines
‘Could you breathe if they trapped us
in a net of myths?’
But today a majority of the people seem to be caught in a web of myths. What can be done? Shall we look out for a Varaha or is he amongst us already?
Keki N. Daruwalla is a poet.