Relentless Regeneration: Poetry of Power and Reflection

Book Review by Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar

Silver Years, Senior Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry, eds. Sanjukta Dasgupta, Malashri Lal, Anita Nahal. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2025. ₹ 330. Pages 230. 

I start this review with a full disclosure. As generation next to this exciting range of women poets, awed and intimidated by their courage and their brilliance, I write as a younger sister, listening for the notes that make their poetry sing. What I hear is not just music, but memory, resistance, tenderness, and above all, survival.

Perhaps it’s the fact that they have lived their lives as “trapeze artists” balancing professional careers as academicians, journalists, bureaucrats, art designers, social workers with the traditional roles as nurturers and caregivers. Fifty senior contemporary Indian poets, residing in India and abroad, have come together to create this exceptional collection of one hundred and seventy two poems published recently by the Sahitya Akademi.

“We are the Kali women” declares Anita Nahal in one of the opening poems.
“We don’t distinguish. We seek. We learn. Comprehend. Embrace” In a mood which is resolute, resolute and triumphant this new generation of “aging” women stride to the forefront and “strut” their stuff. And girl!is it impressive!

In their introduction to the collection the editors, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Malashri Lal and Anita Nahal, point to the ways in which the women poets express, interrogate and deconstruct the double bind with power. Many of the poems included in this collection redefine and radicalize the notions of power and agency. Snigdha Agarwal’s “Gender Bias” captures the ambition and defiance of an entire generation and the hidden hostility they encountered.

“They watch her with eyes

Trained in ancient codes

Judgement curled like a fist in their minds.”

The woman’s confidence is dismissed as performance, her success as a fortunate accident, and the world waits for her to stumble and to fall. Yet out of this brave vulnerable courage to keep going women have written their own stories and destinies.

Pramila Venkateswaran’s “The Grammar of Control” points at the anomaly of power:

“Today’s right taken away at whim

By  graying supremes on ‘order’s’ side.”

Institutional and state power has been concentrated in the hands of older males in most parts of the world and through most of history. Their gaze is on women whom they police and school relentlessly. In response to this enforcement of order, older women are offering up resistance and a more collaborative, co dependent version of power. As Neera Kashyap writes:

“One speaks up….even if the voice squeaks like a rabbit’s or

Is pitched high like a witch’s”

One seeks solidarity with other women. Ranu Uniyal writes:

“A healthy camaraderie

Between us flits and warms

Me inside out.”

The mirror emerges as a trope in many poems in the collection. Chanchal Sarin’s “Many years ago”plays with the image of seeing the mother’s reflection in the mirror. Radha Chakravarty writes:

“The mirror shows a stranger.

With a penetrating gaze”

In the mirror she catches a glimpse of her other selves and other lives. Satinder Kaur calls the mirror her partner in love and secrecy, her confidant, therapist and advisor.

Portraits and paintings recur too as visual symbols of the journey that women’s lives have undertaken. Jayshree Misra Tripathi writes of charcoal sketches of adulthood. Rita Malhotra’s  “On Canvas” celebrates the image of a black canvas splashed with light.

Music plays as sitar accompaniment to the words in “The Body Has Its Own Memory”, as sonnets, odes, Farida Khanum’s throaty ghazal, or as RagaBheempalasi. Perhaps the most touching, evocative and urgent rendition of this is in Malashri Lal’s “Krishna’s Flute”. The poem is set in the context of the pandemic raging through the world. The invisible enemy brings fever and delusion, breathlessness and death. In the midst of this ominous silence, Krishna’s flute brings hope and sweet succor. The conversation between the flute and the Pilkhan tree is a tender touch and the flute’s assertion that it belongs to Radha as much as to Krishna evokes layers of meanings and mythological associations that exemplifies poetry at its best. The poem is dedicated to Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia and soaked in love, longing, hope and redemption.

Mothers, fathers, ex lovers flit through the pages of this outstanding collection. Wisdom is offered as deep reflective insights. Anamika’s “Knowing” reprises the mirror image: “Knowing someone is like buying another mirror for yourself”. It evokes the sound of the sad laughter of old prostitutes, the pain of separation of Bhatkoinya berries from ancestral fields, the chains of prisoners, the strains of Raga Jaijavanti on the ektara. Knowing someone is a passionate plunge first outside and then inside yourself.

The poems range over vast geographical spaces, including floating islands, fields, deserts, the roads of Lhasa, Arlington, Jaipur, Kolkata, Chandipur, Iran, Colorado. Distant rivers snowy hills, deep, dark woods are all part of the wild natural spaces that our imagination visits while reading these poems.

The poets are unrelenting in their ability to look at age and aging without needless romanticizing. Even that great taboo subject- death –is looked squarely in the face as in Sanjukta Dasgupta’s poems which display an acceptance and a befriending of the loving embrace, the gentle maternal arms that await us all and promise everlasting rest.

This volume is breathtaking in its range and its ambition. It reminds us that age is not to be feared but to be celebrated. The lived histories of our lives can become poetry and that poetry can both heal and transform- this is the final message of Silver Years.

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Prof. Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar teaches a RGPV, University of Bhopal. Her novel Zaira has been widely acclaimed. With over thirty years’ experience of teaching and research in the fields of Literature and Culture, Vinita is committed to exploring the depths and preciousness of the human experience through the pages of a book or the spell binding delivery of an oral tale. 

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Setu, June 2025