The poems discussed above are a direct contrast to Ganorkar’s love poems, which, typically, seem to be simple and straightforward, but which are hardly ever unqualified and reveal an unexpected layer on careful reading. It is here that the poet reveals that she can work just as successfully within the literary tradition of women’s love poetry, especially in the poem ‘Dawn’:

Dawn is here.
Move over a little
Loosen your embrace a little
My eyelashes grow heavy
Let me open my eyes a little.
Dawn is here, my love,
Let me learn to function
Away from you a little. (46)

But while the poem works on one level as a simple love poem, it is not unqualified; the ‘I’ in the poem seeks to wake from the induced drowsiness of romance to a self-determined distance. ‘Restlessness’ is another ambiguous love poem in which we see the poet gradually willing to ‘see’ with different eyes. It is interesting that this is also one of Ganorkar’s longer and more prose-like pieces. I have translated it as a prose poem in keeping with its rhythm and tone:

The house starts to suffocate me. I can bear it no longer, am driven outside. I sit in the garden on the swing, lean on its links and look up. Such an enormous sky. Yet all around, the people, the houses are closing in on me.
And I think perhaps it is true that I never found anyone who could give me courage as expansive as the sky, and I think everything is inside-out, and I think everyone is so petty and small minded, and I think…
Chaos, noise, dust continue to fly around me. The sky is huge and so ... real. Suddenly I cannot bear to remain outside either.
I go back into the house, only to find that you have been there all along .… (47)

Again, this poem is more complex than an initial reading suggests. It can be read as coming from within the bhakti tradition. If read in this manner, it is a conventional piece done up in modern, urban garb. But if read differently, that is, not linked to the bhakti tradition, then it is not a love poem at all, becoming, in effect, an ‘anti’ love poem. The ‘you’ can in fact be read as the cause of the suffocation that drives her outside. Significantly, both the above-mentioned poems are positioned sequentially and are among the last few poems in the collection, perhaps pointing to the poet starting to come to terms with belonging/not belonging, or finding her own ways of belonging and articulating various selves towards an inner coherence.

The journey in Vyatheeth has an elliptical, somewhat elusive, quality. The last poem, ‘Palas Tree’, also depicts a journey, one that is both radically different to all the others and yet the same. There, for the first time, we see two people walking together. Each is too tired and thirsty to pay attention to the other’s presence. They are both momentarily trapped inside their own misery, each thinking:

I can walk no more. I need
somewhere cool and wet and green
I can walk no more in this heat
I need at least the promise
of rest. (51)

The speaking voice goes on to say that she has been travelling so long, that she cannot even hear ‘the thud-thud of [her] own footsteps anymore’. At this point the tone of the poem shifts quite unexpectedly, and goes on to say:

Yet when we turn around
and walk back silently
along that very road,
there is a Palas tree,
red blossoms
dancing
in a miniature
        explosion
   on
      every luscious,
 velvet-green stem. (51)

The delight of the last poem lies in the fact that it demonstrates clearly the movement of the poetic persona and the various insights she has experienced along the way. We see quite clearly the move from ‘Misguided’—I don’t understand./Where, exactly, did I take a wrong turn?’ (19)—to someone able to see the beauty of the Palas tree in bloom. The hint of hope expressed in the latter adds a depth and roundedness to the poetic persona, one who is able to actively mobilise each encounter as a site of contestation and reflection. This process is often a fraught one, filled with contradiction and reversal rather than smooth continuity. Despite the threat of real and metaphorical violence, she cannot backslide into an unthinking acceptance of the position ascribed to her because she has become sharply aware of her positionality. This supports Tharu and Lalitha’s contention that:

these are complexities in the cultural fabric that must be recognised if we are to approach the elusive nature of an identity that emerges at the margin, or understand the peculiar tension between public and private realities that underwrites women’s writing. (xvii)

Ganorkar’s writing style often means that there are issues crowding the margins, which are then left to the readers to unravel themselves. Her use of language is disruptive and loaded with deconstructive potential because it points at aporia and the absurdity of essentialist categorisation. This foregrounds the process of reading and creating meaning and the role of reader-positionality in this process, and acknowledges that alternate discourses and perceptions exist. With an unsettling syntax—long, meandering lines followed by short, staccato ones, unexpected line breaks, long pauses, blank spaces, words fragmented and bunched together[i]—and a focus on the breakdown of relationships and spaces, her poems work both as written and spoken pieces. As a result, Dilip and Nina Kulkarni, two well-known theatre actors, could successfully perform some of her poems at an art exhibition called "Beyond Proscenium", using the artist’s (i.e., Shakuntala Kulkarni’s) installations as backdrops and sets.[ii]  Thus the poems subvert not only classical Western notions of representation and reality, but also overturn constructs of a monolithic, middle-class, Brahmin, (‘non-Westernised’) female, pan-Indian identity.

Ganorkar’s work is situated in a space—and creates spaces—not inhabited by mainstream postcolonial theory, because most postcolonial theorists are preoccupied with theorising and writing back to the colonial centre or to pre-colonial origins through ideas of the nation. Ganorkar’s work focuses on region, not nation; the solitary being (woman), not ‘the people’; it is informed by an academic rather than a peasant sensibility; it is existentialist rather than overtly feminist. But at the same time the writing is ‘placed’ for an Indian readership as being unmistakably Indian and woman-authored. Postcolonial theory, in debating a hybridised ‘writing back’ or recovery of autonomous identity, focuses on large-scale fixities. On the other hand, writers like Ganorkar can be read in terms of Deleuze’s analysis—they ‘are big by virtue of minorisation,’ because ‘they cause language to flee, they make it run along a witch’s course, they place it endlessly in a state of disequilibrium’ (Deleuze, 25).

The argument is not that Ganorkar is a postcolonial writer, so much as that, despite being informed by questions of modernity and the kind of alienated existentialism found in other writers (Vilas Sarang, for instance—another academic), she is left out of consideration in a postcolonial approach to Indian writing. This is because of language and, arguably, a western view of activist feminism carried with the postcolonial outlook and a framework that attends primarily to the national space rather than the regional one.

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