Once again after long years of search I came into contact with the power of honest poetry when I was reading Meena Kandasamy’s anthology of verse. She wove a fabric rare and strange, faintly smudged with the Indianness of her thought that saw “even the monsoons come leisurely strolling like decorated temple elephants.”

   Dying and then resurrecting herself again and again in a country that refuses to forget the unkind myths of caste and perhaps of religion, Meena carries as her twin self, her shadow the dark cynicism of youth that must help her to survive.​

   Revelations come to her frequently and prophecies linger at her lips. Older by nearly half a century, I acknowledge the superiority of her poetic vision and wish her access to the magical brew of bliss and tears each true poet is forced to partake of, day after day, month after month, year after year." 

 

KAMALA DAS SURAYYA, Poet

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Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporary Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, de-politicised, neatly sterilized. These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and  sting the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society.

   The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. She  uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socio-aesthetic practice.

   She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by reappropriating the hegemonic language  in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed.The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counter-poetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy.

 

K. SATCHIDANANDAN, Poet

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Meena Kandasamy is a feisty new entrant into the duck-pool called Indian English poetry. In Touch, she makes a Rimbaudian attempt at clearing the decks and telling it straight. Anger is the engine of Kandasamy's poems and she is even more effective when that anger ripens into sarcasm. One of the best poems in the collection—“Mohandas Karamchand”—is a lampooning of Gandhi via Sylvia Plath. A perfect echo of Plath's “Daddy”, the poem shows how persuasiveness in poetry is as much a matter of cleverness with language as having a well-meaning agenda. Whatever one feels about Gandhi, lines such as the following do their work: “You need a thorough review/Your tax-free salt stimulated our wounds/We're gonna sue you, the Congress shoe” and “You dubbed us Pariahs—Harijans”/Goody-goody guys of a bigot god/Ram Ram Hey Ram –Boo”.

    She begins the collection with a flamboyant invitation— “Come/Colonise me/Creep into the hollows of my landscape. ..” She ends it with one of her startling descriptions—an account of a female ancestor who with “her rice-white teeth tore/through layers of khaki, and golden white skin to spill/ The bloodied guys of a British soldier who tried to colonise her.” I hope Meena Kandasamy goes in the direction set by that great-great-grandmother and writes more poems one can sink one's teeth into. There is enough evidence in Touch to make me confident that she will.”

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ANJUM HASAN, Poet, The Hindu Literary Review