A Pocket Babel — Marek Sullivan on borders, context and accountability

Ranjit Hoskote’s The Atlas of Lost Beliefs (2020) is an epic in three parts, the culmination of ‘a twenty year-long project of research and translation”, as the biographical note states, which draws together dazzling meditations on history, language, colonialism, Herman Melville, Upanishadic philosophy, Vedic theology, art and the ocean. According to James Byrne, Hoskote “reappropriates the love poem” and there is certainly romance here, from the “scattershot” rain that “pelts” Hoskote’s skin while he sits astride a scooter at a light (‘Poona Traffic Shots’) to the deep longing of a body “denied two yards of spaded earth in the Loved One’s country” (‘The Heart Fixes on Nothing’).

A strong vein of Indian postcolonial theory crosses the collection. Many of the poems can be seen as a direct extension of the vigorous debates around language and imperialism advanced by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Ania Loomba during the 1980s and ‘90s. Finding their ideas brought to life several decades later in language that fizzes with invention is a strange experience, already coloured by nostalgia and in that sense historical. In another collection this might have seemed passe but Hoskote breathes life into old ideas, rifling with abandon on the organicity of lost or endangered tongues (Konkani, Tulu, Sabir, etc) against the rigidifying power of modern languages and their intimate relation to state formations. In ‘The Map Seller’, a kind of grand tour of the world in 100 empires, Hoskote pictures himself peddling maps like ice creams: “Whatever you like, I’ve got a map that looks like it -/ and you can have any piece of my flaking jigsaw atlas”. The atlas may be flaking but the border lines are real. They are re-erected and reinscribed as we read, buttressed by new promises in old wine skins: “And across this trench that a JCB’s dug along my street: tomorrow’s avenue, today’s wide sludge grave.”

If dug earth divides past from future, one state and the next, the ocean tends to erase boundaries and dance upon them, like the blue handed “reckless dancer” who “poses, heels in the air, Cossack kicking on a crumbling reef” (‘The Atlas of Lost Beliefs’). There is no time for hubris here, or rather, there is too much time:

Where borders appear in water, they are dangerous, exposed places subject to unpredictable fluctuations that disrupt the lattice of language. Sharks drift at the boundary line (this is the jolt where nerve end meets salt, this is the neverskin, / this is where you grow knife-edged fins and plunge (‘Cape Caution’). In a poem based on a copper engraving by hydrographers in the East India Company, language snaps where The river stabs the sea. Here, the coast signals its own tongue: breaking with the horizon’s grammar, a stutterance (‘As It Emptieth It Selfe’). River, sea, coast — three solid words describing unsolid things. How has the nation state survived reality for so long? Hoskote reminds us that state integrity will always be accompanied by paranoia, nightmares of linguistic and racial miscegenation or what the anthropologist Mary Douglas memorably called “matter out of place”.

Despite its propensity for linguistic proliferations, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs is not interested in suspending univocality for its own sake. Hoskote’s scepticism about language and identity is, rather, the starting point for a deeper search, one rooted in love, beauty and art. In ‘A Constantly Unfinished Instrument’, dedicated to Brian Eno, the author evokes the thrilling search for aesthetic form with a synthesiser, a device that is unencumbered by the baggage of tradition and uniquely requires musicians to generate both instrument and sound in a single gesture. Unmoored from the structuring weight of the past, Eno casts off in search of musical beauty like a Captain Ahab of the sonorous: Stay the course until you’ve caught / the quick, true surge of the ocean / that’s felt the fire harpoon pierce its side. Yet despite the chaos and contingency of the pursuit, there is a sense here of an order to be found and pinned down. The poem ends heard it right.

Hoskote’s resistance to anomie is perhaps the most romantic aspect of The Atlas of Lost Beliefs. The linguistic and cultural homogeneity of modern nations may spell the death of cultures and beliefs but the nightmare of a horizon wiped clean by difference is just as intolerable. The poem ‘Under the Tree of Tongues’ consists of the single line, there is no healing. Such nods to prelapsarian unity are, however, constantly offset by Hoskote’s own scepticism about language — particularly the language of the coloniser in which he is compelled to write: Lord of lost perspectives, / this might be the wrong prayer: / Give me back the untroubled pleasures! of the sovereign eye (‘Baldachin’). Even as Hoskote yearns for a time before Babel lie also casts doubt on the validity of that search, since this might be the wrong prayer. The question is, how would we know?