This is not a Russian poem

As a pedlar of words, Telugu poet Varavara Rao is well aware of the need to nurture them. In his poem “Words”, he writes: “Words, smothered in the folds of the self, / Must be stirred awake, / Made to amble and watch / See if wings can bear aloft / The crippled limbs / And soar into the sky.” 

The words he chose to nurture have, time and again, threatened the hegemony of the state, which has at different times branded him a rebel, a revolutionary, a conspirator and, now, the newly minted term, “urban Naxal”.

On Tuesday, Rao — along with Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, and Gautam Navlakha — were arrested in a pan-Indian crackdown by police teams from different states. They have all been accused of plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This is the second round of arrests since June, when the plot was revealed by Pune police, who had then arrested five other activists and had put out a letter, purportedly written by Maoists, in which a “Rajiv Gandhi-style incident” was planned to murder Modi. The letter’s credibility had been challenged by a number of people, including Ferreira and Gonsalves. Then as now, the arrests have sparked a series of protests, with many claiming that the crackdowns on the activists were reminiscent of the Emergency.

Rao was in prison during the Emergency as well — and several times before that. Soon after the Marxist-Leninist movement started in Naxalbari in West Bengal in 1967, Rao returned to Warangal in Andhra Pradesh and joined Thirugubatu Kavulu or Rebel Poets, who were not only associated with the movement at Srikakulam, the hotbed of the Naxalite movement in the state, but also changed the landscape of Telugu literature. Around the same time, he formed Virasam or Revolutionary Writer’s Association. He would also establish the literary magazine, Srjana. During this time, he was in and out of prison: between 1973 and 1975 on the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case; 1975-1977, when he was arrested under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act; 1985-1988, when fearing a threat to his life, Rao got his bail in the conspiracy case cancelled; and then again in 2005, during a ban on Virasam. Much of his poetry — he has published 15 volumes, besides non-fiction and translation — was written behind bars. The repeated spells of imprisonment, however, only seem to have sharpened his poetic — and political — resolution.

Varavara Rao, one of the arrested activists, gestures as he is escorted by policemen in Hyderabad | AFP

In “The Bard”, Rao imagines how the enemy of the poet fears him or her: “When the tongue pulsates, / Tone manumits the air, and / Song turns missile in battle / The foe fears the poet; / Incarcerates him, and / Tightens the noose around the neck / But, already, the poet in his notes / Breathes among the masses.” The translations hardly manage to convey the full force of the original Telugu, a language I don’t read.

The bard might be an individual voice, but he is not a voice in the wilderness. He derives his legitimacy, his mandate, from his social commitment. His words are animated not in the isolation of their creation but in the voices of the masses. The process of poetry, especially for a Socialist poet, is one of learning and relearning, claims Rao in “Words”. “Once again I must learn to utter / In communing with and listening to / Our people; / I must be tethered to the word and abide by it / What’s man’s legacy after betraying the word?” 

As the news of the arrests spread on Tuesday, a poet friend shared Adrienne Rich’s “What Kind of Times Are These” (in Collected Poems 1950-2012) . One of the most striking lines in this poem is in its second stanza: “I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled / this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here…” The obvious response is to the political conditions in Russia and also the US. The poet has already described a meeting house, “abandoned by the persecuted”. While national security — especially the safety of the prime minister — is an important matter, when the State cracks down only on those who have been its vocal critics, one is indeed left wondering what kind of times these are.

The writer’s debut book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, was published last year and his novel, Ritual, is forthcoming next year. The translations of Rao’s poems are by D Venkat Rao