Description

For more than twenty years, award-winning translator, scholar, editor and poet Gopika Jadeja has brought significant Dalit and Adivasi voices to the attention of a literary culture in which they have been absent or silenced.  For the very first time, this volume highlights Jadeja’s own decades-long creative oeuvre, tracing the development of a fearless, committed poetics: from early clarities about the dynamics of love and power to an affirmation of desire as a decolonial force. Amid a changing India and turbulent world marked by violence, inhumanity and erasure, WHAT PARVATI DOES NOT SAY makes a stirring argument for the power of memory against forgetting, and love as bulwark against the ravages of history.

Gopika Jadeja is a bilingual poet and translator, working in English and Gujarati and active in her native India and internationally. A recipient of the 2022 PEN Presents translation award and a Charles Wallace Scholarship for Creative Writing, she completed a joint PhD in South Asian Studies with King’s College, London and National University of Singapore in 2019. With a broadly engaged creative, scholarly and pedagogical practice, Gopika is Editor-at-Large (Singapore) for Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing. She is also Coordinating Editor of PR&TA: Practice Research and Tangential Activities — a Singapore-based peer-reviewed journal of creative practice with a focus on Southeast Asia. She also publishes and edits for the performance-publishing project ‘Five Issues’. Her poetry and translations have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Indian Literature, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Wolf, Sahcharya, Vahi, and elsewhere. Her writing has also appeared in anthologies such as River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023), Witness: The Red River Book of the Poetry of Dissent (2021) and A Thousand Cranes for India: Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred (2020). She is currently working on translations of Dalit and Adivasi poetry from Gujarat, as well as new poetry collections.