Mapping Indian Cities, in Verse

The Wire

07-07-2025

Uttaran Das Gupta
2 minutes ago
'The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City' is a fine attempt to draw a cartography of the diverse and contrasting urban experiences in the country.
In the 13th century, the Persian-Hindavi poet Amir Khusrau described the young men of Delhi in erotic language:
Delhi and its fine lads
with turbans and twisted beards
openly drinking lovers' blood
while secretly drinking wine
Translated from Persian into English by Sunil Sharma, the poem, 'The Fine Lads of Delhi' ends:
Those fair Hindu boys
have led me to drunken ruin.
Trapped in the coils of their curly locks
Khusrau is a dog on a leash.
Often regarded as the father of the qawwali and credited with introducing the ghazal form to the Indian subcontinent, Khusrau does not demonstrate an iota of hesitation while celebrating his homoerotic desires. The fact that these desires of a Muslim poet are for Hindu boys threatens to breach the watertight borders between religions that some of his more bigoted peers might have imagined. Such subversiveness is, of course, expected from a disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, the Sufi saint who did not hesitate to challenge emperors and sultans.
Nizamuddin's dargah in the eponymous locality of south Delhi has been a refuge for devotees from all religions, as well as outcasts from society, such as queer lovers. It is celebrated in several works of art, including the pioneering queer-themed film Fire (1996), directed by Deepa Mehta.
Eight centuries after Khusrau, the poet Akhil Katyal, credited with celebrating a queer geography of Delhi through several famous poems, sees Nizamuddin's dargah from an autorickshaw, while crossing a flyover. In his poem, 'The Evening in Delhi', Katyal describes the vision:
my eyeline swims through
the shikhars of the basti's Shiv temple
straight to the finial — princely green —
of the white-as-milk dome
of the Khilji mosque
in whose shadow
sleeps Nizamuddin
The temple, the mosque and the shrine are all compressed together in a unified vision. Though separated by nearly a millennium, Khusrau and Katyal are connected through the emotional landscape of Delhi, of which Nizamuddin is a metonym.
Edited by Bilal Moin
The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City
Penguin, 2025
'(A)ttending to emotions adds an important dimension to explaining the relationship between people and the urban condition,' write Australian historians Katie Barclay and Jade Riddle in the introduction to their edited volume, Urban Emotions and the Making of the City (2021). They add: 'Cities were and are products of emotion. The communities that inhabited them shared systems of emotional valuation that shaped how they interpreted their social, cultural and physical environments.' The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City, edited by Bilal Moin, charts the emotive landscape of Indian cities through poems, like the ones by Khusrau and Katyal.
At 1,064 pages, this door-stopper of a book is a sort of spectacular, once-in-a-generation anthology that aspires to have the last word on any genre, in this case, urban poetry in India. Within its covers, the book contains 375 poems on 37 cities, some originally in English and others translated from 20 languages, written over a period of 1,500 years. (Full disclosure: my sonnet, 'Mizo Diner', is one of the poems included in this book.)
Moin, a political economist and poet educated at Yale and Oxford, explains his editorial principles in the introduction to the volume: 'First, that each city — both tangible and mythical — remains a ceaseless muse, with its own distinct voice — a tone that resonates through the style, rhythm and texture of its verse. Second, that despite their differences in geography, history and politics, these cities transcend the boundaries that seemingly define them. Together, their congregations, confrontations and conversations, they exemplify a certain ineffable quality — a je ne sais quoi, an inherent Indianness.'
Acknowledging the difficulty of explaining the idea, Moin, nevertheless, makes an attempt to do so through references to several of the poems. 'How do Valmiki and Kabir's visions of Kashi compare to Ghalib's nineteenth-century impressions or the contemporary experiences of Nazir Banarasi and Arundhathi Subramaniam?' Kashi — or Varanasi, as it is now called — is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. It is not only important from a historical and cultural perspective, but also a political one, serving as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's parliamentary constituency since 2014.
My review also started with a similar question, asking how we could connect the city in Khusrau's poem to the one in Katyal's? Moin answers: 'Each poem, shaped by its time, contributes layered depictions of cities as temple towns, imperial capitals, colonial outposts, and dynamic, ever-evolving spaces that serve as backdrops for post-modern life. Collectively, they form an archive of the literary, temporal and spatial continuum of Indian cities.' Captured through the emotive technology of poetry, the city emerges as a liminal place, ever elusive, never permanent.
Moin addresses the multiple contestations that roil Indian cities — class, caste, gender, sexuality, religion, languages and many others. Some of the poet-city combinations are familiar and obvious, such as Nissim Ezekiel, Gieve Patel, Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla, Ranjit Hoskote, Arundhathi Subramaniam and other Bombay poets writing about Mumbai, Agha Shahid Ali and Asiya Zahoor on Srinagar, Katyal, Khusrau, Maaz Bin Bilal, Shahid Ali, Michael Creighton, Mir Taqi Mir, Jonaki Ray, Mirza Ghalib, and others on Delhi, Vivek Nambisan, Tishani Doshi and K. Srilata on Madras (Chennai), or Jayanta Mahapatra on Cuttack.
There are, however, many surprises as well, such as an ode by Warren Hastings, who has the dubious claim of laying the foundations of the British Empire in India, to his wife in 1784. Though written in Patna, the poem does not refer to the city at all, instead populating its iambic pentameter couplets with formulaic, 18th-century imagery and affected language that Wordsworth and Coleridge would make unfashionable with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1789. Its inclusion in this volume is as mysterious to me as some of its quaint turns of phrasing would be to a current reader.
The more interesting poems in this collection are the ones written by those at the margins and borderlands. In some poems, the very imagination of the nation — or Indianness — itself is questioned. One of these is 'When the Prime Minister Visits Shillong, the Bamboos Watch in Silence', by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, the author of the 2021 magnum opus Funeral Nights:
When the Prime Minister
planned a visit to the city
bamboo poles sprang up from pavements
like a welcoming committee.
But when he came, he was
only the strident sounds of sirens
like warnings in wartime bombings.
Translated from the original Khasi by the poet, the poem is full of war images: 'missile', 'arrow', 'threat', 'defused bomb'. Though included in the Shillong section of the book, the bamboo in the poem is a metonym for insurgency and separatism in the whole of the Northeast.
It is not only a reference to the temporary fencing constructed around the city for crowd control. It is also, possibly, a reference to bamboo flowering, a cyclical event that occurs every 48 years. 'When this happens, the flowers produce fruits whose protein-rich, avocado-like seeds are devoured by jungle rats and the rat population explodes,' writes journalist Alex Shoumatoff in a 2008 article. 'The rats go on to eat everything. They wipe out the villagers' crops and grain bins.'
When such an event occurred in 1959, thousands of residents in the current Indian state of Mizoram were killed by famine, leading to a rise in insurgency and separatism in the region. On March 5, 1966, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian Air Force to bomb the city of Aizawl, occupied partially by the insurgent Mizo National Front. Aizawl is about 350 km south of Shillong.
Another poem, 'Mr President is Coming', by poet and lyricist Akhu Chingangbam, reminded me of C.P. Cavafy's poem ' Waiting for the Barbarians'. Performed with Chingangbam's band Imphal Talkies, a verse of his song reads:
Hello, Mr. President,
Chief of the Army!
Every time you come you bring curfew
Hello, Policeman in the streets
Hello, men in green
This is my song for you
Sing with me!
Though this poem was included in the 2014 album, 'When the Home is Burning', it remains incredibly resonant even now. Manipur, of which Imphal is the capital, has been roiled by ethnic violence since May 2023. The cities in these poems become a site where the borders of the nation are contested.
At the same time, the large metropolitan cities of India, like Delhi and Mumbai, are also riven with borders. Marathi poet Narayan Surve's 'Mumbai' (translated into English by Jerry Pinto) is an example of how working-class people perceive the City of Dreams:
Sinews taut in shining calve, the workers humped their loads
In the water, I marked this tramp upon the weathered boards.
I am he, they are us, together we sculpt you, City.
Each day, we add our sweat and toil to making of your beauty.
For ourselves, we live in the chawls of Hell, we clean the dirt of your streets.
Then the police come and we become, the dirt of your streets
These lines are a stark image of how the very people — migrant labourers, construction workers — who build our cities are often shunted out of it. As a proletarian poet, who often lived in the chawls (slums) of Mumbai's working-class neighbourhoods, Surve presents a picture that is a far cry from the romanticised images of Kala Ghoda or Khan Market that crowd the poems of some of the other poets (including, at times, mine).
Urban studies scholar Gautam Bhan, in his book In the Public's Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi, writes: 'Indian cities… are being churned from inside out' by the process of 'urban restructuring through eviction.' The recent controversy over the development of Dharavi, often described as Asia's largest slum, located in Mumbai, or the evictions at the Madrasi camp in Delhi are only two examples that have made it to the news headlines.
Readers of this book will be compelled to reconsider how they experience their cities and how these experiences might be different from their fellow citizens. Its ability to provoke even an iota of empathy should be considered a success.
Uttaran Das Gupta is an Indian writer and journalist.
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