To most people Gieve Patel is synonymous with the poem On Killing a Tree. “It is the one poem that people remember,” he admits with a sudden smile. “Whenever I travel abroad, people I don’t know at all come up to me and tell me that they had studied it in school.”
Gieve Patel with students in Chennai
The poem deals with an incident that happened when he was in the first year of medical school in Mumbai many years ago. An old peepul tree had sheltered a host of creatures, both wild and tame, under its branches. One day, when he came to school, he found that it had been chopped down. Dr Patel described it in the course of a reading last week at The School KFI, run by the Krishnamurti Foundation India in Chennai.
“The poem just came out without much effort. Most of it just fell into place naturally. And though it’s about the beautiful tree that I missed seeing in its usual place, in some ways the poem suggests, I think, that a tree is not very different from a human life.”
As a practising doctor, images of the human body are never far from his compendium, whether in paintings or poetry. And it’s typical of a Gieve Patel poem that he should see the bark of the tree as “leprous”. It’s as if there’s an equal amount of delight and revulsion with the physical aspects of the world around him.
We are in the auditorium of the KFI school, as it is known in Chennai, during the first session of a two-week festival of poetry organized by the Prakriti Foundation. The foundation claims it is the first poetry festival of its kind in Chennai. It is a first in many ways—there are poets from all over the country and the group includes an older generation of poets such as Patel as well as relatively newer and younger voices such as Anjum Hassan, Arundhati Subramaniam and Vivek Narayanan.
Though the main language appears to be English, there are poems in Tamil, Kannada and other regional languages too, and in various forms and manners of presentation. The venues range from Cafe Coffee Day outlets to Fabindia stores to local schools and colleges.
There’s a special pleasure in just listening to the sound of a poem.
Gieve Patel
Doctor, poet and playwright
Of course, Tamil poets and Telugu associations hold poetry festivals all the time, so it might not be such an innovation. Quite by chance, actors Tom Alter and Juhi Babbar are doing a more formal recitation of Ghalib’s poetry at the Taj Coromandel during the opening week. It’s quite a contrast how different the ideas of how poetry should be received and performed can be.