When I die/ Do not throw/ The meat and the bones away/ But pile them up/ And let them tell/ By their smell/ What life was worth/ On this earth/ What love was worth/ In the end

Did we ever let Kamala Das know, whose poem the above is excerpted from, now that she is no more, the worth of love? Or for that matter, poetry? Is the worth of love explicable? Can it be measured in daylight hours and coffee spoons? Perhaps no. And that’s the exploration that binds the poetry of Pritish Nandy and Kamala Das, two different but very attractive ambassadors of Indian poetry, who have come together in Tonight the Savage Rite, a book republished after a gap of 23 years.

Why republication? What is different since the ’70s, when a large number of poets collectively came to dominate the poetry in what was still a minor language in India, is that urban India is now far more comfortable in the skin of its post-colonial, bi-lingual identity than ever before. The proliferation of news media, the ubiquity of English visual culture, the burst of English iconography that have come to colonise the skyline in Indian cities mean that we are longer shocked when poets write poetry in a derived language — when the roots and the rhyme, so to say, divulge and disconnect across the contested space of poetry. This would mean that reading and writing poetry is now a more rewarding and discerning an activity. Right? Wrong. Not because English is still a foreign language. Because it isn’t.

But something else has changed completely. In the miasma and festivity of a delusional ‘new’ India that rejoices every second-moment thanks to its capitalist aspirations and its come-hither superpower wannabism, poetry in particular and the general discernment in arts and the letters in the first to walk to the gallows. Why is it? There is no one answer to it and since the early days of history, it is always a matter of debate why poetry, the most personal of forms, flourishes under this regime and vanishes under the next. But it is of general agreement that across the West, poetry has declined since the decades after World War II. There is no sign that despite academic aid, institutional patronage and support through journals and magazines, events and performances, poetry is likely to get back to its position in the red carpet. The self-congratulatory orgy around the Indian novel has also played a definitive part. Indian fiction has made English omnipresent, a state where it need not justify itself. But then again, Indian fiction may have made poetry invisible, even culturally unctuous.

Other cultures, like Bengali poetry and Indian English poetry, heavily influenced as they are either by the mores and movements of poetry in the West or by the language itself, have shown similar tendencies. In short hence, the decline of the culture of reading and publishing poetry in universal and perhaps irreversible.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see a major Indian publication house republishing a book of poetry in a larger and very attractive format, a book that was once the toast of the intellectual elite and was a boutique publisher’s claim to fame.

But this book and a companion volume of new poetry (after more than two decades) from Nandy (Again) is good news. So is the fact that if the book does well, we may see more publications coming forward to ‘do’ poetry, just like Indian translation, which even a decade ago was no more than a trickle. And is now, a torrent.

But the above theory and its attendant post-colonial implications, however attractive to standard academic practice, finds little traction or attention in the collection itself. Neither Nandy or Das — self-assured, articulate, flamboyant and urbane (in their own way) poets that they were/are, are looking for any overarching reason or philosophy or even an idiom. They write poetry and they choose to do it in English. Period. As Nandy fittingly writes: “Poets have no country. Except the wild wastes/ Of memory: the tapestry of pain.”

What they are looking for is love — love in its many positions, many repercussions, love pre-coital and love post-coital, love that leaves only the trace, love that treats, teases and torments in equal measure. One Nandy poem goes like this: “Tonight I draw your body to my lips: your hand, your/Mouth, your breasts, the small of your back. I draw/ Blood to every secret nerve and gently kiss their tips, as/ You Move under me, anchored to a rough sea.”

Clear, precise, poetic. The sea in Nandy routinely meets the rain which drops the eternal echos of silence, the silence which in Das — confessional and unencumbered — pierces her being and her breasts. “What age, what era/ Was it when we first met/ And recognised?/What country bred us, what rivers/ Quenched our thirst?”

Can love save poetry? If yes, Indian English poetry will make a comeback. But can love save anything? Anyone? Nandy writes, “There are some more lonesong forests I must wander/ Some more tired cities I must tramp.”

May be after travelling the world, the lonesome Poet would find his/her way back to where he/she began. Just maybe our Poet is not dead, but have just lost his/her way.

Tonight the Savage Rite | Pritish Nandy & Kamala Das | Harper Collins | 2010 | 108pp