Outlook – July 06, 2019

books

by Anna Sujatha Mathai

R

AV I Shankar is a Malayali

poet and translator who lives

in Palakkad in Kerala. In his

first book of poems, Architec-

ture of Flesh, he articulated

the semantics of violence–

political, patriarchal and commu­

nal. The intensity of his concern

perfectly matches the sharpness of

his images, and is now matched by

The Bullet Train, which also reveals

a talent for scathing satire. Tellin­

gly dedicated to Rohith Vemula, the

writer uses “black humour, stab­

bing sarcasm, and mischievous

word­play” as K. Satchidanandan,

Malayalam’s towering man of let­

ters, says in his foreword.

Writing of Asifa, the child who was

tortured, raped and killed in Kathua,

RaSh plays on the name As if A, to

show how even such a hideous and

cruel happening can be talked out of

existence. As if it had never been.

The funniest poem in the book, The

Anthem, has a black man sitting next

to an old man with a white beard in

a theatre, asking him: “Who da

fuck’re you, man?” The saintly man

replies, “I’m Tagore. Who art Thou?”

The black man said, “I’m Bob Marley.

And I never stand up for anything

but my rights.”

RaSh’s range and themes are eclec­

tic. In A Modest Proposal, there is

Jonathan Swift. The misogynist,

deadly satirist makes an outrageous

suggestion to the Irish people about

what to do with their children, to

deal with the famine Ireland was

facing. This is soon followed by How

to Lynch a Man. RaSh suggests choo­

sing someone alone, poor, starving,

low caste or Muslim. Next, you need

a slogan: ‘Har Har Mahadev’, ‘Jai

Bajrang Bali ki’, or ‘Bharat chhodo’.

The actual killing is described in

such an unsparing way, it draws you

in squirming, appalled, participat­

ing in the gruesome act. Love in the

Time of Demonetisation tells a good,

lascivious tale of (an imaginary)

meeting in one of the endless queues,

spoilt in the end by the lovers having

to rush off to different banks to col­

lect cash.

Some poems, like Sweet Porn Soup,

have a touch of, well, porn, verging

on the sexually explicit. In another

poem, Shankar is ‘a Darya Ganj

Messiah’: “I am now in a high secu­

rity press/ (Where new 2,000 rupee

notes are getting printed)/with a

secret mission to interpolate Gol­

walker into Ambedkar.” In another

typically hard­hitting ditty, An App­

eal to the Great Teacher, the satire

dwells on graphic torture of the

third­degree kind: “You can teach

me/How to hammer nails into a vic­

tim’s palms/How to drive a pile into

a woman’s anus/Compose music

from the screams of the helpless....

But never, never, never never teach

me/How to love.”

In the title poem of the collection,

the famed bullet train itself becomes

a symbol; it is the dream of the power­

ful. But we must recognise that there

is another ‘Make in India’ model “that

passes through stations with strange

names like Kalburgi South, Pansare

West and Dabholkar Central....” In

this collection, satire looks for a way

to speak of unbearable truths, with

irony, laughter, savagery, and some­

times with a twist of our perception. O

DeMo And Lost Loves

Bitter irony unites with savage sarcasm in

poems to pin down the truths we live with

The Bullet Train And Other Loaded Poems | Hawakal | 64 pages | Rs 250

RaSh (Ravi Shankar N.)

In How To Lynch A Man,

the unsparing RaSh

suggests choosing

someone alone, poor,

starving, low caste or

Muslim. And next, you

need a proper slogan.

Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize winner,

claims he was abducted by aliens

and swears by astrology. Arthur

Conan Doyle, the writer of detective

mysteries, fell for two teenagers’

scams. Through engaging anecdotes,

the book scrutinises the concept

of intelligence and discusses why

people with high IQs are more likely

to make certain kinds of mistakes.

The first stirring of emancipation

of Muslim women an Bengal,

and India, owed much to Rokeya

Sakhawat Hossain (1880­1932): ess­

ayist, poet, activist. Deeply invested

in the early nationalist struggle,

in these satires, ‘fables’ and ‘fairy

tales’ like Muktiphal and Gyanphal,

Rokeya playfully excoriates coloni­

alism, laments the state of the poor

and is anguished by the 1907 split

in the Congress. Tr. from Bengali.

‘Indigenous’ or ‘invaders’? The

origin of ‘Aryans’ is an evocative

issue in contemporary India. The

authors—historians, geneticists

and journalists—examine various

hypotheses on the subject and

draw upon Vedic compositions,

linguistics, archaeological data and

DNA analyses from the Harappan

settlement of Rakhigarhi to chal­

lenge persistent myths and popular

assumptions about our forebears.

David Robson

The Intelligence

Trap | Hodder &

Stoughton

Rokeya Sakhawat

Hossain

Freedom Fables |

Zubaan

Romila Thapar et al

Which Of Us Are

Aryans? | Aleph

ON THE RACKS

8 July 2019 OUTLOOK 63

Correction: Charcoal Portrait

by Selina Hossain is published

by Palimpsest, not Om Books.