Sujata Bhatt - Search for My Tongue

  Sujata Bhatt was born in Gujerat in India in 1956.  

  For Sujata, language has always been a painful experience.

  Her father worked in America and - as a small child aged 5 years old - she

  spent some time in New Orleans, where she learned her first English words.

  Sent back to India for a time (to a convent school), Sujata had her English

  language drilled out of her by the 'very, very old Miss Ghaswalla'.

  However, she then moved to Connecticut in America in 1968, and has lived

  in the west ever since.    She studied at the University of Iowa, and taught at

  universities in America and Canada before moving to Germany, where she 

  lives now with her husband and daughter.  

On the jacket of her book of poetry, she describes herself as 'bi-cultural'.

She wrote 'Search for My Tongue' in her twenties, while she was living in America and studying English, and feared that she was losing her Indian identity and mother tongue.

Bhatt's poems fall into two categories.   Some are about her Indian identity and background, while some are about her new lifestyle and experiences in the west.   It is worthwhile noting that one Indian critic claims that her 'European' poems are far better than her 'Indian' ones - he believes the Indian poems to be shallow - 'school magazine stuff at best' - and spoiled by Bhatt's constant need to explain everything for her western readers.