Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih: “I believe in literary ambidextrousness”
The winner of the 2024 Shakti Bhatt Prize, who writes poetry, drama and fiction in Khasi and English talks about his journey as a writer
How did you feel when you were announced as the winner of this year’s Shakti Bhatt Prize? What did you do to celebrate this special moment?
I truly feel humbled and honoured to be chosen from among so many renowned writers in India. I understand that the distinguished writers at the Shakti Bhatt Foundation do their own research and selection. The honour is all the sweeter for that reason.
I’m also even more delighted because I believe that this award is not only a recognition of my body of work but of Khasi literature, for a part of my work is in Khasi.
I haven’t celebrated. As a quiet thanksgiving, I’m thinking of taking a trip to the sacred woods of Sohra, my hometown, to be with the ancient trees and commune with the spirits of my wise ancestors. If not for them, our greedy generation would have destroyed all our forests.
How do you look back and assess your own journey and growth as a writer?
I had always thought that my first poem was for a lovely divorcee, many years older than me, with whom I fell in love. I had just given my matriculation examination and was waiting for the result when the abandoned woman came to live with her girl child in the compound where I was a tenant. She was beautiful beyond belief. I couldn’t understand how such loveliness could have been so cruelly ill-treated. She seemed to me, in her loneliness, like a flambeau in the dark lanes of those nights: someone both hope and joy-giving, a soulmate, a fellow sufferer with whom I could share my hardship and loneliness. Something stirred inside me. I was racked by a sudden desolate yearning, something fierce and restless, a gnawing, tormenting desire to reach out, to touch. And I scribbled my first few lines of poetry, something I never knew I ever had, addressed to the woman, the first I ever loved.
But I could not bring myself to address her openly. I suffered from a terrible lack of self-belief, the result of my long impoverishment, and yet my passion would not let me eat or sleep in peace. So, one night, furtive like someone committing a crime, I crawled to her two-room residence and slipped a piece of paper through the door. That was my first poem—nakedly, madly in love, and desperately prayerful.
I had hoped that the poem would be both billet-doux and petitioner, but, in my foolishness, I did not even write down my name. And later, much too late, I learnt that my beloved had looked in vain for the man who had called her, my first love, my first poem, Light in the Night. But by then, I had already lost my courage. I remain to her a mystery. She remains to me, my inspiring light.
However, now that I look back carefully, I realise that I actually started my writing career by writing hundreds of love letters to hundreds of girls in high school. At that time, I didn’t know if they had any literary merits. I only knew that the girls liked them, and my classmates, for whom I wrote, never failed to get accepted. It was only much later — when I reread some of the letters I still had — that I realised there was much poetry in them.
After my first poem addressed to my first love, I wrote many more in Khasi and English, carefully preserved in my diaries with many scratches and cancellations. But I never had them published. I thought they were private things written to soothe my lonely hours. Only when I was pursuing my MA, after meeting some of the poets who would later be known as the Shillong poets, did I begin sharing my poems. Finally, I mustered up enough courage to tentatively show them to one of my teachers, who told me to get them published somewhere as soon as possible.
Did you follow your teacher’s advice?
At that time, Jayanta Mahapatra (Jayantada as I came to call him) was editing the poetry page of The Telegraph’s Sunday Magazine — the most widely read English-language newspaper in the Northeast in those days. I decided to try my luck. To my surprise and great delight, one of the six poems I had sent, The Fungus, was published. This was followed by another one, The Parking Lot, in the very next issue. Imagine then the euphoria that overwhelmed me! The great man I had admired for years, who had seemed so remote, a great name among great poets, had actually selected and published two of my very own poems! And I was going to be read by everybody who knew me! Think of their surprise! The unremarkable and inconspicuous Kynpham published by Mahapatra! My nostrils flared with pride, and I was not ashamed of it either: as far as I was concerned, it was my first achievement as a poet.
My first two books of poetry, Moments and The Sieve, were published by Writers Workshop in 1992 on payment of a certain amount. But later, I was determined not to pay anyone for publishing my poetry. And, as it was hard to get poetry publishers who did not ask for money, I decided never to submit my poetry manuscript anywhere. I was happy enough to get the poems published in journals and magazines in the country and abroad.
And then, the Kovalam Literary Festival happened in 2008. By a quirk of fate, I was on the same dais with celebrities like Satchidanandan and Shashi Tharoor, reading my self-composed poems after Tharoor had recited Mahmoud Darwish. After the session, a lady, beaming excitedly, approached me and said, “I must publish your poems!” She introduced herself as Karthika VK, who, at the time, was at HarperCollins. I was stunned! It was so rare to be approached by a publisher in that way. I said, “Please, do! Please, do!”
Among the poems I had read at the session was Blasphemous Lines for Mother. It has a line that reads “those days in Cherra,” referencing Sohra or Cherrapunjee, where I was born and spent a significant part of my childhood. Karthika was intrigued by “those days in Cherra” and suggested that I write a memoir. Instead, I promised her a book that would challenge genres, something big and bad. That was how my epic-length novel Funeral Nights came into being, and that was how I became a novelist!
Do you feel equally at home in Khasi and English when you sit down to write, or do you have a different equation with each language?
I believe in what I call “literary ambidextrousness”, a fundamental discourse on the virtues of knowing two languages and writing well in them. In a vast and complex country like India, these languages would mean one’s mother tongue and the language of interaction. In my case, they would mean Khasi, the language of my tribe, and English.
It is neither desirable nor profitable to keep one’s writings confined to one’s language or the language of interaction. A native author’s work with any literary merit must “go singing through the world” as Pablo Neruda put it. For this, the author must be able to translate his work into the language of interaction. But if he is not ambidextrous in this sense, his work must risk lurking forever in the dark recesses of his own small world.
If he writes only in the language of interaction, he must be able to translate his work into his mother tongue or risk being cut off forever from the hearts and minds of his people.
The need to avoid these risks is, to quote Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” of my poetry and prose as a bilingual writer.
What was the starting point of your book The Distaste for the Earth?
I was fascinated by the true and tragic love story of Manik Raitong, or Manik the Wretched, and Lieng Makaw, the wife of a famous king who ruled an ancient Khasi state. That’s why the book, inspired by the tragedy, may easily be called The Queen and the Pauper. But what is known about the story is a mere skeletal outline that would hardly fill two pages. Moved by what happened to Manik, I wrote a short story and included it in Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends. Soon, many of my readers wrote to me to confess, ‘Your Manik story made me cry.’
That enthused me into writing a short play, Manik: A Play in Five Acts, so that I might explore the troubling themes of the tragedy further. The play is not doing too badly. Some universities have included it in their syllabi, and Setu Prakashan has published a Hindi version.
The drama as a genre, I feel, lacks scope and flexibility. Only a work of fiction, I thought, would allow me to explore fully the dark universe of the story. That was when I decided to create an ancient fictional world of kings and queens, princes and princesses, warriors and plunderers, and chronicles the particular sorrows of a young man, without kith or kin, caught up in that world, and through him, to raise profound existential questions about earthly powers, godly dispensation, and themes such as greed and oppression, revenge and justice, love and tragedy, strife and peace.
But that was not all. Manik was said to be an empath with a unique ability to communicate with all creatures. That inspired me to create Part II of the book, where animals recount their tales of woe against man to Manik. The most remarkable thing about this animal section is that it can very well stand alone: a book within a book. Within the novel, this section raises the question of where our anthropocentric attitude is taking us.
Because of all these intertwining issues, it would be a great mistake to read the book as a mere love story. It is an existentialist exploration, helping me reimagine a world where man is a despot, where God is ostensibly absent, much like our own, outlining issues at once mythic and contemporary.
What are you working on?
My forthcoming book in English is Lapbah: Stories from the Northeast. Those being pitched by my friend Kanishka Gupta (a literary agent) include my seventh poetry collection, Nameri: A Verse Romance, my eighth poetry collection, A Letter to the Sky and Other Poems, my ninth poetry collection, A Midager’s Tales and Other Verse Narratives, and a book called Why the Girl Child Is So Beloved: Narrative Essays on Khasi Culture. In Khasi, the forthcoming books include a collection of one-act plays called Ki Sawangka Shi Bynta and a poetry collection called Ka Shithi Sha Sahit. I am also working on my next novel, a collection of short stories, and a poetry anthology. I am never happy unless I create. Also, I feel that I am running out of time.
Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.