Fermenting the Grapes of History

This essay gathers the political, literary, and historical significance of India in the poems, memoirs, and articles of Pablo Neruda. It shows that the poet’s career in the subcontinent exceeded and rejected a mystifying Indophilia. Instead, the internationalist framework of Neruda’s two sojourns in India (1927–28 and 1950) corresponds to two major phases of his political thought: decolonization and the anti-imperialist peace movement. Neruda’s refusal of Indophilia brought him closer to Indian writers of English, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada and to Indian visual artists. “The Grapes of History” (“Las uvas de la historia”), an image from his long poem on India from 1951, has fructified and fermented in the reflections and translations of Nerudiana among major writers (Ali Sardar Jafri, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Kunwar Narain, and Arundhati Roy) and artists (Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Vivan Sundaram) long after the poet’s passing, well into the twenty-first century.