K. Satchidanandan - Life and Career

Life and Career

Koyamparambath Satchidanandan was born in 1946 in Pulloot, a village in Kodungallur in the Thrissur district of Kerala. After his early education in the village schools, he studied biology at Christ College, Irinjalakuda and had his Masters in English from Maharajas College, Ernakulam. He obtained his Ph.D in Post-structuralism poetics from the University of Calicut. He joined as a lecturer in English at K.K.T.M. College, Pulloot in 1968, and moved to Christ College in 1970 where he became a Professor of English. He voluntarily retired from this post in 1992 to take up the editorship of Indian Literature, the English journal of the Indian National Academy in Delhi. In 1996 he was nominated Secretary, the Chief Executive, of the Academy, a post from which he retired in 2006. Later he served as a Consultant to the Indian Government's Department of Higher Education and to the National Translation Mission. He currently edits Beyond Borders, a journal of South Asian literature and ideas. Satchidanandan is married, with two daughters.

Satchidanandan’s early poems were highly experimental and the publication of his first collection, Anchusooryan (Five Suns, 1971) was an important event in Malayalam literature. The same year he launched Jwala (Flame), an avant-garde journal dedicated to experimental writing. He had earlier published a collection of essays on modern Malayalam poetry (Kurukshetram, 1970).He was also translating poetry from across the world for Kerala Kavita and other poetry journals, and writing critical articles on modern literature, arts and culture. By the mid-seventies, he had aligned himself broadly with the political left in Kerala, and was close to the New Left movement and active in its cultural wing, Janakeeya Samskarikavedi (The Forum for People’s Culture). He was also associated with other liberal political and secular forums like Desabhimani Study Circle and Kerala Sasthra Sahitya Parishad, an organisation to promote scientific outlook. He wrote many poems protesting against the Emergency in India (1975–77); many of his poems were censored and he was also interrogated by the Crime Branch. In 1978, he launched a small publishing house called Prasakthi Library that brought out anthologies of poems and short stories as well as political tracts. A collection of his poems, written between 1965 to 1982 was published in 1983. He was invited to participate in the Valmiki International Poetry Festival in New Delhi and to represent India at the Sarajevo Poetry Days in former Yugoslavia in 1985. In 1988 he visited the U.S.S.R. as part of a poets’ team to take part in the Festival of India there. By this time, his poems and collections had begun to appear in other languages and his books were becoming text books in colleges.

His life in Delhi, after he took up the editorship of Indian Literature, influenced his poetry in many ways: his concerns became broader, resulting in a series of poems on Kerala made possible by his physical distance from the district, and another series on the saint and Sufi poets of India as a part of recovering the secular heritage in the Indian tradition that he felt was getting lost in the sectarian communalism of right wing politics. In 1993 he visited Ayodhya as a part of a team of writers to protest against the destruction of Babri Masjid by the Hindu right wing. He led the writers’ team to China during the Festival of India in China in 1994. As Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi (1996–2006) he launched several new platforms for the emerging writers, especially the young, women, dalits, and tribals besides making the Akademi contemporary in the true sense.

At the same time he kept on writing, translating and editing; a good part of his literary output at this time was in English, as he was addressing a national readership, but he wrote poetry only in his mother tongue, most of which he, along with others, translated into English. He took part in the Ivry Poetry Festival in France in 1997, led a team of writers to Sweden and visited the U.S.A. as a writer the same year. He led a group of writers to Italy in 1999, revisited China in 2000 and again in 2010. In 2002 he was invited to the World Poetry Academy in Verona, Italy, and was active in the campaign against the genocide in Gujarat committed by the Hindu communalists there. His collection of poems in French was published in Paris in 2002. In 2003 he visited France again for readings in five cities as part of the poetry festival, Prentemps des Poetes. In 2004, he visited Syria, New York in the United States and Pakistan as part of the Indian writers’ delegations to those countries; his collection in Italian was published in Rome the same year. He was the Indian invitee to the Berlin Literary Festival in 2005, and read at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He was also an invitee to the Leipzig Book Fair and the Abu Dhabi Book Fair in 2006. He again visited Germany in 2006, after his retirement from the Academy when his German collection was released during the Frankfurt Book fair. The same year saw the publication of his Collected Poems (1965–2005) in three volumes. The first volume of his Collected Translations of poetry came out in 2007. In 2007, he again visited Italy, had a reading tour in the Gulf countries and was invited to the Jaipur International Literary Festival in 2008. Since then he has been part of this Fesrtival, taking part in readings and discussions (2009–2011) He represented India at the London Book Fair, 2009 and the Moscow Book fair (2009).His collection of poems in Arabic translation was published in 2009 from Abu Dhabi..A documentary film on him, Summer Rain was released in 2007. He was made a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi, Kerala in 2010.He was part of the Wales-India poetry Exchange in Wales in 2011 and took part in the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal in 2011, followed by readings in Ottawa and Regina. He took part in the U. N. Symposium in New York on 'The Role of Literature in Unlearning Intolerance'in the same year.Satchidanandan also ws part of the Hay Festival in Kerala in 2010 and 2011. He was also nominated for the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature .