A Temple of Delight along the Arabian Sea

How Women Become Poems in Malabar, Smitha Sehgal, Red River, New Delhi, ISBN 978-93-92494-48-2, Rs. 349/-

-Reviewed by Jaydeep Sarangi

 

How Women Become Poems in Malabar ferrets around women’s space, travels, engagements with within and the outside world and empowerment. Written with extreme intensity, poems in the trendsetting collection are not merely a footnote to equality, or a tick in the diversity box. Smitha Sehgal’s collection explores the feminine experiences in her social role relationships, transformative zeal and the unique setting of the coast of Malabar. The milieu and its rich tapestry emerge as a vivid character in Smitha’s poems. The dedication says, “I dedicate this book with a silent prayer to the ruins of century-old mango trees planted in my ancestors by the Arabian Sea.” It prepares the readers to experience a different collection of poems in the midst of cacophony of poems written these days.

Jaydeep Sarangi

In ‘What Poetry Means to Me’ the versatile poetess says,

“... to discover truth

to sleep in peace

to die in deep meditation.”

The poetess is not bounded by any political map; she travels and travels with poetry from Malabar to Guyana and Kabul to Port of Spain in a splendid vessel to pour gold. In the process, she gets the shop and the shutter:

“When I wake up, this is not what I am

In the brief history of our love,

I am not your coy Radha or devoted Meera,

I am but words.” (‘The Brief History of Love’)

Smitha Sehgal

The Arabian Sea is a vibrant character in Smitha’s poems. Precision is the vital dose of many of her powerful poems. More words create more business in poems which are a handicap in the rhythmic flow the poems. Smitha is aware of her artistry. She takes control of her cadence.

Some poems take us to a rainforest basin where incessant rain welcome dreams of pristine maps snapping inside the cloudlets of her poetic thoughts. In some poems, El Dorado myth opens to a ‘supine strip of road’ within. Poets have a different order of faith. Smitha says,

Music becomes a paradisal river

gathering our betrayals.” (‘El Dorado Inn’)

One of the salient features of these well structured poems is that even the emotionally intelligent ones raise deeper questions,

“call her by my name—

Arabian, Andaman, Mediterranean

she whispers in my conch shell ear (.)” (‘Song of Sea’)

Here doors of promises have no hinges. What else is poetry?

Poems in this collection come after some years of silence. The poet has talent and zeal for sustenance. Some poems link every worldly collapse to the faith in poetic wisdom as the poet puts them out in the tropical sun:

“come back to salt

come to read

come to gather pine cones(.)”

There is desire for currency of beauty everywhere in the collection, and the poetess explores her cultural roots and home photographically. Some poems in this collection of royally variegated poems reflect her preoccupation with sweetness of love, love’s languishment, loneliness and deep death of objects and subjects. The glass shines and we are never lost in the game called love. The poem ‘Rain Man’ describes how someone becomes ‘the flooding Yamuna’ when rain whispers nightlong. Into the mysteries all images are drawn, between light and dark. The tone of the poems is simple, but moving. Her material is varied and at times, sensuous. It is here that the poet's unique gift is revealed through a set of sparkling metaphors and images drawn from Indian sensibilities and value systems. Rain is a trope for many subtle things. The tropical sun smiles with plenty of sun/rain/monsoon metaphors in How Women Become Poems in Malabar. The production of the book by the Red River is out of the box, amazingly satisfying which vividly matches with Smitha’s subjective parameters in the collection. Smitha is above all, an ardent seeker. Poems of this polymeric oeuvre remind us how literature is a special mode of knowing of the world of Truths.

Dubbed as ‘Bard on the Banks of Dulung’ Jaydeep Sarangi is an Indian poet, poetry activist with eleven poetry collections in English latest being the half-confession (2024). and scholar on dalit studies, postcolonial studies and Indian Writings with forty one books anchored in Kolkata/ Jhargram. Widely anthologised and reviewed as a significant contemporary poet Sarangi is on the editorial boards for journals of repute, devoted to marginal studies and poetry criticism. With Rob Harle he has edited six anthologies of poems from Australia and India which are a wealthy literary link between the nations. With Amelia Walker, he has guest edited a special issue for TEXT, Australia. Sarangi has twenty books and several articles/essays/reviews on dalit studies which are an window to the world. His recent article, “The Sociological Self as Palimpsest Caste, Class, Religion, and Gender in the Select Writings of Bama” appeared through Routledge, UK. His recent books include, Mapping the Mind, Minding The Map:Twenty Contemporary Indian English Poets, Sahitya Akademi, 2023 and A Life Uprooted: A Bengali Dalit Refugee Remembers, Sahitya Akademi, 2023. Mapping the Mind, Minding the Map (2023, Sahitya Akademi) is his latest book. Sarangi is currently the President of Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics (GIEWEC) and Vice President, EC, Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, Kolkata. Living with poets and poetry, Sarangi is principal of New Alipore College, Kolkata-53, WB.

Link to a recent newspaper coverage (The Hindu):

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/west-bengal/the-college-principal-who-serves-as-a-bridge-between-bengals-dalit-literature-and-the-world/article68795882.ece

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Setu, February 2025