A journey through India – in poetry

Kerry Leves made a not-so-grand journey through India over two years, and then took over two decades to write about the phenomenal experience

Australian poet Kerry Leves paints impressionist images of India in his collection of poems, A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar. Seemingly disparate images of the multitude of India-s that exist, come together to form a singular, yet personal experience.

“When I look at my India poems now, it seems a bit like I tried to follow poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s formula – ‘to evoke things little by little to suggest a mood’,” says Leves. “The mood is multiple in India, the picture doesn’t settle, but at least in poetry you can attempt to bring out that multiplicity of moods.”

The book is nominated for the 2009 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards - Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry. Leves will participate in an interactive performance as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival later this month.

The poems came out of Leves’ extensive travel through India from 1980 over two years—and it has taken him two decades to write them. Yet the experience of reading the poems is so immediate—India seems to have etched itself into Leves’ inner eye—“like a movie playing in my head, but with such intensity that there was no space to think of anything else,” he says about penning the poems.

When I ask Leves what made his want to go to India in the first place, his answer is much like his poems. There is no one single moment, but a range of delightful memories he traverses to create his story of India.

At 7, he was drawn to Jean Renoir’s Bengal in the film, The River. Then an Anglo-Indian family’s tales build up a sketch, while Indian children’s paintings from a UNESCO publication fill it up with bright, vivid colours.

Finally a preview of a film, Harry Black and the Tiger— “There was this shot of a woman with a water pitcher on her head, wearing a sari, walking down a dusty road, hot sunshine, jungle in the background. That image somehow clinched it in my head—I had to go to India.”

Even the Indian monsoon makes it into Leves’ story—at 16 he was on his way “to becoming a meteorology nut” and wanted to experience “the bursting of the monsoon” in Mumbai. There was also the requisite curiosity sparked by yoga classes and radio broadcasts about Hinduism and Buddhism.

Indian poet Keki N. Daruwala’s dark, rhapsodic poems about Varanasi and the Ganges added another layer. Leves, who refers to Daruwala in his book says, “The poems are almost preternaturally intense, evoking the river, the beggars, the holy men, the ghats. I fell in love with their harshness, their tenderness, their dissonant music.”

Yet, it was finally the late poet Vicki Viidikas, who Leves says “pitchforked” him into going to India. “You can read that ‘pitchfork’ image as Shiva’s trident, if you like!” he adds.

However, writing about India was quite not on his mind at the time when he finally did get to India. “When I flew to India I was too much in awe of the idea of the place to even think of writing about it. The heat, the blazing energy of the people, the crowdedness, and the simultaneity of everything – just walking down Chandni Chowk in Delhi was a kind of epic experience. Everything was in movement, nothing was still,” says Leves.

Neither were Leves and Viidikas quite still in those 2 years. Starting from Delhi they travelled up to Kulu Valley—in part the source of his poem Night Piece, Himachal Pradesh. Then across to Shimla—where Leves says he experienced déjà vu to the level of hallucination. “I seemed to be glimpsing ghosts of long-ago English people who’d once walked about on the cobblestones. And I knew where what had been—where the great hotels of the Raj period were, sight unseen. Some antique map seemed to be unrolling in my head.”

Travelling through Pushkar, Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal in Agra, Varanasi and Sarnath before going to Calcutta, then Puri, before finally resting for about five months in Gopalpur, in Orissa. “We preferred small towns to big cities,” says Leves. “We’d stay in a place, settle down, find places to live, set up our own kitchen, use the local market, and get to know the people.”

Then from the Nilgiri Hills they moved on to spend four months in Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu due to their interest in the mystic Ramana Maharshi.

India, where spirituality is 24/7, really exercised his hard-core western suspiciousness of all things religious says Leves. “From massive temple complexes like Tirupati, to little roadside shrines, to tiny shrine-like spaces in barber shops and chai shops and sweet stalls—at any hour of the day or night, someone is praying or meditating or chanting or making an offering to the Gods. That continuity—which is at once quite public and absolutely private—had the effect of “giving the mind an inward turn”, to use Ramana Maharshi’s expression.”

Though India did define Leves’ spirituality, he managed to stay away from the other most common draw card for western tourist—dope. “Being there was extraordinary enough—I didn’t want to smear the experience with the effect of some heavy drug,” he says.

But because he didn’t smoke dope with people, which at that time was a kind of universal social lubricant, Leves had to find other means of social interaction. So he turned his teenage hobby of fortune telling into palmistry for a social life, and also to make some money to support his Indian stay longer.

“I made a sign and set myself up outside the locals’ market and pretty soon I had a daily queue of clients. After that, everywhere we went in India, I was reading palms—I was working every day of the week,” recollects Leves.

“But when I went to Goa, there were all these rich westerners to read, and I got greedy and made some whopping mistakes, for which I was taken to task by representatives of the western community there! But having chastised me, they remained tolerant, and my approach to palm reading got a fraction saner. Even so, by the time we hit Mumbai, I was pretty much burnt-out.

The first poem in the collection is about Mumbai, and makes the only reference to Lata Mangeshkar in the entire book, other than the title. Yet Mangeshkar defines Leves’ very experience of writing about India.

Much like actors lip-synch to Mangeshkar’s voice, Leves’—a white male Anglo-Aussie, in the late the 1980s to the 2000s—and his poetry is only the playback of the traveller in India, living there between June 1980 and July 1982.

“That traveller’s existence has no material substance any more, just memory, and memory is notoriously unreliable,” he says. “A person takes a journey then writes about it - sounds simple, but it isn’t. Who started out on the journey? And who was it that came back? Which of those two did the writing, under the stroke of memory?”

He writes in one of his poems, ‘Travel defines us’ and the experience of travelling without an itinerary is a life changing one admits Leves. “The kind of travelling we did – open to adventure, going with things – came to seem somewhat impossible as the late 20^th and then the early 21^st century, changed the way we all live. So the book is my extremely modest contribution to the history of a bygone era.”

He initially tried to write about his experience in a journalistic format, however, neither their unplanned travels, nor the very nature of India suited the rigidity of prose says Leves. “When I was there, I kept struggling – and failing – to do journalistic prose. But in poetry you can suggest. There is so much going on in India that isn’t directly visible – so much is conveyed through gesture and attitude, through nuance. Everything happens fast and you have to be very alert to keep up with what is going on,” says Leves.

“A westerner in India, a stranger in a strange land, not doing it posh – this was a sensory, emotional, intellectual roller-coaster ride, and poetry seemed the right medium to convey the vividness of the experience, the surprises, and the multiple mini-narratives that disrupted the not-so-grand narrative of our journey.”