Videos by Priya Sarukkai -Chabria
Invocation Spirit of Water is a poem of prayer and protest ready over bamboo flute music by Vijay... more Invocation Spirit of Water is a poem of prayer and protest ready over bamboo flute music by Vijay Venkatesh. It begins with a calling to dew 'that touches all' and invokes the many forms of water from steam to ice, each time summoning a particular body pf water - be it estuary , ocean or mountain pool, both as itself and metaphor of hope, protest and strength in this contemporary hymn. 8 views
Papers by Priya Sarukkai -Chabria
JSBL, 2014
Reviewed by Ravi Shankar When we consider the aesthetics of urbanity, Walter Benjamin's figure of... more Reviewed by Ravi Shankar When we consider the aesthetics of urbanity, Walter Benjamin's figure of the flâneur comes to mind, the figure who indulges in metropolitan experience with what Balzac described as "the gastronomy of the eye," or the one who becomes in Baudelaire's phrase, a "botanist of the sidewalk." This posture, often inflected as gentlemanly, can be contrasted with the activity of the badaud, the gawker or gaper, who is thought to have lost his individuality to become part of the crowd. Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Christopher Taylor's masterful ³Mumbai/Bombay: Immersions² provides us with yet a third mode of perceiving that combines the former two, a feminine gaze that partakes both of passionate spectating and historicized remarking, a way of being immersed in the city, while also being apart from it. Chabria and Taylor have discovered a collaborative methodology where image and text share equal billing, and the result is a book that should become a classic in the vein of Walker Evans¹ and James Agee¹s Depression-era portrait of sharecropper families in the American South, Let us Praise Famous Men for its innovation and richness of its writing and photography. Mumbai, or Bombay, is the most populous city India, the result of the reclamation of seven islands, and the financial, commercial and entertainment center of India. It¹s a multifarious, contradictory place and accordingly, ³Immersions² is a fertile and intertextual hybrid, part travelogue, part memoir, part lyric essay, part sociological and geographical tract, part fictional excerpt, part photomontage. In fact, it¹s that rarest of species, a coffee table book that you will not want to leave collecting dust, but will actually look forward to reveling in. We are led through the alleyways of Bombay's thoroughfares and neighborhoods, the temporal, spiritual and spatial realms, through the lives of migrant workers to the overlapping, percussive tides of the island city. We are provided with maps and startling facts‹such as the population explosion of Bombay from 10,000 inhabitants in 1661 to over 23 million in 2015‹alongside metaphoric evocations of the ³frenetic energy [that] rides along its railway lines and side streets, slums and towers of opulence, a bolt of vitality [that] slides through its fascinations, derelictions, damnations, depravities, opportunities.² It was neo-Kantian German critic Georg Simmel who in his essay ³Metropolis and the Mental Life² demanded a new mode of inquiry that could help ³solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life.² ³Mumbai/Bombay: Immersions² is one such mode because it manages to capture what Chabria and Taylor call both the ³hard² and ³soft² aspects of the city. As elucidated in the Introduction, ³Bombay/Mumbai is simultaneously a verifiable reality, the OEhard city¹ located in maps and statisticsŠ At the same time, it can also be a personal construction, the OEsoft¹ city imagined, dreamt of, the site of illusions and nightmares.² Either the hard or soft approach alone cannot be sufficient to capture the rhythms and ineluctable character of a city, but by combining their resonances, we move closer to its beating heart. So we are given OEhard¹ facts in sidebars alongside the OEsofter¹ aspects of the city in the form of poetry and evocatively written prose. The superb design of this book must also be
In other words: the journal for literary translators, 2010
Eighth century Tamil poet and founding saint Andal is believed to have been found as a baby under... more Eighth century Tamil poet and founding saint Andal is believed to have been found as a baby underneath a holy basil plant in the temple garden of Srivilliputhur. As a young woman she fell deeply in love with Lord Vishnu, composing fervent poems and songs in his honor and, according to custom, eventually marrying the god himself. The Autobiography of a Goddess is Andal's entire corpus, composed before her marriage to Vishnu, and it cements her status as the South Indian corollary to Mirabai, the saint and devotee of Sri Krishna. The collection includes the Thiruppavai, a song still popular in congregational worship, thirty pasuram (stanzas) sung before Lord Vishnu, and the less-translated, rapturously erotic Nacchiyar Thirumoli. Priya Sarrukai Chabria and Ravi Shankar serve as master translators for the volume, employing a radical new method for that revitalizes classical and spiritual verse by shifting it into a new contemporary poetic idiom in English. Many of Andal's piece...
Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction, Apr 1, 2022
https://rnlkwc.ac.in/pdf/anudhyan/volume6/Anwesha-Maiti.pdf
Identity Formation as a Site of Resistance : an Investigation into Priya Sarukkai Chabria's CLONE... more Identity Formation as a Site of Resistance : an Investigation into Priya Sarukkai Chabria's CLONE by ANWESHA MAITI https://rnlkwc.ac.in/pdf/anudhyan/volume6/Anwesha-Maiti.pdf
This paper is written by Anwesha Maiti and discusses my book Clone
The aim of this essay is to enquire into representations of the city of Mumbai whose urban develo... more The aim of this essay is to enquire into representations of the city of Mumbai whose urban development has produced images of heaven and hell, sometimes within enclosed boundaries. What is interesting to tackle here is its aestheticisation in a photo-book which presents itself as 'image-text' (Mitchell, Stafford), Bombay/Mumbai. Immersions (2013). Not differently from what happens in other cities, such as Cape Town, for instance, here considered only very briefly as counterpoint, the Indian megalopolis's development has produced disconnected images of urban heaven and hell. The photo-text here discussed presents itself as a composite narrative of words and photos, as the product of the cooperation between an Indian woman poet, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, and an English photographer now based in France, Christopher Taylor. Last but certainly not least in a long sequence of urban photo-texts, this new project requires the reader's attention in order to try and clarify its role, its meaning, its function, its ethical/aesthetic responsibilities.
PR&TA JOURNAL, Issue 2, 2022
https://www.pratajournal.com/archive-of-absences Archive of Absences is a memoir based on unava... more https://www.pratajournal.com/archive-of-absences Archive of Absences is a memoir based on unavailable family photographs. It contains two layers of visual and linguistic removals, and retrievals. I reconstruct images through language; while the loss of the actual photographs caused the loss of the language I grew up with, my mother tongue, Tamil. This memoir is an archive of love, recollection and longing; its intention is to convert these absences into a reclaimed reality with the existential truth of longing as its base, and meditation the method. Each act of recollection is simultaneously one of leave-taking, I warned myself. But what exactly am I returning to, and to what, bidding farewell? By its very existence, the Archive of Absence negates all certainties, by its very presence it shores up histories, identities, love. Please see related text: Archive of Absences.
PR&TA Journal , Issue 2, 2022
https://www.pratajournal.com/archive-of-absences
Archive of Absences is a memoir based on absent... more https://www.pratajournal.com/archive-of-absences
Archive of Absences is a memoir based on absent family photographs. It contains two layers of visual and linguistic removals, and retrievals. I reconstruct images through language; while the loss of the actual photographs caused the loss of the language I grew up with, my mother tongue, Tamil. This memoir is an archive of love, recollection and longing; its intention is to convert these absences into a reclaimed reality with the existential truth of longing as its base, and meditation the method. Each act of recollection is simultaneously one of leave-taking, I warned myself. But what exactly am I returning to, and to what, bidding farewell? By its very existence, the Archive of Absence negates all certainties, by its very presence it shores up histories, identities, love.
MAI Feminism, 2021
nvoking Kali draws on the Sanskrit genre of sacred stotra (स्तोत्र) literature, which is comprise... more nvoking Kali draws on the Sanskrit genre of sacred stotra (स्तोत्र) literature, which is comprised of odes, eulogies or hymns of praise within codified poetic structures. This poem refers to the namavalli and sahasranamam, which translate as ‘garland of names and praises’ and ‘1000 names’ respectively wherein each name, attribute or epithet lauds an aspect of the god or goddess to whom the hymn is dedicated. The subject of this poem is the goddess Kali, whose name means Black or Death, symbolising the dread and darkness of Time that she commands. She is regarded as ferocious, untameable, and victorious as a warrior, but also tender, compassionate and protective as a mother. Kali embodies shakti— feminine energy, sanctity, profound wisdom, creativity and fertility – and is an incarnation of Parvati/ Durga Devi, wife of the great Hindu god Shiva.
The goddess is often invoked as a figurehead in movements of resistance, especially those of violence against women (which, alas, have not cut down India’s appalling crime rate against women). However, some of these well–intended invocations interpret Kali in a narrow sense: primarily as an avenging goddess. This locates her in a mundane power equation of wielding greater destruction than the violence at hand. Crucially, such readings relinquish her agency of vast love and spirituality and, with it, our urgent need to reimagine the world and its peoples as aligned with cosmic harmonies and capable of infinite potential and possibilities that the goddess grants. Further, it denies the fact that underlying emotions of love and compassion often galvanise movements of outrage and protest.
Invoking Kali was written during Durga Puja, a community festival to the Great Goddess, of whom Kali Devi is an emanation. In 2020, Puja was low-key and conducted within homes due to the lockdown, a fact that highlights the numerous mistakes we, as a species, have made and continue to make. In the face of suffering on a global scale, this poem is a lava-tongued supplication to the untameable, non-hierarchical auspiciousness of Kali Devi for courage and grace, so that we create a wise vision for all life on our pale blue dot. Beginning with the individual ‘I’, the poem ripples outward. In this, it is also overlaid by the impassioned personal mode of medieval bhakti /devotional poetry which was written in the mother tongue, and called for breaking social boundaries in the path of spiritual inclusiveness. I translate bhakti poetry from Classical Tamil, which, in multiple ways, has transformed my approach to life and language.
Gitanjali and Beyond , 2022
Poet and translator Priya Sarukkai Chabria in discussion with Dr. Malashri Lal on revisioning and... more Poet and translator Priya Sarukkai Chabria in discussion with Dr. Malashri Lal on revisioning and rewiting Rabindranath Tagore's 1912 Noble Prize for Literature award-winning book, Gitanjali/ Song Offerings as Sing of Life. This is a palimpsist, translation and a collage. It is a tribute that challenges norms of translation, the possibility of recreating literary masterpieces in another time, questioning secularism and religiosity , and creating space for the sacred, beauty and ecopoetics.
Gitanjali and Beyond, 2022
Priya Sarukkai Chabria in conversation with Dr. Malashri Lal on revisioning and rewriting Rabindr... more Priya Sarukkai Chabria in conversation with Dr. Malashri Lal on revisioning and rewriting Rabindranath Tagore's 1912 Noble prize winning work, Gitanjali as Sing of Life for a post pandemic world. Discussions range over tranditons of translation including fungal translations; intution, bhakti and ecopoetry, spaces for the spiritual in dark times , reception and rewriting, Yeats and Orientalism, concepts of creativity and writing the sacred.
Not Springtime Yet ( harperCollins(India) Publishers, 2009
Between 100 B.C. and 250 C.E. Tamil poets evolved and practiced what is called Sangam era poetry,... more Between 100 B.C. and 250 C.E. Tamil poets evolved and practiced what is called Sangam era poetry, of the early classical Tamil literature. From this period have survived the Eight Anthologies, Ten Long Poems and the grammar, the Tolkappiyam. Over two thousand poems exist, varying in length from three to eight hundred lines; the names or epitaphs of 473 poets are known, while 102 poems are by anonymous poets. What drew me to these poems—besides the superb translations of A. K. Ramanujam—was their unique poetic universe; the idea of a sangam or fraternity of poets who shared a living culture of poetic expression, to which they alluded in poem after poem. The poems were generally divided into two categories—akam, the interior, and puram, the exterior. While akam evokes the interior landscapes of love, puram devotes itself to the exterior landscapes of war, to praising kings and chieftains, death and glory, and ... the poverty of poets. I prefer the passionate, direct and moving world o...
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Videos by Priya Sarukkai -Chabria
Papers by Priya Sarukkai -Chabria
This paper is written by Anwesha Maiti and discusses my book Clone
Archive of Absences is a memoir based on absent family photographs. It contains two layers of visual and linguistic removals, and retrievals. I reconstruct images through language; while the loss of the actual photographs caused the loss of the language I grew up with, my mother tongue, Tamil. This memoir is an archive of love, recollection and longing; its intention is to convert these absences into a reclaimed reality with the existential truth of longing as its base, and meditation the method. Each act of recollection is simultaneously one of leave-taking, I warned myself. But what exactly am I returning to, and to what, bidding farewell? By its very existence, the Archive of Absence negates all certainties, by its very presence it shores up histories, identities, love.
The goddess is often invoked as a figurehead in movements of resistance, especially those of violence against women (which, alas, have not cut down India’s appalling crime rate against women). However, some of these well–intended invocations interpret Kali in a narrow sense: primarily as an avenging goddess. This locates her in a mundane power equation of wielding greater destruction than the violence at hand. Crucially, such readings relinquish her agency of vast love and spirituality and, with it, our urgent need to reimagine the world and its peoples as aligned with cosmic harmonies and capable of infinite potential and possibilities that the goddess grants. Further, it denies the fact that underlying emotions of love and compassion often galvanise movements of outrage and protest.
Invoking Kali was written during Durga Puja, a community festival to the Great Goddess, of whom Kali Devi is an emanation. In 2020, Puja was low-key and conducted within homes due to the lockdown, a fact that highlights the numerous mistakes we, as a species, have made and continue to make. In the face of suffering on a global scale, this poem is a lava-tongued supplication to the untameable, non-hierarchical auspiciousness of Kali Devi for courage and grace, so that we create a wise vision for all life on our pale blue dot. Beginning with the individual ‘I’, the poem ripples outward. In this, it is also overlaid by the impassioned personal mode of medieval bhakti /devotional poetry which was written in the mother tongue, and called for breaking social boundaries in the path of spiritual inclusiveness. I translate bhakti poetry from Classical Tamil, which, in multiple ways, has transformed my approach to life and language.
This paper is written by Anwesha Maiti and discusses my book Clone
Archive of Absences is a memoir based on absent family photographs. It contains two layers of visual and linguistic removals, and retrievals. I reconstruct images through language; while the loss of the actual photographs caused the loss of the language I grew up with, my mother tongue, Tamil. This memoir is an archive of love, recollection and longing; its intention is to convert these absences into a reclaimed reality with the existential truth of longing as its base, and meditation the method. Each act of recollection is simultaneously one of leave-taking, I warned myself. But what exactly am I returning to, and to what, bidding farewell? By its very existence, the Archive of Absence negates all certainties, by its very presence it shores up histories, identities, love.
The goddess is often invoked as a figurehead in movements of resistance, especially those of violence against women (which, alas, have not cut down India’s appalling crime rate against women). However, some of these well–intended invocations interpret Kali in a narrow sense: primarily as an avenging goddess. This locates her in a mundane power equation of wielding greater destruction than the violence at hand. Crucially, such readings relinquish her agency of vast love and spirituality and, with it, our urgent need to reimagine the world and its peoples as aligned with cosmic harmonies and capable of infinite potential and possibilities that the goddess grants. Further, it denies the fact that underlying emotions of love and compassion often galvanise movements of outrage and protest.
Invoking Kali was written during Durga Puja, a community festival to the Great Goddess, of whom Kali Devi is an emanation. In 2020, Puja was low-key and conducted within homes due to the lockdown, a fact that highlights the numerous mistakes we, as a species, have made and continue to make. In the face of suffering on a global scale, this poem is a lava-tongued supplication to the untameable, non-hierarchical auspiciousness of Kali Devi for courage and grace, so that we create a wise vision for all life on our pale blue dot. Beginning with the individual ‘I’, the poem ripples outward. In this, it is also overlaid by the impassioned personal mode of medieval bhakti /devotional poetry which was written in the mother tongue, and called for breaking social boundaries in the path of spiritual inclusiveness. I translate bhakti poetry from Classical Tamil, which, in multiple ways, has transformed my approach to life and language.