Imtiaz Dharker as a Poetess
Imtiaz Dharker
was born in 1954, in Lahore Pakistan and brought up in Scotland, where her
family had relocated when she was less than one year old. She went to a
Protestant school, but also had a religious upbringing, her parents sent her to
a Koranic school in the weekends. So, there was clash with her school education
and family background. About her family
environment, she observes that she had to follow strictly religious rules and
regulations while as she likes freedom. She eloped to marry, Anil Dharker, an
Indian, Maharashtrian Hindu who lives in Bombay and was a journalist, but
following her own religion. She has a daughter, Ayesha, who is today a
successful actress. Her second husband, Simon Powell, whom she married in 2007,
was a Welsh poetry entrepreneur, the creator of Poetry Live, a series of events
directed at GCSE and A-level students, where contemporary poets read their work
to the children at various venues around the country. He died in 2009 after an
eleven-year-long battle with cancer. Presently
she travels between the United Kingdom of London and
Mumbai of India. She frequently depicts herself as a ‘Scottish Muslim
Calvinist, born in Lahore and adopted by India’. She expresses her feelings and emotions
about her diasporic experience with the help of her poetry and drawings. She is
a poet-cum-artist, editor, documentary film maker. Besides being editor of
Debonair for several years, she has published six books of poetry. “Purdah And
Other Poems” (1989), “Post Cards From God” (1997), “I Speak For The Devil”
(2001), “The Terrorist At My Table” (2009), “Leaving Finger Prints” (2009) and
“Over The Moon” (2014). Her poetry has been included in the AQA GCSE English
Anthology, and in 2008 she has been on the judging panel of the Manchester
Poetry Prize. She is a fellow of the Royal Society in Literature, and was the
poet in residence at Cambridge University Library in 2013.
It is with the help of poetry that she expresses of her
diasporic feelings. She is such a modern Indian poet who is to a great extent aware
of her creative art and its purpose as well as her duty towards her motherland.
Her poetic voice imbued with diasporic sensibility is typically her own and it
cannot be confused with anyone else’s. Accompanied by a display of drawings her
poetry confronted the theme of repression of women by societal forces-
cultural, religious and political. Having both literal and metaphorical
connotations, her poetry captures the heart of every woman. As her exposure to
the western world she develops in her poetry an international outlook; and
enables her to present the woes and sufferings of women throughout the world in
different cultures. Her poems deal with a complex and revolutionary journey.
They surpass the nationality, religion and gender. She represents the issues of
homesickness, urban violence, religious turmoil and political activities in a
very simple and artistic way. She is
also a documentary film-maker, with more than 300 films and audio-visuals to
her credit. She has filmed about many subjects, from street children to cancer
treatment and the prevention of disabilities. In 1980 she has been awarded the
Silver Lotus for the Best Short Film by the President of India. Many of her
documentaries are concerned with social problems, especially among the rural or
poorer communities in India. She also illustrates her own books, with elegant
black-and-white drawings. She has also exhibited her works in most important
cities of the world such as: Mumbai, Delhi, London, New York and Hong Kong, as
well as in other Indian cities.
Her two important poetic collections “Purdah” and “Postcards from god” are concerned with the misuse of religion,
and the way it affects women, her third collection “I speak for the devil” has more personal poems, for instance
“Knees” or “The umbrella”, both included in the section “The broken umbrella”,
which deals with personal relationships in a way that her previous collection
did not. “The terrorist at my table”, first
published in 2006, deals with the tensions related to being a Muslim person
after 9/11 and after the terrorist attacks in the London underground. “Leaving Fingerprints” is her most talented
and mature book. The metaphors are more complicated, as the poet tries to clutch
the reality of her complex identity as a dislocated writer straddling several
continents, cultures and religions. “Over the Moon” is a rhythmic work, devoted
to her late husband, Simon Powell, with the words “not because you died, but
how you live”. Her collection is a poetic message with him in which absence and
memory are developed and entangled relationship of music, light and sound to
convey both life and loss and worlds ahead of the physical. For Dharker, the
task of the poet is therefore that of shaping something out of rough material,
turning something painful and angst-ridden into a piece of art, channeling
those conflicting emotions. Her all
poetic works has a strong characteristic feature of ‘Transmediality’ as her
works are illustrated by her own drawings/visual art. Thus there is a
transmedial exchange between these two art forms which influence each other. So
in case of Dharker we can only understood the complex ideas/meaning attached to
her poems if we approach her works transmedially, since there is strong
connection between her poems and drawings.
There is no
doubt in it that her poetry revolves
around the female particularly that of Muslim,
yet her writing echoes for all people whose voices have been in a way or
another silenced, in spite of of gender, religion or nationality. As a matter
of fact, even though her writing is often associated to a Muslim sensibility,
the influence of her Scottish upbringing should not be forgotten. She told
about it that her Scottish education, with its Calvinist influence, is evident
in her works. Unfortunately,
not much critical attention has been devoted to Imtiaz Dharker, and especially
not within the academy. In spite of being considered one of the foremost living
poets in the United Kingdom and in the Indian subcontinent, there are very few intellectual
articles on her work. There are a few reviews of her books, interviews
published on the web or in Indian publications. In spite of that, Imtiaz Dharker has been
included in The Cambridge Companion to
Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women's Poetry, in a chapter
dedicated to interculturalism. Besides, Eunice de Souza has included her in her
book of interviews: Talking Poems:
Conversations with Poets, which focuses on Indian poets writing in
English. This work of research is, among other things, an attempt to fill this
void, and to grant Dharker the attention she deserves.
