Abhilasha Ojha meets Kyn Pham Singh Nongkynrih, a well-known Khasi poet and writer, at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival.
What brings you to this festival?
As part of a British Council initiative, I was invited to “Writers’ Chain: Found in Translation”, a project which brought together eight poets and authors, four from India and four from the UK. The idea was to work closely with one another, understand the importance of translation. I translated 12 poems over one month, and towards the tail end of the month — leading up to the literature festival — we interacted for a total of four days at Neemrana.
How early did you start writing poetry, and why?
The north-east of India is very turbulent with the presence of so many militant outfits. However, my writing, which started when I was in the ninth grade, was purely out of romance and not the idea of violence that one witnessed all the time. I was in love with a divorcee who was the mother of a girl child. I didn’t know how to communicate my feelings to her so I scribbled a poem for her and gave it to her.
Was the proposal accepted?
[Laughs] No, it wasn’t. I never wrote my name. But thanks to that incident, I got initiated into writing poetry. Gradually I moved to prose, too. The turning point, of course, was much later when I was doing my MA from North East Hill University and my teacher, Dr Emanuel Lall, saw a lot of promise in my poetry. Gradually my work started getting published.
Are readers, publishers and editors giving contemporary vernacular literature its due?
I’ve been fairly lucky to find my writings getting published in foreign as well as Indian languages. My work is regularly published in Swedish, Hindi, Bengali and Telugu. With this initiative, I’ve found my work getting translated into Welsh, Gaelic and Irish. It’s a humbling experience to think your work is reaching different parts of the world through brilliant translations. But what our vernacular literature needs is ample exposure and a lot of support from the government.
You teach English at North East Hill University. When do you write?
I do have this urge to quit work and devote all my time to my writings but financial compulsions don’t allow me such luxury. I write prose after office hours. Poetry can come to me in crowds, in college corridors, while teaching. I jot down lines immediately when a thought strikes me.