Description

One may claim that Hindi is a relatively new language that emerged as a lingua franca in north and central India during the national movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — codified by journalists, activists, teachers and lawyers; Hindi is perhaps the only language where prose happened before poetry. One might also argue that Hindi has always been around; tracing its roots to the Rekhta era, the Bhakti movement, and the earlier works of Apbhransh, Prakrit and Sanskrit literature — inheriting their diction, forms, idioms, and myths; like a river that has always been flowing and yet is always brimming with new waters — a perennial river.

‘Perennial’ intends to introduce an English reader to contemporary Hindi poetry, that has tradition seamlessly woven into it. This anthology covers 40 poets born across seven decades, who come from varied linguistic, economic, and geographical landscapes — some live isolated in India’s hinterlands while others have travelled the world. And yet, they have reflected in their unique ways the various drifts that have come to define twenty-first century India — rising globalisation, communal politics, changing family systems and values, Dalit and Adivasi movements, gender struggles, farmer struggles, to name a few. While the dialects of their region weigh heavily on their expression and style, they are united by Hindi — a language they live and share.

The Poets

Kunwar Narain / Kedarnath Singh / Chandrakant Devtale / Vishnu Khare / Mamta Kalia / Ashok Vajpeyi / Rajesh Joshi / Viren Dangwal / Mangalesh Dabral / Gyanendrapati  / Om Prakash Valmiki / Uday Prakash / Manmohan / Rati Saxena / Arun Kamal / Asad Zaidi / Ramashankar Yadav ‘Vidrohi’ / Devi Prasad Mishra / Anita Verma / Gagan Gill / Sudhir Ranjan Singh / Anamika / Savita Singh / Asang Ghosh / Savita Bhargav / Keshav Tiwari / Neelesh Raghuvanshi / Mahesh Verma / Anuradha Singh / Nirmala Putul / Hemant Deolekar / Farid Khan / Manoj Kumar Jha / Monika Kumar / Geet Chaturvedi / Jacinta Kerketta / Lovely Goswami / Parwati Tirkey / Adnan Kafeel Darwesh / Vihag Vaibhav

The Translators

Abhimanyu Kumar / Anita Gopalan / Apurva Narain / Archana Sharma Awasthi / Areeb Ahmad / Basudhara Roy / Bhumika Chawla-D’Souza /  Carol D’Souza / Dibyajyoti Sarma / Kabir Deb / Kinshuk Gupta / Medha Singh / Nidhi Singh /  Nimish K Sharma / Priyanka Sarkar / Purbasha Roy / Sampurna Chattarji / Sarabjeet Garcha / Saudamini Deo / Semeen Ali / Seth Michelson / Shelly Bhoil / Sourav Roy / Tanuj Solanki / Tuhin Bhowal / Vidya Bhandarkar

Sourav Roy is a bilingual writer, poet, journalist, and translator. He currently works as a Hindi teacher at Head Start Educational Academy, having previously served as a visiting faculty member at Azim Premji University and NIFT Bengaluru. With multiple books to his credit, his debut poetry collection, Kaal Baisakhi, was published by Vani Prakashan in 2022. Sourav Roy’s second poetry collection is forthcoming.

Tuhin Bhowal is a writer, translator, and editor working between three languages: Hindi, Bengali, and English. Tuhin lives alone in Bangalore and tweets @tuhintranslates. Perennial will be the debut book to his credit.

Extract: Introduction: Silent Waters Run Deep by Sourav Roy

Besides its democratisation, the other major overarching tendency of today’s Hindi poetry is its universalisation. Various poetry movements of the world — most evidently Romanticism, Imagism, the progressive movement, and the Beat Generation — had inspired Hindi poetry at different stages — Hindi’s first modern poet Bharatendu himself being a spirited translator. Another contemporary of Bharatendu, Shridhar Pathak, had translated the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith’s works — most notably The Traveller, Deserted Village, and The Hermit — during the 1880s, highlighting the ills of imperialism and its effect on common lives. Nirala had translated the Mahabharata, and Mahadevi Verma had translated the Vedas into Hindi. Agyeya too was a passionate translator, with his focus on European poetry and Japanese haiku; he also translated Tagore’s work, including his novel Gora. Raghuvir Sahay translated several of Shakespeare’s plays and Czech novels, and Harivansh Rai Bachchan translated Omar Khayyam, WB Yeats, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello. Nagarjun, despite his ragtag demeanour, was a serious Sanskrit scholar and a Maithili poet, who translated Kalidasa’s Meghdoot, Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, and Vidyapati’s poems into Hindi. Kedarnath Agarwal translated Pablo Neruda, and Dharamvir Bharati collated an anthology, Deshantar, for which he translated 161 modern poems from 21 countries.

By the time the 20th century ended, much of the canonical literature of the world was available in Hindi; with a pantheon of talented poets who were neck to neck with valuable world literature and translated actively way into the 21st century. This relationship with translation has further evolved with newer poets. Up until the 20th century, translation was primarily the task of a well-established poet, someone who’d have internalised much of Hindi’s cadence and rhythm, and the act of translating would be the logical next step to expand their worldview. Now we find college students and aspiring poets translating English literature into Hindi, owing to their bilingual fluency. Translation is now part of a poet’s individual journey in developing their unique voice, impacting their diction, prosody, and vision; right from the inception.

Then there are poets, living in different parts of India and exposed to other Indian languages — Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Odia, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Assamese, Telugu, Gujarati, among others — widely translating their literature into Hindi. There is a clear surge of publications of translations — both from global and Indian languages — in Hindi magazines, blogs, websites, and in the form of books.

Translation is second nature to a large number of Hindi poets who have emerged over the 21st century; most notably Ashutosh Dubey, Dinkar Kumar, Utpal Banerjee, Prem Ranjan Animesh, Mahesh Verma, Anuradha Singh, Pankaj Chaturvedi, Giriraj Kiradoo, Rahul Rajesh, Monika Kumar, Geet Chaturvedi, Nishant, Mrityunjay Prabhakar, Vyomesh Shukla, Pranjal Dhar, Sudhanshu Firdaus, Devesh Path Sariya, Anuradha Annanya, Anchit, Nishant Kaushik, among others.

The poets they translate encompass both the classical and the contemporary. With the advent of social media and emails, it is now easier to approach a distant poet and work with them. This active embracing of other cultures has enriched Hindi poetry tremendously — exposing the possibilities in diction, form, subject, style and theme — and creating space for much more experimentation.

Reviews

Mohini Gupta in Afterword India

The selected poetry in this collection is profound, philosophical and playful, but also hits hard. It speaks to political issues that have plagued the country before, during and after independence, and continue to remain relevant to address deep-seated social issues today. Poetry has a unique ability to put things in perspective, and a collection like this places poetry from every decade next to each other in an attempt to showcase the social patterns that have been repeating over the years. Poets range from Kunwar Narain (b. 1927), Mangalesh Dabral (b. 1948) and Gagan Gill (b. 1959) to Parwati Tirkey, Adnan Kafeel Darvesh and Vihag Vaibhav (all born in 1994). Be it issues surrounding language politics and anti-Hindi sentiments in the nation or communal violence, casteism and the existing sense of apathy in people, the poems in this collection are not afraid to take a stand. The second half of the collection really foregrounds contemporary voices on the margins and platforms the pain, oppression and hierarchies that continue to perpetuate, with all of us as perpetrators.

From the Book

Living an Ordinary Life

Kunwar Narain
translated by Apurva Narain

I know that
I can’t change the world
nor even fight it
and win
Yes, fighting, I could become a martyr
and beyond that maybe
win a martyr’s monument
or get stardom like a star…
But to be a martyr
is a totally different sort of thing
Living ordinary lives too
people have been seen
quietly getting martyred

In Another City

Kedarnath Singh
translated by Tuhin Bhowal

This is what happened the last time
This is what will happen the next time too
We will meet again
in another city
and keep gawking at
each other’s face.

Blade

Chandrakant Devtale
translated by Saudamini Deo

Between the wind and sunlight that has marched onto the table
The blade is kept, whereas on the table
Lies bread close to a bouquet of fresh flowers
At this time, when between the flowers and the bread,
The sunlight is creating something like a secret dialogue
An odour, brushing the tomatoes between them,
Is reaching me
Someone has flung the newspaper next to the blade
And just then, the blade penetrating the news’ appetite,
Started to look so violent to me
In the meantime, you came out taking a bath, dripping
And I noticed the blade again
Which now appeared extremely timorous and pitiful
Although it continued glimmering
Because of your laughter, morning and the sunlight.

Without You

Mamta Kalia
translated by Kinshuk Gupta

Without meeting you, I’ve walked such a long path that
I can see the other end of the road.
In this long period
I’ve been living
like a flower that blooms,
sometimes without its share of the sun,
like sometimes
somebody wears a ring
without its gemstone.

What’s Left Now?

Ashok Vajpeyi
translated by Sourav Roy

What’s left now?
Hardly any time
but dreams are left.
Everything around turning into haze
but beauty is left.
The truth has been muddled
but words are left.
We’re on the verge of disappearing into oblivion
but the world is left.
Our story is ending
but this poem is left.

Father’s Dead Body

Viren Dangwal
translated by Nidhi Singh

That lifeless face has four days’ stubble
that, too, will burn off soon.
Can’t tell who
has tucked-in cotton balls
into the nostrils
and why.
I can’t breathe.
The carpet is splattered
with water melted off the ice slab,
the floor is drenched
but the room has cooled.
Outside, in the summer heat,
diligent folks
prepare for what lies ahead.
I, in the moment, sit, or stand up, or think
or do not think
a b c d d e d e a d
— a difficult circumlocution of
life and death.

His Love Her Love

Mangalesh Dabral
translated by Sarabjeet Garcha

One woman comes running
for a man
one man comes running
for a woman
the woman on the roof
of a two-storey building
has her eyes fixed on something
in the air
although the man has left
for somewhere
the man keeps waving
for long
although the woman
is now invisible
between them
as if in a dream
streets bridges trees
and electricity poles
keep shivering
love is neither that man
nor that woman
it’s the distance between them
that goes on shivering
both come running
running
but cannot cross that gap

Near the Jasidih Station

Gyanendrapati
translated by Kabir Deb

Parallel to the railway tracks,
a quiet shady street is running late
which will go astray at some point
to carry its pedestrians, its bullock carts
to their respective destinations —
a smallish slum,
a thin jungle —
turning towards them
turning its back away from the rail track going towards the capital,
this narrow green street of the Santhal region.
Right on that next point
when the chirping of a few birds near the track
would sink in the train’s victory-trumpet.
I, quietly leaned against the open door of the train
will gawk at my village
which lies far away at the end of this very road, day and night,
with my open eyes.

Still in a Movie

Uday Prakash
translated by Carol Blaizy D’Souza

This scene is sinister
For years fixed on the screen
Spread from the nerves
To the entire nervous system
A still photograph
Static immovable
A stagnant
Frozen nightmare
Whereas this is cinema
A motion picture
With the killer
And also with
The one being killed
Selfsame ones standing
Look, their immutable faces
Illuminated
With identical smiles
Who is the man
Sitting behind this projector?

Buddha, Einstein and Tao in the Post-ICU

Rati Saxera
translated by Rati Saxena

Buddha is sitting in that corner of the ICU from where
Seeing all that he saw before becoming Buddha
Two-year-old boy, lilac eyes, swinging between eternal and finite
Wounds covered with white bands like tilak on the forehead,
Sliding slowly in the throes of death
Ninety-year-old woman,
Wrestling with death and overtaking him,
What is the path left after becoming a Buddha?
On the other hand, Einstein humming the theory of relativity
Apart from diseases connecting the burning of stars to the universe
Was just tying knots in the theory of relativity
Disease and death being relative, the real question remains of the universe.
What rules will change if one becomes a Buddha?
Taking off the spider’s web, Tao looked down
Said with a smile
Sip joy in pain
Find life in death

New Harvest

Ramashankar Yadav ‘Vidrohi’
translated by Abhimanyu Kumar

I am a peasant
sowing paddy in the sky.
Some people mock me:
You are mad! Paddy does not grow in the sky.
I tell them — You idiots!
If god could grow on earth
surely, paddy can take root in the sky.
And now, only one out of the two shall remain.
Either, god would be ripped out of this land
or paddy would grow in the sky.

Women Are Not Seen Here

Devi Prasad Mishra
translated by Priyanka Sarkar

Women who are not seen here
are probably being grounded with the flour
or turning aromatic like mint in the chutney
Bubbling like oil
the main subzi of the house cooking in them
Becoming the broom of grihastha-ashram,
standing in a dark corner
they must be watching their well-set-up homes turning into rubble
They are probably melting,
becoming the unreadable manuscripts of seepage and darkness
They might be in wells or the smoke,
they must be mumbling after turning into
whispers, not sounds
They must be hiding in a corner of the house,
they must be at home
like house rats, where else
will they run away to?
Please drink this tea,
it’s made by them only.

What Is Your Caste?

Asang Ghosh
translated by Semeen Ali

He felt
I belonged to an upper caste.
In his excitement
he asked,
What is your caste?
For me,
this was a normal question
I’d been tolerating daily.
I answered,
Chamaar.
Hearing this
his expression turned bitter.
I yelled,
Don’t spit!
Swallow it, you idiot!

Expletives

Savita Bhargav
translated by Basudhara Roy

Enacting a mouthy whore
in my drama course
I kept abusing from the stage
those mother-sister expletives.
The whole world is a stage
where this is the common language
of men
to speak which,
the woman
must pretend
to be a whore.