The poet in the archives

In a poem called Chéseaux’s Comet, Arjun Rajendran describes the great comet of 1744 as ‘this celestial messenger/ seen across continents, in the spyglasses of pirates/ & admirals’. In his description, the comet – a sensational astronomical event recorded in the mid18th century – leans its nucleus ‘against the cold ribs/ of a lascar’s widow’. The poem ends with a startling image. The highly unusual ‘sextuple tail’ of the comet that rose above the horizon had been particularly noted in contemporary astronomical records. It had overawed its observers. In Rajendran’s imaginative retelling of that moment, this awe is seamlessly evoked. The poem ends with this dramatic tail of the comet ‘aiming auguries at/ the governess, yet to outlive her daughter and grandchild’.

That’s the challenge of the genre of the “historical poem”, to restore affect to the archive, to recover the once-lived nature of things which end up in the records, to revivify this record. The spectacularity of the 18th century comet is not just told to us, it is realized. We are not just informed. Instead something is deftly evoked for us. The awe of the contemporaries leaks into the words. The comet aims auguries at people. Its radiance is more than any potentate’s, ‘nawab, Mahratta, or Queen’. We have both the historian’s material and the poet’s persuasion, together. One would have been amiss without the other. That’s the strength of Rajendran’s verse. In his new poetry book One Man Two Executions, he begins with a large section of ‘historical poems’, ‘spanning the years between 1739 and 1749… set in French colonial Pondicherry/pondichéry, during the Carnatic wars’. The scale of his ambition is astounding. A poet would have needed academic rigour, writerly restraint, and lyric capacity to enliven this subject material. Rajendran has each of these things.

Across its various histories, poetry has often been held hostage to the idea of the dramatic moment of inspiration. The poets are supposed to sit starry eyed and wait for the oracles to speak to them. In Rajendran’s verse, whose project in this book is not just ‘lyric’ but also ‘historical’, such an idea is left far behind. What takes over instead is deliberation, diligence and craft, and what is almost never associated with poetry in the popular imagination, research.

Rajendran has scoured the ‘diaries of Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709-61), a meticulous diarist, and a dubash (interpreter) to the French governor’. He mines Pillai’s work for ‘the anecdotes, footnotes and chronicles of caste, astrology and maritime records drawn from Volumes One to Six of Pillai’s twelve diaries’. His research had taken him to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and to the descendants of the diarist. He puts in the labour, reads the records, pauses at the details, and then uses his poetry toolbox relying more on craft than on serendipity to arrive at his poems. I am thinking multiple drafts till the archival material has been thoroughly absorbed into the poem and been