Essay: “The afternoon wind comes and goes between India and Brazil” – A new literary dialogue through 100 Great Indian Poems in Portuguese

By Prof Dilip Loundo

In the journal of her trip to India in 1953, the Brazilian poet Cecília Meireles writes: ‘As paradoxical as it may seem, it is easier to understand the East (India) by knowing Brazil, whose problems are curiously similar (struggle for the affirmation of nationality, urgency to adapt to international circumstances, use of wealth, racial setbacks, economic consolidation, education plans), except for their respective ages and the date of their independence[i]. By exploring the potential territory of dialogue that is represented by the poet’s intuition, we witness a fascinating situation. Brazil and India are complex societies with a large territory and population and these countries are regarded, from the historical point of view, as antipodes in birth: India, one of the oldest civilizations of humanity and Brazil, one of the youngest. At the same time, they present a remarkable common characteristic: a content of unity that articulates, intrinsically and organically, a cultural diversity. In other words, they are societies that have two fundamental implications: (i) a dynamic of inclusiveness, a cultural permeability that is, at the same time, matrix of genetic constitution and matrix of historical interaction with external agents; (ii) a dynamic of the imaginary, as an essential structure of articulation of the cultural diversities that confers plasticity and iconographic profusion. This underlies, on the one hand, a postcolonial environment relatively immune to the Cartesian-Enlightenment rationality and, on the other hand, a natural disposition for intercultural dialogue, which emerges as a spontaneity that reinforces and guarantees the continuity and survival of a civilization.

It is within the scope of literature, a privileged sphere of sense building, that the potential of Brazil-India dialogue reaches its most exuberant expression. Although clearly unsystematic, this dialogue registers significant events, both with regard to the presence of Brazilian literature in India[ii] and, especially, with regard to the presence of written and oral sources of Indian literature in Brazil. With respect to the latter, we can identify, initially, a level of predominantly oral subconscious presence, represented by the incorporation of the Indian narratives of the Pañcatantra in the popular folklore of the Brazilian northeast[iii]. Another level, of a more conscious  and written character, is represented by an extensive group of Brazilian authors who, through the most diverse and distinct regions of Brazil, came into contact with the ancient literature of the Vedas, Upaniṣads, Vedānta, Yoga, and Buddhist sutras, and the contemporary literature of key personalities such as Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. This is the case of Cruz e Souza, Augusto dos Anjos, Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa and the modernist writers associated with the Festa group, in which Cecília Meireles stands out, whose philosophical lyric is fundamentally constructed in the light of a sui generis with Indian spiritual sources[iv].

It is in this context, therefore, of the enrichment of the still incipient dialogue between Brazil and India in the sphere of literature, that the importance of the translation of 100 Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury India, 2018), edited by Abhay K. into Portuguese titled 100 Grandes Poemas da Índia stands out. Abhay K. is an Indian poet-diplomat currently based in Brasilia who has received SAARC Literary Award 2013 for his contribution to the South Asian poetry. He has also edited CAPITALS, a poetry anthology on the capital cities of the world and has published six collections of poems. 100 Grandes Poemas da Índia, has been published as a special edition of Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução, a reputed journal of literature in translation by the University of São Paulo. This edition is entirely devoted to Indian poetry. It is undoubtedly a very important contribution to the cultural dialogue between Brazil and India and a unique opportunity for a radical encounter with the multiple facets of the civilizing soul of the Indian subcontinent and its cultural, social and religious expressions.