50 Years of Writers Workshop Poetry
P Lal at the Kolkata ceremony
Today's youngsters won't know it, but the 1960s and '70s were days when South Asian English language writing was not the huge cruise liner it is today, steaming grandly ahead with its Rushdies and Bookers and fat advances, with publishing giants such as PenguinIndia and HarperCollins laying out fancy book launches in plush hotels at the drop of a pen! Those were the bad old days, with nary a publisher in sight. It was in this situation that in 1958, Professor P Lal (full name Purusottama Lal - born 1929), along with some friends, started his Writers Workshop in order to provide a publishing outlet for those lost, benighted souls bent on writing in English. A one-man, one-filing cabinet outfit, hand-typeset books bound in hand-loomed sari cloth. Since then, astonishingly, over 3000 titles have been published. Among them are a host of writers who went to become household names or achieve literary rock star status--and yes, that's right, they started first at Writers Workshop, knocking on its door with manuscript in hand! Professor P Lal was not content with simply publishing books in English. He started a journal called Miscellany, which showcased some of the most interesting English writers, and writing, of that period. The good professor was also a combative spirit. In a now celebrated episode, P Lal went to war with Buddhadev Bose when the latter wrote in The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (1963), that Indian writing in English was the product of "anglomania", that " 'Indo-Anglian' poetry is a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere." P Lal mailed a cyclostyled questionnaire along with copies of Bose's piece to seventy-five Indo-Anglian poets, soliciting answers from them on the topic of writing in English in India. Six years later, in 1969, Lal came out with what A K Mehrotra termed as "a 600-page…response, by far the largest work of its kind yet" titled Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and Credo. It featured the work of 132 Indian poets writing in English as well as the answers to his questionnaire by the poets (the 'Credo' in the title referred to that section). P Lal must have dusted his hands with satisfaction after he unloaded that particular torpedo: Take that, Mr. Bose! The Golden Treasury of Writers Workshop Poetry, brought out on the occasion of its 50th birthday, is a selection of poems and poets from this huge medley of material in its poetry volumes and Miscellany, from letters by writers to Professor Lal and the answers to that famous questionnaire. It has been edited by Rubana Huq, and one has to congratulate her for taking up this daunting task. There are 96 poets in the volume, ranging from Vikram Seth to Gieve Patel to R. Parthasarathy to Mani Rao to Srinivas Rayaprol-- and many more! Though one knows the distinguished roster of Writers Workshop, it is still somewhat staggering to see the many fine, well-known poets arrayed here. An anthology is an anthology, dictated in the final analysis by the intangibles of the editor's taste and palate. Here Rubana writes that she chose "poems, and not particularly the poets, the music and not the craft, the magic and not the mundane, the spirit and not the flesh," which is as good a basis as any. My only quibble would over Thomas Ansell, whose presence in such company will remain a mystery to me. There was no need to force him in just because the Bangladeshi presence had to be enlarged--the inclusion of Daud Haider in translation and of Feroz Ahmed-ud-din, deservedly so, should have sufficed. Her decision to format the anthology on photographed pages in order to convey the 'real' look of the Writers Workshop publications was right, especially since it harmonizes neatly with the reprints of the poets' answers to P Lal's queries regarding Indian-English writing. Those pages represent a period in Indian-English literature when there was much heat in the linguistic debate, and though the fire has abated greatly, the answers make for absorbing reading, ranging as they do from poets such as Nissim Ezekiel (who was acerbic) to Ramanujan (who was disdainful). The production is somewhat marred by occasional misprints, such as Pradip Sen's poem 'Bare Bones and the Poised Fruit' being reproduced twice, or bits of Lawrence Bantleman's bio turning up in Pradip Sen's. However, they do not detract from the enjoyment of reading the book as a whole. A bunch of us Bangladeshis landed in Kolkata on 3 October amid grey skies and a fine rain falling on tin and tarmac. We had come for a colloquium on religion and media at the invitation of Rathikant Basu, head of Worldwide Broadcast Worldwide/Tara TV. That afternoon, we went to the launching of the book, an event held at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre. Professor P Lal stole the show, with his short speech drawn from tales of the Mahabharata (which he has 'transcreated' into English), and each proposition begun with a carefully enunciated "Consider…" Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the governor of West Bengal, presided, and gave a speech exemplary in its modesty and humanism--a speech that would be impossible to conceive coming from any of our politicians. There was a specially fine reading of 'Nostalgia for Another City' by film producer Siddharth Kak, whose book Looking In, Looking Out was first published by Writers Workshop in 1975. Then there was tea and tasty shingaras and sweets and general good-natured chatting, or else standing on the bhaban steps looking and listening to the falling rain, until finally the evening drew to a close, and we settled into our car seats and drove off into the gathering darkness. Peering at Kolkata streets. Consider…
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