Bodies That Remember: Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Cosmopolitanism in South Asian Poetry

3. “One Day the Girl Will Return”: Compassion as Social Praxis

146 3 “One Day the Girl Will Return” Compassion as Social Praxis Many years ago there was a little girl who would quite often wake up in her sleep and start to cry. In her dream she would see everyone in her household die. Now she is all grown up. She is standing before all of you. She is scared even now. Only now, her fears have changed. Now she is scared of the rioters; she is scared of an unfortunate person being taken off a bus far away somewhere; she gets scared staring into the eyes of children. When she gets scared she takes refuge in poetry. As if poetry were a prayer; as if poetry were the only answer to the most difficult questions; as if poetry were the hand of God that would come up and gently rest upon her shoulder at a dark moment. (Gill 2001)1 This chapter on the Hindi poet Gagan Gill poses serious methodological challenges for several reasons. In the span of the eight years that I have now known her, Gagan has become a real part of my life: she is now a dear friend and the godmother to my first-born child. She has made my task of writing about her poetry additionally difficult by refusing my readings of her work as singularly feminist. Nevertheless, I attempt to take up a sustained treatment of the politics and possibilities that afflict the cosmopolitan artist. Through this engagement I hope to arrive at a theory of art that is simultaneously plural and embodied in the material reality of this artist, whose life work I explain here. 1. Gagan Gill, Public Reading, Sahitya ke liye samskriti puraskar lete huye (Accepting the Samskriti Puraskar Prize for Literature), Jan. 20, 1989 (Gill 2001 [1989]). “ON E DA Y T H E G I R L W I L L R ET U R N” | 147 The tools of deconstruction and poststructuralism that are now in vogue in critiques of nationalism did not aid in illuminating Gagan’s poetry because the artist—herself knowledgeable and well read on these themes— refused my treatment of her work along these paradigms. Aijaz Ahmad’s appraisal of poststructuralism and deconstruction in the Anglo-American academy led me to reformulate my questions about Gagan’s poetry as inflecting the different “spaces” the contemporary cosmopolitan poet inhabits, while recognizing that these spaces are disparate and often conflictual . Ahmad encapsulates the stakes in my reading of Gagan’s work: “It takes a very modern, very affluent, very uprooted kind of intellectual to debunk both the idea of ‘progress’ and the sense of ‘long past,’ not to speak of modernity itself as mere ‘rationalizations’ of ‘authoritarian tendencies within cultures.’ . . . Those who live within the consequences of that ‘long past,’ good and bad, and in places where the majority of the population has been denied access to such benefits of ‘modernity’ as hospitals or better health insurance or even basic literacy; can hardly afford the terms of such thought” (Ahmad 1993b, 68–69; critiquing Homi Bhabha). Unarmed with the tools of deconstruction and poststructuralism then, what other avenues does one use to explore Gagan Gill’s poetry? One paradigm that surfaces in her work is that of compassion, most readily associated with Buddhist religious traditions and found in the words of its fearless spokesman, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This Buddhist sensibility, and her exposure to and identification with Buddhism, is one of the most distinctive and interesting features of her cosmopolitan identity that is at the crux of how I read her poetry. Though challenging at times, I have not compromised my own voice alongside my presentation of hers. In the next three sections, I explore the complex relationship between the private aspects of the poet’s life and politics of writing, the publicity it draws, and the consciousness it evokes. By writing myself into this text, describing the places we traveled together, paying special attention to the politics of each artistic space, acknowledging the other people who were there and how Gagan engaged each space, I hope to show how artistic expressions like subjectivities are enacted and performed. These encounters between us, in the material worlds chosen by her—indeed, where her art is embedded—showcase our respective subjectivities; my own experience as 148 | BODI E S T H AT R E M E M BE R an Indian American...