"If you had told me five years ago that I would write poetry, I would have laughed. There were so many other things I wanted to be: lawyer, scientist, dancer... " says Meena Kandasamy. And yet, here she is at 23, with her first collection of poems Touch recently launched at the Crossword bookstore.

Late bloomer

"I began writing in 2002, when I was 18," says the young poet. "I was going through a terrible period in my life: I had just stopped my dance lessons, I didn't know how to go ahead.I had always craved to be a writer and that's what I turned to."

For Meena, the bulk of whose earlier work has been in the form of essays, translations and criticism on issues of caste, communal identity and discrimination that have appeared in publications such as Biblio: A Review of Books, Communalism Combat and The Milli Gazette, the subjects of her poetry naturally grew out of those issues that often dominated her thoughtscape: "I write essentially out of my powerlessness. I never wanted to share my poems with the world. Along the way, I couldn't find the kind of sustained energy, time or even frame of mind to keep writing essays. Everything I wrote was in the form of poetry." Poetry, she found was a perfect medium to express her ideas on the politics of gender and caste, all of which occupy an equal place in her writing. "Women are the first people who should oppose the caste system, since they are the greatest victims of oppression. The problem of women is essentially a problem of caste."

Gender and caste inevitably lead the conversation to language and identity, and Meena explains that one of the reasons she writes in English is because the environment of her schooling years strongly stigmatised the Tamil language for her. "I studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya, where people spoke only Hindi and English. And we studied with all these north-Indian children, so very few people conversed in Tamil anyway. Tamil was being looked upon as gauche and vulgar.During my 12 years of school, I hardly remember speaking half a paragraph in Tamil. My given, official name is a very sweet, very poetic Tamil name, Ilavenil and means spring. But people said my name sounded like the name of a train. I winced in horror and wept on my pillows. I wanted a name people could accept, a name that wouldn't point to my Tamil origins. That is why I chose the name Meena, my nickname at home, which is incidentally the most common female name in South Asia." However, she says, when she began writing, she realised that "Tamil, my language, my identity, my culture, it was all over me. Until I reclaimed my roots there would only have been silence or drivel." And so it is that many of her poems, manage a wonderfully vernacular vocabulary of images. In "Mulligatawny Dreams", for instance, she writes: "i dream of an english full of the words of my language... an english where small children practice with smooth round pebbles in their mouth to spell the right zha..."

Despite having much to say, Meena never intended her poetry for public consumption, and particularly never intended to be published. All of that changed however, when Kamala Das wrote a two-page foreword for her collection, which encouraged Meena to find herself a publisher. "Anybody else could have praised me a thousand times more and I wouldn't have cared a whit. But Kamala Das herself! She, who doesn't say anything just to please... It was her I-don't-give-a-damn poetry that made me try to write."