In an article I wrote in December 2024, “Mumbai, Through its Poets”, I referenced the phenomenon of a Marathi poem published in 1946, that became a “literary event” The poem in question is B.S. Mardhekar’s “Pipaat Mele Olya Undir” (‘In Barrels Wet Rats Died’). I quote from that article:

B.S. Mardhekar’s poem ‘Pipaat Mele Olya Undir’, which he [Arun Kolatkar, in Kala Ghoda Poems] casually refers to here, is arguably the first real ‘decadent’, ‘urban’ poem in Modern Marathi Poetry.

In Barrels Wet Rats Died

In Barrels Wet Rats Died
Necks fell, without strangulation
On Lips, lips met
Necks fell, without desire
Poor, helpless, they lived in ratholes
In barrels, they died, hiccupping
Day spilled, out of their ash-grey eyes
Limbs and private parts washed clean
To live is a compulsion
To die is a compulsion
Sorrow has poisonous eyes,
but of glass
Honeyed honeycombs
set on lips
that too, of Bakelite, Bakelite!
On lips, lips touch
In barrels, rats bathed.
- Bal Sitaram Mardhekar

(This translation is mine. I have attempted to preserve the cadences of the original Marathi. I also share a translation, below, of the same poem, by Vinay Dharwadker (2017, “Mumbai’s Marathi modernists: A memoir from the margins”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing) As you can see Dharwadker’s approach is very different)

The publication of this poem, in 1946, in the Marathi literary magazine, Abhiruchi, acquired the status of a “literary event”. It heralded a new kind of writing, perhaps unwittingly serving as a critique of the lofty imaginations of an independent India. It quickly entered schoolchildren’s Marathi textbooks. Most Marathi speakers belt out the title ‘Pipaat Mele Olya Undeer’ without batting an eyelid when they hear Mardhekar’s name. Why did this become the defining poem for an entire generation of people in Mumbai?....

…Perhaps one of the reasons that this poem became a popular symbol for the urban condition in Mumbai Shehar is the spectacular use of metaphor. The entire poem is a metaphor for ‘‘living’’ and ‘‘dying’’, and Mardhekar’s pen doesn’t provide any explanation even until the end, essentially opening it up to a plethora of interpretations. Who are the rats? What is the barrel? Why is it wet? Why “Bakelite”? Without using any “emotion words”, completely relying on material details, Mardhekar managed to put his finger on the pulse of a people disillusioned by the promises of modern urban life. In his “city poems”, there are moments of wonder at technological advancement and the “factory”, but they are quickly muffled by the sounds of the siren that calls factory workers (including mill karamcharis) to work….”

Mardhekar’s poems are fascinating, for me, because of their deliberate “durbodh” (obscure) nature. I’m not a native Maharashtrian, but I have found Kolatkar’s marathi far more easier to access and translate – he spoke in the cadences of the “street”, even when he spoke about gods. Gods, stones, bus tickets, discarded condoms, and prawn shells, all lived along the same inventory, the same flat plane of matter and material “things” – humans are simply another entry in the list. But this poem by Mardhekar is another kind of inventory – a “heap of broken images”. Consider these lines:

Sorrow has poisonous eyes,
but of glass
Honeyed honeycombs
set on lips
that too, of Bakelite, Bakelite!
On lips, lips touch
In barrels, rats bathed.

I found a new take on “Bakelite” when I heard a deeply enriching interview of Mustansir Dalvi by Shalaj Lawania. [I must note here, that my fragmented interpretations of Pipaat come on the heels of multiple interpretations by learned Marathi scholars, and I use their work as springboards. My favourite among these is MV Dhond’s readings, who even cites a newspaper article by Vijay Tendulkar in one of his three interpretations of the poem]

The interview is a masterclass, blending Dalvi’s expertise and areas of interest including Art Deco, architecture, the ‘urban’, form and function, aesthetics, time, space, movements, urban design and the “social”, and architectural history.

Speaking about the historical context of “Art Deco” in 20^th century Bombay, Dalvi draws a compelling genealogy. I think it is worth quoting him in some detail below:

“What is Art Deco? Before we come to the schematics, we have to look at Art Deco a little bit from a historical point of view. At the beginning of the century in Europe, in the United States, and of course, by extension, in India, you had a phase where architects were looking, constantly looking at what was the best way to represent either their country or their times. And since the late 19th century, the argument was to choose a style from the past that best fit this story.

So the two major contenders for styles from the past that were chosen - one was the Neoclassical, which was buildings that look like the kind that the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans would have designed. And competing with that was the Neogothic, which was the medieval kind, you know, the architecture of cathedrals and things like that. And both these had their proponents and opponents.

And both these were practiced in large numbers, whether in the United States, in Great Britain, in Europe, or in India. And in the sort of overlapping of all of this, for more than a century, the Industrial Revolution had slowly overpowered almost every other older institution in Europe and so on. And what the Industrial Revolution did was brought in new ways of working, new forms of building and extreme urbanisation.

And a lot of these also got translated into new materials that would go into architecture [italics mine]. So the anachronism of using buildings from the past to make buildings for the present, such as, say, a railway station, which is built in the manner of a gothic cathedral, or a library, which is built in the manner of a Greek temple, was something that both architects and engineers felt really had no place in the early 20th century. So in 1925, an exhibition, an exposition was organised in Paris, in which the whole intention was that there should be nothing taken from the past.

It was kind of mandated that whatever you put up, you put up without reference to the past. And that actually gave an open field for a lot of people to do an amazing amount of experimentation and use new materials and use new stylings and new aesthetics and so on [italics mine]. And it is generally accepted that art deco emerges from the experiments of this exhibition.

And when the lessons from these exhibitions went back to America, to England, to other parts of Europe, a style which we now call art deco started to emerge in Europe and America in the 20s and in India, especially in Bombay, from about 1935 onwards. And this style used new materials of construction like RCC, reinforced cement concrete, other forms of new materials like tiles and ceramics and so on, glass, steel, metals, some sort of plastics, you know, bakelite [italics mine] and so on. And a completely different style because it no longer paid homage to the past in any way.”

It is particularly interesting to me that Dalvi’s description of the form bases the adoption of the “new” - departing with intention, from the past – in “material” terms. The emphasis is deliberate. Earlier in the interview, Dalvi describes Art Deco as the great leveller, showing how the form spread across classes. Even here the basis of his argument is “material”. He makes his point by starting from the aesthetic and functional balcony:

“They have done away with the sloping roof. But what they do instead is that in the art deco buildings you have these balconies that emerge as protectors of the walls. And these balconies are cantilevered out - which means they don’t have a support… and that is an amazing act of kalākāri… by the engineers and architects of the art deco… But that had a very important role to play because it gave you a middle space between inside and outside which was a wonderful place to be in [italics mine]. It protected the walls from the rains so you had less leakage. And it gave you a direct connection with the street - so you could communicate with somebody on the street... So it was a very very social architecture that came up [italics mine]. And because it came up in very, very large numbers, it also - and this is what differentiates Art Deco in Bombay from Art Deco in New York - it is everyman’s architecture. It is not the architecture of the elite. Art Deco Buildings come across classes. And because of the RCC it becomes very easy for even people with lesser means to build something like this”

Again, Material. The “new” architecture derives its ubiquitousness and superfluity with the reliable economy of representative RCC. I implore you to note the material basis of the social, through the argument and gaze of the architect. I invoke this mode in poetry.

Mardhekar’s rats soused in barrels, have eyes of glass – sorrow’s “poisonous eyes”, and “honeyed honeycombs” set on lips, made of “bakelite”. Bakelite is that object that is decisively of its time. It is a synthetic completely human-made substance with applications that range from household appliances, to insulators and partitions, car parts, coverings and fixtures. In fact, it was the first plastic made from synthetic components in the early 20th century. This is, in many ways, the representative “glue” of a “new architecture” – and this is the urban condition fragmented into eyes of glass, sweetness of honeycombs, and lips of bakelite. What an image! An object can tell a story – many lives and cultural histories are embedded in its particular contours. What sets on the lips - as “bakelite” - tells the story of a people whose lives have been forced into a rhythm and a form, a synthetic form. This form has excess, and contradiction. The bakelite is synthetic, like the buildings that house their “work” and “life”. I use “synthetic” here to mean more than artificial or plastic. I invoke the power of “synthesis” - the power of combining elements to make a coherent, complete whole. The honeycombs are like the windows of a chawl – the many windows, like lighted eyes in the new faces of the city, and in each home the wonder object (or a similar cousin) pervades – bakelite. Read today, the city emerges with a kind of retro feel – of familiar, glitzy oldness – much like the object itself.

“Form ever follows function”

In his other poems, Mardhekar describes the exteriors of buildings in places in Bombay – the windows and roofs of residential buildings in Girgaum, for example. Poetry has had a long association with architecture, and there is a need for a deep exploration of architectural exposition in the poems of the Bombay poets. Mehrotra speaks about “mapping” and “Google maps” as a defining impulse of the Bombay Poets, but the internal and external architecture of buildings, the great crumbling and resilient edifices of the city, are re-enervated in their verse, both Marathi and English. There are references to these in various scholars’ writings, but I am convinced that the architectural moments and movements could be traced comprehensively through multilingual “city” poems - from Chitre to Mehrotra, Mardhekar to Karandikar and Surve, Desouza to Silgardo, and others (in Gujarati and Urdu, too).

In the interview, Lawania cites Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous assertion that “every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet”, and speaks to Dalvi about the association of his hybrid practice of poetry and architecture. He quotes an excerpt from Louis Sullivan’s iconic article, The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered (1896), where he proposes the now-popular maxim “Form ever follows function”. Lawania’s question is brilliantly phrased, citing Sullivan, and others, establishing the complexity of how “form” interacts with “function” in architecture. I cite the Sullivan quote in full:

“Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.
It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognisable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”

Lawania follows the reading with probing questions about the relationship between form and function – the chicken and egg conundrum. But Dalvi, before addressing this conceptual complex head on, comments on the poetic intensity of the Sullivan quote: “Before I get into it, I would just like to say that… you asked me about architecture and poetry; what you have just read is as fine a form of poetry as any… you know… and Sullivan could really write well”. He then enters into a discussion of the principle, using Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings as an example of a synthesis of form and function. Dalvi explains how, to a very large extent, Wright designed everything in his buildings; “not only the exterior architectural form, but he also designed the interior spaces. He designed furniture, he designed carpets, he designed wall hangings, sculptures, brought in paintings, he designed door handles… everything.”

He conceptualises this vision of complete synthesis with an exciting “poetics” (poetics as ‘making’) – “Now that is what in German is called a “Gesamtkunstwerk” – which means a “complete work of art”. And in that, form and function are indistinguishable from each other… To a very large extent Art Deco aspires to that same thing. To being a complete work of art.” Dalvi goes on to give the example of the Eros theatre building showing how the interior, the various spaces, are as important as the exterior of the building. Earlier in the interview he brings up the “cinema theatre” as one of three categories that used the Art Deco form distinctively (along with residential buildings and office buildings). He says, “There is a word for cinema theatres of that time, they’re called “picture palaces”. That’s literally the reason why these buildings are so distinctive. They’re like little palaces.”

I absolutely adore this progression of ideas. Gesamtkunstwerk or the complete work of art, is practically idealistic in a way that deepens the architectural gaze of the artist, and the writer. In an age that venerates the fragment, the palatial completeness – the spirit of ‘totality’ – stands tall. Gesamtkunstwerk is also translated as “total work of art”. It has an energy of aggregation, reminiscent of the intricate details, the human and more-than-human layers of Bosch’s paintings. The “picture palace” is a startling exposition of this, that can only be experienced – from entrance, lobby, waiting area, auditorium, and finally, to exit. The body is a vessel for that experience. When we watch the film, we experience both tranquillity and chaos. We enter the lobby of Eros theatre from the exterior of traffic, sea breeze, and sweat. How beautiful, to think of the building - the “picture palace” - as a cocoon for the film! In its metonymic expanse, the film is an act of world-making. Dalvi’s particular historical context of the last century (both Eros and Metro opened to the public in 1938) curates the dreams and aspirations of a new nation, a new “city”, and a new architecture, that was spurting into modernity; with the chutzpah of Bakelite!

He talks of the theatres promoted by the big Hollywood studios (Metro for example), and the larger-than-life glam and glitz of Bombay cinema. In many ways the complete experience of Eros and Regal prepared viewers for the final experience of watching the film – an artifice of the hyperreal. I see Dalvi’s Gesamtkuntswerk – the picture palace – as a synthesis of dream and reality, imagination and empiricism, through material. You enter the “picture palace” not to forget your reality, but to resolve it in the darkness of the majestic cinema theatre, in the seat of comfort where you could consider the entire arc of life itself. In all the metaphors and analytics that are assigned to Bombay cinema – including Debashree Mukherjee’s “hustle” – the picture palace as a “complete work of art”, the place of viewership as a kind of temple to the visceral transcendence of the cinematic text, is a compelling one. Dalvi’s analysis is not metaphorical – rather it has a force of “synthesis”, which allows me to extend it, and apply it. This is quite different from the Deleuzian “complete artist”, wherein “blocs of sensation” seem to be embedded within the performance. But the architecture of a complete work of art arrives from the outside in – the sheath of the building is built around the imagined movement and navigation of the singular inhabitant (aggregated as ‘crowd’ and ‘audience’).

Isn’t it fascinating that this “outside”, this form – the consideration with which it is designed – can modulate light and darkness, air and temperature, texture and shape to make you “feel” differently? In many ways the senses are curated by architecture, feeling and sensation are “designed” by the material structure.

In poetry, the paragraphs are described as “stanzas”, and “stanza” is the Italian word for “room”. In good poetry that makes the reader feel, the architecture of the poem is indistinguishable from its content. One complements the other, and you can’t speak about one, without speaking about the other. I quote a stanza from a review I wrote for Saranya Subramanian’s debut collection of poetry. I wrote the review as a zuihitsu, and the form derived organically; to speak about poetry, through poetry: “sometimes, a world grows in the outstretched branch of your verse. sometimes, a word flowers into the fungus of language. almost art. but useful. not enough people speak about how poetry can be useful. [italics mine]’. In Dalvi’s discussion of form and function he says something prescient which I invoke as a methodology to think of the “architecture” of poetry, the “use” of poetry. “Buildings will never be allowed to be built if they are not safe, stable, or functional. But the connection between safety, stability, and function, and the way the building looks – is a cultural thing. There’s no automatic connection.”

The function of poetry is history, and ethnography, biography and cartography. The function of poetry is a synthesis of language and feeling – form and architecture. The poem is a “structure of feelings”, after all; a sensory build-ing. Each part has its function in the totality of the poem. Sometimes we don’t know when one part begins, and the other, ends. The connection between the parts is not always natural or sequential or “automatic” – but there is a connection nevertheless. The extension of this metaphor – here it is a metaphor with pedagogic significance – allows for ways of thinking about the relationship between language and cultural context, but also the movement of words, from the head, to the heart and soul, to the fingers, to the page, and the final movement from the page to the reader’s senses, their imagination, and to their lived experience. This is the journey, and I have attempted only a glimpse of this journey. This is the material architecture of poetry that lives in the writing, the reading, and the reciting.

Note: Mustansir Dalvi is an architect, professor at Sir JJ School of Art, Architecture and Design, author and poet. All of his quotes have been taken from the fabulous discussion with Shailaj Lawani. As I have mentioned, the discussion is comprehensive, and Lawani asks layered questions, invoking varied thinkers, architects, artists, and contexts. I have only highlighted fragments from the interview, to emulate the methodology of Dalvi’s exploration and research - his storytelling. There were other fascinating snippets for the curious researcher - For instance: The landmark Marg Issue: Bombay: Planning and Dreaming (Vol. 18 No. 3), 1965 (edited by Mulk Raj Anand) that featured a plan for Greater Bombay by Charles Correa, Pravina Mehta and Shirish B. Patel. This original visionary plan for Navi Mumbai continues to be referenced by architects across the world.

I urge you to take this opportunity to delve into the entire video.

I hope you are finding the space to rest and to create.

Write to me at aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.

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The event was superbly attended - a packed hall on a Wednesday evening is testament to the commitment of rasiks, activists, journalists, artists, intellectuals and scholars, who know and love the work of the lokshahirs, and of “lokkavi” Narayan Surve’s ideals. I felt something miraculous that evening - a community of people whose deep passion intertwined with a politics of freedom. The recitations, songs, and stories, curated by the mercurial Sutradhār Yuvraj Mohite, filled with collegiality, sharp satire, informed critique, and shared epiphanies, had us entranced for a couple of hours. In that room, I saw the flaring flags of Ambedkar and Marx, Krantikāri Jai Bhim, and Satrangi Salām.

But the thing that keeps coming back to me is the Golden Chain of poets, writers, and singers, the historical continuity of artists, from the last century (and before that) up until the present. This continuity emerged as a living, breathing entity that evening; in the dialogic imagination of the speakers, in their memories, in the timbre of their voices - at times trembling with emotion, and at times, strong as a foghorn - and in the intimate, shared stories of fights against censorship, struggles for the rights of workers, destitute, and women. This was the voice of experience. of having lived and seen, of the practice and art of education, organisation, and agitation. The powerful spectre of the “outlaw” and the “vate”, in their truest, most beautiful forms - those who looked beyond, who subverted the might of capital and tyranny - was standing tall before me, in the smoke and storm of those dancing words.

I wrote a Zuihitsu (that wants to be a koan) about the experience, in the context of varied pasts, presents, and futures of poetry.

This is for the organisers and speakers, inspired by the stories they shared: Sambhaji Bhagat, Pradnya Daya Pawar, Akshay Shimpi, Neeraja, Yuvraj Mohite, Kailas Waghmare, Chinmay Sumit & Deepak Rajyadhyaksha.

Chāvdi

-  a tribute to Chāvdi, “Thoda Sa ‘Gunha’ Karnaar Aahe” – a gathering in the memory of Narayan Surve, presented by Padmashri Daya Pawar Pratishtan, on June 3rd, 2026 at Narendra Ballal Sabhagruh, Thane.
 

when the mallet hits the gong a sun is born. the sun that forks into moons in the lokshahir's eyes. bhakri and chalwal are roasted on the same tawa. 

And his hair. like the unfurled wings of a falcon, ripples into the open mouths of those who are watching, with laughter and memory caught in their throats.

this is the chāvdi, the koodal, the meeting place. these are the horizons ahead of us. and they swell outwards in concentric circles extending beyond suvarna babasaheb's fogged up glasses, beyond surve master's mousy face upturned towards the clarion of progress. beyond the thief who turned poet when he stole into the poet's house.

The Writing On The Wall is an Apology. It's only mistake is that it is in verse. No government can contain the verse. It is the oldest joke in the world. to be in verse.

When the thief came to Ryokan's house, he found nothing. Ryokan was sitting outside cross-legged in the courtyard, looking up at the lone moon; naked, like the day he was born. His white robes were folded before him, a gift for the thief, lest he were forced to return empty handed. He looked at the disappointed youth with a sadness that split the night's inkblack pupil.
As the clouds cleared
the old monk
bathed in moonlight
quietly said:
I have nothing for you, earnest thief
If only
I could have gifted you 
this silver moon.

In the bard's ululating voice, in the young turk's swaying lavani, in the journalist's reassuring interludes that fable into laughter, in the actor's sentimental bravado, in the prostitute's letter home, in the kabutar's companionship, in sur and desh, kaal and kaalokh, in the activitist's defiance of the censor, in the poster with half a sickle flapping in the breeze,
the comrade
arises.

Marx stands up and tells Mardhekar that his ovis aren't saucy enough. Lal Singh Dil flays his heart out, and shows Surve his palm on which is carved out, a crescent. As his words soar to the ceiling - the time waits to be reminded of its cyclicality.

In that room, oh what rooms were there, what rooms. When they sentenced him to death Bhagat Singh let out a great big guffaw. The room remembers. All rooms remember. war rooms, drawing rooms, rooms where desire goes to hide, where boredom turns inside out and becomes epiphany. 

One room is all rooms. what rooms we sit in, where the song reverberates around a circular stage, decades curl like peeling plaster, and the second hand whirls back to 30 years, then 40, then 50. and we are born again in the translation of music
into time. 

yesterday i understood the meaning of prayer. when one poet reads another, the bodies of all the other poets sitting at the round table become bells, a chorus of gongs. the ones who are not reading - they mouth what the reader speaks. possessed. and all their lips shape the message that slowly floats before them. 

outside, the breeze rustles the leaves. a danger wind is coming, Surve master. and revolution is brewing right at the heart of government, at the epicentre, in the room 
of power. 

a poem is a switch. a deadman's switch. if it is triggered, it has the power to turn back time. a poem is prophecy turned inside out. 

I hope the day is kind to you, and you are finding the space to rest
and to create.

Write to me @
aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
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I thought of sea-walls and droplets of blood astride slashing kaththis, of laughter and its cousin- slaughter. But slaughter doesn’t enter this conversation innocently. There is an “origin story” cited to sprout Mehta’s fascination with the figure of the bull - apparently he had witnessed, and even filmed, the death of a bull; and this image - its punctum, had a deep impact on his psyche.

While bulls are ever-present in his paintings - distorted and contorted bodies, flayed by his inclines - this was visible, with astounding frisson, to me in his visceral film Koodal. I had witnessed this film for the first time, only a couple of weeks ago. A friend - an art historian whose eyes grow wide with wonder at art that moves - had told me simply: “You see the film then we’ll talk”. When I did finally see it, I sat through it three times, in immediate succession. I had a tremendous urge to sing along its visual melody, to limn with poetry, its chiaroscuro montage.

So that is what I did.
Some works of art don’t allow the “critical” gaze to contaminate their spreading wings of fire and smoke. I feel this often - the urge to write - but this singular impulse is grounded firmly in the erratic surge of the poetic image, not in the analytical heft of critical writing (there is a time and place for this, of course). In Koodal, Mehta is writing into the city, into violence, and the crowd. So I wrote alongside his film - I wrote into his city, and its haunting metronomic mridangam, with fingers prancing on the tautness of animal hide; with words springing forth from the ancient archives of 1970s traffic, and percussive throngs, funeral processions, protests and “flagellations”; flights of birds, and fornication of cattle, and, of course “the disorderly crowd”.

I slip through his words, his images, his “gesture(s) without meaning”. One line from his friend Krishen Khanna’s account of Mehta stayed with me, and became the seed of the Villanelle - “not sentimental at all, but full of feeling". Khanna was talking about his paintings. This phrase became the central pillar around which the chaotic images, swirling through material and memory, found their centripetal sense of belonging.

The form of the villanelle emerged organically, mirroring the angular, cyclical movement in Mehta’s images. Sometimes, form seeps into theme, without asking.

(Sidenote: A villanelle I go back to, often, is Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, and its movement of feeling and language, throbs at the foundation of the form, for me.)

Koodal or The Shape of Sound
~ Aranya Padil

after Tyeb Mehta

(Stitched together from the fragments of the Films Division commissioned 1970 Tyeb Mehta Film Koodal*)

"not sentimental at all, but full of feeling" 
- Krishen Khanna on his dear friend Tyeb Mehta's paintings

*From the Title Card – 
“KOODAL” 
IS A TAMIL WORD
WHICH MEANS
A MEETING POINT,
THE UNION
AN ASSEMBLY OF IMAGES" 

It’s not water at all      but a whisper   full of longing  
Not the ear    nor the crowd    but its vanishing    full of body   
What remains behind    is the sound    of its thronging

A shard escapes the open mouth    not the song     but its songing
A crow falls from the sky    a slow hurtle     both lightening and toddy
No heaven-spilt river this     just a flickering eye    limned with belonging  

Bodies stacked together   like matchsticks    like clockhands   fondling
What takes the shape of its container   not these tears    vulgar and bawdy
In the evening sky     No feathers remain   only the sound  of this thronging

A blue fist tears open a wall of pigeons    this sky unseams   the city’s jostling
Death empties the gravid streets of all language    death of thought    not of body
Not water at all      But the shape    of sound is a murmur    braised with longing  

Thrashing cattle thrashing gandhis thrashing seas     This memory prolonging
I thought the noisy streets would rise again in my throat   How tawdry
this torrential scream   this everlasting night     this whisper   full of longing  

The days perambulate   the peeling shrine  Men spring askew of Zebra crossings
The oblong sea      is a wanderer   an aspirant   a gully boy  in white khadi
It’s not water at all      this city   but a whisper   full of longing  
What remains behind   in the place’s memory   is the sound    of its thronging

If you are in Delhi, make sure you visit this gorgeous curation. I am sure, the show will travel too, to other Indian cities.

I beseech you to experience the film - it is a masterpiece. Read the poem, if you will, and the mountains of feeling that move with tectonic heft, behind the words…..

I hope the day is kind to you, and you are finding the space to rest
and to create.

Write to me @
aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.

Buy Me a Coffee

Do share this with anybody you think might be interested. A couple of reiterations:

- Only the funds raised from this intensive will be utilised for a Manohar Shetty publication. Not the content or anything produced from the workshop itself.
- This decision is part of a larger effort to foreground the work of Indian English Poets, and to apply tools generated in close reading, that help us write into experiences, and those imagined spaces that are difficult to bring into language and narrative.
- This workshop is NOT only for those people who “identify” as poets, or even “writers”. In fact, artists and creative folk, who count themselves as “not familiar” with “poetry” would really enrich the space :)

I hope the day is kind to you

Write to me @
aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.

Buy Me a Coffee

neurospicy
 ~ aranya

like blue neutrino but almost. I mean to say we are the world we are the people. in the cavernous grottos of our sinuses, engines of desire strobe into vision. we are the feeble fire that crackles in the mushrooming dark without knowing until it’s too late to turn back turn tail. assail. let the armies of our dissent pillage the conversation. 

our minds sizzle with turntable music, with the soft percussive thump that grows larger with time. the way owls’ eyes glow in the dark. the way a small village is wiped off the face of the earth as the world looks elsewhere. 

imagine a cat firecracker-ing across the blue pupil of the sky, its tail a festoon stolen from an afternoon dream, from which the girl with the blue lapis earring wakes up smiling. alive in the grass, she is born again in the gazes of everybody who is not looking. When she yelps in surprise at the red ants gathering around her grandmother’s toe-ring—the little rascals, like shameless relatives eyeing the silver heirloom at the wake, are drunk on the job. how grief comes knocking after death, catapulting despair into the commerce of relationships. 

call that a 'friendship economy', you bigot. Is it not beautiful that the word for the celebration of something finishing is the same as this tired body greeting the day?

her laughter is ordinary. cliche as a meme. not the kind that grabs you by the scruff of your imagination and hurls you into space the interface the everlasting scroll. as I drive I swipe past the empty windows with my ring finger. I dismiss the 1x1 kholis that are yet to be christened. 

inhabiting a home is giving absence a name. This city is a lexicon of people who have left. For one reason or another. Slowly, one language dies, making way for another. 

Speak to us of those times? Remind us how they went. tell us of patience, and what it meant to pry open the vocabulary to speak to the detritus. Have you walked past the construction sites? Have you stared into the rotting maws of this metropolis? where even the speed breakers are patriotic? Jai Ho.

Have you seen the chocolate-box architecture of cement-pools? The dambar has to cool before it can serve its purpose. Before it firms up under the feet of those who will build this city. they sell their souls to the moloch of the future. they offer up their years of waiting in one quiet conspiratorial whisper. their fate is worse then Sisyphus. not fire. but jalbandhan.

the kennel tick hangs from a blade of grass. it spends its entire life in wait for the dog who pants past, tongue out like a divining rod; and in that moment, legs outstretched, it discovers the gift of that quiet furry heat, the oblivious hospitality of its host. I think sometimes, a tick sucking blood out of a brown dog, might have been love, if it did not hurt. but then what love does not hurt. 

there is a chilli that grows in the konkan. its red tail is a question. you’d think it is the destiny of the konkan chilli – the bedagi – to be crushed in a flaming union with coconut. but I am its tyrant. its death is significant only to me. it is the memory of my grandmother that gives this dish its taste. the chilli attained the absolution of its breed when it started to shrivel. I merely honour the corpse.

such a naughty word – spice. garland me now with the quiet mischief of your lips. pucker up in my hands, grow long with the weeping day. chase me in my dreams. laugh at my earnest disappointments, tease out the morning when I first saw you open your eyes before me, when i learnt that melancholy was more persistent than joy. when i laboured to grip its damp shock of longing, when I held you in that sweet despondence. 

tease out the smallness of that despair. when I learnt you were no goddess. merely flesh and bone, and breathing breast; a world I could never know outside of your eyes. only love could sit in that crevice left behind by immortality. sometimes the small god of beginnings vanishes like a thought.* 

our love is the aftershock. we are surprised by our own smallness. grateful to hold the other’s, grateful that they chose us to share it with; 

grateful that we could see the strangeness of our lovers vanish like a thought.  

*i invoke vinod kumar shukla’s explosive “vah aadmi naya garam coat pehenkar chala gaya vichar ki tarah”… in my translated borrowing…..

in the last few days people have been writing in, asking me about the book, “Where Can i find your poetry?” Just to reiterate - the book is available on amazon here.
If you don’t like Amazon you can buy the book on the Copper Coin Website here . (Please note you can also place international orders on the Copper Coin Website! :)

i hope the days are kind to you

Write to me @
aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.

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Poet and editor Kunjana Parashar, conducted an interview of me, framing piercing questions that made me dig deep about my writing practice. I don’t think I’ve ever been so candid while speaking about the craft, about feeling - its role in creative praxis, and about my experiences as an artist writing into the contemporary.

Interested folk can read it by clicking on this button below

An Interview with Poet Aranya Padil

Sharing a poem from the collection.

This post is essentially a love letter to you dear reader. In the hope that the art in its soaring leads to more connections at the altar of poetry. I’m truly eager to meet friends, and readers, and hear responses at these events. I’ve learn, over the last decade, that the poem is only completed, in the imagination of its reader.

i hope the day is kind to you

Write to me at aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.

Buy Me a Coffee

The azaan is never a stranger, and there is a muezzin in my neighbourhood who has mastered the movement of sound from tongue to sky. It is not recorded, of this I am sure. Some mornings, I hear a hoarseness, perhaps, when delhi crowds around the man’s throat. That is when he dislodges this kankar of a city from his throat, with god’s instruction.

As is my habit, I follow the stone with my kharaj voice, it traces the fuzzy contours of the raag’s ascent. It is mostly Bhairavi, but on some days, perhaps, when he’s feeling a bit intoxicated by the prophecy that is this divine errand, his voice strays, and the melody squirms in his breast. It is in that beautiful mistake, that he acknowledges the crowd. In that moment of kansur, the azaan soars, and embraces the others, murmurating along the rooftops.

The azaan is a horde, a joy-battalion of sleepless eyes, bursting with wonder, as ankles click on the tips of barsaatis and balconies. The city wakes up in this unwieldy Babel, a teetering tower of invocation, spiring into song, in the enigmatic architecture of prayer.

I want to tell this world of hate to wake up early, like I do. To listen to that which is natural, which recedes into the environment, without bells or clamour. So loud it is, and so comforting - the azaan, of fajr. Prayer is better than sleep. The thing that i have envied my pious friends is the conviction, the resilient backbone that faiths their belief. Every morning this melody teaches me of that which is natural, in the way that Tibetan prayer flags in the highest cliffs, are natural, not an aberration.

I woke up this morning to two articles. One, about a joke of a film, that caricatures young Muslim men from the most beautiful, developed and intelligent state in this country, casting them as ferocious, manipulative sons of bitches (this is not new, of course). And the other, about “the upstander effect”, about how more ordinary people around the country are standing up to Hindutva terror. It was posed in the form of a question, that headline: Are More People Finally Pushing Back Against Hate? And then I listened to Arundhati Roy embracing her position as a “slave” pushing back against the “king” of “instant-mix imperialism”, back in 2003, in a speech at Riverside Church, Harlem, New York.

Many years ago, I remember an interview where Shah Rukh Khan says that when you are down, you should look for places where you know you will be loved. The world is falling apart, wokebois are screaming urban loneliness, and even international announcements of solidarity sound feeble. In this precarious, swaying root bridge of survival, I cling to this azaan like an intimate friend, a confidānt, more real, even, than the kiss of a lover.

As you might have surmised I live in an area surrounded by masjids. The people here love feeding me, and there is barkat in the streets, during the month of ramzan. Most evenings you will see Muslim neighbourhoods dancing in the raunak of slowly cooked beef, and sizzling chashni samosas. Families, young lovers, and mischievous youth, flood the streets - aaj rang hain, their footsteps echo.

I have found that this impulse is contrary to the brahminical habit of austerity, and discipline; of staying at home, once it is dark. This punctures the “purity” premise of upper-caste propriety. At the risk of romanticisation, and queer appropriation, I choose to see this celebration with the nous of resistance. I need to see it this way. This is all I have. These friends of bread and music, these comrades who teach me love.

The azaan is always filial, where I live in delhi. It slips from the muezzin’s throat into the atmosphere, and blends with a percussion you’re only likely to hear in DDA flat colonies: a flimsy plastic pipe rattling in Sul taal against the water tank it services, every morning when the water comes, like a woodpecker’s existential search for food.

The azaan searches for its friends, and I listen, every morning to how even the birds, and the cats, have grown accustomed to its circadian consistency. I admonished myself this morning for waking up late to this festival of that which is divine, that which is more-than-human.

But as i walk towards the chai stall during my morning stroll, I see the interlocked fingers of my plumber with his friend the local contractor. They are just returning from Sehri. Perhaps they are complaining about their wives, or about the state of the country. But there is love, even in the complaint that rises from the throat, after tasting the food of God.

Ramzan Mubarak, friends.

i hope the day is kind to you

Write to me at aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.

Buy Me a Coffee

Perhaps the kindest thing I can say to you, Saranya, is that you are the needle of a barometer—a barometer of this time. Your pen writes truths too fresh for poetry, and too searing for the tongue. For long, I have thought of you without thinking about what I have thought of you: as a symptom of the present. and now you give me this gift - this absence. Perhaps this is the kindest I can be to you. But perhaps it is also a curse. And for this, I am sorry. I cannot lie.

do you know the feeling like a speeding wrist that grips the neck of an untether'd thought. not imagination, but its seed. that dandelions. when you are watching a horror film, say. before the knife is thrust, and the hurly burly's done, say. before the hero screams go back to pakistan. you have an epiphany, and the time hiccups. after reading your ghazal, i had that feeling. for a moment, i tasted the blue of your absence. and i came here. to write. a note to the moment. 

as i walk through this world i confront two kinds of knowledge. the scholar speaks of completion, of arresting reality within the prison of the noun. but you, dear poet, are the open window. i climb on the ledge of your metaphor, and fly into the sky that is your line-break. I verb into freedom in your absence. 

your poems speak of distance, from the self. your poems speak of the self, that is distant. your poems
speak

to walk your city is to detonate a dream. to walk, no, to crawl, with your monkeys and lizards, and your lightning-bolt fruit-flies, more human than man. that horrible stalker - in your city even the billboards cry, and their tears are a darkness beyond all light. van gogh taught me that melancholy is a mural of nights more dense and textured than the flat day of joy. and when i read you. i sense, again, the presence of that colour. melancholy has possibility. joy is flat.

a therapist once told me about radical honesty. a professor once told me about how the nation is written on a woman's body. there is a poem in your collection that defies both. there is a poem in your collection that tells the story of this country through a to-do list of heartbreaks. some people call it little deaths. like the end of being fucked. more uncertain than a comma. like forgetting to put on the alarm clock. maybe you stayed awake, so that the streets could sleep. maybe, without knowing, you became an accomplice in the criminal offence of care. what does it mean to write a history of the present. what does it mean. to be absent.

i don't like navi mumbai because it is all squares. shiny edges and glistening glass. i like your poems because they have holes. so many holes. cracks that allow the light to shine through. a debut must be raw, no? flawed, unkempt, bursting with meaning, and lust. hold this close now. it is broken. and it can only be fixed by the reader's eyes. what can i do inside a room whose door is closed. hold this close this invitation, this open window. and promise me you won't disown it. not years later. not ever.

It had to have copper pods didn't it? :)

sometimes, a world grows in the outstretched branch of your verse. sometimes, a word flowers into the fungus of language. almost art. but useful. not enough people speak about how poetry can be useful. and for this, dear saranya, i offer my thanks.

i don't see you. i don't know where you've been. but
i know where you'll be. and that is enough.

there is such a thing as a lower-case poet. hmmm.

sanjana needed some space and  
surya just wanted a pretty face
(by god) 
but with a kind heart, sweet as honey,
no one's more misunderstood than shani.

sometimes i think i could live a whole life in the space of a line. sometimes the copywriters get it right. sometimes a poet can write an advertisement for life. and then you better shut up. and listen. 

The blasphemy. Entire histories can be written in verse. inverse. it could be verse. stay with the line, the capital in capitalism, the italic in idyll. stay with the line dear friend. you are too close to the edge. don't look down. those big eyes cannot unsee the truth. stay with the line. language is your only friend. trust me. all life is temporary. that is what makes it eternal.

the blue we see is illusion. but it takes you by the hand. and in describing the illusion, you start to understand the artifice. this is craft. this is craftiness. this is emotion. not sensation. that's what makes it click. that's why you are blue. that's why i am blue. just blue.

can you bring me home? you will hate me. i know. but let me ask you. is there anything more mischievous than writing into you? i could not stop myself. perhaps writing is another form of reading? perhaps even this could be a prayer... i love how the akkam of your sentence turns into the puram of your pause. it is unbelievable what you do. it is uncanny that you, impertinent comma, hold a thousand years in your fingers. what pen did you use what punctuation you wrought, what language you fought, to write, what you write, today.

how to lick the walls/ of darkness dry. how to paint solace with the hues of the crowd. how to draw eyes for waterholes. how to wait. for the question to reveal itself?

Saranya Subramanian’s fiery debut collection of poetry, Absent People, Absent Places, can be purchased online on Amazon

i hope the night is kind to you

Write to me @
aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.

Buy Me a Coffee

It started as the horn of a luxury bus - a tune - Main jat yamla pagla deewana…

…As is my unconscious habit, during walks, I started humming this tune in my head. It hadn’t reached my lips yet (when you recognise your quirk of routinely breaking into song in public, or suddenly reciting poems aloud to remember them, after a point you start to make notes to yourself to curb the impulse. you learn to sing, and commit newly composed lines to memory, without opening your mouth). But as i improvised the tune in my head, something strange and beautiful happened. It has happened before - but for the first time, perhaps, I was able to capture it with the eye of the mind, in medias res…

The tune seeped into a string of fairy-lights that ogive’d on the walls of a church - you know, how lights adorn the white facades of churches before christmas. I had seen that particular series of lights, blazing, like stunned fireflies, the previous night. A friend had pointed it out to me then - perhaps she had set off a train of thought that travelled between the different senses - she vocalised the lights as “tain tain tain”, with a hand gesture mimicking the refrain of the reverse bell curve pattern. Now, as I saw those little bulbs, filaments cooling off from the previous night’s labour, still caged in that same pattern, a tune different from the visual vernacular of her “tain tain tain” entered the consciousness of my ken, unbidden.

It was a beautiful moment - that collision of light-sounds.
I swear. I felt… another tune….

aaj rang hain…

18th Dec. 2025

Essentially, music is an augury. Not merely second sight. It senses the world anew. It apprehends the visual - what has not been seen - and in this, it is prophetic. The sound of longing is the orchestra - and what an orchestra it is. This chorus of voice, conjured up from metal and wood, and taut strings untwang’d, this crowd of birds forged in the studio of the poet’s imagination; this harmony of dissonant sighs… see how it entreats, how it asks you to cradle its silence. See how it longs for sight. Every day the music speaks. In the breast of the lark, and the sunbird, the koyal and the cricket who sits in the grass propositioning his mate, in an unabashed screech of desire. The music whispers in the wind that turns into revelry.

It breaks the chain of thought

The music sits inside you, and brings silence to the table, as pause.
And pause is what augurs the anticipation of rhythm. As social commentators, we speak about the rhythms of the urban, and the pulse of the everyday. But it is such an affective phenomenon, rooted in feeling, and in language.

I wrote about this in a homage to the poet Vinod Kumar Shukla in Outlook. The “everyday” and the “ordinary” are words that are used to describe Shukla’s quiet poetry and prose, by several commentators. I am fascinated by the way in which he hollows out the everyday too (as different from the “ordinary”) - with the presence of characters, and the unexpected dissolution of archetypes. Shukla embodies, for me, this epiphany of “second sight” as a narrative phenomenon, more than one driven by sensation (as a unit of experience).

But sensation doesn’t exist independently of the world and its objects of stimulus. Shukla’s work is fascinating, because it breaks down the impossibility of sensation responding to object in isolation, through the careful sequencing of phrase units, and the rhythmic, but abrupt completion, that is ensnared in pauses, and punctuation. In doing so, he teaches a quality of attention that is nuanced, and sensitive to both the lived experience of the sensing body, and the mutable nature of the object that is sensed into being through poetry. This is a unique poetics, and I am reminded of “Alberto Caeiro” (as we know, a creation of Pessoa’s) - the writer who I like to describe as “the impossible poet”. Like Shukla’s perceptive vision of slow-moving (extra)ordinariness of everyday objects, people and places, Caeiro’s poetics was “sensationist” in that it gently scratches at its surface until it replaces the “empirical” with a “philosophy of seeing” but also of “being”. I had tried to share this method, when I wrote a commentary on the poem that was the title of his debut collection. My Outlook article refers to this too, so perhaps the time has come to move beyond it :)

After reading and translating Shukla’s poems these last few years, I feel that I have still only scratched the surface of his language of expression, and his “rhythms”. As a percussionist of the great concert of the world, Shukla’s music is also a kind of second sight. Like Caeiro, he teaches me that the object doesn’t live outside its imprint. It is born through association and through the background of thought, landscape, and sensation, that it inhabits. The man in the “fog” of Shukla’s poem lives in the “smear” of the “man”. And the “smear” deepens into the entire universe.

Sharing another favourite poem by Vinod Kumar Shukla, and my translation, in tribute, below.

In parting, perhaps to sweeten the sorrow we are left with through Shukla’s passing, I share a poem by the thoughtful poet Amlanjyoti Goswami. I was overjoyed to see Amlan enter a poem by Shukla, since there are some definite influences in his writing styles, made all the more beautiful with his characteristic non-sequitorial surprising turns of phrase and nous. Reading Amlan’s poem again, as I share it this time, it put me into a pleasant reflection about the poets we come to read and love - and how they sit on our tongues, and rise up in our throats, through our own pens. Amlan’s poem preserves Shukla’s taught attention, (even obtusely referencing him - is the “open window” - the same khidki that sat on Shukla’s wall?). But it departs delightfully into a phrased excavation of the persona’s childhood, and memory; not nostalgia.

Amlanjyoti Goswami has written three books of poetry, A Different Story, River Wedding and Vital Signs, published by Poetrywala. River Wedding was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi award. Published in journals and anthologies across the world, including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Penguin Vintage, Rattle and Sahitya Akademi, he is also a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. He grew up in Guwahati, and lives in Delhi.

I wish all of you a very happy new year. I hope that your dreams find purpose, and your desires grow wings. Write to me at aranyapadil@gmail.com if you have any questions, queries, or random thoughts (these last are my favourite :)
I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

Invested, as we all are, in this creative (not critical) labour of art-making, it gives me so much joy to share this new initiative.

I present to you:

ArteSpace - An E-Journal of the Arts, published by Gallery Espace.

Many of you have already reached this inaugural edition of what promises to be an important addition to the firmament of Art Writing & Publications. And while we have set forth on this journey with some pomp and ceremony, we now enter the phase of quietly watching it flare in the eyes of readers everywhere. These pickings are special - they are from the first harvest of this crop. I hope you are generous in your sharing of this bounty!

I am deeply grateful for the support of the Founder-Director of Gallery Espace, Renu Modi, under whose leadership and vision, we take this project forward. Some glimpses from the E-Journal!

Works Featured in the cover of the first edition Anthology.
1. “My Mother’s Closet”, Nandini Bagla Chirimar, 2024. 27.5 x 46”. Pencil on Kozo Shi paper.
2.“Mapping the Dislocations”, Zarina Hashmi, 2001, 20 x 42.5”. Woodcut printed in black, and mounted on Rives BFK White Paper.

(From my editorial | The “Working Space” of Art | Aranya Padīl)

(From Renu Modi’s “Founding Note”)

Below, a screen-grab video from the landing page, featuring the entire curation:

An excerpt from my editorial that speaks about the vision and philosophy of this space.

The working space for an artist is an extension of the pictorial space, but also the “workshop”. Speaking about the conception of a “working space” the abstract artist and revolutionary thinker Frank Stella observes: “But, after all, the aim of art is to create space—space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live.” That space is elusive, and its vanishing presence, today, is related to socio-political overwhelm, and rapid fragments of information assaulting our already diminished attention spans.

But the realisation hit me with the same force that the harmonic resonance of colour and form in a Raza painting frames the viewer’s surprised body, the way the bulging eyes and pierced, bleeding breast of a figure in a Caravaggio painting arrests the viewer who is caught in the corporeal fire of that painted moment. This magical “space” of engagement between the work of art, and the viewer is meaningful, and pervasive. It is replicated through writing – that contextualises the work through creative engagement that takes it beyond a simplistic fetishisation as commodity. The work of art lives in the imagination of its muse – the writer.

We encounter a new working space, now and a new kind of artist – the poet, perhaps?

The poet finds feeling and substance by writing into the world – not by writing about it, in the way that a “critic” does. What does it mean, then, to move beyond familiar modes of scholarship, familiar ways of making meanings, towards a working space of creative engagement with a work of art? How can we write into the space of art, curating our efforts towards ‘listening’, and sensing, rather than imprisoning with meaning, the “critical” space of the artist, and the artwork? How to verb like a poet – how not to enclose sensation and feeling within the rigid contours of the noun?

ArteSpace was born out of these potent questions about form, with the vision of providing a space for the artisanal craft of writing that goes beyond “art” as it is understood. “Arte”, in the romance languages, etymologically refers to ”skill”, “craft”, or “art”. ‘Arte’ is also associated with the Ancient Greek ‘τέχνη’ (“techne”, again, meaning ‘skill, craft, art’). Heidegger says of “techne” that it “is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts.” But techne is also connected with “knowing” – an opening up, “revealing.” This is the kind of work the magazine hopes to give space to. In ‘Arte”, then, we find stories, artists, and artworks that reveal.

It is revelation that reveals, even art writing, as art. In aligning with the senses, with sensation, movement, and feeling ArteSpace, seeks a pursuit that is not at odds with “critical scholarship”, but a praxis that subverts its singular impulse towards argument. Writing into art, creatively, by locating the experience of self and spirit within the work of art – turns, even viewing, into an active exercise. It allows the work of art to become a social entity, contextualising it in the realm of democratic imagination, not the hubristic urge to control, or express power over the work of art.

The first edition of “stories” reflects this vision, bringing together an eclectic set of fresh voices that contextualise, and narrate art praxis through poetry, critical and creative commentary, and provocative scholarship.

Note: ArteSpace is sited on the Gallery Espace website, and can be reached on the “Publications” section. You can scroll down to the bottom of the landing page and also find it there. Readers will also reach ArteSpace organically, through search or the myriad other ways we reach things on the internet.

Happy to hear any responses or ideas, or even pitches! Work for the next edition has already begun :)

I hope the day is kind to you.

Write to me @ aranyapadil@gmail.com - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.

Buy Me a Coffee

music is the silence of thought, and the painting of sound…
(an oublierring, a deliberate mis-remembering, perhaps, [a beautiful mistake?] of words stolen from Pamuk's My Name is Red :)

there is a certain obstinacy in creative work. a refusal to rein in wonder, or melancholy, with the careless shroud of “critical” judgement. there is a refusal to grant that nous the privilege of mentorship. the poet meets the world - every object, every living force - with the poise of desire. we find ways of speaking with birds and things. how else must we resolve this burden of legacy.

to make art we have to listen, first. we learn the shruti, and the chhand, as the sound of music reaches our years alongside the sounds of the everyday - the ordinary folded into habit. this sound returns to its source, to the world, as our own music. this sound that is heard, that is absorbed by osmosis through the membranes of our creative imagination, arises in our throats with the coy defiance of new knowledge. this sound is composed of the speech acts of the dead - of those who went before us. the label of “guru” - i share only with these artists. it is a way of imprisoning with affinity, a relationship of reverence.

so there comes a point, when we, remember as poets, those whom we met on the journey, those who walked alongside us, and listened - rapt with the ecstasy of fire. we remember and mark who have shared their light with us - who have taught us, without trying, the meaning of reverence, and love.

this love, dear friend, comes from a deep place. from a silence so oceanic, that even the self dissolves, momentarily in its blue. this same blue that was stolen from magritte’s brush. so that it can be born again, as a book cover.

(artwork by Vikas Thakur, conceived, in collaboration, for the cover)

i wonder how you, dear reader, will meet these poems that were never really meant for you. the first audience is rarely the last one, and this is what it makes it a beautiful mistake. this is why every act of writing is political - even when it claims not to be. but this is also why the lone act of creation is perhaps, deeply social. once the book is out there, it is not mine. i am waiting for you to read :)

sharing below words offered to the text - in the comradeship of sa’hrdya

in entirety…

‘The music of Aranya’s debut collection of poems, The Map is Not the Territory, is a polyglot music. It is composed from a gamut of sources, ranging across English, Hindi, Tulu, Kannada, Marathi and Bambaiya, carrying the thrum of multilingual and multiethnic metropolitan India. It embraces the cacophony of the street and the elegance of the dhrupad concert, the measured ethos of the library and the crackling zaniness of youth subcultures. Assured in their tonality, Aranya’s poems are magically alive to colour, texture, taste and timbre. Alert to natural catastrophe and political violence, they are unafraid to confront and question the tyranny of institutions and hierarchies. And even while these poems demonstrate a passionately detailed engagement with the things, persons, sensations and atmospheres that enrich the life of the senses, they resonate with a yearning for those larger and mysterious dimensions of experience that lie beyond the weave of words and images.’

Ranjit Hoskote

‘These poems, which come from the cusp of flight and possession, light and “fungal haze”, found lists and an earthworm’s life, are indeed a map, a map of delightful waywardness.’

Sumana Roy

‘To describe The Map is Not the Territory in a few lines is to lose the point. Just as one does not separate a deer from a forest or the music from a tanpura, I find myself incapable of summoning just a few words of praise, quoting only a line or two, or choosing a specific phrase to sum up my impression of Aranya’s debut poetry collection. To do so would mean isolating something that is, by its very nature, surprisingly fluid, consciously disobedient and impossibly plural. From a kamblipoochi eating a leaf to the gargoyles outside Victoria Terminus, from a mallige-seller to a tuk tuk driver, from Bilaskhani Todi to a Leonard Cohen song, from a grandmother grinding love into curry to a didi roasting revolution in her tava, the world of Aranya’s poems absorbs everything—it both touches and is, in turn, touched by multiple, lingering presences. It is both staggeringly singular and deeply choral.

‘Whatever your reason may be to pick up The Map is Not the Territory, I am certain that you will be profoundly moved by its vast simultaneities, and enraptured by its teeming multitudes.’

Kunjana Parashar

The Map is not the Territory Discounted Pre-Order Link

published with Copper Coin

~ Aranya Padīl

i hope the day is kind to you

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you had that bearded messiah thing going for you - what with the “damn you” and the “flinging poetry at you”… did you get what you set out achieve - did they fear you in public, and covet you in private? did they laugh at you in their parlours - like they did with the Beats? i realise now, dear arvind, that of all the lot of them, you were the fiercest, the most unabashedly “gadfly”, the thorn-in-the-flesh-spanner-in-the-words-renegade-bard. i did not properly understand this about you, honestly, until recently, when i met your spirited-youthful-dark-exuberance-wala avatar in Bharatmata (thanks to a very kind soul who has digitised and shared some 60s-70s (onwards) archival documents online - ironically this person calls themselves Bharath M. - wherever you are, kindred spirit, know that you are loved for this sharing!)

yes, i found your “Bharatmata” and the first edition of “Damn You”; i even reached extracts from an “Arvind Krishna Mehrotra” special Virschik (May 1971) which featured Poems/Poemes/Poemas (Baroda Vrischik Press).

o poet of the lower case, i swear i danced through the thorny pastures of your visceral epithets - your sordid metaphors, and tender images. bharatmata stopped me in my tracks. involuntarily, when my voice pronounced bombay as a “chain reaction of suburbs”, my diction tripped. i went back and re-read the phrase which ended with a fatal image of beautiful disgust describing a generation: “…the next one sticks out its head/ like a tapeworm through frozen shit…”.

i swear howl is one of two books i like to leave at strangers’ homes - for them to discover after i’m gone. (Hakim Bey’s TAZ is the other). when i read bharatmata, i recognised the same rhythms, the swathes of Moloch, and the lament of the “best minds” of a generation, caught in the “animal soup of time”. a short extract, then, for this eager audience waiting to sip the poison of your deadly syntax:

then, of course there’s damn you. i had kept this aside, to read at an event that took place recently, a barsi for your friend kolatkar. but time didn’t allow me to share this precocious piece of prose. this aggressive nonchalance, this creative-conviction. how i wish i had this swagger, when i first started to publish….

and now for the next series of sharings. first, dear sir, look at this chikni surat. oye hoye, what sharp-looks i say. like a silent revolutionary, who lets his pen to the talking. expressionless, curt, no-nonsense. hm.

then there’s sheikhsaab’s imaginative artworks, with falling torsos chained to trees…

and one page from this text as image, and image as text - this complex of poetic exhortation this “madman night” - ah what a phrase of reckless abandon…sheikhsaab seems to have channeled a dark “roaming”; truly the chiaroscuro-noir - the sharp cirtyscape traverses the intimate journey from body to world - this “cadenced world/ between water and music…”

let me share my 3 favourite poems from the edition; first the concrete fuck you of “culture and society”. how neatly you drew your own Maslowe’s pyramid… a phallic excess, a pointed steeple of capitalist jizz, a glass-ceiling splattered with orgasm, the non-sense, empty, bourgeois spectre of meaning-making. loved this sir. as a young student of literature, i might have rejoiced more, in the certain knowledge that even this concrete wordlessness, alphabet-fingers stretching up to the heavens, could be called poetry. but even today, it hasn’t lost its sheen, this trope - let me tell you that.

and then this stray poem….

and the last, from that collection. agitation, rant, tirade, prophetic howler. easily my favourite, only because it unravelled this sack of bone and sinew that i call a body. there is no single phrase i can unstring from the tight potli that is this poem. honest. read it. again. yourself.

and finally. how can i let you go free, without the gorgeous clearing house blue of

let it be known that your dedication is “For Arun Kolatkar”. Nine Enclosures, i must admit, is a strange book. i mean this a complement - from one who has courted the strangeness of Pessoa and Borges, Kabir and Lynch. From the list - which was a hallmark of what you call “art by invoice” when you spoke of your dear friend and translator (of experience, and culture), Kolaktar - to the a modern ulatbaansi; these poems left me breathless. there is no doubt that you court the maturity of the journey - the mystic surrealism of time being measured through the passage of object and beast - but also, you revel in the incandescence of a furtive english; brimful of wonder, exploding with the natural cadence and rhythm of bombay-dreams.

[reader, sample these excerpts from Eleven Cross Sections]

the mind rolls down a flat mountain. hmmm. there are such phrases in these poems, dear arvind, that i am caught in the torrent of your wondrous word-travel. what it must have felt like - carving the path, then. i am still green in my study of you, and you, and yours. your metaphors and epiphrastic genitives. it is 2025 and “Nothing changes”, sir. i am, we are all, still finding the language to explain what cannot be articulated. our languages surge in the concerted fermentation that is bombay poetry, today. i wonder why we never studied these poems - why our college syllabi stuck to propriety; why we settled, for a socially acceptable revolution, a resistance that could be beaten into submission, by the literary gatekeepers. i am happy to have reached these now, with the inconstancy of student days behind me, and the road to freedom, ahead of me. thankyou, for the light. for these poems.

i am not able to say much more to you. perhaps, after a few more readings, the verse will settle like a stone in the riverbed of this dreamy poet’s imagination. until then, all i can do is speculate.

with fire and warmth,
aranya

I hope the day is kind to you.
Write to me @ aranyapadil@gmail.com if you want to chat - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

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lunules... little spools of moon... fragments, like threads of egg white that have escaped the fold, as water boils. the body is an image offered to other bodies. but also to space. and time. the imagination. I speculate your body into memory, and in the minuscule deaths that are born in the broken silences that gather as drops on the small of your back - a bridge falls between tomorrow and tomorrow. because our yesterdays are fraught with the slow collapse of cities, under our tongues. like little cubes of sugar an entire people dissolves
under memory’s gasp.

city of aviaries. every night the birds leave. like lonely trees atop city-mounds. remember that evening, my love? remember when the crow plucked the burning moon from the tip of your lighted-joint. my fingers remember. how you taught me to pass a cigarette - the way you offer a lover, a flower. a firangipani, say, that you picked up on your way back from the grocery store. you always brought back gossip. i miss eavesdropping on this city with you. nowadays, when i sit in the balcony, and look at the moon beyond the jamun tree, and the barapulla naala, beyond the temple terrace where sometimes bhimu used to mock us with his feline nonchalance - I only see you from a distance. this is why i can love you again. more than before. more than your absence.

i was not loved from the beginning. i will meet you, my love, between and and but. in the place where there is no electricity for several hours a day, where monkeys frolic under the stern gaze of a power plant. the night stretches like a clothesline between and and but. it has been so long. so very long, now. even the sea is tired, as it calls to the forest. come to me now. let us walk the rainswept Kala Ghoda streets together. let me show you the place i have made for you. i want to sit with you on the concrete kerbside, with tetrapods for company, and the moon whispering the words to Simon and Garfunkel singing about the the 3 am cigarette-vacuum. you are not yet a ghost, not spirit or spume. you are near enough to be distant. and that is all that I have. for now
that is enough.

From this month’s Only Poems Daily’s “Poem of the Month”, (Poet and Kolatkar Scholar) Nikita Deshpande’s unbelievable list poem, Diagnosis

I mean the shrill song of here and now
always summons thunderclouds in my chest

This commentary is culled from a host of fragments, an “old poem” and a new one (by Nikita). Perhaps it is an After prose poem for the unbelievable work of art that is I Will Be Looking At The Moon But I’ll Be Seeing You - Shweta Upadhyay & Hari Katragadda. Congratulations to the both of you, for this masterpiece. Thankyou Shweta for sharing the moon with me as this book.

You can listen to an interview conducted by the mercurial young art writer Kamayani Sharma, with Hari and Shweta, here.

I hope the day is kind to you.
Write to me. (aranyapadil@gmail.com) if you want to chat - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

This newsletter and its associated activities are essentially a one-person enterprise.
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Barsi ‘25 (for Arun Kolatkar) : An Evening of Poetry
We invite you to join us in celebrating the life and work of the legendary bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar, on his death anniversary. The evening will feature readings of his poems, and commentary by poets and cultural theorists who have worked closely with Kolatkar’s poetry, and ideas. Envisaged as the first in a series of annual events, this ‘Kolatkari Barsi’ seeks to contribute to a burgeoning community of writers who are engaging with the notion of an “urban poetics”. While the 2025 edition is an online event, we hope to make this a regular annual fixture, and take it offline in the future.

Barsi ‘25 (for Arun Kolatkar)
Thursday, 25 September · 6:45 – 10:45pm
Time zone: Asia/Kolkata
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/iqq-urch-fcv

I look forward to seeing many of you there! (Please feel free to write into aranyapadil@gmail.com if you would like to read during the open sessions)

I hope the day is kind to you.
Write to me. (aranyapadil@gmail.com) if you want to chat - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

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These, my words (notes from a classroom in which we were discussing structural linguistics, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s ideas on the “logic of the sign”) - they rise from the soft earth, now. they revolve slowly in the air before me, asking the morning to slow down. it is not day yet, and already the mind has slipped into the long, slow habit of assumption. how the self assumes resolution. how thought sheaths the trembling body, how the eyes learn to deceive, how education, it seems, destroys culture.

These, my words (I open the laptop screen, and a constellation of dust on the black screen settles into this language) - they are not innocent, my words. I remember now, that I interpreted the idea that we learn to forget capacities that we were born with, in this way. We were speaking about how our physiognomy is conditioned into producing sound - how an Indian baby might have been able to produce the ‘r’ sound in the word ‘Paris’ properly, if it was born and socialised in France. But having been schooled into language in its own context of upbringing, it learns a different complex - the ‘r’ sound in azhaga, perhaps. This is why i wrote about how education destroys culture. Is it not true? We belong to schools of thought, and argument. Our faculties are nurtured in alternating strings of opposition and consonance with the technologies of self-fashioning. Nothing is more social. I fear the sophistry of language, even as I use it to veil the slow decay of sensory impulse….

These, my words (words are all i have to play with). This morning I woke up to a dream that I enjoyed tremendously. It is a strange creature, this mind. This dream is so compelling, so real that every-time I wake up to it - I remember it with a distinctness that is unconsciously reserved for moments in art that move me (the first time my Ustad’s voice coaxed rain or taught morning the meaning of sleep, say). The dream - as dreams are wont to do - always begins in medias res. I am in conversation with a woman. She seems to be a composite of various people from my life. But she is a colleague - this is apparent - the kind of colleague with whom an intimate friendship has developed. We pursue similar things, and we discuss ideas and experiences we love. We collaborate, and exchange ideas (“Did you catch that show?”, “What did you think of the way X verbs into blue in that installation?”). In the dream our conversations our vivid. There are even cutaways, and pregnant cinematic pauses, punctured by sordid but beautiful urban landscapes - a polluted delhi sky curdling the setting sun into an orange dream, a bombay street that is caught in the hungama of ganpati visarjan. As you can see, dear reader, a plot has materialised in this series of dreams. I do not know her name, but in the last one it became clear to me that we lived in different cities. The final cut showed her checking in to her hotel room, after messaging me. We were discussing where we would meet. The scene is strangely intimate in the way a film can be impersonal and vulnerably vicarious at the same time. I wake up from the dream and check my phone instinctively… (My body resists this movement, and my obstinate mind cannot conjure up the memory of the name)… I remember that someone once told me that we cannot see text in dreams. This is not true. I saw her name in the message. I cannot remember it. That is all…

These, my words (I do not know, yet, why I speak to you in this way. without inhibition, or silence. why these words flow. I do not know you. This is what it is, perhaps. You are an improbable mass, dense as the abujhmād forests of Chhattisgarh. But, for a moment, I stop myself, realising that you are dense in way forests are dense, yes, in the way that slowly, as the eye reaches colour and shape, the darkness acquires character, and the sal trees, or the chind, or even the peepal - how they look back; sometimes, in anger, but mostly, the way one looks at a painting in a museum, an abstract work, perhaps even impressionist. I stop myself from furthering this thought. WE are not a brand and you are not my target audience. I remember a poem…

and then another….

How delicately Laméris’s poem pirouettes on that final volta. I remembered this poem, the way body apprehends sound; first as feeling, and then, as poetry.

These, my words (the time has come to stop, is it not? and listen… hmm)

Outside, the morning is awake. The birds, like renegade sentences in the day’s argument, have begun to dance outside my balcony. A freight train hoots somewhere in the distance. I play the first thing the algorithm throws up at me, without thinking much about it. I walk towards the sun. It is Venkatesh Kumar, and he is singing Bhairavi. My heart skips a beat, like a lover who suddenly realises he is being looked at. That voice, thick as time, and coy as this impertinent sun that has quietly seeped into my room, through the crack in the curtain. As he soars, as his wings flare into the beautiful mistake of epiphany - as Bhairavi turns mishra - I turn away from the city waking up. He is transported now, into a place beyond my imagination. My body floats in the red rivulets that streak the morning with surprise. No words come to me, my lips touch each other in the manner of first love, hungry, but uncertain, and from my chest, from the pit of my stomach, a note emerges - I smile as we meet, as my voice predicts the destination of his meend. By the time words enter his alaap the body has moved beyond recognition, and the divinity of the bhajan is lost in this morning.

Reader, I share this piece of music with you today. Listen to it, as I have. Learn its cadences by heart. The speaker at the end of the recording calls it swardarshan, and “a flowing river of khyaal”. Perhaps she’s right, and perhaps Kumar knew that he had to end the programme with a bandish. But I know as I listen to the piece, again, and again, that there is a moment, when Kumar breaks from the plan, when the music takes him somewhere else - notes reach him that aren’t even on the scale.

This is the sound of heartbreak, and longing. Of separation. and finally, of sacred union. When he utters the words “Shyams Sundara Madana Mohana”, I am left thinking, How minuscule this immortal divinity! How inadequate this reverence of idol and form, this human reduction - in the face of unarticulated sound.

P.S. The refrain “These, my words” references the title of an anthology of Indian Poetry edited by Eunice Desouza and Melanie Silgardo . The title actually references a poem from the collection which uses these words.

I hope the morning is kind to you.
Write to me. (aranyapadil@gmail.com) if you want to chat - if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

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I have thought of these questions for some time, now. I have no answers, of course, only burning questions, that I insolently frame for you to see. These poems are odes - little thankyou notes - they are my gratitude for those who have walked this path before me. They embody what my writing naturally swerves towards - the raw dissonance that is born out of that nous which ricochets of the wordsmiths, image-makers, and sound-diviners who I have loved, and learned from (even without some of them knowing of course).

The series features, Basavanna, Kolatkar, Hillary Hahn, Ralph Vaughn Williams, George Meredith, and finally, a sestina for Ghulam Muhammad Sheikh. These are all “after” poems.

My thanks to the editors of Hākārā Journal (Bilingual) for featuring my poems. I share below some fragments as a glimpse to the works. You can read them properly here: 4 Poems & a Sestina @ Hākārā Bilingual. My gratitude, also to Ranjit Hoskote, whose poems in this vein, have been an education.

Sharing the link where can access the poems, again, for ease: https://hakara.in/aranya/

Do write to poetly@pm.me if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

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This must be rectified. It is a crime that this beautiful poem is not easily available on the internet.

Note: I had first shared Ranjit Hoskote’s Nocturne on the now-dead website www.poetly.in on Dec. 11, 2019. I think I met the poem in his collection Vanishing Acts. I have shared the commentary, and the “slide” below - exactly as I had composed it then (forgive the inelegance of the writing, I was younger, and perhaps, more naive, too). There is a reference in the commentary to the same “college” (Xavier’s) in which the above story took place.

“I think it was Van Gogh who observed that the night is infinitely more colourful, than it's paramour, day. He also talked about the layers of melancholy as an emotion - the complexity and beauty - as compared to the flat, sometimes, unidimensional effervescence of joy.

No theory can be built on these deeply felt, but lightly held aesthetics of compassion; but Hoskote's Nocturne disinters the abstractions in both these impulses. Lovers sighs are the oldest threads that poets use to emerge from the labyrinths of their nostalgia. This is why I treasure every new piece of magic that manages to bring the visceral, immediate, passionate presence of the beloved- the "flaming chorus of swords". The attention to detail, the evocative visuality, the economy of language in teasing out desire and the bittersweet pungency of sensation - mashallah! I read this poem when I was in college (pause for jokes and banter about adolescence and young love), but even today, when I read this poem, I find myself biting my upper lip, nose wrinkling at the faint trace of cherries in the air.”

two days ago, a dear friend made me a gift of poetry (isn’t it uncanny how beautiful things often begin with the grace of a dear friend) . this morning, my eyes fell on the blue book. but outside, dawn was brooding. i allowed my body to slip into the gossamer robe of a rainswept silence so impossibly free of birdsong, that it could only have come from the sudden nostalgia of a city that I had left behind. perhaps it is home, this comfortable absence that rings with the sound of the day alighting from its perch - familiar faces, loni, kadak pao and adrak-chai; a dog riding pillion with his potbellied master, on a scooter; and my father walking slowly towards his temple, with a plastic packet of mallipoo in his hands. (he likes to be the first face that god sees in the morning). perhaps this is the synesthesia of belonging, the assurance that when one returns to a familiar place it will have changed imperceptibly. 

From the blue book

From the places you loved and had to leave: that if, like the fairytale giant you leave your heart hidden there, sure, you become invulnerable, but you also run the risk of always having to remember - always having to return to the heart you chose to hide there. Which, in turn, will once again make you vulnerable.

What I saw, heard, learned … (Giorgio Agamben, Trans. by Alta L. Price, Seagull, 2023)

the birds have started to gossip now. their tentative cheeps are the loom on which an old recording of rageshri weaves its future. i climb this architecture of anxiety with quiet surrender. i wait for dada’s fingers to pluck the gandhār from his uncle’s tongue. the birds sit outside now - 2 bulbuls - listening patiently. waiting. like me. the morning unfolds in our shared silence, in our anticipation of the moment when he will enter the fray; the moment, when Ustad’s quiet rishabh will pierce through the fog of a teenager’s wondrous surmise. and when it comes, a smile escapes my lips - the same smile that Ustad directed at me, as we watched his nephew soar ahead.... in an  epiphany of wings. from Ustad's rishabh I learnt that music is in the falling, and not the slow ascent. that the unexpected descent into the world is more breathtaking than the measured rise. when the sound escapes from our breasts, and our fingers, when it seeps into the air before our gaping mouths, and when it returns, again, to the sarai that is our body..... we become quiet. all students, all witness.

“I must go back briefly to a place I have loved
to tell you those you will efface I have loved.”

Agha Shahid Ali

and now the gandhār unfurls. it is a sky whose stormy visage has mellowed into time.

From living together: that the existence of the other is an enigma that cannot be resolved; it can only be shared. Sharing this enigma is what humans call love.

What I saw, heard, learned … (Agamben)

perhaps not. perhaps a thing does not need to be mysterious to be beautiful. perhaps we are secure in the total knowledge of our oblivion - not a sharing, but a knowing. i think this is what humans call love. there is no gap, no distance to be crossed - already we are alone together. our bodies knows the sound of each other’s arrival; without language.

when two ends meet, it’s a circle.

What water taught me: delight, when our foot no longer finds its hold and our body almost unwillingly gives in and swims.

What I saw, heard, learned … (Agamben)

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sometimes i imagine the empty wooden frame of a painting  in front of which an old woman sits. she looks like someone who was once beautiful                         and still is. one hand pets the arm of a stiff teak-black armchair       her elbow's  propped up by a pillow that looks a bit like a telescope.    she is at peace.    not like the painter painted    from Las Meninas.  not curious      just still.  you wouldn't know it from looking at her      but her mind is bathed in quiet creative  fervour      she is making.        slivers of blood       redden the cracked mud of her visage.   they move   those gentle fireworms   with the stealth   of  something that grows.   you'd think they'd reach her   eyes     that the fire     would make itself known with a glint.       who knows.                                 meanwhile... the frame blurs slowly into people.                    tendrils snake into the centre - a forest borrowed from bosch's fingers.                       a tune stolen from the first movement in beethoven's 9th         flares into an amber sky.   colours that are a gift  from Bombay's  first rain     curve into little petroleum-rainbow-suns.          it is high time we light up the stars, adil whispers from the wings.           and finally                      the painting is ready.    caravaggio might have been proud.                   the spark reaches the silent artist's eyes her pupils twinkle into flame.   her brow furrows                a quiet knowing smirk curls the side of her lips.     sometimes i imagine a goddess at her workshop          sometimes her fingers  tap the world into being           sometimes she dreams a guernica into being   each time              the colours glow differently              each time the world she paints is new.                                                                          

*aranya

When I was at school (before YouTube was a ‘thing’), a teacher introduced me to the music and lyrics of Tom Lehrer . Perhaps he did not realise then what he had shared with me - the keys to this “trained mathematician’s” universe of satire. The law of creative non-linear association ensured that Gopal’s “listening” sessions led me on different trails (Gopal was the teacher - who taught at the alternative school CfL, Bangalore - where I studied for six years). Those pathways were filled with various influential figures from the world of dark-comedy, satire, and textual-music. Last week, Tom Lehrer kicked the bucket. He wouldn’t mind me referring to his death in this way, I am sure. As a performer, even though he was a sensitive observer, and a keen witness; he didn’t take himself seriously. This is why his biting critiques hit deep. Always cloaked in humour, his “Golden Hits” type nostalgic rhythms would parody various elements of American society - including war policy, military-industrial complex, capitalism, colonial hegemony, and bigotry in academia (there are hardly any “human” subjects that perhaps, evaded his creative gaze and his humorous pop-singer aesthetic). He’s Kolatkar’s contemporary, only four years younger, come to think of it. I wonder if Kolatkar liked him.

So long, Tom. You will be sorely missed. Rest in poetry.

I share three of my favourite Lehrer songs below. Happy Sunday! (and happy listening)

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The slum here means exactly what architect and social activist Jai Sen means when he speaks of the 'unintended city'—the city that was never a part of the formal 'master plan' but was always implicit in it. The official city cannot survive without its unintended self, but it cannot own up to that self either. For that other city consists of a huge mass of technically and officially discarded 'obsolete' citizens who form the underground of a modern city. They provide the energy—literally the cheap labour—that propels both the engine of civic life in a Third World society and the ambitions of its modernising elite.”

Nandy’s articulation of the “city that was never part of the formal ‘master plan’ but always implicit in it” deepens the conversation, to articulate the human cost of labour, embodied in disenfranchisement and marginalisation, but also the “unintended” as the “engine” of civic life. He further connects this to the “ambitions” of an elite class with eyes set on modernity as a defining social characteristic (there is a link here that could be made with “capital”). I find this articulation compelling, not only as a complex that problematises “urban planning” and cultural anthropology, but as a statement on the poetics of the urban; a way of rendering the absences and erasures inherent in both “imagining” and “making” cities. Space is constructed in the minds of those who inhabit it, and time is immortalised in the fingers of artists (not historians). Nandy’s “unintended city” as a conceptual formation, foregrounds the spontaneity and chaos associated with precarity, and mechanisms of survival, over intention and planning, while also laying bare the hypocrisy of the elite, and the bourgeoise.

It takes a particular kind of discerning observer to unravel this “unintended” design through their creative documentation. Anand Patwardhan shows us the political implications of “development” by focusing on the real “makers” of Bombay – their stories and song - in Bombay, Our City (1985), while also exposing the “use-and-throw” model of their “masters”. Amar Kanwar makes a similar argument, but in the context of the nation (not the city), in his Night our Prophecy (2002). I believe that Arun Kolatkar’s vision is similar, in the poetry cycle Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) . Other commentators have proposed that the various characters - both human and ‘non-human’ - embody varying degrees of ‘marginality’, ‘subalternity’ etc.). The “unintended”, as an analytic, helps us think through the tensions between design and reality, state and citizen, imagination and built environment.

There are no less than 23 mentions of ‘Kolatkar’ in the Penguin Book of poems on the Indian City edited by Bilal Moin (including bibliographiphic notes and such; I’ve checked!). While this is testament to the tremendous influence of Kala Ghoda Poems as a text, in the conception of Mumbai city in Indian literature, Moin’s fascinating curation of “urban” poems doesn’t feature any excerpts from that collection. While his introduction starts with the reflexive nostalgia of the Military Cafe and the The Wayside Inn, referencing the activity of the “Bombay poets” during the latter half of the last century, he chooses to feature a couple other Kolatkar poems. I applaud this decision.

Returning to Bilal Moin’s editorial vision, let us refocus our energies by broadening our scope to the notion of the “Indian” city - the chosen frame of the anthology. In my view, Moin’s anthology, is, perhaps more sensitive to some of the fault-lines I’ve mentioned above - the decision to include works from other languages through English translation somewhat remedies the perils that come with an “anglophone” focus. One must acknowledge the editor’s layered engagement with the subcontinent’s geography, history and language. The book allowed me to rejoice in the “unintended” (re)discovery, both of cities (and the ignored cultures or spaces therein), and poets (and their colourful poetic personas). For this I am grateful, and my curation of a small selection from the volume in today’s commentary, is an attempt to pass on this gratitude, without compromising the accompanying element of surprise.

I hope this selection will serve as a kind of teaser - provoking you to reach the book in its entirety. It is a worthy addition to your library - especially if you identify as a “bombay poet” :)

Do write to poetly@pm.me if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

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