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    Gieve Patel

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    Soma Biswas
    Gieve Patel is an important Indian poet, playwright, and painter born in 1940 who lives in Mumbai. He has written three books of poetry, three plays, and his works explore the human body, social inequalities in India, and violence and death. His poetry focuses on the physicality and fragility of the human body through graphic and unsentimental descriptions of the body, sexuality, and mortality. While presenting a bleak view of human suffering, his later works also acknowledge a sense of transcendence beyond the physical world.

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    Gieve Patel

    Uploaded by

    Soma Biswas
    2K views3 pages
    Gieve Patel is an important Indian poet, playwright, and painter born in 1940 who lives in Mumbai. He has written three books of poetry, three plays, and his works explore the human body, social inequalities in India, and violence and death. His poetry focuses on the physicality and fragility of the human body through graphic and unsentimental descriptions of the body, sexuality, and mortality. While presenting a bleak view of human suffering, his later works also acknowledge a sense of transcendence beyond the physical world.

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    Gieve Patel

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    Gieve Patel is an important Indian poet, playwright, and painter born in 1940 who lives in Mumbai. He has written three books of poetry, three plays, and his works explore the human body, social inequalities in India, and violence and death. His poetry focuses on the physicality and fragility of the human body through graphic and unsentimental descriptions of the body, sexuality, and mortality. While presenting a bleak view of human suffering, his later works also acknowledge a sense of transcendence beyond the physical world.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    2K views3 pages

    Gieve Patel

    Uploaded by

    Soma Biswas
    Gieve Patel is an important Indian poet, playwright, and painter born in 1940 who lives in Mumbai. He has written three books of poetry, three plays, and his works explore the human body, social inequalities in India, and violence and death. His poetry focuses on the physicality and fragility of the human body through graphic and unsentimental descriptions of the body, sexuality, and mortality. While presenting a bleak view of human suffering, his later works also acknowledge a sense of transcendence beyond the physical world.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 3

    Born in 1940, Gieve Patel is an important presence in the history of modern Indian

    poetry in English. He is a poet, playwright and painter, as well as a doctor by


    profession. He has written three books of poetry (Poems, How Do You Withstand,
    Body and Mirrored Mirroring); three plays (Princes, Savaksa and Mr Behram); and
    held several exhibitions of his paintings in India and abroad. He lives in Mumbai.
    Influenced by Ezekiel.

    Gieve Patel is hardly an avant-garde writer and he does not pretend to be one,
    writes scholar Sudesh Mishra. Belonging to the same generation as (Adil)
    Jussawalla and (Arvind Krishna) Mehrotra, he is a poet whose vision eludes simplistic
    modernist labels and equations. Mishra attributes this to the fact that Patel (like
    poets Kamala Das and Jayanta Mahapatra) has never been a formal student of
    literature or linguistics.

    The enduring concerns in Patels poetry are the besieged terrain of the human body,
    its frailty, absurdity and perishability; the vulgar social inequalities of caste and
    class that continue to assail post-Independence India; the predicament of the
    subaltern, perennially relegated to the sidelines of history and art; the daily
    catalogue of violence, conflict and pain that make up the centurys folk song; the
    perpetual looming shadow of physical death; and a probing curiosity about what if
    anything lies beyond a world of fraught materiality.

    In the accompanying interview, Patel describes himself as a profane monk whose


    poetry reveals a slightly sick concern with the body. This preoccupation is evident
    in Patels poetic terrain (evoked time and again with horrified but rapt fascination): a
    world of nerve endings and viscera, ragged fibre and vein, gnarled root and leprous
    hide, pervaded by the overwhelmingly organic odours of sex, secretion and
    excretion. The tone is frequently flat, dispassionate, even offhand, wary of any
    attempt to ennoble, prettify or sentimentalise the subject matter. The existential
    questions and they are never far away in Patels work are not presented as airy
    abstractions; they emerge thickly, haltingly, from the glutinous dough of
    corporeality that is the focus of what seems to be the gaze of a committed forensic
    pathologist.

    Patel makes no gestures at discerning harmony or resolution in the chorale that


    rises daily from the worlds forsaken cellars. But in the relentless feverish probing
    of the darkest areas of human pain and desolation, he acknowledges, particularly in

    the later work, the emergence of something else. God may be too grand a word for
    it. Transcendence too big. But there is a growing realisation that

    it makes sense not


    to have the body
    seamless,
    hermetically sealed, a
    non-orificial
    box of incorruptibles.

    There is even something akin to gratitude at being Interpenetrated/ with the


    world. Gieve Patel is a practicing doctor, and his experiences reflect a preoccupation with the body, that gives these poems a taut quality. The theme is
    actually continuing a pattern from his earlier poems, along with a fascination with
    death -- e.g. Post Mortem, 1966: "It is startling to see how swiftly / a man may be
    sliced / from chin to prick" (read whole poem in our excerpts from Nine Indian
    Women Poets, Jeet Thayil's 60 Indian poets).

    During the riots, a patient arrives with a slit belly, "Bewildered, but firmly holding / a
    loop of his gut / in his own hands". Or, "What is it between / a woman's legs" that
    draws destruction, and the attention of "kisses, knives"?Gieve Patel Biography and
    Works:
    A medical practitioner by profession, Patel is a poet and play-wright. He was
    educated at St. Xavier High School and Grant Medical College, Bombay. His poems
    are unspectacular take-offs on the Indian scene on which he comments with
    fastidiousness. He gives very minute details in the Frostian style. In 1984, he was
    awarded Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC
    to write a play - Mr. Behram. Major Works:
    Poetry Collection by Gieve Patel:
    Poems (1966)

    How Do You Withstand Body (1976)

    Plays:
    Princes (1970)
    Savaksa (1970)
    Mr. Behram (1984)

    Popular Poems by Gieve Patel:


    On Killing a Tree
    Servants
    Naryal Purnima
    Nargal
    On My Own Cadaver
    Commerce

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