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The Wire
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Wire
Mapping Indian Cities, in Verse
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. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Word on the street: A delightful collection of poems celebrates Indian cities across 2,000 years
It began with a bout of homesickness. While studying for a degree in economics at Yale in late-2020, Bilal Moin began to feel a yearning for Mumbai. He sought refuge in poems about the city, initially turning to classics by Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla and Dom Moraes. After a while, he cast his net wider. Entering keywords into the university library archive, he discovered poets he had never heard of, their verses on Bombay preserved in journals and magazines long-since defunct. In 2023, he mentioned his 'Word document of homesick scribbles' to Shawkat Toorawa, a professor of comparative literature at Yale. 'He pointed out that, pretty much by accident, I had put together an anthology,' says Moin, speaking from Oxford, where he is now pursuing a Master's degree. Last month, that collection was released as a 1,072-page hardcover anthology: The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City. It holds 375 poems by 264 poets, translated from 20 languages. Readers can explore the very different Mumbais of the Jewish playwright and art critic Nissim Ezekiel and the Dalit activist Namdeo Dhasal. They can lament the loss of Shahjahanabad with the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Revisit the colonial-era Delhi of Sarojini Naidu, the Haridwar of Manjul Bajaj, or discover a tiny microcosm of India in Thangjam Ibopishak's Imphal. 'My hope is that as you travel through these poems,' writes Moin in the introduction, 'you will discover that within the magic, malice and masala of urban India, every city-dweller becomes, in their own way, a poet.' Centuries of verse 'on a scrap of dried out / soil under a dried up tree / a deer stands in the very centre of New Delhi…' the Polish poet Katarzyna Zechenter writes, in A Nilgai Deer in the City of Delhi. As his homesick search took him all over, picking what to include in the book, and deciding where to stop, was a huge challenge, Moin says. 'Penguin,' he adds, laughing, 'neglected to give me an upper limit for the number of poems I could include, and I took advantage of that and trawled as far and wide — geographically, linguistically and temporally — as possible.' The oldest poem in the collection is Pataliputra, an ode to that ancient Mauryan capital (and ancestor to modern-day Patna), written by Tamil Sangam poet Mosi Keeranar, sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE. 'May all of Pataliputra, swimming in gold, / where white-tusked elephants splash about / in the Sona River, be yours…' he writes. One of the most recent is Imphal as a Pond, by the 22-year-old queer activist Mesak Takhelmayum: 'My family is like the archipelago at Loktak, / if not the chains of islands in the great ocean far beyond these mountains, / in our separation, we yearn for one another / we yearn for water to connect us.' Jungle of people... Once he had a longlist ready, Moin spent weeks sending out hundreds of emails to poets and publishers, trying to work out how to get permission to feature each piece. 'I've featured writers who maybe had one or two poems published 15 years ago, and then seemingly never published again,' he says. 'So I had to send a lot of Facebook messages to people with similar names, saying 'Hi you don't know me, but are you this poet?'' He was determined that each poem be presented at its best, so he dug through multiple translations, and consulted with linguists, scholars or simply friends and acquaintances, to identify the best or most accurate recreations in English. There was a lot of debate over which translation of Tagore's two poems, Song of the City and The Flute, to choose. For the former, he chose the translation by William Radice: 'O city, city, jungle of people, / Road after road, buildings innumerable, / Everything buyable, everything saleable, / Uproar, hubbub, noise.' In loving memory As he read his way through centuries of verse, Moin says, he noticed something that thrilled him: over and over, certain cities inspired the same sentiment. Whether this was an effect of culture, literary mirroring or an idea that took root and spread, tracing these threads through time felt extraordinary, he says. Kolkata's poets tend to look at the city as a harsh mistress, their unrequited love for her both romantic and torturous. Mumbai poets struggle to come to terms with their city's glaring inequalities, and write of the difficulties of surviving in this maximal metropolis. As for Delhi, 'it doesn't matter if you're reading poetry from the 14th century or the 21st,' Moin says. 'The theme is always that this was once a great city, but it no longer is. And that one loves Delhi for its past.' 'A lot of fantastic gay poets, such as Hoshang Merchant and R Raj Rao, are featured in this collection,' Moin adds. 'It's interesting to see, through their eyes, how the city enables the marginalised to express themselves, while on the other hand still stifling them.' There are poets in these pages who are also activists and fighters, soldiers and sages, memory-keepers looking to record a city's present, its culture and its people, its quirks and flaws, before it is all erased and redrawn. But most poets in the anthology, Moin points out, are none of these things. They are simply the 'loafers' of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's imagination, drifting carefree through gardens, temples and lanes, finding ways to turn the minutiae of the everyday into art. As Nirupama Dutt puts it, in Laughing Sorrow: 'I will go to the poet of the city, / looking for life without restraint. / He will have half a bottle of rum / in one pocket and a freshly / written poem in the other.' Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
Scroll.in
16-06-2025
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Gopal Lahiri
Stories written by 'Frequently, heaven erupts': A new book of poetry takes readers across 37 Indian cities An excerpt from 'The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City', by Bilal Moin. Siddharth Dasgupta , Arun Kolatkar , Nandini Sen Mehra , Satya Dash , Malovika Pawar , Ashwani Kumar , Jayant Parmar , Riyaz Latif & Gopal Lahiri K Satchidanandan's poems in 'Questions from the Dead' confront the environmental crisis Plain-speaking and laconic, these poems speak the truth, they are not a source of comfort. Gopal Lahiri · Oct 30, 2021 · 05:30 pm
Scroll.in
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
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Siddharth Dasgupta
Stories written by 'Frequently, heaven erupts': A new book of poetry takes readers across 37 Indian cities An excerpt from 'The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City', by Bilal Moin. Siddharth Dasgupta , Arun Kolatkar , Nandini Sen Mehra , Satya Dash , Malovika Pawar , Ashwani Kumar , Jayant Parmar , Riyaz Latif & Gopal Lahiri The Art of Solitude: In these surreal times, John Coltrane's jazz is an invitation to believe As we flit between existential anxiousness and soulfulness within a chosen sanctuary, the American jazz legend is never too far away. Siddharth Dasgupta · May 30, 2020 · 11:30 am
Hindustan Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Cyber-fraud gang busted by Delhi Police; 2 arrested, Armyman among victims
A new anthology, "The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City," edited by Bilal Moin, features 375 poems from 37 cities, celebrating India's poetic heritage across 1,500 years. It includes works in English and translations from over 20 languages, showcasing both classical and contemporary poets. The 1062-page book is available for ₹ 1,999.
