In 2022, the RSL launched a programme to induct Fellows from “communities, backgrounds and experiences currently under-represented in UK literary culture”. This includes writers of colour, LGBTQI+ writers, working class writers, disabled writers, and writers outside of London to ensure diversity.
Meena Kandasamy has made a name for herself as a public figure wearing various hats. She is an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist, and translator with a long list of publications, fellowships and residencies to her credit. The accolades keep coming as her body of work expands. Earlier this week, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), a charity based in the United Kingdom that works for “the advancement of literature”.
The author, who was born in Chennai in 1984, and has a Ph.D. in sociolinguistics, announced the news on Twitter with a photograph of herself signing her name in the RSL’s historic Roll Book with a pen that once belonged to the British novelist George Eliot who wrote Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Middlemarch (1871-72), among other books.
The RSL was founded in 1820. According to their latest press release, the organization’s mandate is to be “a bridge between authors and audiences of all backgrounds and experiences to engage as many people as possible with the great diversity of literature in the UK.” The RSL Roll Book is considered an honour because it contains signatures of Fellows elected over two centuries. Fellows sign their names in the book using pens belonging to writers like Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Jean Rhys, Andrea Levy, Arnold Wesker, among others.
This year, the RSL launched a programme called RSL OPEN to appoint Fellows from “communities, backgrounds and experiences currently under-represented in UK literary culture”. This includes “writers of colour, LGBTQI+ writers, working class writers, disabled writers, and writers outside of London” to ensure diversity. Nominations were made by readers and writers from all over the UK, and the final selection of Fellows was made by a panel of writers chaired by Bernardine Evaristo, who won the Booker Prize in 2019.
Meena Kandasamy is one of 29 writers elected to the Fellowship in the first year of RSL Open. We reached out for her response to this major achievement. Over email, she responded, “There are dreams which came true for me as a writer – getting a book of poetry or a novel published; seeing it get press, a readership, generate debate in society. Then, there is the stuff which exists beyond the realm of aspiration, something so distant and far away –something reserved only for the very best in your line of work. The Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature was something like that — hallowed, prestigious, unattainable.”
Those who have missed out on her work have a substantial pile to work their way through. She has four poetry collections – The Eighth Day of Creation (2005), Touch (2006), Ms. Militancy (2010), #ThisPoemWillProvokeYou & Other Poems (2015). Her novels are The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). She has written The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle (2021), and co-authored Ayyankali: A Dalit Leader of Organic Protest (2007) with Abdul M. Nisar. She has translated six books from Tamil to English.
Anand, publisher and director of Navayana, welcomed the news about her fellowship. He said, “Meena isan artist with words I’ve known for 20 years now. I was her first publisher in many ways. I have admired her evolution as a fearless artist who isalways acutely conscious about testing the limits of both form and character. She makes language at once laugh and cry with her.” He published Ms. Militancy and The Orders Were to Rape, which Meena wrote, and Ravikumar’s edited volume Waking is Another Dream (2010), which she co-translated.
Anand went on to describe Meena’s writing style. “Her English has a Tamil undersoil. She cares for language like she cares for herself. She’s at the centre of her work and unabashedly so. There’s nevertheless a careless ease in all she does. She’s very careful about that. I want to see more of Meena the poet—for myself, for Navayana, and for the world of words.”
Manasi Subramaniam, Associate Publisher and Head of Rights at Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Random House India, has published Women, Dreaming (2019), which is Meena’s English translation of Salma’s Tamil novel Manamiyangal (2017). Calling Meena “the most delightful bundle of contradictions”, Manasi added, “She is as gentle as she is fierce, as shy as she is bold, as open-minded as she is opinionated. My interactions with her have had a rare quality, a sense, even as her editor, that I am an equal partner in her work. She listens to feedback with a self-assured confidence, but also with curiosity, a genuine desire for her work to be enriched by the collaboration. That sort of thing takes true generosity of spirit.”
Working on this translation involved collaborating not only with Salma and Meena but also with Saba Ahmed, who is Meena’s editor at the UK-based non-profit publishing house Tilted Axis Press. Manasi said, “It felt powerful to be part of this coven of women working together.” Next year, she is going to publish Meena’s translation of Book 3 (known as Inbam) of the Tamil classic Thirukkural, attributed to poet and philosopher Thiruvalluvar.
She noted, “It is only the second time, to the best of my knowledge, that this hugely important work has ever been translated by a woman, even though its first English translation was published in 1794, and there have likely been over a hundred translations since. What she has brought to the text is an acute sense of aesthetic pleasure”. For those unfamiliar with it, Manasi said, “…it’s love poetry, sure, and it’s very sensual, but it’s also full of hyperbole and pathos, and Meena is very alive to that contrariness between the solemn and the melodramatic. It’s such a joy to watch her engage with the text, and to tease out its vivacity.”
Meena’s induction as a Fellow was applauded by Delhi-based historian William Dalrymple, who is a co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. He said, “I am a huge fan of Meena’s work. She’s one of the most powerful and angry voices in Indian poetry and a major talent. I am thrilled to welcome her as a fellow Fellow of the RSL!”. Meena has been a part of the festival in 2015, 2019 and 2022. She has also spoken at JLF London in 2019 and 2022.
Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based journalist who tweets @chintanwriting
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