Anand Thakore is a poet and Hindustani classical vocalist from Mumbai. His recent collection of poems, In Praise of Bone, places intense emotion, philosophical seeking, and sardonic wit within a miscellany of poetic forms. I sat down with him to discuss his intersecting creative practices, his approach to unity and chaos, and his literary relationships with Arundhati Subramaniam and Deepankar Khiwani—two poets published alongside Thakore in Drunken Boat’s Three Indian Poets (2024).
I met Anand thanks to the introduction of Dr. Ravi Shankar, who had invited him to read at Tufts University. We met at Semolina, a Mediterranean restaurant in Medford, MA, where we hunkered at a back table before the evening crowd descended. Over wood-fired eggplant basil pizza, we embarked upon a discussion of his foray into the world of poetry.
Lili Newberry: Tell me a bit about yourself and your introduction to poetry.
Anand Thakore: I spent a part of my childhood in England, after my mother was posted in Birmingham as a manager with the Bank of India. She was the sort of woman who had been sent off to a British boarding school as a child in ‘British’ days, so English was the only language my mother really spoke with me, though my grandparents spoke Gujarati as well as English. This might sound weird to an American ear, but in my very early childhood Hindi and Marathi were languages one spoke with the ‘servants,’ whom some of us have now more politely begun to refer to as ‘household staff.’ It’s a very different world; when I was growing up, the English language wasn’t really accessible to anyone who wasn’t ‘middle’ or ‘upper-middle’ class. When you want to say ‘put the food on the table,’ you’re speaking one language, but when you want to talk about whether there’s anything good to say in favor of Marxism, you’re speaking English—a peculiarly plural, marginal sub-culture, with its own sharp dichotomies, its own sense of being at once post-colonial and primarily anglophone.
I remember feeling an intense sense of isolation throughout my early years in England, of being different, of not belonging and being constantly picked on. I also remember being aesthetically drawn to the beauty of the cultural landscape. I resented, of course, being called a ‘Paki’ and discriminated against for the color of my skin—at school, on buses, on trains and in public libraries; but I retaliated by going out of my way to prove myself exceptional and superior to everyone else in everything I did. (Looking back, I can see how this was not a healthy form of growth…) It was The Empire Strikes Back all over again: yes, I shall be chosen to read the Bible in church, simply because of my skills at elocution, though, of course, I’m neither British nor white nor Christian.
When we got back to India, I rediscovered my intense connection with Indian classical music. I felt this deep sense of happiness coming back from England to India at the age of 12; I felt “this is where I belong”—a sense of belonging that has never left me. So, years later, when I was invited to the last interview for the Inlaks Scholarship to Cambridge, I didn’t take it, and I went to accompany my Guru in a concert instead. I stayed back because there was something in the music of the Indian soil and the concomitant culture… It was the smell of the soil that kept me there. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just addicted to familiar spaces… but I guess these are just analyses of my past better left to biographers—if anyone should ever find such matters of any interest!
The connection with Hindustani music was irresistibly powerful. I didn’t initially and primarily see myself as a poet. I loved to read, of course, as a child: Shakespeare and Shelley were favorites; and I saw strange connections between things, perhaps invisible to other kids. I was interested in things like Renaissance art and history and ancient Greece, Hindu mythology, religious traditions, and many things besides; but in my growing up years I never saw myself with any certainty as somebody who was likely to make something worthwhile out of verbal language as such. I saw myself more as somebody with the potential to sing, to learn—and perhaps someday teach—music, because my mentorial environment had made it clear to me that in some way I could do that. I mean, when it came to music, I had some formal training. The same was simply not true, in my case, with poetry. Although I studied literature assiduously and played around with free verse rather obsessively for my own amusement, I don’t think I wrote the first complete poem that made me feel “maybe I can show this to somebody else as a professional construct” until I was 23.
LN: Did your music feel like a professional construct as well? Because I know it is more strictly traditional in many ways.
AT: To a greater extent, yes, but there were also a lot of borderline areas. I mean, if you’re just meeting at somebody’s house and jamming, for instance—though it depends who you’re jamming with. Jamming in front of somebody becomes terribly professional when a senior musician walks in, or somebody who knows his music, like my dad.
And then I learned music formally from gurus who were the disciples of very great musicians. And they made me think in certain ways about art. They made me think, for instance, that every composition exists in a history of related compositions; every composition has its parent composition, every improvisation is the seed for a new composition; every composition has the potential for endless improvisation—all of which began to apply to my processes as a poet in various ways.
LN: Yeah, it’s like improvisation from the store of examples of improvisations that you have.
AT: Yeah. Another thing we had to do as music students was memorize so much. You had to pick up a composition immediately. (we don’t use written scores…)
I started doing that with poetry as well. I was studying English literature too, and I was studying Sanskrit. I gave up on Sanskrit in a couple of years to complete an M.A. in English literature.
LN: I’m interested in how you said you were very drawn to the musicality of just living and creating in India. And yet you write poetry in English. Why is English your chosen language for poetry?
AT: Well firstly, because my mother spoke to me in English, because I grew up in a primarily English-speaking sub-culture that was surrounded by this huge subcontinent and population with multiple languages, though English, in my experience of it, lay at the core. The emergence, ever since the early days of colonialism, of a tiny, marginal group of Indians, for whom English had become a “first” language, remains invisible to many people outside India; strangely enough this group of people is in some ways also invisible to many within the subcontinent; and there have been any number of “nativist” objections to the use of English by Indians as a language of literary expression.
I use 70% English, but I do a lot of my thinking in Hindi as well. I get angry with people in Hindi. I get seductive in Hindi. I sometimes say things to myself in Hindi and then come up with the English line, because what was told to me as a musician by my gurus—which was essential to the creative process—was said in Hindi. Something like “let it come from your guts,” which I might tell myself when I’m looking for a line of (English) verse—this is likely, for instance, to occur to me in Hindi. Hindi swear-words, four-letter words and expletives, seem to hold a similar place in my psyche, as also simultaneously religious utterances, prayers, etcetera, which often occur in Hindi.
LN: Is it a translation in your head?
AT: I’m not translating the lines, exactly. I’m getting into that feeling through the Hindi language. Like if I said to myself, Wake up. Anand. Anand, wake up, you’re losing the tone, Anand. I say that in Hindi. I compose classical compositions, vocal compositions in Hindi. But it’s a limited form with a certain formula to it, like the common English pop song. One can do amazingly creative things with pop songs if one is assiduous and ingenious enough, but you can also write the—you know—the I-love-you, I-love-you, I-love-you, kind of pop song. And so, as a composer of Hindi lyrics for classical compositions, I realized my limitations.
LN: And going back to your simultaneous music and poetic practices… How do you see music informing your poetry and the other way around?
AT: It works both ways, but because music was a process I was formally initiated into, whereas poetry wasn’t—we didn’t have Columbia writing school, and I didn’t have mentors, a group of poets whom I could hang out with until much later in life—I think my ideas about music influenced the way I went about poetry more than the other way around; I even tried consciously to write the kind of poetry that fit in with my aesthetics as a musician, only to gradually realize that I was limiting myself as a poet by doing that.
LN: What kind of poetry arises from following your aesthetics as a musician?
AT: A poem, for instance, that involves fidelity to a theme, like being true to a central melody; one that has a tight compositional structure, or that begins a process of endless variation and improvisation—attempts at balancing the poles of fixed composition and spontaneous improvisation. Poetry, for me, was also about those things. Now, sound is very important, sound as a physical category, the sound of words and their rhythm. I’m not a very mathematical poet: five beats in one line, four beats in the next and three in the next is quite a normal occurrence in my verse; but consciousness of an essential stress pattern is very important for me. Rhyme is something I tend to use quite a lot of.
I think of the critic who said about Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” something like: “if all he wants to do is create rhythm, why doesn’t he just bang on a drum?” I also felt that at times about my own words: like, this is better done in music than words, this is better done in pure music—it could work either way. I think I started creating compartments at times which allowed me to function well in both places without going totally crazy!
LN: How would you decide what goes in which compartment?
AT: It’s not easy. But there has to be a fluidity too, an osmosis of sorts, because it’s the same person going through both processes. If it’s melancholia you’re going through, you can’t say that I’m going to be happy in my music and melancholy in my poems.
LN: I mean, some people would say that any one poem isn’t even one poem on its own, that their body of work is more fluid than that.
AT: In my case, that is true. I pursue a particular kind of direction for a few years until I think I’ve gone far enough in that direction. For a while I wrote long prose-like poems that just go on and on. Then it was no, no, no, no! I want no more of this—cut it short for God’s sake, let me write something that resolves itself in fourteen lines!
LN: How would you trace the changes in your poetry over the course of your time writing? Like, which little offshoots and phases, if you want to call them that?
AT: My first two books seem obsessively concerned with the need to push speech in the direction of song; to seek out what I call somewhere “the varied benedictions of a higher musical order.” This is assuming that music is a “higher order,” but that is only one of my perspectives on poetry. I can also discern in my poetic strategies a growing counter-obsession that ran parallel to this, an obsession with speech per se, and a concomitant need to concentrate my energies in verse, on what began to seem possible to me only in verbal language. Oddly enough, it was my music gurus who used to tell me that there are some things you can only do in language. You can’t do them in music. So don’t waste your time trying to do them in pure music.
LN: What did your gurus mean when they told you that? Did they have something in mind—what can only language do?
AT: See: music also evolves on the basis of the spoken word. In the West and in the East, people started writing speech down long before they started “writing” music. There was music, but the writing of music?—this is a later development. And when you teach music—for instance, in the course of improvising how to construct a musical phrase—teacher and student are still thinking in terms of something like a musical phrase. What I mean is we’re thinking in terms of something linguistic, verbal, an entity that exists in verbal language, regardless of music as such, and in a sense preempts purely musical knowledge. Everyone is using phrases all the time, but everyone is not making music. So, the teaching of music necessitates the linguistic analogy. And at a basic level one needs verbal language to talk about the “language” of music. The two are inseparably connected. This inseparability seems to underlie my first two collections.
The next two books—Mughal Sequence and Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls—seem to involve a different set of principles and goals from the ones on which my previous work was based. Both books are sequences of dramatic monologues welded together by an underlying sense of unity at the level of theme and form. All the poems in Mughal Sequence are monologues that refer to the same historical period, and each poem in Seven Deaths refers to a specific death and is arranged formally, in unrhymed tercets. Each of these collections tends to be seen as a more of a “book” than a random compendium of individual lyrical “moments”; and many people have seen the whole book, in each case, as a single long poem in several parts. That’s another way in which my poems have changed in my recent practices. I’ve stopped seeing poems in terms of “books” of poems. It’s all for now again, all for this poem, and each poem for itself.
LN: How do you decide, then, what goes in the work?
AT: You look at what you have over a period of three or four years, and you try to get a general idea of what’s worth keeping, and you may be right, and you may be wrong! But I think I’ve reached a point at which I know that poetry is not about five-year-plans because I’m now too old for five-year-plans!
But when I was your age, I was totally about spontaneity: it’s just the next poem you need to see; there’s nothing but the immediate impulse, each poem lives only for itself, each poem needs to be true only to its own laws, each concert for itself… Even holding it on till tomorrow, and then “over-polishing” it was seen as being false to myself; it all had to happen in one rush of energy.
LN: Why do you think that was? Why were you suddenly able to write a whole book around the same structure?
AT: I functioned in that way, I mean the utterly impulsive and spontaneous way, in inspired phases, for about six years, through my late teens and early twenties, and though much of it was fun and fascinating, it rarely ever led to anything that seemed to have the beginnings of a real poem! And then I think I dried out, or I burnt out, and I had to find another way of functioning, both as a musician and poet, a way that had more to do with clarity of direction, steadiness of purpose—all those boring old things that you start learning when you begin to take things “seriously”! In my late thirties and forties, I think there was the “middle phase”… and the growing “clarity of direction” and “steadiness of purpose” brought me face-to-face with the dangers of pushing the lyrical attempt too far in the direction of related literary forms: prose fiction, drama, even non-fiction.
I now see a loss of energy there, a centrifugal movement away from the core of the poetic attempt. And at 50, I’m saying to myself again: “look, these long-term schemes and overall plans are really not worth the effort…” Because how much time have I got left to do anything anyway? What is life about? Just now, it’s about this pizza, this conversation. Can my poetic vision focus on what’s happening just now, right here: this pizza, this restaurant, this experience of meeting a new person, sharing a few ideas?
LN: So, would you say that’s more of a return to writing spontaneously?
AT: Yeah. The older I grow the more I seem to feel that life is not about the great narrative I have in my head—upon which, some day, I am going to confer a grand epic structure; though that too can, of course, be a legitimate approach to poetry for some. I think I’ve personally outlived it. I may be wrong!
LN: Yeah. It’s interesting that you wrote that way, and then you strayed from it, and now you’re writing that way again. I imagine, as a younger poet, it’s probably also difficult to sustain such a thematically consistent work because you don’t know yourself and your practice.
AT: Yes, but that’s so much more beautiful… to inhabit the immediate and not feel the compulsion to sustain! So long as you have the technical command to bring whatever you’re grappling with at any point to some sort of complete or convincing form. But the thing is, to reach that stage takes a lot of work and a lot of ‘knowing’ one’s own strategies.
LN: What are some of your strategies?
AT: One strategy is to ensure that there is a strong musical order to what I’m writing. The minute I’m thinking in terms of a musical arrangement of some sort, there’s instantly so much I cannot say—because if I say all those things that are circling about in my head with regard to my personal life and social, cultural, or political situations, I’m going to lose the music. So immediately, I have to prioritize the music of the line over other concerns and then limit the “meaning” because I have a central melody now, I have a tune that is asking me to stay with it, give it my full attention.
Rhythm is also an important strategy, and emotional color, so to speak, emotional specificity. Now see: all the things I’m talking about here connect with a search for unity, the attempt to create something unified. And yet, strangely enough, the one thing that provokes me most strongly to move on as a poet is a sense of being completely fragmented. So, there’s a paradox there, or maybe a natural causal connection. It’s because one is so fragmented perhaps that one seeks more unified forms. There’s so much inner brokenness at the emotional level and thinking about it only makes it worse! Am I, as an anglophone Indian poet, Indian or British, or Indo-British, am I a musician, or am I a poet? Am I culturally X or Y? Schizophrenia! Dichotomy!—questions of identity that I teach myself patiently to put aside in favor of pure craft, though, yes, they continue to pop up annoyingly in consciousness.
LN: Yeah, I think simply by virtue of containing something within a poetic form, no matter how fragmented the content, it’s still together in a poem, and that’s some kind of unity.
AT: Ah, but unity is not enough to make it art… If it doesn’t have a strong chaos-dimension, it can’t move anyone, it can’t stir anything. When I was studying literature 30 years ago, I remember reading “The Waste Land” and attempting in that phase rather hopelessly to imitate poems that came across as “collages”—some even had one line in Hindi, one line in English. All of those attempts were discarded. And then if it was a question of whom I would rather learn by heart, Yeats or Elliot, of course, I would rather learn Yeats by heart and serenade his verse to myself on my long scooter-rides into the countryside outside Pune University. So, it’s the way everything comes together, holds together, that seems to compel me in the end; even when Yeats says “the center cannot hold,” he is creating something that has a huge centrifugal energy to it. And Elliot is doing exactly the opposite thing in “The Wasteland.” Things are deliberately set into flight at once in multiple directions. And that’s cool too, as a way of looking at art. I think my obsession with unity and the need to contain chaos in traditional forms comes a lot from my training in classical music. And yet, there has to be room for chaos in art; nothing moves without chaos…
LN: How do you think all of this speaks to your preferences for resolution in poetry, your own or others’?
AT: When I read a really good Shakespearean sonnet and it’s all brought round so gracefully and logically to that last line, I might feel that all is here so beautifully “contained.” But it might also leave me feeling that I’m situated somewhere outside it all, that the sheer perfection of the craft isn’t allowing me entry, like an excellently constructed room that one isn’t allowed walk into. A poem can turn into too much of a construct to feel natural. I’m wary of that. That’s why in Mughal Sequence, I followed a completely different method. If you look at the lines and the shapes of the poems, they’re just all either two lines or one line. There’s no stanzaic pattern there, apart from that. There’s so much space between the lines. At times, a single movement goes on without a pause for six lines. There’s a lot of variety and variation there and openness of form but then look at this… after indulging all that “freedom,” I feel compelled to return to a shape like this: four + four + three + three = fourteen—the pure, mathematical sonnet.
LN: And how does your process differ in either of these instances? What’s it like to write the more mathematical poem versus the sprawling, stanza-less poem?
AT: They’re both very demanding. They’re both so damn demanding. Ultimately, my guide is life. What do I need just now? Do I need just now to run into the middle of the street and throw my arms out and let out a loud, expansive cry in praise of everything or yell for how much pain I’m in? Or do I want to sit here, observing myself meditatively till I start calculating every line, every beat? Do I need to cut off a lot of nonsense in order to see just the minute, the tiny thing I need to see? And if so, will formal constraints be of assistance in that attempt? And it may be that at a given moment, I need to see nothing, that everything I perceive is useless, either to the emergence of a poem or a more valuable experience of life…
LN: I want to ask you about the other two poets in Three Indian Poets, Arundhati Subramaniam and Deepankar Khiwani.
AT: Deepankar and I, we were in school together, strangely enough.
LN: Did you know he was going to be such a good poet?
AT: I learned a huge amount about poetry from him in my mid-teens. His mother taught him how to scan poetry and write in meter when he was 10 or something. But he didn’t teach me anything directly; he kept a lot of his knowledge to himself, and yet he impressed me so much, we had a certain rapport. And then he turned his back on poetry around 25 or 26, after which he only wrote when he was internally compelled, when he just couldn’t restrain himself. He came to see poetry as a destructive force better not toyed with; but ultimately, his inner conflict resulted in two exceptionally good manuscripts. It’s fine poetry of a particular kind: formal, restrained, precise but with a strong emotional undercurrent. He was a person who never projected himself as a professional poet, who had extraordinary talent and an extraordinary literary mind. But I think he was very scared of his own genius and what it might do to him.
LN: And Arundhati?
AT: I met Arundhati at 23 or 24, at the poetry circle in Bombay. We shared lots of poems. We shared lots of work, lots of ideas. We had a little literary sub-culture, a small but significant culture composed of about 12 to 15 people. She also went to school just opposite the street at JB Petit girls’ school and then to Xavier’s College, which Deepankar also attended some years later. Anglophone South Bombay was really a very small world back then! Imagine: Deepankar, Arundhati, and I all went to school within 100 meters of each other at roughly the same time. There was a certain English-speaking South Bombay community, a South Calcutta community, an English-speaking central Delhi community. This was a tiny fragment of the population, so everybody in these circles seemed to know everyone else! When Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children, everyone in my school read it, of course, because it described our school. At least everyone read the first two or three chapters. And it’s probably the first time we were reading something that described our own environment so vividly and entertainingly in fine English prose.
LN: I know it’s not exactly nonfiction, but did you think Rushdie’s description of your school seemed accurate to your experience?
AT: Actually, sometimes you wonder if it is fiction! It’s that realistically convincing. It’s every road name right, every street corner right, the bus timings right. Rushdie’s Bombay is accurate—not like my Boston would be, if I were to write a short story set in Boston!
LN: Another thing I wanted to ask about was your object poems or your “thing” poems. You mentioned that the first thing that occurs to you when you’re writing poetry, oftentimes, is the voice, rather than an image or a phrase. So, I was curious how this occurs with objects?
AT: A reviewer who’s also a poet talks somewhere about my “Sequence Addressed to Hanging Objects.” She says that what seems to begin as an apostrophe to a wind chime or a dream catcher then emerges as a statement about the poet’s own psyche and turns into an indirect mode of self-address. It’s not really about the object; it’s about the speaker. There tends to be a movement from outside to inside in many of my poems, from the outer world to the inner world. I see something “out there” and I feel an empathy with it that makes me want to talk about it. But then the sense of it being “out there” becomes hazy—the idea that we are continuous with all that surrounds us; that we are not essentially cut off from it, but that our minds create barriers; and those moments in which those boundaries disappear are a cause for aesthetic celebration.
I have a recent sonnet that is about the search for that sort of moment. It’s set in a swimming pool. So, what sort of object is water? It is also an object, if you look at water from outside. And then you get into the water, and when you’re sensing it, you make a certain connection with it; it’s entering you—physically, through the pores of your skin, but also in other ways—as you are immersing yourself inside it. This is the magical, phenomenological moment that poets like Kabir in the Hindi tradition, love to sing of. It’s the continuum beneath all things that defies boundaries, specific definitions. It’s similar to what happens when Shelley in “To a Skylark” becomes, in a sense, the bird that is singing and that he is singing about. At one level, the Skylark functions as an apostrophized object with symbolic dimensions; but who or what is it really?
LN: And is this kind of continuity between yourself and specific objects—or just yourself and anything—is this a personally held philosophy? Or just a poetic one?
AT: I think, over the years, it has become a personally held philosophy—in my music, too. It’s very much part of my musical practice, for instance, to be listening with complete attention to the accompanying instruments. If 60% of my focus is on listening to the accompanying instruments and 40% on singing, I’m in a good place. Because if I’m attuned to or “respecting” my environment, I’m likely to make better music. Maybe “receiving” is more accurate here than “respecting” (which sounds a bit too much like a save-the-environment poster for my taste!)
LN: It’s like a listening-more-than-you-talk sort of philosophy.
AT: Yes, because if I listen to the percussion and the string accompaniment more deeply, I will also listen to myself better, and the better I listen to myself, the more tuneful, the more accurate my pitching will be, the clearer my lens. But one more thing before we end this conversation, since both of us have to leave soon. Something with regard to the disappearance of boundaries; boundaries between the inside and the outside. A lot of poetry for me is also about saying that I’m trapped, that this oneness with the world of objects is a state I aspire to but rarely and only momentarily attain. I remain trapped in a world of ideas. So the final object in “Sequence Addressed to Hanging Objects” is an important discovery in my search—it’s a wind chime. At last, I have an object that actually starts speaking back to me. It does its own thing. It makes its own music, regardless of what I am saying to it. It is saying whatever it says, free of any control on my part. It is God answering, perhaps: the wind is now saying this—listen to it.
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Anand Thakore grew up in India and in the United Kingdom. His published collections of poetry include In Praise of Bone (2023), Waking In December (2001), Elephant Bathing (2012), Mughal Sequence (2012), and Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls (2017), which was recently shortlisted for The Jayadeva National Poetry Award. He is the founder of Harbour Line, a publishing collective, and of Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians, as well as the recipient of grants from The Ministry of Human Resource Development and The Charles Wallace India Trust.
Liliane Newberry studies English and philosophy at Tufts University. She serves as a co-editor-in-chief of Currents Magazine, a Boston-based arts and literature publication. Liliane is originally from San Jose, California, and spends her time writing poems, letterpressing, and building a stamp collection.