“I am home wherever I live’
Poet of the world: Indran Amirthanayagam. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
I meet Indran Amirthanayagam in a café thick with espresso and the Monday morning din of people mingling business with pleasure. Indran in holiday attire, is calmly reading a book, waiting for me. I think “how appropriate – just the man we want in the Tower of Babel!”
For that is what Indran is: poet of the world; breaker of boundaries. He writes poetry in five languages, four of them foreign, mastered out of sheer passion and a deep desire to connect with the world…
Although an American career diplomat, and translator and publisher to boot, Indran’s life mostly revolves around poetry, and he is back in Colombo for the HSBC Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival this weekend.
Some may recall that Indran is the son of the late poet and diplomat Guy Amirthanayagam (Indran too has his own French name- Jean-Marie) and grandnephew of Meary James Tambimuttu, of Poetry London fame.
Indran is happy to be back ‘home’ –where he lived till age eight, schooling at St. Joseph’s College Maradana, before the Amirthanayagams went abroad, first to England, then to Honolulu, Hawaii.
The poet in young Indran was cajoled out in Hawaii which evoked memories of Ceylon – the palms, the fruits, the sea. His first poem, he recalls with a nostalgic smile, was a version of his father’s poem ‘Western Man Eastern Man’, called ‘Reflections on Western Man by Eastern Man’! The poem had oodles of food as his poems will always do.
Poetry at first for Indran was a way of dealing with solitude. As a 14-year-old in Honolulu he was a solitary boy attending a co-ed school where he “didn’t know how to respond to girls”. “Poetry gave me a chance to reflect, to understand who I am and who we all are as human beings in different societies.”
Since then, however, the vast storm-clouded skies of politics have dominated his poetry. His poetry as often published in Groundviews gives an overview of this. “I can’t separate myself from politics,” says Indran, pointing out that the word politics, coming out of the Greek ‘polis’, for community, is what “moves, affects, hurts, or makes happy” the community. Of course he writes on love whether romantic, filial or religious but most of his poetry, like his Elegy for an Extended Family, deal with that ‘community’.
‘The Elegy’- published among the best American poetry of 2025- is about the violence inflicted on Gaza, and the extended family Indran refers to is “you, me, all of us”- suffering because some of our “family” has been killed or raped. While some would say poetry should be art for art’s sake – about ‘clouds and roses and daffodils’ – Indran maintains politics is natural to him like breathing or eating or swimming.
The personal mingles with the politic, when he writes, for example, about the 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom, two years before he was born when his father (then Assistant Government Agent in Galle) was helped by his Sinhalese colleagues to escape from the mob hidden in the backseat of a car. This gave birth to his poem ‘Riot’ which mulls on how he would not be here to write the poem had not Guy escaped.
Whatever is on the world political arena is grist to Indran’s mill, just as the situation in his native land.
Apart from English, Indran writes poetry in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He considers the whole world his home, having also lived in Africa (including Cote d’Ivoire), Europe, India, England, Argentina, Peru and Mexico, and he wants to “build his home” in each of these languages.
“I am at home wherever I live, and I make it home by learning the language and writing in that language.” When he keeps away from one language for some time he feels lost and unhappy.
Every week, Indran writes a Spanish poem for the newspaper El Acento, and a French poem for the Haitian newspaper Haiti en Marche.
At first, he had to translate ideas from English to the other tongue with, say, an English-Spanish dictionary but soon he would trade it for a Spanish- Spanish dictionary and be able to think in that language. He insists it’s just a matter of overcoming fear, and writing on despite mistakes, with the help of a native speaker.
Curiously enough there’s one language he has ignored and that is Tamil. Indran is regretful about this and says “I feel I’ve lost my original home.” The trauma of losing Tamil was what probably led him to learn other languages. “For me, getting back to the Garden of Eden and making myself whole again, means learning Tamil,” he sighs.
Asked what he likes most about writing, Indran says it’s “walking out the poem” –a ritual – a morning walk when thoughts are “jostled up, and become verses”- lyrics he records on his phone or later transcribes.
Thirty years an American diplomat, working in countries from Belgium to Cote d’Ivoire, amongst the “traffic” he encouraged on the bridge between the US and other countries is “cultural traffic”. What he most enjoyed was bringing writers from the USA to where he was serving and vice versa. When he was in Haiti, he brought the Martha Graham Dance Company there after the earthquake of 2016. Bringing the leading dance company of America to a country with so much dancing talent was for Indran, “diplomacy at its best” – a celebration of “life, of art, of culture – on an equal basis”.
Indran is happy to be back in Sri Lanka with his daughter Lola, a photographer and filmmaker, and looks forward to the launch of his new book ‘White Space Sonnets’ on February 17 at Barefoot at 6 p.m. – apart, of course, from the excitement of the Ceylon Literary Festival…
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