Abstract
Introduction
Significant poetry collections published in 2022 include Vivek Narayanan’s After, Vinita Agrawal’s The Natural Language of Grief, Sukrita’s Vanishing Words, Indomitable Draupadi by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Paresh Tiwari’s now a poem now a forest and Lakshmi Kanchi’s debut collection Lakesong. Four outstanding novels are set in different time periods of Indian history: Navtej Sarna’s Crimson Spring, Jerry Pinto’s The Education of Yuri Nilanjana S. Roy’s Black River and Tabish Khair’s The Body by the Shore. Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao won the Author Award for best debut, and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Historian Aanchal Malhotra made her debut as a novelist with The Book of Everlasting Things. Short story writer and poet Anupama Mohan has published her first novel, Where Mayflies Live Forever. Aruna Chakravarti’s Through A Looking Glass has nine long stories. Mumbai Traps by Anju Makhija and Irani Café and Other Plays by Shiv Subrahmanyam have made 2022 a productive year for drama.
Vivek Narayanan’s After is epic in its range. The poems, a “reinvention or rewiring”, are a critical conversation with Valmiki’s Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic. The structure remains amorphous as one moves between characters, parts of the main narrative and the contemporary world. There are also several illustrations in the book. Sanjukta Dasgupta’s eighth poetry collection Indomitable Draupadi has poems based on mythology (Draupadi and Sita), history (Padmini and her 12,000 companions committing sati) and the 20th century sati Roop Kanwar, and concludes, “Rape and gang-rape of female bodies/ No caste, religion or class exempt/ A timeless unabashed national sport”. However, not all the poems are about the exploitation of women and many other themes find a place. Minutiae of life, stillness of memory and pain of death brought in by the Covid-19 pandemic have all been captured with a profound poignance in Vinita Agrawal’s The Natural Language of Grief. Sorrow shrouds humanity during the lockdown; its impact on the migrants is the subject of many a poem — “Life is a fossilised old exoskeleton/ its old flesh sublimated to ether/ but this old town, lockdown and all/ still palpitates in my heart/ like a fresh wound/ without the protection of old scabs.” The living and non-living are seamlessly integrated.
Vanishing Words, Sukrita’s fifth, is an eclectic poetry collection. The book also carries paintings by the poet and provides a unique sensory experience. The poems are interrogatory, questioning the existential nothingness of life especially in the post-pandemic world. The Dal Lake in Srinagar, the emptiness in Gorakhpur, the wisdom of Jarawas who escaped the tsunami, poems on the pagodas near Hanoi, Vietnam, the “cackling goats and jostling sheep” in the Himalayan slopes, the mountain peaks of the Himalayas, the snow leopards of Ladakh are all part of the poetic landscape in this book. Paresh Tiwari’s third collection, now a poem now a forest, has a Prologue, Epilogue and five sections. Images from nature and recollections of the past are coupled with the dominant mood of protest in the book. Dedicated to Arun Kolatkar, the poem “How to Kill a Poet” reminds one of Gieve Patel’s “On Killing a Tree”.
Many new poets made their debut in 2022. Lakshmi Kanchi, Poet-in-Residence at The Wetlands Centre, Cockburn, published her first collection, Lakesong, which makes a plea to preserve the ecosystem in India and Australia. The wetlands, lakes, swamps, the rich marine life have been beautifully etched in poetry. Arjavam, Geetha Ravichandran’s debut collection, is also impressive. “Arjavam” is a Sanskrit word meaning straight from the heart. The book has four parts — “Layam” or rhythm, “Swaram” or notes, “Talam” or meter/ beat, and “Raagam” or melody.
Several interesting debut collections appeared from the North-Eastern states. The Tortoise Prince by Gumlat Ong Maio of the Singpho tribe of Arunachal Pradesh is a retelling of fourteen folk tales of the tribe in verse form. The Singphos have no written history and Maio’s recording of these oral folk tales in written form will help document the culture and belief of the people. Assamese poet, Sawmitra Roy’s debut collection, In The Streets of Your City, has poems written in several forms including the Ghazal — “I got up from my bed on the other side this morning./ Dreams escaped like sparrows from my eyes this morning”. Poet from Shillong, Abhradeep Bhattacharjee’s debut collection has the title Songs for a Half-Escape. Headspace: The Mind’s Realm is a collection by the husband-wife duo from Nagaland, Aaron Pamei and Achingliu Kamei. Aaron Pamei’s poems record the loss of lives during Covid, the killing of George Floyd and other events. The rickshaw puller sleeping precariously is the “Indian precariat”, reduced to “A rag in the sewer/ But the flame behind his eyes refused to go out”. Achingliu Kamei’s tone is distinctly different. Her poems centre on the culture and topography of the Nagas.
An introspective mood drawn from the welter of personal experience is a mark of several noteworthy collections published in 2022. The late Anna Sujatha Mathai’s sixth poetry collection, Lighthouse for Drowning Memories, reflects a kind and compassionate consciousness. In a searching voice, Mathai draws from her own lived experiences as also from those of others around her. Mathai’s’ poems emphasize an engagement with life over the certitude of death. Sanjeev Sethi’s Strokes of Solace is a dialogue with self. The poems explore the inner mindscapes through a mesh of words; there is wisdom shared through poetry — “Poetry is born/ of unsettled scuffles.” The poems probe the workings of the mind and creativity to make sense of the question — “Why am I me?” Sethi’s signature style of stringing together words from different languages and experiences is once again to be seen in this collection. Wrappings in Bespoke is the poet’s seventh collection; the poems are more lyrical in tone as they ponder on life. Indu K. Mallah’s third book, The Last Sigh and Other Poems, showcases the poet’s distinct quality of rootedness in the present world. The poems move into the inner recesses of the heart but always return to an engagement with matters of real time. letters in lower case, Jaydeep Sarangi’s tenth poetry book, has poems written over a period of two years. The eponymous poem integrates the individual with nature’s elemental forces. One sees a fresh turn of images in several poems like “bird cooing morning”, “vendors howling”. Amlanjyoti Goswami’s second book Vital Signs carries the freshness of his earlier debut poetry collection. Nostalgia of childhood is remembered in bus routes. There is a five-part poem on Durga Puja, from Shashti to Dashami. Ivy Imogene Hansdak is from the Santal tribe of Jharkhand. The mood is pensive in her second collection, The Prism of Life. She is deeply saddened by the silence of the middle class at the mass migration of workers during the lockdown period — “This silence fails to bring succour to my soul,/ It fails to lead me into the land of dreams.”
The city in myriad forms is the subject of poetry in several collections. Sharmila Ray’s Varanasi Within Varanasi paints a picture of the city in short poems of four to five lines each. Poems on the myth of this ancient city’s creation, the history, culture, the colours, the smells, sounds, and the people — all recreate Varanasi for the reader. Nikita Parik’s second collection My City is a Murder of Crows presents the quotidian in poetry — a visit to the dentist, a conversation with a Hyderabadi cab driver, the Jhumka seller near Delhi, the metro rail of Kalkatta, café Lazy Suzy in Bangalore, to name a few. Siddharth Dasgupta’s All These Streets We’ve Known by Heart is the poet’s third collection. Seven broad sections with poems and photographs make this a curative experience. The vast trajectory of the poems spans from Paris to the lanes of Hazrat Ganj, Lucknow. The ghazal remains special in this book, both as form and nuance.
Some poets have experimented with style and theme. Debashish Lahiri’s Tether that Light is ekphrastic poetry inspired by paintings from B. N. Goswamy’s The Spirit of Indian Painting. Nine paintings from the book along with nine triptychs connect the image with the word. The poems in Prabhat K. Singh’s fifth collection From the Banks of Phalgu provide a different perspective to the world. In “Self-employed”, a street food stall “thela” is “preferred to a corporate job”. Traveller and polyglot Kiran Bhat’s Speaking in Tongues is a rich experiment in poetry and translation. Divided into three broad sections — “Autobiografia” (also translated into Spanish), “Kiran Speaks” (also translated into Mandarin) and “The Book of Travels” (also translated into Turkish), the poems present struggles in the poet’s life as a gay South Asian. Kiriti Sengupta’s Water Has Many Colours is a combination of poetry and visual art. The poems work in tandem with the art illustrations by Rochishnu Sanyal.
Travel is an important trope in Abhay K.’s poetry. Currently the Indian ambassador to Madagascar, he writes about different places from Nalanda in Bihar to the Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan in Stray Poems. The poems also meander into the bureaucratic corridors, making a dig at the bureaucrats — “Here comes the bureaucrab/ through the betel-stained corridors of power/ of Kama-Bhawan/ wearing his well-groomed smile”. Monsoon is a long poem, inspired by Kalidasa’s Meghaduta (“The Cloud Messenger”), which the poet had translated into English; it follows the origin of the monsoon in Madagascar through the Indian Ocean to the Himalayas and back. It is written in quatrain form with 150 stanzas in free verse.
Poetry collections centred on women’s issues are powerful and inspiring. Basudhara Roy’s third poetry book Inhabiting has 55 poems across three sections. The first presents a sensitive and enduring emotional landscape, the second section is full of energy, reminding the reader of the raw power in women; in the third section there is expression of pain and a yearning for healing. The poem “Rules for a Rape Republic” is hard-hitting and a wakeup call to address the issue of violence against women. Different stanzaic forms including the ghazal have been used. Kamayani Vashisht’s second poetry collection Recipe for Ladyfinger Pickle picks up the culinary phraseology of everyday life to assert issues related to women. Here, the side-dish dreams “of sabotaging/ the main course”. Shamayita Sen’s my body is not a vessel is her second book of poems. Written in the first person, the poems document women’s experience of their bodies. In a distinct assertive voice, Sen rejects the patriarchal appropriation of women’s bodies as a “vessel” for procreation — “I’ve been told my body is a vessel/ that must bear wounds, but/ I disagree. Does that matter?”
Significant haiku collections have also been published. Translator and poet, Arvinder Kaur’s Fireflies in the Rubble presents glimpses of her mother’s life along with haiku on her grandmother, her own life and her daughter. Assamese poet Daipayan Nair’s tilt of the winnowing fan is a haiku and senryu collection on diverse topics — “night rain/ the emptiness/ of a rusted tin drum”. Nishi Pulugurtha’s Raindrops on the Periwinkle, a haiku collection, draws attention to nature — “A lost sole mynah/ perched alone on maze of pipes/ crisscrossing random”. Rohini Gupta’s Where Rivers Meet is a collection of haiku, haibun and renku. Kittens find a special place in these haiku.
2022 was also a good year for drama. Anju Makhija’s Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays has six plays. All the plays have been staged. The protagonist in each of the plays is the Mumbai city in myriad forms. “If Wishes Were Horses” quite reminds one of Mahesh Dattani’s Where There is a Will. Pushpa Vaswani’s will is read after her death, it wills a flat she had bought with her money to Chandrika Kamble, a street flower vendor. The sequence of events raises many questions including the individual right of a woman to give her property to anyone outside the family. Another play in the collection, “The Last Train,” responds to the increase in violence in Bombay. “Cold Gold” is a thriller and draws attention to the self-seeking tendencies of people in the “maximum city”. The hypocrisy and empty lives of the well-heeled remain the focus. “Now She Says She’s God” was commissioned as a sequel to Anurag Kashyap’s When God Said Cheers. The play “Meeting with Lord Yama” is a poetic drama and “Off the Hook” is a musical.
Actor, playwright and award winning screen-writer Shiv Subrahmanyam’s Irani Café and Other Plays is a collection of three plays; photographs of the play’s performances have been included in the book. The plays are contemporary and mostly Mumbai-centric. “Irani Café” presents the passion and desire of people from different walks of life. “Snapshots from an Album” is about the relationships in present-day modern urban living. The plot of “Clogged Arteries” centres on the family of a filmmaker, Avinash Mathur, who is engrossed in the business of money-making along with a string of affairs on the side. Two endings are suggested for the play — one is unconventional and therefore liberating for its characters; the other reinforces the traditional societal structures. The ending demands of the audience — “Take your pick”. A striking aspect of all three plays is racy dialogues, quick conversation and a language somewhere between the stage and the screen.
Veteran journalist Saeed Naqvi’s The Muslim Vanishes, a play in three acts, presents a dystopia in which the Muslims in a village have suddenly disappeared. The play unravels the caste and communal dynamics that have undergone a complete change due to the “vanishing” of members of the Muslim community. The play ends with a court trial; the eleven-member jury includes Amir Khusrau, Mahatma Phule and other personages from history, figures that are a reminder of India’s syncretic traditions. A historical play, The King Who Got Lost, by D.A. Shankar, is based on the life of the young King Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar, enthroned by the British after the Mysore war of 1799. The play explores the impact of the political machinations of Dewan Purnaiah on the king’s life. However, it ignores Mummadi’s significant contributions to the spheres of literature and culture. Amit Ranjan’s short play “The True Story of Fooko, Shoe Kriya, and Fooko, in Just Three Acts, Mind the Commas Please” was originally written in 2008. The play is in the absurd style and the dialogues are full of word play.
Many significant novels of the year are based on twentieth century Indian history. Navdeep Sarna’s Crimson Spring presents multiple perspectives on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre through the lives of characters, some fictional and some actual historical figures like Udham Singh, who assassinated Sir Michael O’Dwyer (the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre) in 1940. Many years of research have gone into this novel which presents incidents that preceded and followed 1919. Sarna presents the British side of the story through minor characters.
The Book of Everlasting Things by Aanchal Malhotra traces ninety years (1924-2014) of the life of Samir Vij, who loses everything when his house in Lahore is burnt down during the Partition riots. Hyderabad is Book 2 of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s “Partition Trilogy”. The first book, Lahore, was about the trauma of the partition of Punjab. Hyderabad moves to the Deccan to present the political turmoil caused by the British departure. Characters from day-to-day life mingle with political leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, as the Nizam of Hyderabad resists joining India. Someshwar skilfully recreates the world of Princess Niloufer, the Nizam’s daughter-in-law, making good use of information about the palace which is in the public domain.
The locale is a village in Bengal in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence in the period 1946 to 1954. The novel traces the effect of the Partition on the lives of three girls whose father, a dedicated doctor, is killed in the Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta which followed the observance of “Direct Action Day” (16 August 1946). Srirupa Dhar’s debut novel For a Drop of Rice-Water recreates the man-made Bengal famine of 1942. Vijay Balan’s The Swaraj Spy is based on the life of his granduncle, and seven years of research. The protagonist works with the intelligence unit of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. The novel reveals how war and espionage affect the protagonist.
The Mendicant Prince by Aruna Chakravarti fictionalises the “Bhawal Sanyasi” case, recreating life in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century. Ramendranarayan Roy was the “Kumar” (prince) of Bhawal, a large zamindari in undivided Bengal. Twenty-five-year-old Roy died in Darjeeling in 1909. Twelve years later, a sanyasi turned up in Bhawal, claiming to be Roy. His sisters accepted him, but his wife filed a case that he was an imposter. The case went on from 1930 to 1946, from Dhaka to the Privy Council in London. The novel is structured as a series of first-person narratives by various characters, such as Roy’s wife Bibhavati, his sisters, his sisters-in-law and the judge of the Dhaka District Court. There are excerpts from letters and official reports. The last portion of the novel is rather slow-moving.
Poet and translator Jerry Pinto’s third novel, The Education of Yuri, lovingly recreates life in Bombay in the 1980s. Yuri’s parents die in an accident on the day of his baptism; he is brought up by his idealistic uncle, Tio Julio, a bachelor dedicated to the church. The bildungsroman covers the five years Yuri spends in Elphinstone College. The reader can empathise with the emotions of Yuri Fonseca, as the lonely teenager tries to make friends. The city can also be considered a protagonist because of the way different localities come to life, ranging from Fort to upmarket Malabar Hill and middle-class Mahim, where Yuri lives. Pinto reproduces the language of the college students perfectly.
Nilanjana S. Roy’s third novel Black River, set in present day Delhi, is very different from her earlier novels, The Wildings (2012) and The Hundred Names of Darkness (2014), which were set in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area; they were animal fables, with allegorical significance, presenting humans from the point of view of cats. Black River explores the seamier side of life in India’s capital: land sharks, drug pushers, sex workers and pimps, and the landless migrant workers living on the periphery of the city, “who work to build Delhi’s roads and homes, to guard the factories and offices of the wealthy”. It begins with the murder of an eight-year-old girl, the daughter of Chand, a migrant worker, near her house in Teetarpur, a village on the bank of the Yamuna (Kalindi “black river” is another name for the Yamuna). Almost all the characters are from a lower class of society; they emerge as distinct personalities. Amarendra Kumar’s Maidservant is another novel set in contemporary India. It has a poor woman as protagonist. Malti harbours no bitterness towards her parental family, in spite of them stopping her education and choosing to marry her off. Her successful attempt to educate her sons is inspiring. The parallel plot has an affluent family; the novel depicts compassionate interaction between the two families, not class conflict.
Tabish Khair’s eighth novel, The Body by the Shore, a dystopia set in the coming decade, is a fast-paced sci-fi thriller; the world in 2030 is dominated by commercial interests. The various strands of narrative converge in action onboard an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Denmark; the facility is being used to develop a bioweapon which aims to change the consciousness of human beings. The skilfully delineated characters are memorable: Jens Erik, a conscientious policeman in Aarhus, Denmark, who re-examines the case of a body washed up on the shore; his daughter Pernille; his senior, Aslan Barzani; Harris Maloub, a former assassin for a secret agency, and his associates; and Michelle, a young Caribbean woman who works as a cook on the oil rig.
Novelists have also written about earlier periods of Indian history. Ranga Rao’s fourth novel, Those Women of the Coromandel, is set in nineteenth-century India. Basavaraj Naikar has written fiction and drama featuring lesser-known figures of Karnataka, like the seventeenth century Raja Sivappa Nayaka (A Noble King of Bidanuru) and Rani Chennamma (The Warrior Queen of Keladi). He also writes about religious figures like the twelfth century Basaveshwara (A Democrat of Devotion). Krishna Deva Raya, the legendary king of Vijayanagara, is the protagonist of three novels published in 2022: Abhijeeth Hiliyana’s The Boy Who Would Be King and The Crown of Vijayanagara are fast paced recreations of the king’s life, with a nuanced exploration of his character, while Naikar’s A Glorious Emperor of Vijayanagara tends to be a straightforward narration of events. Vikramjit Ram’s Mansur is a fascinating recreation of the intrigues the master artist Mansur faces in the 17th century Mughal court. Rajat Pillai writes about a seventh century king in Harsha: The Fearless Warrior of Thanesar.
Like Tabish Khair’s The Body by the Shore, Christopher C. Doyle’s The Khandavaprastha Conspiracy (Book 3 of “The Mahabharata Quest” Series) is a thriller featuring a secret laboratory perfecting a bioweapon; here it is in China, and the Muslim Uyghurs are the guinea pigs. Doyle, who has been researching the Mahabharata for many years, gives a credible scientific explanation for Krishna’s questionable conduct of burning down the Khandavaprastha forest, killing all the inhabitants. Hindu mythology continues to fascinate writers, as shown by books like Gunjan Porwal’s Ashwatthama vs Parashuram, Koral Dasgupta’s Draupadi and Kevin Missal’s Durga. Lord Krishna was killed when a hunter shot at his foot, mistaking it for a bird; Meghnad Desai’s Mayabharata: The Untold Story Behind the Death of Lord Krishna presents a fanciful interpretation of the incident. According to him, it was not a hunter but an architect from the Mayan civilization of Mexico who killed him because Krishna asked him to.
Detective stories and thrillers proliferate. Harini Nagendra, Meeti Shroff-Shah and Nachi have made their debuts with detective fiction. Nagendra’s The Bangalore Detectives Club is set in 1920s Bangalore; the detection plot is well worked out and the recreation of the topography of the time is flawless, but the freedom enjoyed by the newly married Kaveri in an orthodox Brahmin family does not ring true. The Death of Kirti Kadakia by Meeti Shroff-Shah is set in contemporary Mumbai; the authentic (and somewhat satirical) representation of very rich Gujarati families is well integrated with the detective story. Nachi has a police officer as detective in his first novel, Death of a District Magistrate. Joygopal Podder’s Eye Witness is his twentieth thriller; he holds the national record of “fastest published crime fiction author” with 15 novels in 57 months. Kritika Sharma has written romances, ghost stories and thrillers; The Rogue Spy is her tenth book.
Some impressive short story collections were published. Aruna Chakravarti’s second short story collection, Through a Looking Glass, has nine women-centric stories. Most of the protagonists are involved in a struggle for their rights in a society which exploits them emotionally and physically. However, it is not a picture of unrelieved gloom. The settings are recreated vividly, with every small detail perfectly in place, whether it is rural Bengal in the first quarter of the twentieth century (“Through a Looking Glass”), government quarters in New Delhi in the decades after Indian independence or contemporary Delhi (“From an Upstairs Window” and “Accident”). The characters come from all classes of society and have been developed in depth. The five stories in Temsula Ao’s The Tombstone in My Garden explore the myths, beliefs and social practices of the people of Nagaland, in rural as well as urban settings The story “Snow-Green” shows that plants too have feelings; the exotic plant refuses to bloom when it is transplanted. The title story has Lily Anne, an Anglo-Indian, looking back on her life and the precarity of her dual cultural identity. Many of the stories in Vivek Sachdeva’s The Biryani Shop and Other Stories are set in present-day Delhi. Naseer, a Muslim who makes a living by selling biryani, is the protagonist of the title story, which recreates the riots: “Muslims and Hindus were united together in fear, yet they were divided.” “The Doll’s House” and “A Thunderbolt” show how decisions by the government affect common people adversely.
Many established publishing houses are now favouring translations. Works in many languages and genres, from various time periods, ranging from the eighth century CE to the twenty-first century, have been translated into English. Harimohan Jha’s novel The Bride (1930) is the first translation from Maithili. K. S. Ram and Uma Ram have published a parallel text version of Harihar Vaishnav’s Selected Poems; readers who know the Devanagari script can enjoy the rhythm of the poems better. Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize for 2022, the first Indian-language novel to do so. The JCB prize shortlist had just one novel written originally in English, Mamang Dai’s Escaping the Land, and five translations, from Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Malayalam and Nepali, respectively. Khalid Jawed’s The Paradise of Food, translated by Baran Farooqi, won the JCB Prize, the first Urdu novel to do so. Aleph Book Company has expanded their “greatest stories ever told” series and volumes of translations from eleven Indian languages have appeared so far.
A large number of biographies and memoirs appeared, some originally written in English, others translated from the Bhashas. Tushar Gandhi’s The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba casts new light on Mahatma Gandhi’s wife Kasturba. It was always assumed that Kasturba was illiterate, and Gandhiji never dispelled this impression. Two years ago, the staff of Gandhi Research Foundation of Jalgaon found a damaged diary at Kasturba Ashram, Indore. It was written by Kasturba Gandhi, in colloquial and ungrammatical Gujarati, about her life in the period January to September 1933. Tushar Gandhi, her great-grandson, has translated it into English, with detailed notes on her life.
The first three volumes of “The Routledge Writer in Context” series appeared in 2022, exploring the texts and contexts of three leading Indian writers: Indira Goswami (Asamiya), Krishna Sobti (Hindi), and Joginder Paul (Urdu) [
We mourn the death of political theorist, literary critic and historian Aijaz Ahmad (1941-2022), poet Anna Sujatha Mathai (1934-2023), poet, novelist and short story writer Temsula Ao (1945-2022) and actor and screen-writer Shiv Subrahmanyam (1959-2022).
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.