Report: The Mumbai Poetry Festival 2024

Poets are often viewed as solitary, perhaps even asocial, figures scribbling away even as the rest of the world is occupied with the prosaic and the pragmatic. It was wonderful to see so many of them under one roof, sharing their work, celebrating each other, queuing up to buy volumes of each others’ poetry and get them inscribed even as they invoked the voices of literary ancestors and absent contemporaries.

Put together by Paperwall Publishing’s Hemant and Smruti Divate to mark 20 years of their poetry imprint, Poetrywala, the two-day festival included poets from India, Colombia, Malta, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Croatia, Cuba, Slovenia, Greece and the United States.

Poet, critic and former civil servant Ashok Vajpeyi’s inaugural address on poetry and freedom got a well-deserved standing ovation. Drawing attention to the “dark times we live in” — alluding to the invasion of Ukraine and the violence in Gaza — he said, “When there is no political or social freedom, poets tend to create, through writing, a kind of spiritual freedom that offers resistance to the conditions of unfreedom outside.”

He spoke about hatred and violence in India, the obfuscation of history, the assassination of writers and the role of poets as watchdogs of freedom when “truth is under assault from all sides”. Expressing concern about self-censorship, he also spoke about the need to protect creative freedom because “poetry is an unceasing, unstoppable, interminable satyagraha against simplification, uniformity and totalitarianism.”

A panel discussion on Latin American poetry with Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Katherine Hedeen, Dulce Chiang, and Rei Berroa moderated by Subho Bandopadhyay followed. Despite the constraints of time, they gave the audience a rich flavour of the diversity that exists within the thriving culture of poetry publishing and poetry festivals in Latin America. The poems were first read out in Spanish, and subsequently in English translation. As it is rare to meet poets from that region in India, the discussion was a treat.

Striking a balance between the global and the local, the festival featured poetry readings in Marathi by poets like Sachin Ketkar, Pradnya Daya Pawar, Dinkar Manwar, Saleel Wagh, Minakshi Patil, Manya Joshi, Manoj Pathak and Sanjeev Khandekar. Their work was translated and read out in English by Mustansir Dalvi and Rahee Dahake.

Dalvi also read from his own poem, How to bring down a dome, which alludes to the demolition of the Babri Masjid: “the dome deflates/ like the breast of a mother, famished/ in a country without love.”

HS Shivaprakash, Kamalakar Bhat, Christos Koukis, Siddhartha Menon, Jerry Pinto, Mukta Sambrani, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Menka Shivdasani, Prabal Kumar Basu, Adrian Grima, Bodhi Sattva were some of the other poets who read that day and the sounds of English, Kannada, Hindi, Spanish, Marathi, Maltese and Greek filled the venue. Pinto’s translations of Tukaram and Narayan Surve from Marathi to English were particularly poignant.

Menon, who has taught in schools run by the Krishnamurti Foundation India for over 30 years, released his new book The Compass Bird at the festival. A treasure trove for nature lovers, the volume is alive with koels, mynahs, cats, hornbills, kingfishers, peacocks, babblers, pigeons, robins, snails, ants, monkeys, dogs, crows, and rats.

The other new poetry titles released at the event included Prabal Kumar Basu’s In Search of Silence, Sanjeev Khandekar’s All That I Wanna Do, HS Shivaprakash and Kamalakar Bhat’s Kannada translation of Hemant Divate’s Marathi poems, Nakli Digilu, and Paranoia, Dalvi’s English translation of them.

Day 2 of the festival opened with a keynote address by cultural activist and literary critic Ganesh Devy, who questioned the idea of civilization propagated by European colonizers. He didn’t talk specifically about poetry as Vajpeyi had already articulated what needed to be said on the subject.

This time, poems in Bengali, Odia, Maltese, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Croatian, Slovenian and of course, English, echoed through the hall. Poets like Sampurna Chattarji, Marko Pogačar, Udayan Vajpeyi, Ranjit Hoskote, Mrityunjay Kumar Singh, Kedar Mishra, Rei Berroa, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Prabodh Parikh, Danish Hussain, Barnali Ray Shukla, Suhit Bombaywala, Yamini Dand Shah, Bina Sarkar Ellias, Anand Thakore, Anjali Purohit, Ashwani Kumar, Jennifer Robertson, and Dion D’souza were part of the lineup.

Chattarji, whose book Unmappable Moves, released that day, was also in conversation with Adrian Grima about contemporary Maltese poetry, a subject unfamiliar to most Indians.

Bina Sarkar Ellias’s poem, All Roads Led to Palestine, which invoked Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said, was chilling: “mute olive trees/ bearing fruit/ and pain, / slain, for/ daring to/ grow on/ occupied land.” Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poem written at the ashram of Ramana Maharishi in Tiruvannamalai, Berroa’s soothing lullaby dedicated to children in Gaza and Ukraine, Mishra’s poem about Manipuri activist Irom Sharmila, Purohit’s translations of Marathi cotton farmer Bahinabai’s poetry, and HS Sivaprakash’s translations of Basavanna and Allama Prabhu from Kannada, were all striking.

Ranjit Hoskote read his poem Paishachi, which mourns the long history of unrest in Kashmir. Speaking about the situation there being compounded by “insurgency, low-intensity warfare, civil strife, and the Indian State’s military repression of local demands for autonomy”, he also mentioned the Kashmiri playwright-director Mohammad Subhan Bhagat, who was silenced when the “organically rooted, gentle and syncretic form of Islam” was replaced by a “militant brand of Wahhabi Islam” opposed to music, theatre, cinema and art.

Pervin Saket’s poem, Word Problems for Ten Marks Each, made an impression with its unusual experimentation with form. A winner of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in 2021, it draws inspiration from the 12th century Indian mathematician Bhaskara II, who was known for his word problems. One stanza uses the template of mathematical word problems to comment on social issues: “If Firuza, of the straight A’s/ and curved waist, who has learned/ to clasp her chemistry books to her chest, / is the regular source of optical data/ to five pairs of unblinking, pursuant eyes, / how many weeks before her father/ decides she doesn’t/ need college anymore?”

Elizabeth Grech’s book Between Seas, translated from the Maltese by Irene Mangion, and Brane Mozetič’s Obsessed with Life, translated from the Slovenian by Elizabeta Žargi, Tamara M Soban, Timothy Liu and Barbara Jurša, were also launched on the second day. As both poets couldn’t travel to India, their work was read out by others.

Curated with a lot of heart, the Mumbai Poetry Festival 2024 had much to offer. Hopefully, better budgets will allow organizers to present a bigger and even more inclusive festival in its future editions.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.

In a world obsessed with size and scale, the Mumbai Poetry Festival 2024 was a refreshing reminder that small can be incredibly beautiful when crafted with love. Hosted by Paperwall Publishing in association with the Raza Foundation on January 5 and 6 at a banquet hall in the basement of Hotel Bawa International in Vile Parle, Mumbai, the event brimmed with camaraderie.

Poets are often viewed as solitary, perhaps even asocial, figures scribbling away even as the rest of the world is occupied with the prosaic and the pragmatic. It was wonderful to see so many of them under one roof, sharing their work, celebrating each other, queuing up to buy volumes of each others’ poetry and get them inscribed even as they invoked the voices of literary ancestors and absent contemporaries.

Put together by Paperwall Publishing’s Hemant and Smruti Divate to mark 20 years of their poetry imprint, Poetrywala, the two-day festival included poets from India, Colombia, Malta, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Croatia, Cuba, Slovenia, Greece and the United States.

Poet, critic and former civil servant Ashok Vajpeyi’s inaugural address on poetry and freedom got a well-deserved standing ovation. Drawing attention to the “dark times we live in” — alluding to the invasion of Ukraine and the violence in Gaza — he said, “When there is no political or social freedom, poets tend to create, through writing, a kind of spiritual freedom that offers resistance to the conditions of unfreedom outside.”

He spoke about hatred and violence in India, the obfuscation of history, the assassination of writers and the role of poets as watchdogs of freedom when “truth is under assault from all sides”. Expressing concern about self-censorship, he also spoke about the need to protect creative freedom because “poetry is an unceasing, unstoppable, interminable satyagraha against simplification, uniformity and totalitarianism.”

A panel discussion on Latin American poetry with Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Katherine Hedeen, Dulce Chiang, and Rei Berroa moderated by Subho Bandopadhyay followed. Despite the constraints of time, they gave the audience a rich flavour of the diversity that exists within the thriving culture of poetry publishing and poetry festivals in Latin America. The poems were first read out in Spanish, and subsequently in English translation. As it is rare to meet poets from that region in India, the discussion was a treat.

Striking a balance between the global and the local, the festival featured poetry readings in Marathi by poets like Sachin Ketkar, Pradnya Daya Pawar, Dinkar Manwar, Saleel Wagh, Minakshi Patil, Manya Joshi, Manoj Pathak and Sanjeev Khandekar. Their work was translated and read out in English by Mustansir Dalvi and Rahee Dahake.

Dalvi also read from his own poem, How to bring down a dome, which alludes to the demolition of the Babri Masjid: “the dome deflates/ like the breast of a mother, famished/ in a country without love.”

HS Shivaprakash, Kamalakar Bhat, Christos Koukis, Siddhartha Menon, Jerry Pinto, Mukta Sambrani, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Menka Shivdasani, Prabal Kumar Basu, Adrian Grima, Bodhi Sattva were some of the other poets who read that day and the sounds of English, Kannada, Hindi, Spanish, Marathi, Maltese and Greek filled the venue. Pinto’s translations of Tukaram and Narayan Surve from Marathi to English were particularly poignant.

Menon, who has taught in schools run by the Krishnamurti Foundation India for over 30 years, released his new book The Compass Bird at the festival. A treasure trove for nature lovers, the volume is alive with koels, mynahs, cats, hornbills, kingfishers, peacocks, babblers, pigeons, robins, snails, ants, monkeys, dogs, crows, and rats.

The other new poetry titles released at the event included Prabal Kumar Basu’s In Search of Silence, Sanjeev Khandekar’s All That I Wanna Do, HS Shivaprakash and Kamalakar Bhat’s Kannada translation of Hemant Divate’s Marathi poems, Nakli Digilu, and Paranoia, Dalvi’s English translation of them.

Day 2 of the festival opened with a keynote address by cultural activist and literary critic Ganesh Devy, who questioned the idea of civilization propagated by European colonizers. He didn’t talk specifically about poetry as Vajpeyi had already articulated what needed to be said on the subject.

This time, poems in Bengali, Odia, Maltese, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Croatian, Slovenian and of course, English, echoed through the hall. Poets like Sampurna Chattarji, Marko Pogačar, Udayan Vajpeyi, Ranjit Hoskote, Mrityunjay Kumar Singh, Kedar Mishra, Rei Berroa, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Prabodh Parikh, Danish Hussain, Barnali Ray Shukla, Suhit Bombaywala, Yamini Dand Shah, Bina Sarkar Ellias, Anand Thakore, Anjali Purohit, Ashwani Kumar, Jennifer Robertson, and Dion D’souza were part of the lineup.

Chattarji, whose book Unmappable Moves, released that day, was also in conversation with Adrian Grima about contemporary Maltese poetry, a subject unfamiliar to most Indians.

Bina Sarkar Ellias’s poem, All Roads Led to Palestine, which invoked Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said, was chilling: “mute olive trees/ bearing fruit/ and pain, / slain, for/ daring to/ grow on/ occupied land.” Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poem written at the ashram of Ramana Maharishi in Tiruvannamalai, Berroa’s soothing lullaby dedicated to children in Gaza and Ukraine, Mishra’s poem about Manipuri activist Irom Sharmila, Purohit’s translations of Marathi cotton farmer Bahinabai’s poetry, and HS Sivaprakash’s translations of Basavanna and Allama Prabhu from Kannada, were all striking.

Ranjit Hoskote read his poem Paishachi, which mourns the long history of unrest in Kashmir. Speaking about the situation there being compounded by “insurgency, low-intensity warfare, civil strife, and the Indian State’s military repression of local demands for autonomy”, he also mentioned the Kashmiri playwright-director Mohammad Subhan Bhagat, who was silenced when the “organically rooted, gentle and syncretic form of Islam” was replaced by a “militant brand of Wahhabi Islam” opposed to music, theatre, cinema and art.

Pervin Saket’s poem, Word Problems for Ten Marks Each, made an impression with its unusual experimentation with form. A winner of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in 2021, it draws inspiration from the 12th century Indian mathematician Bhaskara II, who was known for his word problems. One stanza uses the template of mathematical word problems to comment on social issues: “If Firuza, of the straight A’s/ and curved waist, who has learned/ to clasp her chemistry books to her chest, / is the regular source of optical data/ to five pairs of unblinking, pursuant eyes, / how many weeks before her father/ decides she doesn’t/ need college anymore?”

Elizabeth Grech’s book Between Seas, translated from the Maltese by Irene Mangion, and Brane Mozetič’s Obsessed with Life, translated from the Slovenian by Elizabeta Žargi, Tamara M Soban, Timothy Liu and Barbara Jurša, were also launched on the second day. As both poets couldn’t travel to India, their work was read out by others.

Curated with a lot of heart, the Mumbai Poetry Festival 2024 had much to offer. Hopefully, better budgets will allow organizers to present a bigger and even more inclusive festival in its future editions.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.