I’m not teaching this semester—my first out of the classroom since 1990. After deferring my sabbatical for a year to complete a major curriculum revision, and finish my second term as department chair, I’m finally taking advantage of a semester away from the College. We are wintering in Pune, India, where my partner Rebecca is a Fulbright scholar, teaching environmental law at Symbiosis College, and my two children, Nathaniel (11) and Ellinore (9) are in school. You can glimpse some of what we are experiencing here during a six month stay at my place blog, The Far Field.
If all goes according to plan, we will be in India until June. My sabbatical work is organized around reading the poet Mary Oliver and doing some writing on her work. And the reading and writing is taking me in some unexpected directions (as it should). I’ve been busy with other projects, too: compiling and editing the index for the forthcoming anthology, Teaching North American Environmental Literature; correcting the typescript for an article on redefining scholarship in English, “Reading, Writing, and Teaching in Context” that will appear this fall in Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life (MLA); inviting contributors for a special issue of the journal Pedagogy that I have been invited to guest edit on the small college English department; and writing a review of Mary Oliver’s recent collection of poetry, Thirst. Of course I’m enjoying the unstructured time here, walking and running, swimming, and learning once again what it might mean to be an urban creature. There is time for reading about India, too. We picked up the authoritative cloth edition of Birds of the Indian Subcontinent when we first arrived, and more recently A Field Guide to Indian Mammals and the Book of Indian Shells. (We have a resident gecko in the kitchen, large fruit bats circle above our building in the twighlight, and the kids have a bag of pretty shells from the Bay of Bengal.) We mostly read fiction before arriving—including my colleague Brinda Charry’s two novels set in India. Now I’m spending time with Rabindranath’s poetry, Gitanjali as well as the Selected Poems. I’m reading nonfiction commentaries on India, including V. S. Naipaul, India, Shashi Tharoor, The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cellphone, and Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian. And I’ve just started Chitrita Banajerji’s Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine. We’re traveling scholars as well—exploring the city and further afield. While Rebecca has been busy with her Fulbright opportunities in Pune, Pondicherry, Chennai and Delhi, in early January I traveled to Hyderabad to present a plenary address at an interdisciplinary conference on land culture and knowledge systems. And, here in Pune, I spoke on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to an ornithology class at Garware College. And we spent time in Tamil Nadu on the southeastern coast, where I lectured on north American environmental literature to students and faculty in English at Pondicherry University, and to students and faculty in the departments of English, Botany, and Zoology at Christian Madras College in Chennai. India is rich and complex and challenging. After a couple of months, we feel as if we are beginning to develop a sense of where we are.
