From Silence to Rhetoric

Abstract

Like the world itself, the textual encounter contains infinite possibilities. But how does language capture the undisclosed? This question is internalised in the process of writing but it is also fundamental to the spiritual quest. My detours as a writer, from silence to rhetoric, constitute a journey that is difficult to name, but which is triggered by discontents of one or another cause, displacing me towards different ways of seeing. The poems in my recent book Vishvarūpa permit me to explore a Hindu culture and heritage lost through the vicissitudes of colonial history. I made several journeys to India to research these poems. But what pitfalls does the poet face as ethnographer? How can myth and memory reconstruct a postcolonial identity?