Description
Sanskarnama is a book of clear political intentions. The volatile social mores spurred by attacks on freedom of speech and privacy trigger these lyrical yet sharp poems. Each turn of phrase takes the reader into the heart of matter that over-arches people’s rights. Readers will easily identify the issues that loom large today, and will re-discover them as poetry of resistance in this elegant volume.
In these poems, the versatile Nabina Das sings into the dark times. She scoffs, satirises, ridicules, insults, curses and reproaches those responsible for this darkness. Probably for the first time, poetry in Indian English speaks here in a direct political voice with immediacy. Nabina records the cruel, absurd and macabre drama that is being played out by the ruling communal forces in India and creates another Toba Tek Singh to express a poet’s anguish over events like the lynching of innocent Muslims, the slaughter of children by depriving them of oxygen in a Gorakhpur hospital, and people being branded ‘anti-national’. Her pen has a ‘rebel ink trail’ that writes ‘elegies in anger’. This collection establishes her as a serious political poet of our times. — Mangalesh Dabral
Reading these poems is akin to sitting at a banquet table. There is an extraordinary, barely contained passion to be found in them, startling and resonant images of both the personal and broadly political, and an inexhaustible, energetic engagement with the turmoil that is life. — Mona Zote
Born and brought up in Guwahati, Assam, Nabina Das is a poet and writer currently based in Hyderabad. Her poetry books are Anima and the Narrative Limits (Yoda Press), Sanskarnama (Red River), Into the Migrant City (Writers Workshop), and Blue Vessel (Zaporogue, Denmark). Her first book of translations is Arise Out of the Lock – 50 Bangladeshi Women Poets in English (Balestier Press, UK). She is the editor of Witness, the Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent (Red River), and co-editor of 40 under 40: Poetry of Globalisation (Poetrywala). Her short fiction collection is titled The House of Twining Roses (LiFi Publications), and her debut book is a novel titled Footprints in the Bajra (Cedar Books). A poetry and fiction fellow with several universities and foundations, Nabina has been published widely at home and abroad.