A Review of Perennial: The Red River Book of 21st Century Hindi Poetry
Review by Atreyee Majumder
Sourav Roy & Tuhin Bhowal, eds. Perennial: The Red River Book of 21st Century Hindi Poetry. Red River, 2025.
Review by Atreyee Majumder
If a poetry anthology is “unputdownable,” is it a good thing? In the translation anthology Perennial, I found poetic voices that break the glass walls of Anglophone India, and in so doing, stretch the boundaries of the English language.
I should begin by noting the masterful historical overview of Hindi literature in the introduction to the anthology. The editors pull out and show us a library of Hindi poetry—through Aadikaal (ancient era), Bhaktikaal (Bhakti era), Chhayavaad (shadowism), Prayogvaad (Experimentalism), to the radical Akavita Andolan, Nayi Kavita Andolan (New Poetry Movement), alongside Dalit Vimarsh (Dalit discourse) and Stree Vimarsh (women’s discourse). Many known names—Agyeya, Kedarnath Singh, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral—appear alongside lesser-known names, mapped onto the grid of multiple poetic movements. The anthology, I began to notice, was fundamentally concerned with modern, twentieth- and twenty-first century Hindi poets and poetic work. I remain curious about the varied layers of the “I” in poetry that are described in the introduction but I hoped to hear more, particularly, about a curious essay “Keval Main, Keval Main” (on the self in poetry) by Namvar Singh. I hoped to hear more on the Nayi Kavita movement’s resolve that no subject was less worthy of poetry.
I particularly enjoyed reading the thoughtful little biographical texts that were appended to each poet’s section. I learned a great deal about the lives of Indian poets who have mostly written in Hindi, though many are bilingual. Some have translated major texts of philosophy and literary criticism (including Brecht and Benjamin) into Hindi. Most had earned their living as professors of literature, some as journalists, some as government servants, one as a math/physics tutor. The pursuit of poetry has professorial jobs to thank for providing bread, butter, and time to the poet, I thought, as I read through the bios. The biographies also threw out names of places in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and so on, that I, as a big-city-dweller, hardly had a sense of. Hindi emerged (largely) from the languages of the regions of the north and central parts of India, but maybe there is a language of a peculiar kind of soul that borrows from these locales. Nothing else, in these poems, spell regionality, though. These are thoroughly cosmopolitan poems, alive to the world both near and far.
The two hundred poems screamed and whispered at me simultaneously. I was able to distil them into two significant themes that might be worth delving into: 1) Human/non-human relations, 2) love and rage.
Human/Non-Human
Pigeons, shovels, and many a river. Rocklands, hotels, lampposts, flowers, railway stations, hills, trees. There is a deeply apathetic attachment to the ordinary world in these poems—unlike odes to an exemplary daffodil, quite unlike the Kadamba tree under which Radha and Krishna usually meet in much of Braj poetry of the Bhakti ilk (devotional tradition[s] that enrich much song and poetry across the length and breadth of India). Modern poetry in English, at least poetry from America, doesn’t seem to do this very much, that is, take the physical, non-human, environmental entities and apply to them a thorough attention, but not in search of beauty. Maybe in search of their distinct stories.
Sourav Roy translates Ashok Vajpeyi’s poem “So Many Paths”:
River. A long bridge over the river. A long path beside the river. Water’s many paths within the river. Many birds flying making their traceless paths over the river.
Tuhin Bhowal translates Farid Khan’s poem “Tiger”:
I’m hopeful that to save its own species, the tiger will become a poet, the way dinosaurs became lizards, And the poet, occasionally, a tiger.
There is a wry humour in these lines, which is obvious. But one also finds in these poems a deep attention and love for the physical world. The poet’s “I” merges with the tiger, the river, and a range of entities from the non-human world—alive or inert.
Love and Rage
The poet who left the deepest mark on me was Ramashankar Yadav Vidrohi (trans. Abhimanyu Kumar). Vidrohi’s poems are burning in a cauldron of rage. In the poem ‘New Harvest’, he writes:
If god could grow on earth, surely, paddy can take root in the sky.
These lines serve as commentary on the commodified form of faith in India today. But they speak contemporary, relevant political matters with a poet’s subtle weaponry. Vidrohi manages in an agrarian imagery of ‘paddy’—one that draws out some primary quality of a timeless India wherein, suddenly, he springs amid a whimsical poem about a paddy—a scathing line about faith and religion. Men for whom this rage poem is written, are not interpellated, their deeds are taken for granted—as though he were saying, “we live in a world where manipulation of gods on earth is a regular, mundane affair.” Credit is, of course, due to the translator for letting Vidrohi roar out into the contours of the English language. I can’t help, as a reader of Bangla, but think of the connections with the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam whose poem “Vidrohi” is most famous.
Rage becomes the flipside of a coin ultimately called Love. Rage is perhaps a disappointed, broken love. The other very angry poet in the anthology is Asang Ghosh who writes, in sorrow, rage, and amusement about caste in India, a poem called ‘Now I’m Breathing’ (trans. Semeen Ali).
While leaving the fool forgot to close my grave. After a long time Now I’m breathing.
The other poems of Asang Ghosh convey a direct rage, but this one wrung my heart out. A man, laughing and breathing snugly in his grave; a poet looking inward and laughing a bit, perhaps, at his own living deadness.
I can’t close this section of the review without mentioning the poet Anamika and her poem ‘Salt’ (trans. Basudhara Roy).
Salt is earth’s grief and also its taste. Three parts of the earth are seawater and the heart of man, a salt-hill.
This too is a heartbreak poem, of muted rage and a bit of laughter. In the first line, the translator has shown how the limits of the English language can be pushed, wrenched, manipulated effectively by the infusion of themes quite alien to its own traditions. I don’t believe Eliot’s peaches come quite close to the triumph of salt.
In my repeated congratulation of these poets and their translators, there is a futility. They have been chasing the gods of poetry for a while now, and will continue to do so, with or without awards, visibility, rave reviews. Poetry breathes the textures of a Hindi-speaking world talking on its own terms to the wider world—India and beyond—unselfconscious, ambivalent, and yet not thumping the table saying ‘look at me.’ Perhaps, that is why these poems took me to visit my damaged and fraught relationship with my country. There are versions of this country where people write about the world as they see it replete with rivers, tigers, and salt, I was reminded. The spatio-temporal world of the Hindi language lends elements to their “I”.
Let me end this tribute with Nidhi Singh’s translation of Nirmala Putul’s poem ‘Tribal Women’:
They don’t know how rivers dry up before reaching their world how their photographs reach the metropolis They don’t know
Atreyee Majumder is a poet, writer, and anthropologist based in Bangalore, India. Her first book of poems, titled The Book of Blue, was published by Red River in 2024. Her research/creative work is curated here.
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