Trafficked! Indian-American little magazine networks and the Arvind Krishna Mehrotra / Howard McCord correspondence

Résumé En

Although Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of the most remarkable contemporary poets of India, he has consistently refused to be constricted by the obvious or prescribed signs of Indianness. One’s location, "whether cultural, historical, geographical or fictive — is everything," he writes, but it is shifting, constantly remade, and reinvented. If he can relate to the term "transnational," as he has himself suggested, it’s perhaps in the sense that he ended up becoming an Indian poet by first camouflaging as an American one. To be sure Mehrotra delights in infuriating those who, within the increasingly Hinduized, nationalist cultural landscape of India, may feel provoked by the implications of such "irreverent" transnationalism.Even at 17, he harbored the illusion that he did not live in Uttar Pradesh, but New York City, and "to keep the illusion from shattering" surrounded himself with books and magazines from elsewhere, as well as with friends who lived in other countries. Many were poets, little mag contributors, and editors, and many lived in America. The letters and postcards he exchanged with some of them — and I will focus here on Mehrotra’s correspondence with American poet and small press founder Howard McCord, then teaching at Washington State University in Pullman, — testify to how literary geographies ("the only country worth having patriotic feelings about") can run counter to "real" ones. They are also evidence of the extraordinary little magazine networks of the time, the underground traffic between American and Indian "communities of the medium" and the transnational friendships, conducted and staged through the channel of the little mag, that sustained the creativity of these writers ...