The Journey

K. Srilata

Professor
School of Arts and Sciences.

Says Queen Prishati to King Drupad

That daughter of yours
is a strange one.
She cares neither for jewels nor clothes.
All day long, she sits
with her nose in a book.
Dressed in the palest of white garments,
jasmine buds her only jewels,
that daughter of yours –
Why! She is practically an ascetic!
Only the other day, she sent for a quill.
To write poems with, she said.
What kind of prince will marry such a girl?

This conversation about Draupadi is one of the 60-odd sequence of poems that are part of Srilata’s imaginatively bold and playful re-tellings of the Mahabharata. This interpretation of an erudite Draupadi is based on the Oriya novel Yajnaseni by Pratibha Roy.  

An author of 13 books that include six fiction, poetry and translations, and scores of refereed publications in academic journals, Srilata’s interest in literature began during her quiet life as an only child growing up on a campus. Reading was an escape in those sedentary years. Soon Srilata was shaping her thoughts and feelings into poems in a secret journal. Her interest has always been in the process. What shapes a text?

 “Understanding the process by which literary texts come into being can be fascinating for its own sake, quite apart from getting people interested in what the text itself has to offer – a window into other worlds,” says  Srilata, who has witnessed this process firsthand. Her mother, Vatsala, wrote her first poem Aalamaram (Banyan) in her late-forties on the heels of an All-India Women’s Conference that she attended which changed her perspective on her own life. In a powerful poem Suyam (Selfhood), her mother had poignantly described the forging of a new self. Srilata has recently co-translated into English her mother’s autobiographical novel in Tamil Vattathul. It is titled The Scent of Happiness. 

Srilata’s earlier collection of poems, The Unmistakable Presence of Absence Humans is about the absence of a person or an idea that goes missing from one’s life. In her words, ‘the absent are always present in our lives, in difficult and powerful ways, in ways that we may not always be able to explain or account for.’ It speaks among other things, of her missing father and the missing plurality in the fabric of the country. 

The rewards of the abstract takeaways from literary texts have inspired her teaching and research philosophies. “The teacher should see herself as a conduit, as a facilitator – a minimal presence,” she says. In her 21 years at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, she has taught Creative Writing, Fiction, Indian Literature, Rise of the Novel, Poetry, Literatures in Translation, English for Communication, Indian Classics, Literature and Values.  She has supervised post graduate research in a range of topics, including the caste question and literature, an area close to her heart, for her own PhD thesis was about the women’s question in the self-respect movement in Tamil Nadu.

A poet, an author, a columnist, a translator, a writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, at Sangam house and at the Yeonhui Art Space in Seoul, co-curater of the CMI Arts Initiative and writing residency and now a faculty member at SaiU, Srilata teaches English literature.