People often compliment Tishani Doshi for “writing like a dancer”. I am interested in words, she smiles. And her words flow out in beautiful patches of prose or poetry.
On and off the page, the Chennai-based poet, dancer and writer is “open, passionate and unafraid.” Like the person that she is, her half-a-dozen works so far are marked by experience and expressions.
The fragmented journeys she has undertaken in her life, she told students and teachers drawn from various city colleges in Madurai, make her love the sense of anticipation. “There is never any fear of what is going to happen next,” she says.
But what worries her is the way mainstream and popular writing is moving towards entertainment and easy reading. “In a pluralistic society like ours, if there is lack of diversity, then it is a problem,” she points out and asks why should we be mono-image obsessed? Why should cricket mean only Sachin and popular writing mean only Chetan Bhagat?
Every creation, whether it is with words or dance movements, poems or songs is art and art is not just entertainment. It is a high form of literature requiring deeper understanding. “You have to feel every word you write or read,” she says.
Exposure to different cultures – her mother is Welsh and father Gujarati, she has studied in America, lived in London and toured the world – helps Tishani to colour the landscape of her imagination. “It makes me stand out as an outsider, look in as an insider and gives me the power as a writer.”
To get to write what you want is most attractive about writing rather than just churning out customised recipes, says Tishani. She wrote her version of her parent’s life story, one of a reverse migration. It became her debut novel – The Pleasure Seekers -- which was long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2011 and shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010.
When she reinvented her family history, she says, it was like a love letter to her parents, who are yet to read the book. Her sister did but found Tishani’s version of childhood memory to be so different from hers. Our versions of a wonderful childhood did not override each other and that is the beauty of writing. “There is joy in partially dealing with the truth and also making up stuff that leaves you with lot of space for imagination and scope of possibilities in a story.”
Tishani feels every creative work requires a different lifestyle and discipline. For instance, she explained to the audience, writing is a job, you do not wait for inspiration but you have to be a good reader to be able to write good on a canvas that is vast. You have all the time and no word limit. On the other hand, in poetry, you move fast and far with so few words. And that is an amazingly different kind of power.
Tishani started off as a poet and is happy to remain one. It was in America that she decided to be a poet and started working on her images. Her first poetry collection, Countries of the Body, won her the Forward Poetry Prize in 2006. Her latest collection of poems, Everything Begins Elsewhere published last year also received critical acclaim. “But I am still trying to figure out how to make a living as a poet,”she says.
Tishani says poetry is marginalised because it is often interpreted as quaint and irrelevant. It is the duty of every poet to engage the audience so that it becomes an incentive for the people to choose to read a poem, she says. That is why she travels a lot addressing school and college students. “I think when you hear and meet a poet face-to-face, it creates a different kind of curiosity.”
That each act of creation has its own style and structure, character and nature struck her when she began learning dance under the famous choreographer Chandralekha. She calls it the serendipity,a nice geometry of why things happened to her in life. She came to India on the invitation of a friend for scuba diving in Andaman & Nicobar Islands and almost became a scuba instructor but for her navigational skills. She then thought of joining her dad’s business but wasted time doing nothing. It was then that she thought of learning Kalaripayattu and was drawn by Chandralekha’s magnetic charm. “It was with her I began to feel an artist’s life. There is so much generation of energy. You do not feel restricted by any single mode of creativity.”
For Tishani, the transformation from a dancer to a writer or poet is effortless. Last year she took upon the task of interpreting a completely strange story from a Welsh mythic cycle. Slated for release this winter, in “Fountainville” she retells the story of Owain, or The Lady of the Fountain that has a complex history in Welsh legend.
There is a power and authority as she speaks courageously about her choices. She says how poems require a tempestuous passion and a novel requires a careful sense of craft. And that is how she got attracted to the city of dual names and wrote the introductory chapter for the coffee table book Madras Then Chennai now, a visual tribute to the city’s past and the present.
Tishani keeps herself busy. I would love to write and travel more, she says, and yet she loves the luxury of slowness. Currently staying between two fishing villages on the coastline of Chennai, she says, I love the madness and energy, chaos and stillness, juxtapositions of the old and the new. I am much in love with what I do. But I want to get better, she adds.
