The Interview : Ashwani Kumar

Kamlaker Bhatt, poet and writer, talks to Ashwani Kumar about his poetry and creativity . 

KB: How did writing poetry happen in your life?

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AK: I come from a language-rich background. I spent my early childhood in a place called Gua, located at the tri-junction of Bihar, Bengal and Odisha, in a forested mining town. Later in life, I returned to this town, and imagined it once again. Ashis Nandy, in his introduction to my book on My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter, refers to my "imaginary birthplace."

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For me, Gua is more than just a birthplace; it is a kind of metonym for my life, my circumstances, and my experience as a poet — and beyond that, as a writer. My identity, like my work, is layered and fragmented. Coming from Bihar, where very few people pursue writing poetry in English, I have often wrestled with questions about my linguistic choices. Bihar has a rich poetic tradition dating back to Buddha, whom one could consider both a poet and a philosopher. However, this tradition seemed to diminish during the colonial period, when Bihar became, in a sense, a wasteland — much like T.S. Eliot’s.

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Finding my place within this literary landscape has been a challenge. Even today, peers ask why I do not write in my native languages or dialects—Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, or Hindi. They hear something unfamiliar in my English, a tonal estrangement, and wonder where it comes from.

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I started writing at an early age. In my book Banaras and the Other, I include a long poem titled Family Album, in which I reflect on the iconic writer Phanishwar Nath Renu. My earliest poetic influences were in my own language, and I vividly remember reading my first poem in front of Renu himself. That encounter shaped my literary journey, and I later returned to him in my Family Album series.  Through those poems, I explored the history, culture, politics, and social conditions of my land, my people, and my own poetry.

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Yet my turn to English was neither planned nor deliberate. It was a chaotic, almost unconscious migration. Looking back, I often note how I unexpectedly found myself in Oklahoma—the land of tornadoes—where I embraced English as a language of survival. Perhaps this shift was shaped by A. K. Ramanujan, or by his ghost, whom I encountered only by accident. On my PhD committee in Oklahoma was Vinay Dharwadker, a distinguished linguist and poet, and one of Ramanujan’s most celebrated disciples. It was through these uncanny academic and literary proximities—Ramanujan, Dharwadker, and others, including strange and dislocating geographies—that I began to invent my own language of poetry. Even as I remained an untutored, invisible, and disenfranchised Bihari migrant in the Anglophone world, that voice persisted.

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This was around 1997—my memory falters. Yet even before Oklahoma, I was already deeply immersed in poetry, though shy of publishing. I hid my poems as one hides secrets—rustic, colloquial untruths whispered to oneself. Then Shinjini entered my life—was it 1990 or 1991? Again, memory fails. Once I began writing to her, she discovered in me—not just a lover, but a poet, too.

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KB: Does your childhood have anything to do with the kind of poems you write and how you write them?

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AK: Yes, absolutely. Looking back now, I can see it clearly. As I’ve often said, I was almost raised in the wilderness. My father was a policeman, and we lived in the barracks, surrounded by cops — not the kind you see today, not the threatening kind, but simple, ordinary people. There were very few children around, and I didn’t attend school in the conventional sense. Instead, a teacher would come in the mornings, much like how Amartya Sen recalls picking up Sanskrit and other languages in his childhood.

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The rest of the day I was free—wandering through forests and gardens, absorbing the world around me. It was an untamed childhood, undisciplined in every sense. Perhaps that is why my poetry, too, resists discipline. If you look closely at my work—its stanzas, its tone, its tenor—you will sense a wildness, an element of unpredictability. Some of my poet friends write with great formal control, their poems finely structured, even sanitized, shaped by the worlds they come from. They can compose a sonnet or a ghazal with  precision. I cannot. I come from the wilderness—a wild child of an untamed world.

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Sunflowers at the Village School

In the village school,
we never carried bagful of books.
Only our bamboo reed pencil like a hoe or spud,
digging up nocturnal potatoes in the school compound.

Our headmaster Munirka Choubey—
a middle-aged part-time volunteer of
Hindustan Socialist Republican Army—
repeatedly closing and opening his eyes,

Occasionally coughing, dictated
History lessons. After saying everything
about the origins of Indus civilization, his eyebrows
would turn into ill-fated pages of Tolstoy’s novels.

In the spare time between classes,
He cut his half-grown nails; right, left,
and counted them innumerable times
on the study table.

Whenever he went out to relieve himself
behind the berry shrubs,
we smoked seeds of sunflowers,
secretly hidden into the buttonholes of underwear

and laughed about Ibn Battuta’s tattered shoes.
In the mathematics class
strange birds, beasts, and Beethoven walked into the class,
kissed our lips and breathed folk songs into our lungs.

During the unseasonal school hours,
we loitered around the abandoned shrines,
chewing new languages
of limestones and liquid tobacco.

As soon as the sun dipped,
and the day’s dust stopped
accumulating in the paan shop’s mirror,
we returned home with flocks of sheep and water-buffaloes. 

KB: So, in a sense, you are constantly traveling between your childhood, your past experiences, and the present?

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AK: Yes, very well said. But more than my mind, it is my dreams and fantasies that make that journey. I remember when My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter was published, K. Satchidanandan while releasing the book used the word whimsy to describe my style. He said, “Every word of his is whimsy.” He meant that my poetry startles — one moment you’re reading about blood pressure, the next, a flower appears.

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Another defining quality is irreverence — toward everything. Toward tradition, toward language, even toward the craft of poetry itself. Honestly, I wasn’t even aware of this until critics pointed it out to me. Ashis Nandy, for instance, said at my book launch that I am not an "English English" poet. Yes, I write in English, but the English I use is something else entirely. He compared it to the way Bengali poets might say, "I dream in Bengali but write in English." I suppose I dream in Malayalam, in Hindi, in Bhojpuri, and my poetry emerges in English. It may sound bizarre, but it was psychologist Ashis Nandy’s fictional prolegomena to My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter that brought my exile to an end and opened my ritual passage into the world of English poetry.

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KB: Poems like “Mother’s Tongue” seem to foreground a political theme — perhaps addressing the impact of colonialism or other linguistic hegemonies. However, your poetic idiom is intensely imagistic, febrile, and resistant to becoming a slogan. Even in “Mother’s Tongue,” the poem does not operate at a prosaic level, simply pointing out conflicts between dominant and marginalized languages. Instead, it enacts these tensions at a deeply imaginative level. So, when you write, is the issue of meaning or message something that is uppermost in your mind?

AK: Let me first speak about my creative process. I must confess — I confess everything — I am deeply political. Not just political, but intentionally and passionately so. I have been a teacher of politics, I have engaged with political thought, and ever since childhood, I have been drawn to political ideas. But there is an important distinction I make: I am political, but I am not politicized or polarized in the way that some poets or political commentators are today.

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When I moved to Delhi, I encountered various ideological camps — left, right, center — all vying for influence. My poem My Mother’s Hairpin reflects my disillusionment with these rigid political camps and the oppressive structures they create. I resist that kind of politicization, and my poetry, too, resists it. It is political, but in an open-ended way — perhaps in the tradition of Kalidasa, who engaged with politics but never in a didactic or rigid manner. My poetry does not scream or shout; it does not take sides in obvious ways. That restraint is not a conscious decision — it is simply who I am.

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I also do not separate my poetry from my existential being. My work is an extension of who I am, not something crafted externally to serve a specific agenda.

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You mentioned the imagistic, febrile quality of my poetry. That, I believe, stems from a deeply philosophical engagement with language and experience. If I were to trace the roots of my poetic consciousness, I would point to 1984. That year, that event, saw the birth of my first poem. I was a witness to the anti-Sikh riots, and that experience shaped me indelibly. My first real poem was written soon after, though I only published it decades later. That moment stayed with me.

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Even when I write about something as horrific as massacre, my poetry is not just about violence; it contains a sensuousness, an undercurrent of love. My recent poem, written on January 1st, 2024, spans the journey from 1984 to today. It speaks of Gaza, of war, of love amidst destruction. In one of its lines, I write:

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"fasting sparrows whisper prayer for lovers and martyrs,
And I lose my mouth and youth in her thighs."

KB: Have you ever written a deliberate poem — one where you consciously decided, "I want to write about this"? Something that moved you, and you reflected on it before writing?

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AK: Yes, I have. There is one poem, “Slaughter in the Office of a Professor of Poetry”—my response to a real-life incident of violence, something I deeply opposed. Though rooted in my fictional autobiography, the poem carries elements of the surreal, a kind of political surrealism.

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The classroom depicted in the poem is surreal in itself. It features all kinds of people—humanists, individuals wearing different caps, representing diverse backgrounds. Yet, despite its surreal quality, the poem is grounded in reality and addresses real-world violence. Salman Rushdie once remarked—if I remember correctly, in response to a question about Shame—that writing about South Asian realities often necessitates a surreal style. I completely agree, especially given the  social dynamics in our society.

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If I were to leave behind one thought from this conversation, it would be this: I am more enchanted, mesmerized, and seduced by the idea of fantasy than anything else. My language is fantasy. Even "Slaughter in the Office of Professor" is a fantasy poem.

Slaughter in the Office of a Professor of Poetry

“With extra words in a short poem,
you can buy a butter knife and a packet of cigarettes,

and live among sedentary species happily,”
said Prof. Gooseberry, a palaeontologist turned poet

to his students in his Fossil office room.

Among his students were mostly black, white, yellow, brown,

mixed-race Hindu humanoids in skull caps.
But there were also a hedgehog, a tortoise,

and a water buffalo from the closed abattoir.

Evolutionists may not believe,
poets are the only language animals with omnivorous teeth,

more scavenger than hunter. In the cold desert of darkness,
they kill vegan dictators with a neck bite.

At the end of the long lecture on his recent paper,
‘Predatory Transition from Ape to Monkey God’,

the professor turned to me and said,
“You seem distracted.
“Want to know how Neanderthal mobs in Bermuda khaki shorts,

came on Hero cycles and
lynched sage sparrows in Dadri in the Northern Hemisphere?”

“With a hand-axe, or a club, or a garrotte?” I asked.
“No, you useless Homo Habilis,” said he.

“Tell me,” I insisted. “Instinct,” he averred,

“How beautiful” . . . I wowed ad nauseam!

KB: You mention that your poetry is spontaneous, that it pours out in bursts. I imagine that in those moments of creation, your imagination is teeming with ideas — far more than what ultimately makes it into the poem. Does that happen? That some aspects of your imagination never find their way onto the page?

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AK: Absolutely. That is very well put. It feels like being flung into the Milky Way, grasping at planets, but everything is slipping away. I often think about Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, a text I frequently use in my teaching. What struck me most in that book was his meditation on fear. I once wrote that fear and I were born together like twins, and this fear informs my poetry.

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It is the fear of losing loved ones, of being uprooted, of becoming a migrant. And let me be clear — I don’t romanticize migration. I would rather be a poet of rootedness, like Kamala Das. But the fear of losing everything — my homeland, my language, my self — haunts me. It’s a metonymic fear, but also more than that. It is not just about an impending loss; it is the fear of not being able to decipher or articulate that loss. In my short bio for Punch Magazine, I wrote about the fear of large-scale violence—the fear that a mother tongue can be annihilated, that a self can be erased. My relationship with fear carries a Sufi inflection: a cultivated fragility, an openness to vulnerability. Amrita Pritam invokes a similar sufiana tenderness in her poetry. At the same time, there is also the fear of obscurity or misrecognition . I spent much of my early poetic journey in self-imposed obscurity, even while excelling academically and professionally. But the fear of being forgotten, of vanishing without a trace, is real. It is also a linguistic fear — the fear of my language being erased.

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KB: Reading your poetry, I sense an immense fluency — a forceful, dynamic flow of language and imagery. Yet, at the same time, there is an underlying struggle. Some poets visibly wrestle with language, but your fluency doesn’t seem like a struggle in itself. Rather, it feels as though the fluency is a kind of mask or outlet for an internal conflict. Would you say that’s true?

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AK: You’ve accurately named it. That’s exactly it. The best way I can describe it is through a metaphor — imagine a tsunami building up inside me. The struggle is in containing it. My fluency comes from that tension, that need to burst forth.

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I’ve written a poem about this — a small river and a great river. If you look it up, you'll find that Small River is a tribute to Jayant Mahapatra. The small river flows for ten, twenty miles and then disappears — that is like a village river, unpredictable, restless. I relate to that. But the great rivers — they bore me. They move systematically, unchallenged. When I lived in Germany, the Rhine River was right there, immense and imposing, but it bored me to death. There was no struggle in its flow.

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My poetry is like that small river — unpredictable, urgent, overflowing with images. At a Sahitya Akademi’s reading in Tripura,  eminent critic Harish Trivedi described my Banaras poetry as jalaprapāt — a waterfall. It cascades, and the reader can only grasp whatever they can catch in the moment. That is where the fluency and the struggle coexist.

KB: Who is your audience? Who do you write for?

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AK: That question is closely tied to another — why do I write at all? But honestly, it is a bit of a misleading question. But let me clarify something: I don’t write for an audience. Let me say this once and for all, especially to a friend and a celebrated poet like you — I don’t write with an audience in mind. That is where my saintly or Sufi sensibility comes in, a tradition deeply rooted in Indian literary thought.

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In fact, sometimes I wonder — am I truly the author of my own poems? The notion of authorship, of an author's presence as central to the work, is a very Western idea. In Indian thought, the self dissolves into the act of creation. I write from what I call my "mythic memories" — a term I’ve coined because it carries a paradox. Myth and memory, though seemingly distinct, are intertwined in my writing. And because of that, I remain oblivious to my audience. I don’t think of readers when I write, and, frankly, I am uncertain who they might be.

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But still, you could ask — who, then, do I write for? On a lighter note, perhaps I write for all kinds of beings—imagined, fantasized, divine. Gods, goddesses, ghosts of various kinds. But I don’t write for the so-called worldly people in any conventional sense.

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In Indian poetics, we have the concept of sahridaya — the refined reader, the rasika, someone trained in aesthetics to fully grasp poetry. But my approach seems to challenge that very idea, doesn't it? I don’t write for an elite, cultivated readership. In fact, my poetry invites the reader to undergo a kind of self-destruction — not in a harmful or violent way, but in a deeply sensual and spiritual sense. It is about dissolving and reforming oneself, about restructuring and relocating one's inner world.

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So, in that sense, I write for an entirely imaginary audience. Tagore wrote for an imaginary audience, and I find myself in a similar space. My poetry exists in an imagined world, for an imagined world. And to be honest, I was happiest when I was writing in complete anonymity.

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Women Studying Mathematics

You should not complain 

why women study mathematics. 

their laughter or their banter are all inconsequential 

when they yell at the false ceilings of Pythagorean triangles.

I can show you

women are roller skating and solving  

algebraic proofs of your poetry, and

hoisting flags of freedom against bald-eyed Gods.

When women do things like

ploughing, harvesting in the fields or

building boats in the shipyards 

only then we know the magical reality of numbers.

You are wrong — 

women never stop playing football in the three-dimensional sky.

When threatened with honour-killing by Zebra-striped boys

they simply huddle into each other’s arms and rewrite 

history of light, literature and lottery — 

a new manifesto of revolution in mathematics