Where Boundaries Grow Blurred: Tansy Troy in Conversation with Basudhara Roy about her new book, A Blur of a Woman in The Matchbox by Usawa
Basudhara Roy, author of three books of verse and nurturer of fellow poets through her regular online guftar sessions, grapples with universal questions: if Stitching A Home (Red River 2021) deals with identity through place and culture, then broadly speaking, the poems in Blur of a Woman (Red River 2025) could be interpreted as dealing with identity (and non-identity) through gender, gendered work and a feminine experience of love. However, this is over-simplistic, for the many and various poems and their themes deserve detailed analysis and multiple readings. In order to help me decipher them thoroughly, I decided to write to Basudhara, asking her to clarify some of my thoughts. The following interview is organised according to particular themes that seem to run through several poems in the collection, though these poems may be placed in different sections of the book itself.
On Talking To Trees
Tansy Troy : In your very first poem of the new collection, you describe how you ‘have long spoken to trees to know/that every trunk yields in compassion.’ Intriguing as this concept is to me, my first question is a technical one- where do you choose when to begin and end a poetic line- by how it gets physically written on the page? By how it looks when it’s typed? Or by where the breath ends when you read it aloud?
Basudhara Roy: You know, Tansy, I feel that I have been through all these three phases of deciding how to work with line-break in a poem. I have moved on from considering a line as a single unbroken unit of thought, to breaking a line visually by its black length on the white page, to breaking it in terms of both dramatic intensity and breath-length. From being a routine technical necessity, the decision on line-break has gradually become to me a vital avenue of establishing the poem’s intended flow, and thereby, of setting its distinct tone and mood.
In working with the ghazal, I do try to keep a reasonably strict track of my syllables in deciding my line-length but out of the ghazal-form, my attention is preoccupied by the readability of a poem and by how easy or difficult its transferability and play of meaning become on the tongue with any particular process of breaking lines. If a particular method of line-breaking offers me both suspense and fluidity, that is my happy choice.
Of late, this has been accomplished for me by the ear rather than by the eye, and by observing the tongue’s muscular glides in articulating the lines of a poem. If the phonological movements feel encumbered or contrived in any way, that is my beeping indicator that the line-break needs to be re-envisaged.
TT: I love how in ‘Choosing God’, you speak of how ‘Grandfather prayed to the sun/Grandmother to a tree,’ and how you yourself prayed to the fragrant magic of the scent of a sandalwood box. Do you feel the traditional polyphony of faiths and the mutual acceptance of the many paths to god is undergoing a radical shift in contemporary India? The gods really do seem to be running ‘pell-mell seeking refuge’ at a time when worship of particular predominant cults seems to be erasing the personal and idiosyncratic. Would you say this has always been the case or are we loosing, rather than choosing our gods?
BR: I think you have put that last line with great poetic poignancy! Yes, we are ‘losing our gods’ and this loss will, for many, not manifest itself until we have come to a dead-end.
When I reflect on my (Jharkhandi-Bengali-Hindu) childhood, the one thing that I remember as common to all our households was the presence of an elaborate ‘pujoghor’ (worship room/worship corner) which no matter how tiny or cramped, was always marked by the visibility of an array of deities. Crowding the shelves would be photographs and paintings; terracotta, clay, stone, marble and brass figurines, as well as books and hand-written paper inscribed with mantras, totems, and astrological configurations representing a host of deities–human, animal, spirit, natural element and so on. If you cared to know, the household elders had a story about each of these gods and how their power came to be recognized and worshipped. In the cultural matrix that surrounded us, it was possible for anything and everything to be deified and there would be shells, cowries, leaves, flowers, grass, water, pieces of ribboned cloth, bangles, vermillion, turmeric, sandalwood, incense, fruits, sweets, vegetables, and currency happily jostling with each other and with surrounding divinities as divine.
Under such conditions, it was very difficult to deny the sanctity of any object. As children, we made our way gently through such worship rooms/niches lest we should disturb or defile something and earn thereby the vengeful ire of some remote god.
Today, there is an abject disappearance of that diverse culture of godhood. The upsurge of radicalism with its insistence on a monolithic version of religion and a rigid godhead has deprived us of the freedom and necessity of personal experiments in faith. To receive a religion without the right to explore the various dimensions of faith can, in my opinion, only be tremendously self-defeating.
TT : And to lead on from this, as women writers, is there a certain universal goodness/goddess which protects against these vicious times? As you say, ‘It’s not three or five circles that I hold./ My circles are manifold like a tree.’
BR: Well, essentialist as this may sound, I firmly believe that the particular structure of women’s bodies and their biologically and historically scripted roles allow them greater opportunities to participate in and reflect upon the psycho-spiritual domains of existence. The cyclical nature of women’s activities and occupations helps to keep them away from the linearity of motion that, in a patriarchal world, stands for growth and progress. Women’s language derived from their understanding of a co-terminus self has the potential to offer a new world of cultural signification. All this can act as a counter-perspective and if, responsibly fleshed out, a counter-philosophy to a self-destructive capitalist and radical mode of being and living in the world. The universal goodness/goddess in us is this knowledge of being different and of being differently abled, along with the conviction that without this epistemic difference that we bring to the table, the world would be a poorer place.
On Technology And The Process Of Writing/Dreaming:
TT : Basudhara, you write in ‘Beyond Mourning’ that ‘Already there are too many holes in memory’s bag’ but that ‘…however sapped a sieve, not all can exeat.’ Do you feel the rapid invasion of digital language and response is erasing poetic culture? Is the internet invading our dreams? Can the parts of our brains that deal with subtle nuance, that retrieve deep symbols and conjure premonitions survive the onslaught of multiplatform/screen existence? How important is it for the poet in all of us to ‘press off’ and sink back into ‘the womb of night’ in order to begin dreaming a different future to the one which seems is being pre-prepared for humanity by the multi-nationals and dictators of our current world?
BR: One of the greatest complaints that I have against technology, Tansy, is that it has greatly altered our perception of time. Technological advancements have gate-crashed upon Time’s sacred domain and have contracted it like never before. While the fact that there is an enormous amount of work being done in little or negligible time has been a singular achievement for mankind, it has also pitted the human badly and unfavourably against the machine. Humans, at all levels and in all domains of work are being expected to perform with mechanistic speed and perfection and this unreasonable pace of activity is dearly taking its toll on our sense of being.
All humans and not just poets and artists need refuge in themselves. They should have the opportunity to respond to the need for solitude, to step back from the necessity to perform like machine sans reflection and sans revaluation of their performance. A culture that measures performance in terms of material output will not be able to relate to the complex processes of mental work that make creative envisioning and critical thinking possible.
That said, I think technology has buttressed the human imagination in inconceivable ways. It has brought the world into the sanctuary of our minds, drawing our attention to things that we might have lived and died on earth without knowing. The potential of the internet to enhance human creativity is immense but to lose, however, our self-awareness in it would be deeply tragic.
On The Fabric Of Vision
TT: I love how in the poem ‘How I give myself away’ you exemplify how both a sari and a woman can be divided and diminished in so many subtle ways that she is in the end, anonymous and used, discarded. Cloth, like life, can wear and tear and the images of the rain making ‘running stitches’ in the ‘soiled chemise’ of air in ‘Ubiquity of Death’; and ‘the pandiculation of a city…pleating itself/weary like a century-old sari’ are beautiful descriptions of this very fact. Tell us more about your relationship to fabric. Which are your favourite handloom pieces, are there any heirloom shawls or saris you particularly treasure? What are their stories?
BR: When I look around me for material for my poetry, it is the fabric of the everyday world that strikes me, again and again, as most insistently poetic. One is struck by how ordinary things begin and end, a process that is inevitably always far from ordinary.
In our households, for instance, clothes have a distinct afterlife. After they have ceased to function as clothes, they are sorted fabric-wise and put to a variety of secondary and tertiary uses. Cotton fabrics have the busiest afterlives and soft, well-worn cotton sarees would be in great demand to turn into rags for innumerable domestic purposes. It, somehow, kept reminding me of how women’s work was never over. To put it Donne’s way, even when they were done, they could never be done and no matter how weak and diminished they became, there would be some particular chore that was just right for them.
Fabrics and cotton fabrics, in particular, hold a deep appeal for me. Their tactile feel gives me a sense of assurance in my daily negotiations with the world. With the right fabric under my fingers, I feel that I can conquer the world. I do not wear sarees very often and own only a handful but these few are very dear to me. A couple of them belong to my maternal grandmother and every time, I drape myself in one of them, I feel I can see things just the way she might have seen them had she lived.
Read the complete interview at Matchbox by Usawa.