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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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