Description
When this book is published and you read it
your morality will be outraged and
you will say: ‘… … I always
knew he was a little weird but I didn’t
know he was such a pervert. When did he
write all this? How did he find the time?’
Diverse voices inhabit Uttaran Das Gupta’s Visceral Metropolis, attesting to the sumptuous heterogeneity of the postcolonial urban experience, veined equally with anxiety and exaltation. Visceral Metropolis grapples boldly with its three central subjects: the big city as crucible, sewer, testing ground and festive parade of illusions; the individual self that is alternately ambushed and replenished by the big city, and must craft itself as it goes; and poetry itself, as passion, elusive illumination, pleasure, redemption. Das Gupta is a connoisseur of the tingling rawness of physicality, bearing witness to bodies that collide and coalesce. He dwells on the memories of lost elsewheres that lie secreted within the floating metropolitan present, mapping the elastic distances between urban and sylvan. Accompanying the poet on his secular, even joyously profane and transgressive pilgrimage are ancestral spirits ranging from Ghalib to Amrita Pritam, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Allen Ginsberg and Anil Karanjai. Speaking for the tribe of poets, Das Gupta exults: ‘… we are cunning, step-brothers of pickpockets;/ no Gabriel or Urizen can reprimand/ our trespasses…’ — Ranjit Hoskote, author of Jonahwhale
The freedom of not belonging, the landscape of permanent tenancy in a restless, shifting city — in this set of startling, deceptively conversational poems, Uttaran Das Gupta claims and creates a Delhi from history’s landfills. As a new generation of Delhi poets pitches their migrant’s tents in the city’s hidden spaces, his search for love and other forbidden pleasures leads him into fascinating terrain — some of it familiar, much of it unexplored. His subtle, strong voice, drawing from the poetic traditions of Calcutta and Delhi, brings a multilingual sensibility to Indian poetry in English. — Nilanjana S Roy, author of The Wildings
‘You think you know me?’ the very first poem in Visceral Metropolis asks. ‘You think you know me? / You’ve no fucking idea how lucid / and dangerous I can be.’ There is in these lines a coruscating rage and desperation that the formal rigour, the meter, the rhyme, can scarcely contain, though there will be moments of love and tenderness, a glint of humour, a comforting memory… These are poems of being young and being a poet in the city, of trying to survive and make your way through the near-apocalyptic metropolitan sprawl, with the past and future, with the impossibility of return and the impossibility of making any lasting or meaningful human connection, with poetry even, all bearing down on you — yet madly, because unreasoningly, finding and hanging on to, if not exactly hope, then some reason to live. — Rahul Soni, translator of A Name for Every Leaf
Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He has also published a novel, Ritual.
Reviews
Jhilmil Breckenridge in The Wire
Das Gupta often uses whimsical, unusual images, but does not leave the reader wondering; he makes his point, often, succinctly, and in no uncertain words… And so, through this haunting elegy mostly for a Delhi crumbling, falling into a man-made destruction, there is a sense of hope. And love, always love.
Maaz Bin Bilal, in The Hindu Business Line
Das Gupta is just as alert to the city’s impending demise as he is to its charms. Not only does he pick up on damning headlines such as ‘Delhi will drown in its own waste’, but as an acute observer of Delhi’s many ills, he lampoons the city’s propensity to romanticise its ruins at the cost of its poor.
Amrita Ajay, in Coldnoon
The silica-covered ring road and the ferric water in taps invite the reader into the world of well-crafted vignettes that reify so many evanescent experiences… The city in his verse goes beyond the senses into textures of abstraction – sometimes melancholic, sometimes transcendent.
