Chat with Meena Kandasamy

Poet & Activist

About Meena Kandasamy

In 2014, Meena Kandasamy translated and reimagined the 2,000-year-old Tamil anti-caste text *The Book of Desire*, not as scholarly reconstruction but as a weaponized lyric intervention, weaving Sangam-era metaphors with contemporary Dalit feminist rage. Her poetry doesn’t plead for inclusion; it dismantles grammar itself, refusing honorifics, breaking lineation to mirror caste rupture, and embedding Tamil script mid-English stanzas to assert linguistic sovereignty. When she performed 'The Gypsy Madonna' at the Chennai Kalakshetra Festival, she held silence for 73 seconds, the number of days B. R. Ambedkar waited for Gandhi to respond to the Poona Pact, transforming breath into archival protest. Her activism isn’t adjacent to her art; it’s the same act in different registers: publishing under her own name despite family pressure to use a Brahmin-sounding pseudonym, co-founding the anti-caste publishing collective The Marginalised Press, and insisting that love poems between a Dalit woman and a non-Dalit man must foreground power asymmetry, not romance.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Meena Kandasamy:

  • “How did translating *The Book of Desire* change your relationship to Tamil literary tradition?”
  • “What does 'poetic sovereignty' mean when writing in English while refusing caste-marked Tamil honorifics?”
  • “Why did you embed Tamil script directly into English poems like 'Exquisite Cadaver'?”
  • “Can a love poem between castes ever avoid replicating hierarchy? How do you navigate that?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Meena Kandasamy really publish under her real name despite family opposition?
Yes. In 2006, her family urged her to adopt the surname 'Rao', a common Brahmin-associated name, to avoid professional discrimination. She refused and published her debut collection *Touch* under 'Meena Kandasamy', citing her maternal grandmother, a landless agricultural worker, as her naming lineage. This decision triggered estrangement from several relatives and became foundational to her public stance on naming as resistance.
What is The Marginalised Press, and why did she co-found it?
Launched in 2018, The Marginalised Press is a volunteer-run, non-profit publishing initiative focused exclusively on first books by Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan, and queer writers from South India. Kandasamy co-founded it after witnessing mainstream publishers reject manuscripts for being 'too angry' or 'not universal enough'. It operates without gatekeeping editors, authors retain full copyright and receive royalties from day one.
How does her poetry engage with Sangam literature beyond translation?
Kandasamy deliberately misreads Sangam conventions: where classical Tamil poetry used nature imagery (kurinji, mullai) to encode caste-coded social roles, she repurposes those landscapes as sites of violation, e.g. describing a Brahmin landlord’s garden as 'mullai choked with pesticide'. Her work treats Sangam texts not as heritage but as contested terrain, inserting Dalit women’s voices into centuries-old poetic forms to expose their erasure.
Why does she refuse to separate 'art' and 'activism' in interviews?
She argues that aesthetic choices, line breaks, diction, transliteration, are political acts. In her 2021 essay 'The Grammar of Refusal', she details how using the Tamil word 'pulaiyar' instead of the Sanskrit-derived 'dalit' in English poems asserts indigenous terminology over state-imposed labels. For her, every comma placed after a caste name is a tactical pause, not stylistic, but ethical.
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Topics

poetryactivismsocial justice

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