Moving world, moving voices: A discussion with Daljit Nagra

Andrew Green

doi:10.1177/0021989420911836

Abstract

This interview explores a range of both emergent and persistent areas of interest in the work of Daljit Nagra. Nagra’s two latest books — Ramayana (2013) and British Museum (2017) — represent explorations of his interests in both “rootedness” — what it means to be connected or grounded in a cultural environment — and “route-edness” — what it means for cultures to travel and the impact of cultural journeying (Clifford, 1997). In both books he considers how cultures — both as individual and intertwined entities — in complex ways solidify and mutate; how they remain static and move. In this interview he explores his own shifting, layered, and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with diverse cultures, considering the extent to which and the means by which cultures “translate”. Underlining the inevitable clashes and dislocation such processes necessitate, via pluralism he identifies an essential desire for the meaningful connection of diverse cultures. Like the British Museum of the title of his most recent work, he sees the importance of his poetry as a project in human connectivity, asserting creative achievement, resilience, and value. In exploring these ideas, Nagra discusses the ways in which his work connects both to Indian culture in transition and translation and to canonical English Literature. This interview was conducted in Uxbridge, West London on 6 December 2018.

Highlights

Since the publication of his first two collections, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (2011), Daljit Nagra has cemented his position as one of the world’s foremost contemporary poets
As a British poet of Sikh Punjabi parents who emigrated to England in the 1960s, he has always been interested in what Jeremy Noel-Tod (2017: 36) terms “the conundrum of national identity”
Martin Heidegger proposes poetry’s capacity to reveal truth through what he refers to as “projective saying”, a form of language that offers the potential for the disclosure of truths by bringing forth articulations which are ordinarily hidden (2002: 45)

Summary

Introduction

Since the publication of his first two collections, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (2011), Daljit Nagra has cemented his position as one of the world’s foremost contemporary poets. These are rich ideas to bring to Nagra’s later (and early) work and encourage readers and students, as this interview suggests, to consider in depth the ways in which the poet seeks his own subjunctivizing and playful space within the cultural storehouses of Britain and South Asia.

Results

Conclusion