Mumbai: “It takes real narcissists to find themselves in the center of a city full of people, even at 2 am, 4 am, 5.47 am…” writes Saranya Subramanian in her colorful Bombay poem, part of her debut collection ‘Absent People, Absent Places’. One wonders what would happen if all poets took the place of these narcissists. The simple, straightforward answer is that there will never be a shortage of poems about the city. A more subtle response, however, would challenge this premise altogether: poets would prefer to lurk in corners as silent flaneurs, to be seen, heard, and remembered.
And yet, most of Mumbai’s poets have resisted remaining hidden, instead seeking a rare kinship in the community, which has seen a resurgence in recent years. The revival of Poetry Circle 2.0 in August last year, and long before that, collectives and movements like Poetry in Parks, The Bombay Poetry Crawl, The Manch and Poetrification by The Hoshruba Repertory, continue to attract the attention of both poetry and poetry-makers across regional and linguistic boundaries.
Poet, art critic and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote, recalling the formidable role of the PEN All-India Centre, founded in 1934, headquartered in New Marine Lines, as well as the salons and reading groups led by Nissim Ezekiel, Dilip Chitre, Adil Jusawalla, Tony Patel and others, says, “Poetry never really died or disappeared from the scene.” “What has changed over time is the way poetry is transmitted and shared, and how people gather around it.”
The quest remains the same, however, “the broader cultivation of the literary imagination for both writers and readers.”
hanging out with poets
In 2020, Subramaniam, then an undergraduate from Ashoka University, founded The Bombay Poetry Crawl, an idea that emerged from her thesis, a spatial mapping project that traces the characters of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda poems. “I had so much fun traveling around and discovering those characters. So I thought, ‘Why not take other people with me?'”
After his first walk, which took place a few days before the pandemic-induced lockdown, Subramaniam continued his work through a series of online conversations, which attracted the attention of other 20th-century poets in the city. “I realized that you can’t read any poet alone.” After completing his master’s degree at the University of San Francisco, he resumed guided poetry tours with great enthusiasm. Through archival initiatives, Subramaniam, 29, is exploring places frequented by poets, and mapping the verses in the streets, mills, houses and cafés where they were written. She has already led more than a hundred of these padayatras, featuring poets ranging from Namdev Dhasal, Malika Amar Shaikh, Narayan Surve to Eunice de Souza, Give Patel, Kaifi Azmi and Sahir Ludhianvi, writing in all languages.
Through these travels he also learned that public memory of poets varied from city to city. She says, people in Chennai know their poets very well. “They worship their poets…can recite their poems by heart.” He believes that although Mumbai has a rich poetic tradition, the awareness is still limited. But recently there has been a genuine curiosity to experience the city through poetry, and perhaps this is what is attracting diverse groups of people to visit it. “Earlier, attendees mostly consisted of students or people with arts background. Now, I get people from STEM, finance and corporate,” says Subramanian, who is currently digitizing the archives handed over by Jussawalla.
making new relationships
Some believe that the renewed appreciation for poetry is perhaps a result of the months, even years, lost to COVID-19, one of the worst pandemics of the last hundred years. Many looked for answers beyond science about the prevailing uncertainty and overwhelming sense of loss of control.
Marathi poet, editor and publisher Hemant Diwate admitted that he had avoided poetry gatherings and events until the pandemic. “The work happening in these spaces was different from my own practice and the kind of poetry I was reading.” He says the forced lockdown forced him to seek out these places and make connections again.
In 2021, as the city emerged from the deadly second COVID wave, Divate also saw sales of poetry books skyrocket. For the first time since the launch of his publishing arm Poetrywala (2003), he sold more than 5,000 poetry books in a short period of six to eight months, generating a revenue of Rs 9 lakh. “Everyone was reading poetry. It was probably helping them cope. For some, it was also the feeling that they had been given a second chance at life. Art became a means of understanding what we were feeling,” he says, adding with conviction, “After all we are most human when we create and consume art.”
Now the new generation also has a deeper sense of awareness, says Hoskote, “Poetry is important, and it has the ability to take you beyond all the forces of mind-numbing oppression”.
Although readership has plateaued since then, Divate believes that the brief increase in sales has fueled the ambition of many poets, who have begun to write more consistently and without interruption. Divate has presented a number of English debuts over the years – Yamini Dand Shah, Jennifer Robertson, Dion D’Souza and Suchita Parikh-Mundul to name a few. He says that poetry in other languages also boasts of equally promising talent.
Poet Suchita Parikh-Mundul remembers attempting to self-publish her first book of poems in 2005, but she quickly buried the idea because it made her feel “exposed.” His recently released collection, ‘Absurd Theatre’, divided into three parts, “draws attention to aspects of life that anyone can experience, especially in an urban setting”. Mumbai features prominently in his poetry: “The coastal road looms like a handful of edelweiss over the diamonds of the Arabian Sea,” read the opening lines of one of his poems. “It wasn’t until I went back to my poems that I realized how much I had absorbed the city,” she says.
Looking back, Mundul says the nervousness she felt as a young poet has been lessened by the explosion of social media, which has made poetry more accessible and even democratic. What it has done most for him is help him find a community. “Once every week, I meet with three other poets online. We all live in different Indian cities, and one is from Cairo. During these sessions, we come up with a prompt and then write a poem before discussing it. Writing in a safe space makes a big difference, you feel less alone.”
writing in a tradition
Hoskote says, poets in the city have always worked within a tradition. This is a sentiment shared by poet Maneka Shivdasani. “We all learn from those who come before us,” she says.
For a long time, the Poetry Circle, co-founded by Shivdasani, Nitin Mukadam and Akil Contractor in 1986, served as a platform promoting this tradition through mentorship, workshops and engagement.
“[In the Poetry Circle]we emphasized reading very widely and thinking beyond boundaries,” says Hoskote, an alumnus of this group. “I think it was, for us, a furnace of ideas and a place where we all trained in some ways for the roles we eventually came to occupy.”
Shivdasani had considered reviving the Poetry Circle – which had closed in 2005 – as a tribute to Mukadam after his death in 2015.
She says the need felt even more urgent after the pandemic and the rise of social media, where poets often wanted instant recognition. “I felt that the more we connect online, the more important it would be to meet face to face for deeper discussions,” she says. She adds that sometimes even the best poets can write poems that could benefit from such conversations.
It was only last year when writer-poet-translator Jerry Pinto, a member of the original group, offered the People’s Free Reading Room and Library, where he is chairman of the board of trustees, as a venue that the plan took off. Shivdasani and Contractor, along with Pinto, remain active collaborators in this new iteration, supported by poets Dion D’Souza and Urana Bose. “When a poet has a space that allows them to share their poetry and receive constructive feedback and encouragement, it not only helps them produce better work, but also hones their art.”
The hope, she says, is to ensure that the city’s poetry tradition continues to grow as it has for the past several decades. “And I think that will happen because there are certainly some talented poets out there. It’s up to us as a society and a community to provide them the space to flourish.”
