Half Circle
Poet K Srilata’s latest book ‘Footnotes to the Mahabharata’, chronicles the stories of love and loss through the voices of five women—Alli, Draupadi, Hidimbi, Gandhari and Kunti—and the inimitable voice of the ‘Sakhi’.
– Praveena Shivram
In the reading of poetry, there are moments when you distinctly and consciously meet yourself. e brevity of words on a page become automatic invitations for us to inhabit the gaps, the empty spaces, the margins, and when the poems in and of themselves are retellings of an epic poem that you have grown up listening to, then that same invitation becomes a sort of magnetic pull. You forget, sometimes, where the poem ends and you begin.
K Srilata’s ‘Footnotes to the Mahabharata’ that chronicles the stories of love and loss through the voices of five women—Alli, Draupadi, Hidimbi, Gandhari and Kunti—laced by the voiceless voice of the ‘Sakhi’, is a profound undertaking. e complexities of relationship, desire, destiny, and the rules of war and dharma that relegate women to the sediments of time, are given new life, a breath that roars.
There is an urgency to the poems as they follow each other, an urgency born out of a seeded reality, of stories overlapping with each other, reminding us that the lives of women are but ‘footnotes in the war’ (the most powerful page in the book), reminding us that silences, too, can speak volumes. ‘As a poet, I think you get used to first thinking of space, of silences, of the pause. ere is an intuitive understanding that less is more—or rather that “nothingness” is performative. Most of the poems which are now part of “Footnotes to the Mahabharata” are dramatic monologues or quasi dramatic monologues—so there is a lot of “speaking” and a lot of “listening”,’ said Srilata over a short interview.
In her prologue, she expands on this, saying, ‘Moving away from Western poetry-titling practices, I was drawn on the titling tradition of Tamil Sangam Agananuru and Purananuru poetry, in which titles declare upfront who is speaking to whom. is approach to titling seemed especially suited for the dramatic monologue.’ In this dichotomy of being upfront and leaving things unsaid is the very power of Srilata’s poems—they dance into each other, always making space for the third, the reader. With every reading, the ideas ferment even more, the residual thoughts and feelings becoming markers of an understanding that is elusive as much as it is ephemeral, and yet, an imprint is left behind. e despair of Alli, the desire of Kunti, the love of Hidimbi, the sacrifice of Gandhari and the anguish of Draupadi become windows of nuance, and you wonder, wasn’t this always part of the story? How did we miss it?
This Thought That We Might Never Again Meet
Lonely as a swan without her mate,
this thought, Bhima,
that we might never again meet
or that if we do, years later,
the parts of us which have grown
in the absence of the other,
and those which have decayed,
will greet each other as strangers.
What is most interesting in Srilata’s book is the use of the haiku. Sometimes it precedes the poem, sometimes it comes in the end, always occupying the corners, like a marble, once rolled away, waiting to be found. I read them as they owed on the page and read them out of order, and each time the feeling was the same—it opened another avenue, another pathway, that stayed true to the essence of the epic itself. ‘ ere is no trunk to this textual tree, no pristine Ur-Mahabharata for scholars to isolate from a mass of corrupted texts; if it is a tree at all, it is a banyan, which must have an original root but sends down so many subsequent roots from its branches (other variants) that one can no longer tell which was the original’, Srilata quotes in her prologue taken from Wendy Doniger’s review for London Review of Books which is a part of John Smith’s translation of the epic. It is this open-endedness of time and myth, legend and history, fiction and imagination that allows the Mahabharata to condense and collapse into itself as it takes the form of a haiku. ‘Around the time that I started working on these poems, I had been experimenting with haikai forms—the haiku, the senryu and the haibun. So this made its way into the poems—and along with it the haiku’s legendary silences too—the paradoxical quiet speaking that is intertwined with the form. e dramatic monologue with its silent listener—in this case, the figure of the Sakhi or the heroine’s friend—is a form I have used almost throughout. There is so much that remains unsaid in all of this speaking and listening, and in the haiku that is part of the fabric of the poems. Haiku practitioners speak of the haiku as being a half circle—it is up to the reader to step into that gap. I think about that all the time—it is a lesson for all poets, all writers and artists really and especially important in a world that is crowded with information online and on social media, where we lurch between mindless scrolling and a state of hyper-productivity and forget to sit, forget to wait, forget to simply be,’ said Srilata.
Says Draupadi to Sakhi Nitambini
The Thorn of His Question
‘As different as sugar and salt,
as unalike as rivers and mountains,
my brothers and I.
How do you propose to handle us?’
asks Yudhishtira.
hidden amidst roses the thorn of his question.
At the end of the book, Srilata offers us ‘Source Tales’ that give us the necessary backstory for each of the five women featured in the book. It is ironic that it is placed in the end, because the poems, in and of themselves, paint a vivid picture of space, time, context, thought, feeling, character and story, and even without the source, we feel its heft. And the one line that could encapsulate the world of these poems, comes in the middle of the book. Srilata’s poems, ultimately, challenge the very notion of mutability and mortality—the circle is complete only when you enter it, and wonder, once again, where does the poem end and you begin.
Says Hidimbi to Herself
Are we but footnotes in the war?
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