Limned as an enmeshing of “lyrical ecopoetics with subtle political critique,” Leeladhar Jagoori’s 1977 Hindi poetry collection Bachi hui prithvi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan) has been translated into English by Matt Reeck as What of the Earth Was Saved—now out from World Poetry Books. His avant-garde poetic and political positioning is evidenced by this book, which was published in the last year of Indira Gandhi’s the Emergency. In the words of translator Matt Reeck, Bachi hui prithvi (1977), the Hindi original of What of the Earth Was Saved, is a testament to the fact that Leeladhar was ahead of his time, writing around “regional consciousness and environmentalism,” a literary forefather to today’s Hindi-language and Indian writings on nature and ecology.
In this interview, I spoke with Leeladhar, who is currently in Dehradun (with translator Matt Reeck translating my questions from English to Hindi, and Leeladhar’s answers from Hindi to English), on his trailblazing poetry collection—the first full volume of his poems to be translated into English—and modern Hindi verse, especially poetry on prakŗti (nature).
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your poetry collection What of the Earth Was Saved is now out from World Poetry Books—translated by Matt Reeck from the Hindi original Bachi hui prithvi, which was published in 1977 by New Delhi-based Rajkamal Prakashan. Could you take us back to 1977 and before that: what was your creative process like and what were the poetic underpinnings to the poems in this collection?
Leeladhar Jagoori (LJ): In school, I practiced everything. I wrote songs and ghazals. I wrote anuṣṭubh verse, a traditional poetic form in Hindi poetry, like it was conversational—like talking.
My first volume was published when I was a student at Banaras Hindu University. I had come back from the army and I went to Banaras to earn an MA. I was invited to read at a poetry event, and a publisher heard me and asked to publish my work, and I said fine. Those poems are about mountain life. I finally came around to seeing that it was a young person’s poetry. It was immature in a sense. It’s usually read as nature poetry. Then my second volume, Now Things Have Begun (Natak jari hai, 1971) was published from the standpoint of a young unemployed man looking for work. It’s spare, unsparing, tough-minded poetry. Its images are new, rough, not polished. In the 70s, poetic language sought to dig down to the very core of experience. Instead of ornamentation, it went in for bare language. Now Things Have Begun is full of these things, the things that young people then were thinking about.
Then my third volume was On This Journey (Is yatra men, 1974). Its poems are more tender, dreamy and full of love. Agyeya, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, and Dhumil all praised it. Manglesh Dabral, Trinetr Joshi, Prabhati Nautiyal, Madan Kashyap, and Avadhesh Preet, Prem Sahil, and Om Thanvi said the book ushered in a new direction in Hindi poetry. In the May 1975 issue of the magazine Dinman, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena wrote a review that featured the book on the magazine’s cover. It was my good fortune that Agyeya praised it, and that Nirmal Verma was taken by the poems as well.
In On This Journey, I found a way to break from the poetry I’d previously written. These poems reflect new experiences and new language. I thought love poems could serve as a vehicle for political expression. In those days, a tree or a mountain, the idea of family or touching the sea, anything at all could move me—incite me—to write poetry. Politics and love mixed together. I reread On This Journey to remember my youth. Rereading these poems, I recall the full head of hair I used to have! To me, its poems neither renounce life nor embrace it wantonly.
In On This Journey, nature and politics are brought together. I ask implicitly when society defined me as an individual and through what means. These poems freed me from what I’d written before, and they taught me that it’s pointless to write poetry, and to continue to write poetry, only to perfect formal skill. In poetry, the expression of a feeling isn’t limited by personality or historical date. Poetry is written in whatever circumstances you find yourself in, and when today’s poet is faced with the same circumstances, a new poem will be written that is wholly different from the poems written before. This difference isn’t upsetting. It should be that way. For poetry, tradition and breaking tradition will always be necessary.
Then the poems of It’s Still Night (Rat ab bhi maujood hai, 1975) and What of the Earth Was Saved (Bachi hui prithvi, 1977) were written during the Emergency. Even some of the poems of Now It’s Words That Tremble (Ghabarae hue shabd, 1981) are influenced by the Emergency.
By the 60s, Indian politics had already lost its way. And by the middle of the 70s, there was the Emergency. It wasn’t possible to write about individual people; every single image was about society and about politicians. Even though literary language in those years was filled with violence and revolution, there was still the search for some small space where the individual could speak about their personal life. We were searching in our national life to find the space to express our particular circumstances—some corner where amid all the misery something good could take root, like a plant.
The destitute were being pushed aside, like they were bad luck. Those who were pushing them aside were the rich, and this was generating bad karma for them. In the 60s and 70s, poetry was about these haves and have nots. So in the 60s, and after, the topic of most poetry was want, lack, and the lives of those who were left behind, or left out, of society. More generally, you could say that back in those days, in the 70s, Hindi poetry was responding more to Indian violence and social chaos than Western points of reference. Hindi poetry worried more about the national scene than modernity. I’ve always thought that the decade’s poetry was more socially engaged than the poetry of Maithali Sharan Gupta’s time, or Dinkar’s.
I consider a poet’s job to consist of three things: writing about the society, the time, and the country. So What of the Earth Was Saved was important for me because it was at this time that all these goals came clearly into focus for me. Before, the poetry I wrote was somewhat more personal. But my process has always been the same. Language is like a river. It comes from a source, then takes its own shape. And a river can change its course over time. But it’s the same river.
AMMD: In Kāma’s Flowers: Nature in Hindi Poetry and Criticism, 1885-1925 (State University of New York Press, 2011), Valerie Ritter wrote about prakŗti (or nature) in Hindi poetry:
These flowers—as all of the stuff of the nature poetry that emerged in Hindi in the modern era—held powerful resonances with both older poetics and new concerns with freedom, political and social. The flowers which formerly adorned Kāma’s arrows, messengers delivering pleasure, desire, and lust, are now these arrows of desire themselves, reincarnated. The accoutrement has become the thing it had once ornamented, and love poetry becomes nature poetry, in the shift to Hindi poetic modernity.
Could we converse about these two poetic movements: first, the coinciding of love poetry evolving into nature poetry with the introduction of ‘modernity’ into Hindi literature; and second, the burgeoning of newer concerns via nature poetry, such as ethnopolitical critiques?
LJ: How can you write about anything without writing about nature? Nature is in everything. Maybe because I was born in the mountains, surrounded by nature, I think like this. I don’t know. But nature isn’t always good. Nature has devastated my life three times. It killed my mother when I was five with smallpox. In 1970, a landslide wiped away my house. I was away with one of my sons, but the landslide killed my second mother, two brothers, two sisters, and my eldest son. My father just barely managed to save my youngest son. Then in 2013, our home and the hotel my youngest son managed were wiped clean off the earth in a flood. The buildings sat right at the corner of the Ganges, where the river turned direction, and the water rushing downstream ate the buildings in a second, nothing more. All of my old photos, old books, were gone. And without us, what does nature mean? People hurt nature, but they also spread it. Help it. Nature has its own politics, its own thinking, its own way. You can see it in the changing seasons.
People say that nature plays a big role in my poetry. That’s true. In my mind, there are two geographical circumstances that impress people—the mountains and the sea. No matter where you live, your national and international consciousness, your cultural bearing, your political life, all of these are tied to the mountains and the sea. While the problems facing people in the mountains and by the sea are of course different, their dreams of a better life and happiness are just the same.
As for politics, since I live in society, my poetry can’t escape being political. In the 60s, when I started writing, society was in revolt. Everyone wanted to see change. Everyone thought that the freedom we’d won from the British was not full freedom. It was half freedom. We wanted change, and we wrote poetry about wanting change. By the 80s, this feeling had changed. No one had the energy anymore. And today no one says anything. Everything’s devoid of principles. When coalition governments started, that was the end of Leftism. Today these parties aren’t what they say they are. The people who say that writing can change society are wrong. That’s not the truth. Writers put a mirror up to society. They can show what’s going on in society, but they can’t change it.
In India, the situation is complicated because of caste. There’s the problem of caste, and there’s the problem of class. In terms of the caste system, we won’t ever really understand it if we only look at it through the traditional sociological lens. But Marx’s class-based commentary isn’t entirely appropriate either. He wrote about class, not caste. Now in India classes are mixing. My own poetry tracks the changes in society. It’s possible that poetry that takes a laissez-faire or passive attitude is marked by middle-class thinking. But this is only visible in some bad Hindi poetry, where the writers just accept things as they are.
AMMD: Your native tongue is Garhwali, a language of the Garhwali people in Uttarakhand state’s Garhwal region. However, as your translator has written, you “stopped writing these [Garhwali] songs because [you were] increasingly distant from the context in which they would have meaning,” and because you had uncertainties in performing them. Could you illuminate how central the extra-textual elements of setting and performance are in oral traditions like Garhwali poetry?
LJ: In the early 70s, after I came back from college in Banaras, I had my first teaching post in a village, and there was a tradition where the women would sing as they worked. It was beautiful. They were like poets to me. But where else was that going to be done? Back then, I would occasionally go to Lucknow to read Garhwali poems for All India Radio there. I remember I read a poem called “The Melting Snow as Spring Approaches.” It was about the changing seasons, and how the women would sow the new year’s first seeds. But these are village songs. They are traditional. They can’t be taken out of their context. They wouldn’t mean the same. There’s no national audience for it.
AMMD: Among your poetry collections which have not yet been translated, which one do you think would be the most difficult to translate? And what demands would a translator face upon rendering that collection into another language?
LJ: It depends on the translator. I think my poetry is easy to read. My imagery, my imagination, might be difficult, but the words aren’t hard. In general, for translating poetry, my feeling is that it’s not just about the words. Translation is about feelings as well. The translator has to transform the words and the feelings into the new language. To translate poetry, for example, you have to have a poetic sensibility, and you have to think about the ethos of the new language. Then you have to take into account time as well. If the poetry is from another time, you have to balance the two times. This is the translator’s struggle. The translator’s talent is seen in negotiating this difficulty. But a good translation can become a canonical poem in the new language. Look at Tagore—he won the Nobel Prize because of translations.
AMMD: When we speak of Hindi Literature, who are your influences—Global Majority, Asian, South Asian, and Indian scholars, writers, and thinkers—whose works shaped your philosophy, your creative-critical writings, and your ethos? And in what ways have they been influential to you?
LJ: India’s old poetry is full of so much wisdom and beauty. Tulsidas, Kalidasa, Valmiki. Valmiki wrote the world’s first epic. There’s also a Sanskrit line that says that every line of poetry has to be full of meaning, and precise. That’s sometimes what I find missing today: you have to have something to say, and it has to be poetry. It has to be said in as few words as possible. There’s a sort of difficulty, a beauty, that comes through this sort of compression.
Among modern poets, I’ve been influenced by Jayshankar Prasad, Maithili Shuran Gupta, Hari Oudh, Dinkar, and Agyeya. Rajkamal Choudary and Dhumil, as well. They were contemporaries—I’ve met them. I’ll never forget Dhumil. I dedicated my fourth book to him. I visited him in the hospital when he was dying. I helped him to the bathroom, and in the bathroom, he recited these lines to me, “Don’t ask the smith / what iron tastes like / ask the horse / with the bit in his mouth.” Those were the first lines of my book (It’s Still Night, 1975). No one else would ever know he said that if I didn’t put those lines in my book.
Then, in terms of learning how to write, Muktibodh, Raghuvir Sahay, Nagarjun, and Shamsher Bahadur Singh were central. I’m also influenced by the Rajasthani poet Meghraj Mukul. Then, in Lucknow, Shrilal Shukla was a big help. He transferred into the Information Service after I got there. He was my direct boss.
For poets, influence comes through finding new words, finding ways to use new words. Poets have to be good at taking what happens to them in their lives and making it abstract, and then these abstract situations become real for readers. This is challenging to do. The biggest thing is to find a way to make your poetry into a language.
I don’t read other languages, so I don’t really have other influences. But, when it comes to questions about writing poetry, and finding the right time, I remember an anecdote about the Russian poet Mayakovsky. The story I heard was one night he went walking, and a storm broke out. He rushed to find shelter. There was a barn nearby, and he took shelter there. Suddenly, the title of a poem came to him, “A Cloud in Trousers,” but he didn’t have anything to write with. He remembered the title till he got home, then he wrote the poem. I’ve never read it, but to me it’s silly to say that you have to wait for the right time to write a poem. Poems come whenever, they come from everywhere, from life, from thinking, from reading a book or the newspaper. For instance, my poem “A Bit of News” came from reading about terrorists in Panjab in the newspaper. They were hiding in the sugarcane fields.
This interview was translated from the Hindi by Matt Reeck.
Leeladhar Jagoori (b. 1940) is one of the leading Hindi poets in postcolonial India. Among his poetry collections and books include Shankha Mukhi Shikharon par (1964), Natak Jari hai (1971), Is Yatra men (Sahitya Bharati, 1974), Raat Ab bhi Maujud hai (1975), Anubhav Ke Aakash Mein Chand (Rajkamal Prakashan, 1997), Mere sākshātkāra (Kitāb Ghar Prakasan, 2003), and Ghabbaraye Hue Shabda (Rajkamal Prakashan, 1981). A recipient of several literary awards from Padma Shri to Sahitya Akademi, from Raghuvir Sahay Samman to Namit Puraskar, translations of his poetry by Matt Reeck appeared in, among others, Asymptote, Exchanges: A Journal of Literary Translation, Another Chicago Magazine, On the Seawall, and Europe. He holds an MA in Hindi Literature and lives in the mountains of Dehradun, Uttarakhand in India.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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