Biography of Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil (born 13 October 1959) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist, and musician. He is best known as a poet and is the author of four collections: These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar, 2008), English (2004, Penguin India, Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004), Apocalypso (Ark, 1997) and Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992). His first novel, Narcopolis, (Faber & Faber, 2012), which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize.

Early Life and Career

Born in Kerala, Thayil is the son of the author and editor TJS George, who at various times in his life was posted in several places in India, in Hong Kong and New York. Thayil was mostly educated abroad. He received a Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College (New York), and is the recipient of grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Swiss Arts Council, the British Council and the Rockefeller Foundation.

His first novel, Narcopolis (Faber, 2011) is set mostly in Bombay in the 70s and 80s, and sets out to tell the city's secret history, when opium gave way to new cheap heroin. Thayil has said he wrote the novel, "to create a kind of memorial, to inscribe certain names in stone. As one of the characters [in Narcopolis] says, it is only by repeating the names of the dead that we honour them. I wanted to honour the people I knew in the opium dens, the marginalised, the addicted and deranged, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low; and I wanted to make some record of a world that no longer exists, except within the pages of a book."

He is the editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK, 2008), 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India, 2008) and a collection of essays, Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry ( United States, 2015 ).

He is the author of the libretto for the opera Babur in London, commissioned by the UK-based Opera Group with music by the Zürich-based British composer Edward Rushton. The world premiere of Babur takes place in Switzerland in 2012, followed by tours to the United Kingdom (where it shows at theatres in London and Oxford) and India. At the work's core is an exploration of the complexities of faith and multiculturalism in modern-day Britain. Its action hinges on an imagined encounter between a group of religious fundamentalists and the ghost of Babur, who challenges their plans for a suicide strike

Thayil is also known as a performance poet and musician. As a songwriter and guitarist, he is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil (Mumbai, New Delhi).

Thayil was also a guitarist for the psychedelic rock band Atomic Forest in the early 1980s for a brief period.

In 2006 he told the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, that he had been an alcoholic (like many of the Bombay poets) and an addict for almost two decades: "I spent most of that time sitting in bars, getting very drunk, talking about writers and writing. And never writing. It was a colossal waste. I feel very fortunate that I got a second chance." These days, he says, the only addictions he has are poetry and coffee. "Coffee's much easier to get than heroin."

He has worked as a journalist in New York, Mumbai, and Bangalore.

Biography of Nissim Ezekiel

Nissim Ezekiel (Talkar) ( 16 December 1924 – 9 January 2004) was an Indian Jewish poet, actor, playwright, editor,  art critic. He was a foundational figure in postcolonial India's literary history, specifically for Indian Poetry in English.and He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for his poetry collection, "Latter-Day Psalms", by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.^[5] Ezekiel has been applauded for his subtle, restrained and well-crafted diction, dealing with common and mundane (simple) themes in a manner that manifests both cognitive profundity, as well as an unsentimental, realistic sensibility, that has been influential on the course of succeeding Indian English poetry. Ezekiel enriched and established Indian English language poetry through his modernist innovations and techniques, which enlarged Indian English literature, moving it beyond purely spiritual and Orientalist themes, to include a wider range of concerns and interests, including mundane familial events, individual angst, and skeptical societal introspection.

Early Life

Ezekiel was born on 16 December 1924 in Bombay (Mumbai) in Maharashtra. His father was a professor of botany at Wilson College, and his mother was principal of her own school. The Ezekiel belonged to Mumbai's Marathi-speaking Jewish community known as the Bene Israel.

In 1947, Ezekiel earned a BA in Literature from Wilson College, Mumbai, Bombay University. In 1947-48, he taught English literature and published literary articles. After dabbling in radical politics for a while, he sailed to England in November 1948. He studied philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. After three and a half years stay, Ezekiel worked his way home as a deck-scrubber aboard a ship carrying arms to Indochina.

Career

Ezekiel's first book, The Bad Day, appeared in 1952. He published another volume of poems, The deadly man in 1960. After working as an advertising copywriter and general manager of a picture frame company (1954–59), he co-founded the literary monthly Jumpo, in 1961. He became art critic of The Times of India (1964–66) and edited Poetry India (1966–67). From 1961 to 1972, he headed the English department of Mithibai College, Bombay. The Exact Name, his fifth book of poetry was published in 1965. During this period he held short-term tenure as visiting a professor at the University of Leeds (1964) and University of Pondicherry (1967). In 1969, Writers Workshop, Ezekiel^[12] published his The Damn Plays. A year later, he presented an art series of ten programmes for Indian television. In 1976, he translated Jawaharlal Nehru poetry from English to Marathi, in collaboration with Vrinda Nabar, and co-edited a fiction and poetry anthology. His poem The Night of the Scorpion is used as study material ^] in Indian and Colombian schools. Ezekiel also penned poems in ‘Indian English’   like the one based on instruction boards in his favorite Irani café. His poems are used in NCERT and ICSE English textbooks.

Nissim Ezekiel is often considered the father of Modern Indian English poetry by many critics.

He was honored with the Padmashri award by the President of India in 1988 and the Sahitya Akademi cultural award in 1983.

Editor

He edited The Indian P.E.N., the official organ of P.E.N. All-India Centre, Bombay from The Theosophy Hall, New Marine Lines, Bombay now Mumbai and encouraged poets and writers.

Death

After a prolonged battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Nissim Ezekiel died in Mumbai, on 9 January 2004 (aged 79) as a doyen of Indian English poetry.

Books by Ezekiel

1952: Time To Change
1953: Sixty poems
1956: The Discovery of India
1959: The Third
1960: The Unfinished Man
1965: The Exact Name
1974: Snakeskin and Other Poems, translations of the Marathi poet Indira Sant
1976: Hymns in Darkness
1982: Latter-Day Psalms
1989: Collected Poems 1952-88 OUP

Plays

1969: The Three Plays Kolkata: Writers Workshop, India

Do Not Call it Suicide Madras: Macmillan India, 1993.

Prose

1992: Selected Prose
Naipaul's India and mine- an essay
Editor[edit]
1965: An Emerson Readers
1969: A Joseph King Reader
1990: Another India, anthology of fiction and poetry

Poems

The Couple
Enterprise
A Time to Change
Island
For Elkana
The Professor
Soap
Marriage
In the country cott
The Paradise Flycatcher
Night of The Scorpion
Goodbye party for Miss Pushpa T.S.
Entertainment
“Background, Casually”
Poet, Lover and Birdwatcher

Appearances in the following poetry Anthologies

The Golden Treasure of Writers Workshop Poetry (2008) ed. by Rubana Huq and published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta
Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) ed. by R. Parthasarathy and published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi

The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) ed. by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi

Further reading

R. Raj Rao, Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography (Viking, 2000)
Sanjit Mishra, The Poetic Art of Nissim Ezekiel ( Atlantic, 2001)

Meera Bai

Biography of 
Meera Bai

Meera, also known as Meera Bai or Mirabai (1498-1546) was a Hindu mystic poet of the Bhakti movement. She referred to the Lord, whom she saw as her husband, with different names like Satguru, Prabhu Ji, Girdhar Nagar, Krishna. She even called him the husband of her soul. Due to her mother, her in-laws disapproved of her public singing and dancing as she belonged to a Royal Family of Mewar and was a princess. But she had too much love for her god and sacrificed everything, even her family, for god and attained Moksha through Bhakti Yoga. She is a celebrated Bhakti saint, particularly in the North Indian Hindu tradition.

Meera Bai was born into family of Merta, Rajasthan, India. She is mentioned in Bhaktamal, confirming that she was widely known and a cherished figure in the Bhakti movement culture by about 1600 CE. Most legends about Meera mention her fearless disregard for social and family conventions, her devotion to Lord Krishna, her treating Krishna as her husband, and she being persecuted by her in-laws for her religious devotion. She has been the subject of numerous folk tales and hagiographic legends, which are inconsistent or widely different in details. housands of devotional poems in passionate praise of Lord Krishna are attributed to Meera in the Indian tradition, but just a few hundred are believed to be authentic by scholars, and the earliest written records suggest that except for two poems, most were written down only in the 18th century. Many poems attributed to Meera were likely composed later by others who admired Meera. These poems are commonly known as bhajans, and are popular across India.Hindu temples, such as in Chittorgarh fort, are dedicated to Mira Bai's memory. Legends about Meera's life, of contested authenticity, have been the subject of movies, comic strips and other popular literature in modern times.

Biography

Authentic records about Meera are not available, and scholars have attempted to establish Meera's biography from secondary literature that mention her, and wherein dates and other moments. Meera unwillingly married Bhoj Raj, the crown prince of Mewar, in 1516. Her husband was wounded in one of the ongoing Hindu-Muslim wars of the Delhi Sultanate in 1518, and he died of battle wounds in 1521. Both her own father and her father-in-law were killed within a few years after her husband,during a war with the Islamic army of Babur – the founder of Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent.

After the death of her father-in-law, Vikram Singh became the ruler of Mewar. According to a popular legend, her in-laws tried many times to execute her, such as sending Meera a glass of poison and telling her it was nectar or sending her a basket with a snake instead of flowers. According to the hagiographic legends, she was not harmed in either case, with the snake miraculously becoming a Krishna idol (or a garland of flowers depending on the version). In another version of these legends, she is asked by Vikram Singh to go drown herself, which she tries but she finds herself floating on water.Yet another legend states that the Mughal emperor Akbar came with Tansen to visit Meera and presented a pearl necklace, but scholars doubt this ever happened because Tansen joined Akbar's court in 1562, 15 years after she died. Similarly, some stories state that Raidas was her guru (teacher), but there is no corroborating historical evidence for this and the difference of over 100 years in the birth years for Ravidas and Meera suggest this to be unlikely.

The three different oldest records known as of 2014 that mention Meera, all from the 17th century and written within 150 years of Meera's death, neither mention anything about her childhood or circumstances of her marriage to Bhojraj, nor do they mention that the people who persecuted her were her in-laws or from some Rajput royal family. Nancy Martin-Kershaw states that to the extent Meera was challenged and persecuted, religious or social conventions were unlikely to have been the cause, rather the likely cause were political chaos and military conflicts between the Rajput kingdom and the Mughal Empire.

Other stories state that Mira Bai left the kingdom of Mewar and went on pilgrimages. In her last years, Meera lived in Dwarka or Vrindavan, where legends state she miraculously disappeared by merging into an idol of Krishna in 1547. While miracles are contested by scholars for the lack of historical evidence, it is widely acknowledged that Meera dedicated her life to Hindu deity Krishna, composing songs of devotion and was one of the most important poet-saint of the Bhakti movement period.

Poetry

A number of compositions by Meera Bai continue to be sung today in India, mostly as devotional songs (bhajans) though nearly all of them have a philosophical connotation. One of her most popular compositions remains "Paayoji maine Ram Ratan dhan paayo" (पायो जी मैंने राम रतन धन पायो। ). Meera's poems are lyrical padas (metric verses) in Rajasthanilanguage.While thousands of verses are attributed to her, scholars are divided in their opinion as to how many of them were actually penned by Meera herself.There are no surviving manuscripts of her poetry from her time, and the earliest records with two poems credited to her are from early 18th-century, more than 150 years after she died.

Hindi and Rajasthani

The largest collection of poems credited to her are in 19th-century manuscripts. Scholars have attempted to establish authenticity based on both the poem and Meera being mentioned in other manuscripts as well as from style, linguistics and form.John Stratton Hawley cautions, "When one speaks of the poetry of Mirabai, then, there is always an element of enigma. (...) there must always remain a question about whether there is any real relation between the poems we cite and a historical Mira."

In her poems, Krishna is a yogi and lover, and she herself is a yogini ready to take her place by his side into a spiritual marital bliss. Meera's style combines impassioned mood, defiance, longing, anticipation, joy and ecstasy of union, always centered on Krishna.

My Dark One has gone to an alien land.
He has left me behind, he's never returned, he's never sent me a single word.
So I've stripped off my ornaments, jewels and adornments, cut my hair from my head.
And put on holy garments, all on his account, seeking him in all four directions.
Mira: unless she meets the Dark One, her Lord, she doesn't even want to live.

— Mira Bai, Translated by John Stratton Hawley

Meera speaks of a personal relationship with Krishna as her lover, lord and mountain lifter. The characteristic of her poetry is complete surrender.

After making me fall for you so hard, where are you going?
Until the day I see you, no repose: my life, like a fish washed on shore, flails in agony.
For your sake I'll make myself a yogini, I'll hurl myself to death on the saw of Kashi.
Mira's Lord is the clever Mountain Lifter, and I am his, a slave to his lotus feet.

— Mira Bai, Translated by John Stratton Hawley

Meera is often classed with the northern Sant bhaktis who spoke of a formless divinity

Sikh literature

Prem Ambodh Pothi, a text attributed to Guru Gobind Singh and completed in 1693 CE, includes poetry of Mira Bai as one of sixteen historic bhakti sants important to Sikhism.

Influence

Scholars acknowledge that Meera was one of the central poet-saints of the Bhakti movement, during a difficult period in Indian history filled with religious conflicts. Yet, they simultaneously question the extent to which Meera was a canonical projection of social imagination that followed, where she became a symbol of people's suffering and a desire for an alternative.  Dirk Wiemann, quoting Parita Mukta, states,

If one accepts that someone very akin to the Mira legend [about persecution and her devotion] existed as an actual social being, the power of her convictions broke the brutal feudal relationships that existed at that time. The Mira Bai of the popular imagination, then, is an intensely anachronistic figure by virtue of that anticipatory radical democracy which propels Meera out of the historicity that remains nonetheless ascribed to her. She goes beyond the shadowy realms of the past to inhabit the very core of a future which is embodied within the suffering of a people who seek an alternative.

— Dirk Wiemann / Parita Mukta, On Meera

The continued influence of Meera, in part, has been her message of freedom, her resolve and right to pursue her devotion to deity Krishna and her spiritual beliefs as she felt drawn to despite her persecution. Her appeal and influence in Indian culture, writes Edwin Bryant, is from her emerging, through her legends and poems, as a person "who stands up for what is right and suffers bitterly for holding fast to her convictions, as other men and women have", yet she does so with a language of love, with words painting the "full range of emotions that mark love, whether between human beings or between human and divine"

English versions

Aliston and Subramanian have published selections with English translation in India. Schelling and Landes-Levi  have offered anthologies in the USA. Snell has presented parallel translations in his collection The Hindi Classical Tradition. Sethi has selected poems which Mira composed presumably after she came in contact with Saint Ravidas. and Meera Pakeerah.

Some bhajans of Meera have been rendered into English by Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield as Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems.

Popular culture

Composer John Harbison adapted Bly's translations for his Mirabai Songs. There is a documentary film A Few Things I Know About Her by Anjali Panjabi.Two well-known films of her life have been made in India, Meera (1945), a Tamil language film starring M. S. Subbulakshmi, and Meera a 1979 Hindi film by Gulzar. TV series, Meera (2009–2010) was also based on her life.

Meera Bai's life has been interpreted as a musical story in Meera—The Lover…, a music album based on original compositions for some well known Meera bhajans, released 11 October 2009.

Kamala Surayya

Biography of 
Kamala Surayya

Kamala Surayya (born Kamala; 31 March 1934 – 31 May 2009), popularly known by her one-time pen name Madhavikutty and Kamala Das, was an Indian English poet as well as a leading Malayalam author from Kerala, India. Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography, while her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for the poems and explicit autobiography. She was also a widely read columnist and wrote on diverse topics including women's issues, child care, politics among others. She was born in a conservative Hindu Nair (Nalapat) family having royal ancestry, She converted to Islam on December 11, 1999, at the age of 65 and assumed the name Kamala Surayya.

Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power and she got hope after freedom, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation. On 31 May 2009, aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune.

On 1 February 2018, Google Doodle by artist Manjit Thapp celebrates the work she left behind, which provides a window into the world of an engrossing woman.

Early Life

Kamala was born in Punnayurkulam, Thrissur District in Kingdom of Cochin (present-day Kerala, India) on 31 March 1934, to V. M. Nair, was a managing editor of the widely circulated Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and Nalapat Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poet.

She spent her childhood between Calcutta, where her father was employed as a senior officer in the Walford Transport Company that sold Bentley and Rolls Royceautomobiles, and the Nalapat ancestral home in Punnayurkulam.

Like her mother, Balamani Amma, Kamala Das also excelled in writing. Her love of poetry began at an early age through the influence of her great uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer.

At the age of 15, she got married to bank officer Madhav Das, who encouraged her writing interests, and she started writing and publishing both in English and in Malayalam. Calcutta in the 1960s was a tumultuous time for the arts, and Kamala Das was one of the many voices that came up and started appearing in cult anthologies along with a generation of Indian English poets.English was the language she choose for all six of her published poetry collections.

Literary career

She was noted for her many Malayalam short stories as well as many poems written in English. Das was also a syndicated columnist. She once claimed that "poetry does not sell in this country [India]," but her forthright columns, which sounded off on everything from women's issues and child care to politics, were popular.

Das' first book of poetry, Summer in Calcutta was a breath of fresh air in Indian English poetry. She wrote chiefly of love, its betrayal, and the consequent anguish. Ms. Das abandoned the certainties offered by an archaic, and somewhat sterile, aestheticism for an independence of mind and body at a time when Indian poets were still governed by "19th-century diction, sentiment and romanticised love." Her second book of poetry, The Descendants was even more explicit, urging women to:

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of

Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,

The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your

Endless female hungers ..." – The Looking Glass

This directness of her voice led to comparisons with Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath

At the age of 42, she published a daring autobiography, My Story; it was originally written in Malayalam (titled Ente Katha) and later she translated it into English. Later she admitted that much of the autobiography had fictional elements.

"Some people told me that writing an autobiography like this, with absolute honesty, keeping nothing to oneself, is like doing a striptease.

True, maybe. I, will, firstly, strip myself of clothes and ornaments. Then I intend to peel off this light brown skin and shatter my bones.

At last, I hope you will be able to see my homeless, orphan, intensely beautiful soul, deep within the bone, deep down under, beneath

even the marrow, in a fourth dimension" - excerpts from the translation of her autobiography in Malayalam, Ente Katha

Kamala Das wrote on a diverse range of topics, often disparate- from the story of a poor old servant, about the sexual disposition of upper middle class women living near a metropolitan city or in the middle of the ghetto. Some of her better-known stories include Pakshiyude Manam, Neypayasam, Thanuppu, and Chandana Marangal. She wrote a few novels, out of which Neermathalam Pootha Kalam, which was received favourably by the reading public as well as the critics, stands out.

She travelled extensively to read poetry to Germany's University of Duisburg-Essen, University of Bonn and University of Duisburg universities, Adelaide Writer's Festival, Frankfurt Book Fair, University of Kingston, Jamaica, Singapore, and South Bank Festival (London), Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), etc. Her works are available in French, Spanish, Russian, German and Japanese.

Kamala Surayya was a confessional poet whose poems have often been considered at par with those of Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell.

She has also held positions as Vice chairperson in Kerala Sahitya Akademi, chairperson in Kerala Forestry Board, President of the Kerala Children's Film Society, editor of Poet magazine and Poetry editor of Illustrated Weekly of India.

Although occasionally seen as an attention-grabber in her early years, she is now seen as one of the most formative influences on Indian English poetry. In 2009, The Times called her "the mother of modern English Indian poetry".

Her last book titled The Kept Woman and Other Stories, featuring translation of her short stories, was published posthumously.

Personal Life

Kamala Das had three sons – M D Nalapat, Chinnen Das and Jayasurya Das. Madhav Das Nalapat, the eldest, is married to Princess Thiruvathira Thirunal Lakshmi Bayi (daughter of Princess Pooyam Thirunal Gouri Parvati Bayi and Sri Chembrol Raja Raja Varma Avargal) from the Travancore Royal House. He holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and Professor of geopolitics at the Manipal University. He had been a resident editor of the Times of India.

On 31 May 2009, aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune. Her body was flown to her home state of Kerala. She was interred at the Palayam Jama Masjid at Thiruvananthapuram with full state honour. A biopic on her titled Aami directed by Kamal, released on February 9, 2018.

Politics

Though never politically active before, she launched a national political party, Lok Seva Party, aiming asylum to orphaned mothers and promotion of secularism. In 1984 she unsuccessfully contested in the Indian Parliament elections.

Conversion to Islam

She was born in a conservative Hindu Nair (Nalapat) family having royal ancestry, She converted to Islam on December 11, 1999, at the age of 65 and assumed the name Kamala Surayya.

Awards and other recognitions

Kamala Das has received many awards for her literary contribution, including:

• 1963: PEN Asian Poetry Prize
• 1968: Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Story – Thanuppu
• 1984: Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature
• 1985: Kendra Sahitya Academy Award (English) – Collected Poems
• 1988: Kerala State Film Award for Best Story
• 1997: Vayalar Award – Neermathalam Pootha Kalam
• 2006: Honorary D.Litt by University of Calicut
• 2006: Muttathu Varkey Award
• 2009: Ezhuthachan Award

Works

English

Novel

• 1976: Alphabet of Lust

Autobiography

• 1976: My Story

Short stories

• 1977: A Doll for the Child Prostitute
• 1992: Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories

Poetry

• 1964: The Sirens
• 1965: Summer in Calcutta
• 1967: The Descendants
• 1973: The Old Playhouse and Other Poems
• 1977: The Stranger Time
• 1979: Tonight, This Savage Rite (with Pritish Nandy)
• 1984: Collected Poems
• 1985: The Anamalai Poems
• 1997: Only the Soul Knows How to Sing
• 1999: My Mother At Sixty-six
• 2001: Yaa Allah

Malayalam

• 1964: Pakshiyude Manam (short stories)
• 1966: Naricheerukal Parakkumbol (short stories)
• 1968: Thanuppu (short story)
• 1982: Ente Katha (autobiography)
• 1987: Balyakala Smaranakal (Childhood Memoirs)
• 1989: Varshangalkku Mumbu (novel)
• 1990: Palayan (novel)
• 1991: Neypayasam (short story)
• 1992: Dayarikkurippukal (novel)
• 1994: Neermathalam Pootha Kalam (novel)
• 1996: Kadal Mayooram (short novel)
• 1996: Rohini (short novel)
• 1996: Rathriyude Padavinyasam (short novel)
• 1996: Aattukattil (short novel)
• 1996: Chekkerunna Pakshikal (short stories)
• 1998: Nashtapetta Neelambari (short stories)
• 2005: Chandana Marangal (novel)
• 2005: Madhavikkuttiyude Unmakkadhakal (short stories)
• 2005: Vandikkalakal (novel)

Appearances in the following poetry Anthologies

• Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) ed. by R. Parthasarathy and published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi
• The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) ed. by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi
• The Golden Treasure of Writers Workshop Poetry (2008) ed. by Rubana Huq and published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta