SMOULDERING HEART
To mourn poet and teacher Eunice de Souza, who died on July 29, is also to mourn a period and a milieu in Bombay’s cultural life
Eunice de Souza (1940-2017) never had the slightest patience with the claims of a normality imposed by consensus or authority. Not one to be trapped in a ghetto, whether ethnic, academic or political, she early embraced the rapture of all that was strange and liberating. In her poem ‘Return’, she revisits the moment when she first heard the French Jesuit and translator Guy Deleury, then resident at the Christa Prema Seva Ashram, read the Marathi saint-poet Tukaram’s
abhangas: Tuka, forgive my familiarity. I have loved your pithy verses ever since that French priest everyone thought mad recited them, and told us of his journey with your people... You made life hard for your wife and I’m not sure I approve of that. Nor did you heed her last request: Come back soon.
Deleury, with his lifelong devotion to Tukaram and to India’s Bhakti literature of ecstasy and protest, was an emancipatory part of de Souza’s growing up in Poona, where she was born in 1940. Demonstrating her refusal to conform to what she experienced as the stifling pieties and norms of her Goan Catholic birth community, she sought out unusual, even eccentric figures like Deleury (who later renounced his priestly calling and entered secular life) and the Santiniketan-trained Goan émigré artist Angelo da Fonseca, whose radiant Indianisation of Christian iconography prompted orthodox opinion to cast him into exterior darkness. Such presences, and the pathways they opened up, nourished de Souza’s imagination.
As a young poet and academic, de Souza articulated the difficulties confronted by a woman making her way in the India of the 1960s and 1970s, a postcolonial society in which feudalism and patriarchy continued to dominate public life and the accepted perception of gender destiny. While the label ‘confessional’ is a reductive and inadequate one, de Souza’s encounter with the work of such poets as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich offered her models of poetry that opened up forms of public expression for women. In the precisely titled ‘Autobiographical’, she appears to pay the patriarchy back in its own coin: I thought the whole world was trying to rip me up cut me down go through me with a razor blade then I discovered a cliché: that’s what I wanted to do to the world. In the ‘Songs of Survival’, she registers a move towards a more stoic, ironic stance: Practice grave courtesy: there are no tears in the eye of the storm. Survive to know you can. There is little to be said for suffering. Throughout her career, de Souza was active as a literary critic, editor, researcher, and columnist. To mourn de Souza is also to mourn a period and a milieu in Bombay’s cultural life when the arts had not become narrowly professionalised and mutually separated, and when compelling intellectual and artistic synergies exploded across the scene. Writers and painters, architects and filmmakers, activists and advertising professionals met, formed friendships and often collaborated. Poets like Nissim Ezekiel transited between academia and the visual arts. Poets like Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre straddled the worlds of literature and advertising. Poets like Adil Jussawalla were active in academia, journalism and publishing. These cultural experimenters and their contemporaries were responsive to theatre and music, often working together to develop work beyond the page. They were committed to keeping the transmission lines of literature open, whether through little magazines or small presses, as the research of scholars like Laetitia Zecchini and Anjali Nerlekar has shown.
While the Clearing House publishing collective has received retrospective acclaim for its role, the 1960s and 1970s were animated by numerous reading circles and publishing platforms. Among these were the circle around Nissim Ezekiel at the PEN, the salons that Kamala Das convened, imprints such as Pras Prakashan, and successors to Clearing House such as Newground and Praxis, which published de Souza’s early collections of poetry. The self-renewing energies of this background continued to pulse through Eunice de Souza’s work until the end. Wintry as its wisdom sounds, her last book of poems, Learn from the Almond Leaf, published last year, offers us unquiet meditations like ‘A Smattering of Rain’: A smattering of rain, Earth lets off steam. A hawk falls. A volcano upchucks. Watch it! Earth’s heart is still smouldering. Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator