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