Biography of author
Speaking specifically about Gujarati literature, Gadhvi said, “It actually began in the late 1970s, when people began penning poetries and short stories and proses to describe what they faced. These were mainly blank verses and not formalized works. The main inspiration behind Dalit Sahitya in Gujarati literature was works in Marathi literature. Right from novels to short stories to poems to even ballads, it was visible in various forms.”
Activism is at the heart of her literary work; she has translated several political texts from Tamil to English, and previously held an editorial role at The Dalit, an alternative magazine in 2002. In her late teens, she translated the essays and speeches of Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi founder-leader Thol.Thirumavalavan into English: Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation (2003) and Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers (2004). In 2007, she translated Dravidian ideologue Periyar’s feminist tract Penn Yaen Adimai Aanaal? (Why Were Women Enslaved?) and co-wrote the first English biography of Kerala’s iconic Dalit leader Ayyankali. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics. Her op-eds and essays have appeared in The White Review, Guernica, The Guardian and The New York Times, among other places.
One Eyed
the pot sees just another noisy child
the glass sees an eager and clumsy hand
the water sees a parched throat slaking thirst
but the teacher sees a girl breaking the rule
the doctor sees a case of a medical emergency
the school sees a potential embarrassment
the press sees a headline and a photo feature
dhanam sees a world torn in half.
her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,
the price for a taste of that touchable water.
Rachna Joshi
Rachna Joshi is a poet and reviewer with a master's in creative writing from Syracuse University. She has written four collections of poems, including Configurations, Crossing the vaitarani, Travel Tapestry, and Monsoon and other poems.
Joshi has been published in magazines and anthologies in India and Abroad. She worked as Senior Assistant Editor at the India International Center for 28 years and currently lives in Noida, UP.
Monsoon
The Yamuna swells
across field and marsh
as wind and water lash the city.
A curtain of rain
catches scooter and cyclist
in its wake.
Rain falls through me
Through my past
Through memory
Through grandmother’s eyes
When they would water.
The magnolias fall to one side
and the Ashok and Eucalyptus
shine with silvery glow.
Telephone lines go bust
electricity and power surge and wane
and connectivity is a poor Morse Code.
E-mails dysfunction
Friends blotted out
News blotted out
What happened to Khashoggi
Did Obama get elected
Or did Urijit Patel resign.
Rain flows out
washes the roads
and fuses the landscape.
The rain unravels like music
Mallikarjun Mansur singing Megh Malhar
Fuzon belting out Saawan beeto jaye piharwa
Jagjit Singh singing of saun da mahina
And woh kaagaz ki kashti, woh baarish ka paani.
A loving refrain
it inundates my being,
envelopes the spirit
washing out the day’s drudgery.
Crossing the Yamuna by metro
I see again scattered hutments
and withered fields of grain
needy farmers waiting
for the river to replenish their fields
by forgetting its banks
and spilling itself widely.
The river will withdraw into its channel,
silt-laden banks will sprout again
lush and green.
I too feel like rich accumulated
silt, ready for the language
of change to grow in me, say
things I’ve never said before.
Nissim Ezekiel
Nissim Ezekiel is an Indian poet who is famous for writing his poetry in English. He had a long career spanning more than forty years, during which he drastically influenced the literary scene in India. Many scholars see his first collection of poetry, A Time to Change, published when he was only 28 years old, as a turning point in postcolonial Indian literature towards modernism.
Ezekiel was born in 1924 in Bombay to a Jewish family. They were part of Mumbai's Marathi-speaking Jewish community known as Bene Israel. His father taught botany at Wilson College, and his mother was the principal of a school. Ezekiel graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1947. In 1948, he moved to England and studied philosophy in London. He stayed for three and a half years until working his way home on a ship.
Upon his return, he quickly joined the literary scene in India. He became an assistant editor for Illustrated Weekly in 1953. He founded a monthly literary magazine, Imprint, in 1961. He became an art critic for the Times of India. He also edited Poetry India from 1966-1967. Throughout his career, he published poetry and some plays. He was professor of English and a reader in American literature at Bombay University in the 1990s, and secretary of the Indian branch of the international writer's organization, PEN. Ezekiel was also a mentor for the next generation of poets, including Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel. Ezekiel received the Sahitya Akademi cultural award in 1983. He also received the Padma-Shri, India's highest honor for civilians, in 1988.
Ezekiel died in 2004 after a long battle against Alzheimer's Disease. At the time of his death, he was considered the most famous and influential Indian poet who wrote in English.
Despite the fact that he wrote in English, Ezekiel's poems primarily examine themes associated with daily life in India. Through his career, his poems become more and more situated in India until they can be nothing else but Indian. Ezekiel has been criticized in the past as not being authentically Indian on account of his Jewish background and urban outlook. Ezekiel himself writes about this in a 1976 essay entitled "Naipaul's India and Mine," in which he disagrees with another poet, V.S. Naipaul, about the critical voice with which he writes about India. "While I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider," Ezekiel writes, "circumstances and decisions relate me to India. In other countries I am a foreigner. In India I am an Indian. When I was eighteen, a friend asked me what my ambition was. I said with the naive modesty of youth, 'To do something for India.'" We can see this attitude at work in Ezekiel's poetry—even when his poems are satirical, they come from the voice of a loving insider rather than someone who is looking from the outside. In this way, Ezekiel's poems are quintessentially Indian because they exist there. Ezekiel writes, "India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from India."
The critic Vinay Lal argued in 1991 that it is not surprising that a poet like Ezekiel brought about so much literary change in India: "It is perhaps no accident either that the first blossoms of the birth and growth of modern Indian poetry in English should have come from the pen of a poet who, while very much an Indian, belongs to a community that in India was very small to begin with, and has in recent years become almost negligible, a veritable drop in the vast ocean of the Indian population."
Night of scorpion
I remember the night my mother
was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours
of steady rain had driven him
to crawl beneath a sack of rice.
Parting with his poison - flash
of diabolic tail in the dark room -
he risked the rain again.
The peasants came like swarms of flies
and buzzed the name of God a hundred times
to paralyse the Evil One.
With candles and with lanterns
throwing giant scorpion shadows
on the mud-baked walls
they searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
With every movement that the scorpion made his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said.
May he sit still, they said
May the sins of your previous birth
be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world
against the sum of good
become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh
of desire, and your spirit of ambition,
they said, and they sat around
on the floor with my mother in the centre,
the peace of understanding on each face.
More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours,
more insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through,
groaning on a mat.
My father, sceptic, rationalist,
trying every curse and blessing,
powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
I watched the holy man perform his rites to tame the poison with an incantation.
After twenty hours
it lost its sting.
My mother only said
Thank God the scorpion picked on me
And spared my children.
Kamla Das
Kamala Surayya, also known as Suraiyya or Madhavikutty, was a noteworthy Indian English poet and litterateur and a leading Malayalam novelist from Kerala, India. Her short tales and autobiography are her most popular works in Kerala, but her English output, published under Kamala Das, is known for its fiery poetry and graphic autobiography. She gained a lot of appreciation due to her honest presentation on female sexuality, free of any sense of shame, which gave her work a power that distinguished her as a generation's iconoclast. She died on May 31, 2009, at the age of 75, in a Pune hospital.
On March 31, 1934, Kamala Das was born in Punnayurkulam, Thrissur District, Kerala, to V. M. Nair, former managing editor of the Malayalam newspaper Mathrubhumi and Nalappatt Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poetess.
She spends most of his childhood days in Punnayurkulam and Calcutta. Her father worked as a senior executive for the Walford Transport Company, which marketed Bentley and Rolls Royce vehicles. Kamala Das, like her mother, was a gifted writer. Her passion for poetry developed at a young age due to her great uncle, famed writer Nalappatt Narayana Menon. She married Madhava Das, a bank official, at the age of 15, who encouraged her literary ambitions, and she began writing and publishing in both English and Malayalam. It was a tumultuous decade for the arts in Calcutta during the 1960s, and Kamala Das was among various voices that rose to prominence alongside Indian English poets and appeared in cult anthologies.
Kamala Das was the mother of three sons. M D Nalapat, Chinnen Das, and Jayasurya Das were Kamala Das' three sons. Madhav Das Nalapat, the eldest, is married to princess Lakshmi Bayi of the Travancore Royal House (daughter of Princess Pooyam Thirunal Gouri Parvati Bayi and Sri Chembrol Raja Raja Varma Avargal). He is the UNESCO Peace Chair and a geopolitics professor at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education. He was previously the Times of India's resident editor.
Despite never having been involved in politics before, she founded the Lok Seva Party, a political party dedicated to protecting orphaned mothers and promoting secularism in the country. She ran unsuccessfully for the Indian Congress elections in 1984.
Besides writing poetry in English, she was also known for writing short stories in Malayalam. Das also wrote a syndicated column; her candid essays, which sounded off on everything from women's concerns to child care to politics, were popular, despite her contention that "poetry does not sell in our country [India]."
Summer In Calcutta, Das' debut collection of poetry, was a breath of fresh air in Indian English poetry. During a period when Indian poets were constrained by "19th-century diction, passion, and romanticized love," Kamala Das traded the certainty of an antique and sometimes sterile aestheticism for freedom of mind and body. She mostly wrote about love, betrayal, and the ensuing sorrow. The descendants, her second collection of poetry, was much more forthright, asking women to:
"Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood and all your
Endless female hunger..." - The Looking Glass
She wrote her brave autobiography, My Story, at the age of 42; it was initially written in Malayalam and afterward translated into English. She later revealed that most of the book was based on fabrication. Her voice's directness drew similarities to Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath.
Kamala Das wrote about many seemingly unrelated issues, ranging from the narrative of a destitute elderly servant to the sexual preferences of upper-middle-class ladies living in a metropolitan metropolis or the ghetto. Pakshiyude Manam, Neypayasam, Thanuppu, and Chandana Marangal are some of her most well-known stories. She published a few books, the most well-known of which was Neermathalam Pootha Kalam, which was well-received by both readers and reviewers. She also does poetry readings at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Bonn, the University of Duisburg in Germany, the Adelaide Writers Festival, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the University of Kingston in Jamaica, the University of Singapore, the South Bank Festival in London, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and other venues. Her work is accessible in the following languages: French, Spanish, Russian, German, and Japanese.
A Hot Noon in Malabar
This is a noon for beggars with whining
Voices, a noon for men who come from hills
With parrots in a cage and fortune-cards,
All stained with time, for brown Kurava girls
With old eyes, who read palm in light singsong
Voices, for bangle-sellers who spread
On the cool black floor those red and green and blue
Bangles, all covered with the dust of roads,
Miles, grow cracks on the heels, so that when they
Clambered up our porch, the noise was grating,
Strange … This is a noon for strangers who part
The window-drapes and peer in, their hot eyes
Brimming with the sun, not seeing a thing in
Shadowy rooms and turn away and look
So yearningly at the brick-ledged well. This
Is a noon for strangers with mistrust in
Their eyes, dark, silent ones who rarely speak
At all, so that when they speak, their voices
Run wild, like jungle-voices. Yes, this is
A noon for wild men, wild thoughts, wild love. To
Be here, far away, is torture. Wild feet
Stirring up the dust, this hot noon, at my
Home in Malabar, and I so far away …
Thank you.
