The carnival of democracy
A poem written during the time of the 2020-21 farmers’ protests at the gates of Delhi celebrates the spirit of resistance in a democracy. We carry this poem by people’s poet Surjit Patar from Punjab, who passed away on May 11, 2024, as a tribute to his memory
August 24, 2024 | Surjit Patar
Of polls, poems and photos
A reporter and a poet from West Bengal bring to us what they have observed from travelling across the state in the five years before General Elections 2024
June 1, 2024 | Joshua Bodhinetra and Smita Khator
A hundred and eight feet incense stick
Long after the buzz over God and His fanfare have ebbed at His temple, a poet's sharp and witty limericks force us to take a hard look at the changing fabric of the nation
May 12, 2024 | Joshua Bodhinetra
‘Poetry makes nothing happen’, not if you stop listening
A poem in Dehwali Bhili warns us about the dangers of distancing ourselves from poetry at a time when the world is in need of light and love
March 17, 2024 | Jitendra Vasava
An Adivasi writes off the village
A poet writes about his dilemma: should he continue with his suffocating existence on the margins of the city he has been forced to migrate to, or return to his village? A poem in Panchamahali Bhili
September 12, 2023 | Vajesinh Pargi
An ancient tree, a changing climate
A poem about human apathy towards climate change also speaks of the changing social and political environment in India
June 27, 2023 | Pratishtha Pandya
A tale of a book and three neighbours
The Indian Constitution is celebrated in a set of nine haikus, honouring the values that make us who we are
May 27, 2023 | Joshua Bodhinetra
Annadata and Sarkar Bahadur
When the powerful manipulate the official records, a poet picks up his words to pen the truth. This one about farmer suicides in UP and elsewhere in the country
April 24, 2023 | Devesh
A dream, a country, a crematorium
On 21 March 2023, the World Poetry Day, a poet dreams of a country and mourns a dream
March 21, 2023 | Devesh
Lives and languages hanging by a thread
In times of divisiveness and hatred, a poet goes looking for the languages of love and liberty. And where else does she end up but in a gossamer of mother tongues rising from silenced histories
February 20, 2023 | Sabika Abbas
The beanstalk of Joshimath
The subsidence in and around Joshimath has led to cracks in hundreds of dwellings in the town. This poem is written in the aftermath of this disaster
February 3, 2023 | Pratishtha Pandya
Of cursed tongues and towers
A passionate debate sparked off by a minister’s earnest appeal for a common national language takes a poet back to the Tower of Babel
November 23, 2022 | Gokul G.K.
The song of a Rabari girl
A short poem, where a young Rabari girl from Jamnagar district writes about her realities, wishes and rights
September 26, 2022 | Jigna Rabari
Of trees, people and civilisations
In his fifth and final poem in a cluster of five written in Dehwali Bhili, an Adivasi poet takes a hard look at the growing conflicts within an Adivasi identity in a society governed by fancy ideas of development
September 15, 2022 | Jitendra Vasava
The boy who dared to drink
Moved by the death of Indra Kumar Meghwal at the hands of his teacher, a poet wields his pen and lashes at the age-old caste system that keeps many at the receiving end of injustice
September 7, 2022 | Joshua Bodhinetra
The ends of justice: a case of Bilkis Bano
A lone woman’s painful struggle for justice, and the recent remission granted to 11 convicts who had assaulted her during the 2002 Gujarat riots, sits, disturbingly, at the centre of this poem
August 24, 2022 | Hemang Ashwinkumar
A name and the conspiracy of naming
A statement by the first tribal President of India, ‘Droupadi was not my original name’, brings back painful historical memories to Adivasi communities, the earliest inhabitants of this country. The anguish she expressed has been shared by many Adivasis, like the poet here
August 9, 2022 | Jacinta Kerketta
The civilisation of the jungle
In his fourth poem in a cluster of five written in Dehwali Bhili, an Adivasi poet condemns the self-destructive nature of our so-called civilization and its hollow understanding of peace
August 3, 2022 | Jitendra Vasava
Once we separate ourselves from the river…
In this third poem, in a string of five written in Dehwali Bhili, an Adivasi poet from Narmada district speaks of the rupture between human beings and nature, and a universe of alternative values
July 8, 2022 | Jitendra Vasava
The beast, the begum and the bulldozer
‘For every heart the beast plucked, grew a new heart, a new flower, a new life, a new world’: a poem provoked by a series of selective demolition of houses and buildings across the country
June 29, 2022 | Gokul G.K.
The Adivasi and the ‘Moon Man’
In a string of five poems, an Adivasi poet from Narmada district in Gujarat curates the lived experiences and beliefs of tribal communities. This is the second in the series
May 13, 2022 | Jitendra Vasava
Between bulldozer blades: flowers and hope
Her life lay shredded by a bulldozer. As if the riots a few days ago had not done enough. But the wild flowers, she knows, will grow like hope from the vicious claws of these machines. A poem
May 4, 2022 | Pratishtha Pandya
Curating a forest in a seed: a poem
Languages, says this Adivasi poet from Gujarat, carry literature, knowledge, worldviews and more. He celebrates this treasure through poems in the Dehwali Bhili language. This is the first in a series
April 26, 2022 | Jitendra Vasava
Infinite longing, demarcated bodies
A reporter finds her medium falling short of her expectations as she speaks about life and love with a sex worker from Delhi. She does pick up a pen, but what she writes is not a news story
February 22, 2022 | Shalini Singh
The India of my dreams
A writer is moved to strong emotions and poetry as the air fills with words of violence and hatred in the country she loves and calls home
December 29, 2021 | Namita Waikar
A hole for a heart and a hope for a hammer
A poet’s powerful tribute to farmers, diverse and united in their spectacular struggle against the three unjust farm laws imposed on them that the state was compelled to repeal
December 11, 2021 | Joshua Bodhinetra
The superstate and the Smile Police
A poem inspired by the spate of cancellations of shows by stand-up comedians and others in recent times – with the authorities, on each occasion, citing possible law and order issues
December 8, 2021 | Gokul G.K.
Feral goats and ghar-wapasi
A poet, troubled by growing ethnic violence and the drives to deter, detain, and deport migrants across the world, and rising hatred against minorities in his own country, ponders the meaning of ‘ghar-wapasi’
November 25, 2021 | Anshu Malviya
The King and his very secret elephantine years
A mother remembers a folktale she heard from her mother and writes a little verse about it. Any resemblances to people living or dead are entirely figments of the reader’s own imagination
August 27, 2021 | Pratishtha Pandya
She, my fellow traveller
A little vignette from a train journey to mark the International Day of the Girl Child on October 11
October 11, 2021 | Amir Malik
Of Gods, an orphaned public and lost children
A Gorakhpur poet speaks out in anguish as he watches children in large numbers succumb to a deadly fever across UP’s Gorakhpur, Mathura and Firozabad districts amidst a public health system collapse
September 21, 2021 | Devesh
Keezhvenmani: huts ground to dust and ash
On December 25, 1968, landlords killed 44 Dalit workers in this Tamil Nadu hamlet. A poem on that tragedy in a week when Mythili Sivaraman, one of the great chroniclers of that atrocity, has passed away
June 2, 2021 | Sayani Rakshit
The king and the lone wheel of a tractor
He abhorred those pests getting adept in the dark arts of unity. A poem for the present times
May 24, 2021 | Joshua Bodhinetra
Counting the dead and lessons unlearned
Why were the classrooms deserted, the playgrounds on fire? A poem for teachers lost
May 22, 2021 | Pratishtha Pandya
The King and his palace on pyre
As outrage pours in at the Centre's relentless work on the lavish Central Vista project amidst the pandemic, a poet recalls an old tale
May 12, 2021 | Sayani Rakshit
Bharat is burning, Dharmaraja!
Epic characters tumble out gasping for air, but are pushed into an inferno by godlike guardians
May 5, 2021 | Anshu Malviya
'With strangers was the journey too...'
The country is ablaze with a thousand bonfires of human lives. A poem about the pandemic
May 3, 2021 | Gokul G. K.
Five drops of crimson...farewell to the white
This is poetry that pierces, paintings that perforate – and a story of the pandemic
April 29, 2021 | Joshua Bodhinetra
Waiting yet again in a last long line
A lifetime spent standing in queues – then one more at the very end. A poem on the Covid-19 crisis
April 19, 2021 | Pratishtha Pandya
Crushing the flowers in the fields of sorrow
The continuing and appalling atrocities against young Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh inspired this poem
March 8, 2021 | Pratishtha Pandya
The Sultan and the locust plague
It’s nearly 60 days since tens of thousands of farmers protesting against three laws affecting them swarmed to the gates of Delhi. This is a poem inspired by the official response to their protest
January 22, 2021 | Pratishtha Pandya
Hoping against hope in Kamathipura
Sex workers in Kamathipura have been struggling to give their children a life of dignity. Here is a poem inspired by two stories about the realities faced by these women caught in a pandemic of misery
December 28, 200 | Pratishtha Pandya
'A couple of acres to pay my debt'
Despite the pandemic and lockdown, tens of thousands of farmers have hit the streets across India since September 25 to protest against three new farm laws. This is a poem in anguish on their struggles
November 5, 2020 | Sarbjot Singh Behl
So many Salihans now, all dreamers of dreams
A tribute to Adivasi freedom fighter Demathi Dei Sabar who led an uprising against the British in Saliha village of Odisha’s Nuapada district in 1930 – and to the many young Demathis of that region today
August 15, 2020 | Pratishtha Pandya
I am a labourer, not a liability
The mass exodus of millions of migrant labourers following the March 25 lockdown continues to fire the imagination of poets and painters. This poem rebukes our many hypocrisies in dealing with workers
June 15, 2020 | Anjum Ismail
Iron in the migrants' soul
The tragedy of the 16 migrant labourers run over by a train near Aurangabad, Maharashtra, on May 8, still haunts us. This moving poem and compelling painting remind us of that dreadful incident
May 31, 2020 | Gokul G.K.
Locked-down with blood on the tracks
The 16 labourers – 8 of them Gond Adivasis – run over by a goods train on May 8 near Aurangabad district in Maharashtra were all in their 20s and 30s, and from Umaria and Shahdol districts of Madhya Pradesh
May 10, 2020 | Pratishtha Pandya
The migrant march of red ants under lockdown
How long can one watch hungry migrant labourers stranded half-way from their villages when there is Chinese-Thai dinner waiting to be prepared at home? A poem that tears into indifference and inequality
May 6, 2020 | Pratishtha Pandya
Bags on their heads, fear in their hearts
The Covid-19 lockdown-driven distress migrations have touched poets and artists alike. Here's a response
April 16, 2020 | Gokul G.K.
The lady and the lamp - a poem for April 5
The nine-minute lights-off, lamps-on event of April 5 impacted different people in diverse ways. This was how one poet in Ahmedabad responded to it…
