A pivotal chapter in India’s struggle for independence
Ashis Ray is the noted author of the definitive and incontrovertible version of Subhas Bose’s last hours in his book Laid to Rest (2018).
In metaphorical terms, alienation stems from a lack of place or disavowal of community. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis communicates this alienation with grace and sincerity.
In metaphorical terms, alienation stems from a lack of place or disavowal of community. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis communicates this alienation with grace and sincerity. In the words of Candice Louisa Daquin from the introduction, Singh-Chitnis “has gravitas but also, immediacy and tender familiarity.” It may come as odd that alienation could be communicated with “tender familiarity.” However, Trespassing My Ancestral Lands achieves this with astounding brevity and form.
To define alienation, its etymology comes from the Latin meaning “belonging to another.” Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, an immigrant to the United States from India, will know what it means to enter an unfamiliar land while belonging to another. This breach from one’s motherland is poetically rendered in three sections of the book: Trespassing My Ancestral Lands, Blood and Water and The Dance of the Century. The opening section reveals the importance of culture and rootedness; the second section concerns war, refugees, and humanitarian crises; and, the final section is poems about the Covid-era. Singh-Chitnis devises language that is reflective and culturally challenging. She writes with impressive reflection on cultural matters that are likely foreign to the readers, instructing the readership with occasional atonal grace.
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The poetry is crafted with remarkable simplicity. Readers will perceive authorial intention through phrasings such as “Birds are Our Ancestors”, or from “Sermon” where she writes, “If you hope to do anything for change, / write an epic or a tale in my name, / and teach it if you can, in every school on earth.” “Sermon” concludes with “ […] teach it as a sermon to the believers.” This is a directive concerning assaults on female dignity though violence. “Do not bother hanging my perpetrators,” she exclaims furiously. This poem lends the message of extolling violence against women, even finding further violence unnecessary and impractical. “Sermon” is everyday Woman speaking in defense.
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The woman is close to earth and her story is primordial. Singh-Chitnis writes that her city’s “history [is] in the layers of my skin”, deepening the alienation experienced in immigration to the United States. However, “Her story is much older than civilization / invaded and plundered, conquered and gifted, / questioned and blamed, dismissed and shamed, / over and over and over again,” the poet writes in “The Salt of a Woman” identifying land in the feminine. Who are the ‘believers’ referenced in “Sermon” but the inhabitants of this land? The land becomes metaphorical for humanism. This is poetry that recognises complexities yet is not shy to reconcile with them.
Alienation from the poet’s motherland of India leads to questions such as “What have I lost to deserve the beauty around me?” (“Jacaranda”) and “Once detached from our mother’s womb, / is it possible to return to it?” (“America Held My Hand”) The poet finds belonging through her estrangement from “our homeland” to which she cannot return. The title of the poem indicates a feeling of becoming lost like an infant in a shopping mall without her mother guiding her. America reaches her hand to guide the poet whose curious question leads others “coping with the answers”. Can the estranged immigrant return home upon accommodating the new foreign country?
There are many such questions as the poet channels her experiences. The poet’s Buddhism resounds in “The Land of My Birth: The Light of Asia” in which she grapples with the Adittaparayaya Sutta, or the Fire Sermon of the Buddha. “Every memory of my city is an affirmation,” she writes. She quotes from Buddha, “And what is all that is burning?” The burning is metaphysical and existential, the “fire of lust, hate, and delusion.” This ‘burning’ referenced by the Buddha is further elaborated through the poem’s context. “O, the city of light, the land of Nirvana, / the land of my ancestors and Vihars, / the seat of my soul” Singh-Chitnis writes.
These poems are carefully crafted riddles the reader is invited to interpret. The greatest poetry should not unveil too much, and Singh-Chitnis’s poems deftly conceal. Some paradoxes do not have answers. In “Displaced” she writes, “But one day / they came to uproot us, / clip our wings, and bury us, / neither dead nor alive / beneath our broken feathers.” The ‘they’ is not defined—is this poem referring to Indian independence from English dominance? However, the title suggests something deeper. ‘They’ are the enemies of immigration. The immigrant is the ‘seed’ in the first stanza and ‘the bird’ that has no limits. As an immigrant she relates to the bird, and the seed that “requires / no clearance […] to grow.” In essence, the poet identifies herself within a liberated natural context. Still, ‘they’ are not defined. It leaves the reader to have an open dialogue with the poem. This sentiment of natural freedom is also reflected in “The Painted Ladies of Baja”, a poem about cosmopolitan butterflies that ends with the butterfly asking the poet, “Where have You come from?” This implies that hostility to immigration is unnatural, furthering alienation as part of the human condition.
“The Temples of Knowledge”, a poem on libraries destroyed by humans during major conflicts, begins with war’s destruction of the largest bookstore in Gaza, at which “A handful of people are protesting at an intersection.” People become alienated from the deepest reservoir of humanity, the book, as the poet suggests, “No one is taking notice, except for those // who are watching live T.V.” As the poet tells us, “History repeats itself more often than we realize,” as she then lists libraries destroyed by human hands. Her anger is present in lines, “Who had arrived? Who had arrived? // Who had arrived to conquer the unconquered, / trampling the footsteps of the Buddha / under the hooves of horses?” This reflection on Nalanda Mahavihara’s destruction during the Turko-Afghan conquest of the 12th century, introduced with repetitions, is a reminder of the thrice burning of this great historical center of learning. How can humanity learn from error when we continue pillaging ruthlessly? “When I grieve for Gaza, I grieve for / all the athenaeums destroyed in the world, / every archive lost in space. // When I grieve for Nalanda, I grieve alone and wonder why. / The world didn’t expect me to survive,” the poem ruefully ends.
In “The Daughters of the Hindu Kush”, the first poem on the stoning of women in Muslim countries, the poet further condemns abuses against women. “Keep your eyes closed if you can’t watch, / the storms shall pass. The storms shall pass! // But they keep returning.” Earlier in the poem the poet writes, “We make conscious choices.” Humanity’s alienation is deepened by such inhumane practices we do nothing to change. This poem about the stoning of women for adultery in Afghanistan centres on women’s rights as human rights, “[…] their saviors were gone, morphed into mounds of skulls.”
The final section “The Dance of the Century” concerns the Covid era. The opening poem “The Sound of Tsuzumi” personifies Death as a drum, a character “like a Kabuki performer” that disappears “with a generation / stuffed in its Komono.” Covid is the “dance of the century.” Singh-Chitnis writes:
“We slip on the mask of the moon
and dance alone and together.
We learn steps unlearned.
At the curious sounds of Tsuzumi
we rise, breathing deeply –
and breathless, we fall.”
Death is both the dance and the instrument inviting the dance, the Tsuzumi. The death dance confounds reality and illusion, making the dance one of aloneness and togetherness simultaneously. Through death and the deep wounds of the Covid-era, we become one in our social isolation because we share it. This reflects thoughtfully on the human condition.
The book’s final poem “ER” offers the “personal I” in which the narrator “died in front of everyone, / without anyone noticing me” after not showing any signs of illness or mortal wounds. As crowded ERs of the Covid-era led to confusion and death, the poet relates to the confusion and displacement. These poems in “The Dance of the Century” also place alienation as a core problem of the book. “I just had some internal injuries no one knew,” Singh-Chitnis writes, inviting alienation both from oneself and the surrounding society. Knowledge of one’s wounds without validation from the outside world is a powerful metaphor for lacking a sense of belonging.
“Last night, I was face to face / with my enemy. / No dagger was drawn. // The world was fast asleep / as we stitched each other’s wounds,” Singh-Chitnis writes in “Line of Control” suggesting alienation from oneself again. The enemy is the human Ego in “Line of Control” as the poet writes, “Centuries torn into pieces / descended from the moon / to bind up our wounds.” In this poem, the poet meets with herself—as if in battle, lines are drawn similarly to historical wars. The Line of Control is also the dividing line of Kashmir and Jammu, a military boundary line both Pakistan and India agree to voluntarily respect. She ends with “We didn’t pray. We recited poetry.” Poetry becomes a tool of self-control and universal communication for its healing effects, “We washed our hands and faces / in the river Sapphire and kissed the earth.” The metaphorical connection of history with the self contains its own riddles.
Varying aspects of alienation are potent as part of the human condition. Singh-Chitnis unites the refugee experience during humanitarian crises, a dying person’s fears, women experiencing violence, and her own identity as an immigrant to the United States as all part of the universal human experience. By examining present crises through a complex historical lens, humanity is seen as divided by its own making. Trespassing My Ancestral Lands is a journey of the decentered human condition, often revealed through humane rage and compassion. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes with remarkable grace, creating poetry that astounds and enlightens. Her poetry shines a light on the dark age of our contemporary world, highlighting much we’d like to forget but should not.
The reviewer is the founder of Transcendent Zero Press and co-founder of World Inkers Printing and Publishing. He hosts the interview series World Inkers Network.
Spotlight
Trespassing My Ancestral Lands
By Kalpna Singh-Chitnis
Finishing Line Press, 2024
104 pages, Rs 2,354/-
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