A Different History by Camila Luna

Different history- Sujata Bhatt

“Different History” is a poem that talks about how badly books are treated and the history of India that had been colonized. He was upset about the colonialism and that in India they speak in English but it is a contradiction of what he said because he wrote the poem in English. In this poem there is a change of tone when he starts to talk about the language in the verse “which language” and in the same stanza there are rhetorical questions, “has not been the oppressor’s tongue?” “Truly meant to murder someone?” The author makes strong the idea by using anaphora.

       “It is a sin to shove a book aside

                With your foot;

    A sin to slam books down

             hard on a table;

    a sin to toss one carelessly

             across a room.”

In this stanza it repeats “a sin to” to make stronger the issue of the bad treatment of the books and for him that was like the Indian and the British were doing to its culture they were talking in English and they didn’t matter about the history of their own culture. He talks about India a lot and Gods that help them. The Gods can appear in different ways “disguised in snakes or monkeys”.

Clearly the main characters are the books. The author can’t accept how badly they are treated.

In the same poem the author started to talk about the torture that India suffered because of colonialism “[…] that after the torture” “the unborn grandchildren grow to love the strange language”. It conveys the idea that India really suffered the coloniasation of the British and this country wasn’t any more India. In one way he is talking about books but indirectly he is talking about the Indian people when the British come into their country all the bad treatment that they received. In the verse “without offending the tree” he is talking about offending the oldest people that lived in India for many years and the roots of all of them their grandparents and the real Indians that lived there.