A Carousel of Time: The Politics and Poetics of Sanjukta Dasgupta’s Oh Freedom

Title: Oh Freedom

Author: Sanjukta Dasgupta

Publisher: Sahitya Akademi

Pages: 126

Price: ₹ 225

---Reviewer: Koushik Sen

Sanjukta Dasgupta’s newest volume of poems, Oh Freedom, collates the poems that she has written over the last couple of years. Putting down this very line on a computer screen, it feels like documenting something; that primal itch since I A Richards for close readings, to get into the head of a poet, to decode the cryptic lines as if they were some sort of interpretive revelation of history. That is something akin to what people generally tend to do in their daily lives, their furrowed eyebrows, their WhatsApp screen reading message deleted, frantically typing out, ‘What did you delete?’ As if the act of omission, the commission, the very act of writing and non-writing is not valid ipso facto.

Sanjukta Dasgupta

It is a difficult proposition to talk about Dasgupta’s poems and do so with the expected impersonal detachment. The anxiety of influence looms as someone who relates to things; one is given to think that the couple of years at the University of Calcutta are a permanent epiphany. At the same time, it is easy to read the lines redolent of the familiar wit, the occasional bon mots, and the surreptitious jibe at the positivist view of history as a Marxist-feminist: ‘He himself said he had Greek genes/Remember Alexander’s visit’ – the rest is history. And that’s no critique of the ethno-religious supremacist politics – she’s talking of her father, or her mother’s husband, to be loyal to the title of her poem. She follows up this poem with one on her husband, beginning with a characteristic tongue-in-cheek ‘Unlike Draupadi, I have just one husband’ but ending on a neoclassical sobriety. Poetry is fiction, after all, as Terry Eagleton makes it clear in his How to Read a Poem.

Koushik Sen

With poems like Bombs in Bethlehem and Murder Most Foul, the continuity of time that carries with it the weight of a domino effect of political misappropriation is made clear. Dasgupta’s poems, particularly those with this sensibility, are a departure from the modernist hope for a savior. She uses the usual leitmotif of the baby, metaphorically and metrically aligned, but appropriates it as a subversion. Her vision is that of history repeating itself as a farce. The half rhymes and progressive metres grope for hope in a world that cannot distinguish the left from the right in the ever-changing madness of shifting politics that consider a concession from neoliberalism as a victory: ‘Dreams turn to nightmares/Callous fingers on remote triggers’ or ‘A storm rose, a tumult tore/Through the tragic night/As never before’. It is not the calloused fingers but the callous ones that call the shots, and the poet engenders and accomplishes a literary history that can tell very well the mushroom cloud from the cumulonimbus. The poet, the seer, is aware that there is no centre that holds anymore, and the falling apart of the world is not a departure in principle; rather, there’s a firm knowledge that spring will always follow winter. 

It was Julian Barnes who had famously written that history is the crossroad between the shortcomings of documentation and the inaccuracy of memory. For poets, however much logicians would hate it, it is by their very vocation that they bridge this gap, and they do it with a personal reading of history. With poems fashioned as childhood reflections like Tom, My Little Puppy, and Bulbulie, My Little Bird, Dasgupta seeks to do the very thing that she does in the other poems, at least in their central fabric: undermining the family without subverting the personal. It seems like a contradiction in sorts, a Marxist obsessed with the individual – but that is where the poet trumps over the rationalist – putting fingers on a history that is so awfully visible yet guarded, carefully picking out the bones from the flesh, the crenulated mark of personal loss recognizable. The learned is separated from the instinctive, bond from love; which reminds one of the late Sankha Ghosh’s often quoted lines: ‘Mukh Dheke Jaay Bigyapone’ (Advertisement obliterates the identity). Incidentally, Dasgupta refers to this instinct with her characteristic wit in one of her poems, Reading, noting with a chuckle how emoticons are the new antediluvian pictography.

These motley threads do not serve as a workaround to the realm of the elusive freedom, but probe the absence of it in everything, from the throes of birth to the stillness of death. One could go on and on about Dasgupta’s love for Shakespeare and Hemingway and how she weaves the Greek myths to weave her own fabric, the spool of politics leaving her with no dearth of creative lapse during her creative hours. However, as a jaded reader, one could only sit with this book, maybe stare at the wall for one, and bask in the carousel of the city memory she weaves, one that is inhabited by the rich and walked on by the workers. Maybe the tea will run cold, and one would, inspired by the reading, set out to haunt the alleyways of this ancient city appropriated by traders for centuries, only to find a lane or two named after people who truly belonged to the city she cares for, such as the one who saved a manual scavenger by entering a manhole, losing his life in the bargain, a little over a century ago.

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Reviewer's Bio: Koushik Sen (b. 1994) completed his Master’s in English Language and Literature from the University of Calcutta, and has taught as Assistant Professor of English for five years. He writes in both, English and Bangla, and his works have been published in Aaro Ananda, The Statesman, NY Literary Magazine, among other places. His translation of Avinandan Mukhopadhyay’s poems, Limbed Moon Harvested Void, was published in 2025. He has served as book review editor for Ethos Literary Magazine, and writes a review when he genuinely likes a book. 

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Setu, November 2025