Cecília Meireles, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar: Latin America’s literary encounters with India
· Scroll
In 1953, a Brazilian woman in her early fifties stepped off a plane in Delhi at the personal invitation of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. She was not a politician – she was a poet. Cecília Meireles had been chosen as the sole Latin American delegate to a gathering of intellectuals convened in New Delhi to ask an urgent question: could Gandhi’s philosophy serve as a creative counterpoint to the nuclear tensions of the Cold War?
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She arrived on January 1 and immediately wrote home that Indian life felt “as familiar to me as if I had always lived here”. The sense of recognition ran deep and recurred: years after the visit, she would still describe India as the place where she had felt “most inside my own inner world”.
The route to India
But its genealogy was unexpected. In a 1964 interview, she described how she had come to India: “My grandmother spoke like [the 16th-century Portuguese poet] Camões. It was she who first drew my attention to India, to the Orient – cata, cata, que é viagem da Índia (“come along, it’s a journey to India.” Perhaps a nautical idiom for urging haste), she used to say when she was in a hurry. Tea from...