Reflections Magazine Issue #60 - Fall 2003 | Page 15

!mpact!
The city offered two other surprises. One
was Shansi, a program funded by Oberlin
College in Ohio, which provides a home
for some of its graduate students desiring
an Indian experience. Shansi (first started
in the city of Shansi, China, for which the
program is named, and later expanded to
include Madurai, India) originated long
before “multiculturalism” became a catchword. The Madurai portion of the program
was celebrating 50 years while I was there
in January.

A POETRY
READING TOUR
English Prof Takes His
Poetry On The Road,
Around The World
By Saleem Peeradina
Associate Professor of English

E

arlier this year, an invitation from
American College, Madurai, took
me to South India where I conducted
a poetry workshop and did readings of my
work in local colleges. The trip was an eye
opener in many ways.
Founded by American missionaries way
back in 1881, the college has a sprawling,
shaded campus and is now part of the larger
Madurai University system. Within the
college, it was the Study Center for Indian
Literature in English and in Translation
(SCILET) that was my host.
The Center has one of the largest libraries and databases in Asia for the study of
Indian Writing in English. It serves not only
local students and faculty, but scholars from
other parts of India as well working on their
M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees. It publishes one
of the three surviving poetry journals in the
country and invites distinguished writers
under its Visiting Writers program.
The moving spirit behind SCILET is Paul
Love, a teacher of English from Michigan,
who first went to India on a cargo ship at
the age of 25 in 1954. Madurai has been his
home now since the mid-eighties.

The other program, SITA (South India Term
Abroad), associated with American College, brings American students to the city
for a semester’s stay involving academic
study, fieldwork, and home stay with middle
class families. I was invited to speak to the
group, and was amazed at the initiative and
courage of these students—wearing Indian
attire, learning Tamil (the state language),
eating the food, observing the customs—to
immerse themselves in a culture which is
alien even to North Indians!
As for the workshop itself, I had a group of
14 which produced some sharp, average,
and some pretty bad verse—no different
from what students produce elsewhere,
including in the US. It is easy to underestimate these students. City-slick Indian
students have a tendency to put down these
small town students but I found them wellinformed, inquisitive, imaginative, politically sensitive, and, what touched me most,
very earnest.

Faculty/Staff
News

13
My books have been in circulation in India
for 30 years and it was reassuring that faculty and older readers were familiar with my
work, even though I have been an expatriate for the last 14 years. The colleg