Description
The poet who proclaims ‘You are tree to me’ knows poise and action in equal measure. Gayatri Majumdar has that rare eye which can see ‘a neighbour’ pouring ‘ghee into’ a ‘fairy tale’s dying hour’. She melds dream, desire, myth and memory into an experience that transcends the merely vicarious. Honest, earnest and effusive, the poems in a warm place with no memory are unhurried remouldings of the idiom of worship. — Sarabjeet Garcha, author of All We Have
These poems by Gayatri Majumdar are very special invitations. Their dance will welcome you with colour, with balm and, yes, with concern. And, you’ll enjoy their greetings made vividly poignant by the birdsong that surrounds them. — Hiram Larew, award-winning poet, advocate, and leader in the arts and poetry community
Gayatri Majumdar’s poetry, impassioned and profound, is rooted in the pure and absurd beauty of living. They touch on different signposts of life and, in the process, transcend their own boundaries. She is a major voice in Indian poetry in English. — Sekhar Banerjee, poet and a Pushcart Prize nominee, 2021
As editor, publisher and founder of critically acclaimed Indian literary journal, The Brown Critique for over two decades (1995–2015), GAYATRI MAJUMDAR published hundreds of established and emerging poets from India and other countries. She began her career as a journalist in Press Trust of India and The Independent (India) in Mumbai. Her career also encompasses leadership in the publishing industry and work in NGOs. Gayatri’s books include A Song for Bela (a novel; Sun Publishing, 2017); poetry collections Shout (Sampark, 2000), I Know You are Here (Red River, 2019), The Dream Pod (Copper Coin, 2022); non-fiction The lotus of the heart (2021; to be available as an audiobook in 2024) and Brown Critique Home anthology (co-ed, 2021). Her poems and prose have been published in major journals and anthologies and featured in The Indian PEN, A Hudson View, ‘Poetry International Web’, Indian Literature, BigBridge, Open Space India, The Sun Collective, Hibiscus: Poems That Heal and Empower, Open Your Eyes: An Anthology on Climate Change and Shimmer Spring, Setu, Chipmunk, emerging poetry, Borderless Journal (Singapore), Dreich (Scotland–India), Renaissance, Direct Path, Sri Aurobindo’s Action, The Kali Project anthology (US) and trouvaille – A Travel Anthology. Gayatri was on the Review Committee of Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2022 and her poems are a part of Converse: Pippa Rann Poetry anthology–India@75 (UK). She is currently working on her next non-fiction title.
As co-founder of ‘Pondicherry Poets’, Gayatri has been curating the annual Pondicherry/Auroville Poetry Festival. Apart from hosting and participating in several literary/music/sustainable tourism events in Pondicherry and across India, in September 2019, she curated a seven-day residential ‘Wings of Spirit’ literary/music festival in Talla Ramgarh, Nainital, in the Himalayas. ‘The Brown Critique_Gayatri Majumdar’ YouTube channel features poets and musicians regularly. While Brown Critique Books has published a handful of mostly non-fiction titles over the past few years. Gayatri lives in Pondicherry, India and is associated with Sri Aurobindo Society, specifically handling the publication of books, eBooks and audiobooks (AuroPublications).
Reviews
Neera Kashyap in Kitaab.org
Gayatri Majumdar is a poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, anthologist, publisher, and journal editor. Her own books include a novel, A Song for Bela (Sun Publishing); poetry collections, Shout (Sampark), I know You are Here (Red River), The Dream Pod (Copper Coin); a non-fiction audiobook, The lotus of the heart and an anthology, Brown Critique Anthology, Home (co-editor). Her own poems and prose have appeared in major journals and anthologies. As founder-editor and publisher of the critically acclaimed literary journal, The Brown Critique, she has published hundreds of poets from both India and abroad.
Sutanuka Ghosh Roy in FemAsia Magazine
Majumdar constantly plays with places, spaces, love, loss, pain, and hope, culling music from the ordinary hum-drum life and varying the drapes of memory to make it less dramatic and more contemporary, she stuns with the beauty and the range of her art, “steer my kheya tori toward the land of forgetfulness..forgiveness–/ of unending, unsoiled melody/ Where nothing more need be uttered,/ nothing is../ Remain—silently/ never leave.” She conjures her poetry from the abstraction of pure movement between forgetfulness and remembrance.
From the Book
Coffee Philosophy
If it were not so easy to find,
I would go crazy trying to locate it
in twin rainbows and brass goddesses.
Then over a cup of coffee you convinced me,
kind of nonchalantly,
the earth and its luminaries
sprung from a seed
of time and space not of our making;
I didn’t believe you.
Look, how we fall over each other?
Getting high with incense smoke raising our ceilings,
wanting to die again, storm dancing uprooting,
collect rain in a bottle,
give a rain check to a reckless prophet
of a lazy hour stroked with dreams.
The Mother plays the organ —
Jesus points to his sacred heart;
we carry river pebbles in our pockets,
some slip through old holes
in this collision of time.
I sit here writing — not sure why —
waiting for that coffee with cream
restless, I shift around artefacts and memories
in empty space crammed with myths.
Aware
I bite into this mysterious story —
one bite at a time; savour
surprising flavours of clove, carrot and grace.
Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags begin to chant above my door;
the washing machine revolves around a sun
of this morning’s dream hatching restless willow trees
with car honks, squirrel talk, petal bloom in the mix;
a white-throated Kingfisher perches on the white ledge
of my deep peace — his descending trills marking women selling fish.
A neighbour pours ghee into this fairy tale’s
dying hour — my tenant, a pigeon, ruminates
even as she comforts her new-born fledglings
watching other children giggle, stomp-play
wondering what kind of schooling is that,
deciding most certainly flying is more fun.
On this hot May day,
the fan overhead steady, humming to rhythms
of my breaths and to the half-awake sea shoring about my room.
In this play of touch-and-go,
things settle —
the day will break into something like a smile, into eternity.
Flower in Her Hair
She asked puzzled, why are you
wearing a flower in your hair?
Then there was the fragrance of rain
slowing the planets above…
The boat anchored on my window pane
for nights now under the waning moon –
considering her options, lost in thoughts
stuck as if in an asylum.
She falls into a portal
of pure bliss —
a thing sticking to her blasphemies…
forsaking tenderness and time.
The frangipani in her hair
held up by a family of chattering monkeys
on their long trip to infinity.
