‘Doubters have saved mankind’: K Sachidanandan’s poetic imagination as a site of resistance

As a poet, K Sachidanandan has reinvented himself at every stage through unsparing self-criticism and persistent exploration of the changing environment of poetry in relation to the existing social structures. He was quick to distance himself from the triumphant assertions of high modernism, as he sensed its inability to be socially inclusive. As the 1970s turned turbulent with several subaltern movements defying the centralisation of state power, his poetry questioned the authoritarian ruling class and its coercive politics.

He was one of the first poets in Malayalam to recognise the ideological breakthrough achieved by the Dalit, Feminist and Environmental movements, against the gradual co-option of revolutionary movements by regressive forces. As globalisation empties out cultures of their capacity for resistance and oppositional thinking, we get alienated from the collective memories of the community as well as the creative potential of the usable past. This was the context in which Sachidanandan returned to the secular-modern Indian traditions to emphasise the polyphony and plurality of Indian thought and belief systems. His poems have to be read against a constantly evolving transregional and translational poetic that locates the poet at its moving centre.

In a poem titled “The Indian Poet”, Sachidanandan describes the Indian poet as a...

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