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Meet Keshav Malik
(Interviewed by P.Raja...)

Published in largely circulatd magazines & newspaper of India & abroad Keshav Malik has been since the late nineteen fouties, editor of Sahitya Akademi's bi-monthly India Literature  & Art critic for The Times of India. New Delhi, he ia acclaimed as one among the readable Indian poets writing in english today. While reviewing his first volume-The Lake Surface and other Poems- in New Statesman, London, V.S.Pritchett rightly remarked ; "each one crisp as a Thermometer reading"
A second volume -Rippled Shadow - followed in Nov. 1960 caring 291 of his poems .The Paris Review applauded :"A true poet beyond all doubts..." 
Keshav Malik poetry demands to be regarded in the light of what is commonly called 'high seriousness' & that dose not mean his poetry is hard not of untie. The human condition , nature, dawn & dark, love & wrath, death & the astonishing enigma of existence itself are the theme of his poetry. An interview with him will throw some light on his creative process...
Why did you choose to express yourself in English , when it is not your mother tongue?
It iso happens that even my mother who is a writer dose not write in her mother toung - Punjabi. She writes in Hindi. Moreover my father did his work not in Punjabi but in Urdu & in English. He also knew Persian. Such awe the linguistic situation in the family. Then also , childhood was spent in non Punjabi speaking regions like Bombay, Meerut, Calcutta, Shrinagar - all with a wide variety of schools. No wonder English became the only stable working medium. This is no self justification, it is merely to say how we are formed by random circumstances.

What is the impulse behind your poetry writing?
To get to the truth between the lines. To state the unstated - that which is lurking behind appearances.

Who are your early influences? Did you learn anything from the early masters of Indo-Anglian verse?
I really don't know what these influences were. I can say who really influenced my work, I can only tell what i liked then & whom I knew . Walter de la Mare meant something. The russians who my mother read avidly meant something hugely. Shaksphere's The tempest & The Winter's Tale, but ofcorse. Than there was the British poet of the thirties. Tagore. But important cultural  impressions, could be the Hindi Urdu, & Kashmiri poets & writers who were guest or visitors at home often. Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, S.H.Vatsayan, Bachan, Ashk, Faiz Ahamed Faiz, Krishan Chander, Jainender Kumar, Mahjoor, Azad, Nanarsi das Chaturvedi. No sign here of Indo-English poets, rather of the novelists like Narayan.

Do you out line your poems before you start to write them? Or is it a line by line progression?
It could be line by line progression, but may as well as be cutting of a whole world out of a rock of words, like a sculpture scoops out a stone. Addition or subtraction. A construction - by adding one piece to another.

Poet Mayakavsky & another classical French poet compared the writing of a poem to the pangs of  childbirth? Do you disagree?
Pangs of childbirth! Yes, could be but it could be also that the whole thing is a spiritual exercise, in which you strive to keep intact the personality in you which dose no other then contemplate, silently,  observe, or reflect. You than don't want any other personality (& of which there can be several in you) to take you over, make you some other being. However of this happening there is always a chance. At - least I Keshav Malik- can any moment turn in to someone who dose not have  the inner being which makes poems. It is not easy to stay still in the substance of experience. Yes, why not become an actor, be asocial being, a sage, a thinker! The poem takes birth if one has maintained  the  hinted as always disappearing, evaporating self. Ofcorse even then there could be the pain of giving birth.

[Contd...]

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