1. I am writing to you from Alwar, Rajasthan. Where are you writing to us from?

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A very chilly and dreary Oxford, U.K. 

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2. The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City has marked a bold arrival with 37 Indian cities, 375 poems, 264 poets, and 90 translators working from 20 languages. Could you take us through what goes into the making of an anthology of this scale and scope? What were your specific responsibilities as the editor of the book?

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The inspiration for the book really came from a personal place–homesickness, mostly. I was born and raised in Mumbai, and while studying at Yale in the U.S., I began to miss the city with a kind of quiet ache. That longing naturally found its way into my own writing, and I started seeking out city poems. Initially these poems were Mumbai-specific, just for my own comfort. But as I read further, the collection grew: first Delhi, then Kolkata, Chennai, Srinagar. I became fascinated by how each Indian city seemed to have its own distinct poetic register and its own rhythm, idiom, and obsessions. And yet, despite these differences, there was a shared cadence too. Indian cities, in all their contradictions–sacred and profane, intimate and indifferent–seemed to call out to poets. I realised there was no anthology that brought these voices together across languages and time. That absence became the project.

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Professor Shawkat Toorawa, who had edited a brilliant anthology of New York poems, was the first to nudge me toward taking the idea seriously. What followed was nearly three years of compiling, transcribing, and acquiring rights. It gave me the chance to read deeply, reach out to some of my poetic heroes, and poring over an astonishing range of work from across the subcontinent.

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The role of an anthologist demands wearing many hats: the aesthete while reading poetry, the hawker pitching the manuscript to publishers, the detective tracking down copyright, the therapist and negotiator with estates, and, finally, the curator, assembling it all into a coherent collection. I owe countless debts to those who patiently taught me to juggle these roles—even after the balls were already in the air.

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The challenges were many. Some poems were buried in out-of-print books or obscure journals. In several cases, poets or translators had passed away, and we had to track down heirs, colleagues, students. . .sometimes even former lovers. It became a kind of literary detective work. But it was also unexpectedly moving. People responded not just with permissions, but with stories, memories, fragments. The generosity was overwhelming.

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3. What are the cities in these poems made up of?

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It's a delightful question, because the cities in these poems are both infuriatingly solid and beautifully spectral.

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On the surface, the recipe for an Indian city is made up of the obvious ingredients: the concrete of flyovers, the blistered asphalt of backstreets, the red spit of paan staining colonial cobblestones, the flesh of millions of citizens, and the relentless, humid air. They are built from Irani chai in stained glasses, the rhythmic clatter of local trains, and the neon glare of a Ganesh Chaturthi poster competing for space with political graffiti. You could say they are architectural collages. Even a single street in Bombay, for example, is an agglomeration of Parsi cafés, Sephardic synagogues, pavement shrines, and glass-fronted boutiques all jostling for the same square foot of land. 

 

But their true, enduring substance is far less tangible and far more profound.​ These cities are built from memory and desire. The poems in the collection reflect the full spectrum of urban life: myth and folklore rubbing against flyovers and factories, religious festivals lighting up the streets, and love stories playing out in mohallas, balconies, and train compartments.

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But more importantly, the city offers a kind of freedom the village often cannot: the chance to shed the inherited roles of caste, gender, religion, and sexuality. The anonymity of the city makes reinvention possible. That’s why so many Dalit poets, including Named Dhasal and Chandramohan Sathyanathan, turn to the city as both subject and site of protest. Women poets explore themes of survival and selfhood in the city; queer poets like Hoshang Merchant, Akhil Katyal and R. Raj Rao carve into cities notes of secrecy and desire. 

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Cities also bring conflict with tensions born of proximity, oppression, and inequality. Even the pastoralist Tagore laments the claustrophobia of Kolkata: ‘Another being shares my room / Covered by the same rent— / A lizard.’ The anthology doesn’t shy away from this and includes powerful poems on riots, displacement and political injustice.

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For many Indians today, especially younger generations, the city isn’t just where they live; it’s where their entire universe is contained. It's difficult to imagine a single idea that captures the full diversity of the nation. But the Indian city–by virtue of its density and diversity–offers perhaps the closest thing to a national cross-section.

 

If I may be indulgent and borrow from the book’s introduction: “Octavio Paz once described a poem as ‘a thing made of words, for the purpose of containing and secreting a substance that is impalpable, resistant to definition.’ The Indian city, then, is much like a poem, a thing made of avenues, and buildings, and bazaars and citizens. It is impalpable, waiting patiently for us to discern its secrets.”

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4. What is a city poem? Did you have a personal definition you worked with?

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From the start, this anthology was never intended to be a “greatest hits” collection of Indian poetry. There are already excellent anthologies that do that. Here, the focus was on poems, not poets. The guiding principle was simple: if a poem captured something distinct about the Indian city and did so with real craft, it was considered. A poet’s reputation was never a requirement. I’ve sought to select poets based not on citizenship or language, but on their thematic connection to Indian urban landscapes. That opened the door for both established names and newer voices, some of whom had never been published in print before.

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My personal definition, the one that became my curatorial compass, was this: a city poem is one where the city is a character, a mood, or a central, unresolved conflict. It’s the work in which, if you tried to remove the city, the poem would collapse in on itself, bereft of its meaning.

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Poems don’t just describe cities, they preserve versions of them. A poem can capture the sound of a tramline that no longer runs, a street corner that’s since been razed, or the atmosphere of a city in a particular moment of political flux. Take Imtiaz Dharker’s Hiraeth, Old Bombay, which mourns spaces like Naz Café, not just as locations, but as emotional touchstones. In that sense, poets often become archivists, even if unintentionally.

 

Valmiki, Ghalib, Kabir, Arundhathi Subramaniam–all write about Banaras, but seeing very different cities. Or take Kumaraguruparar’s seventeenth- century praise of the Meenakshi temple in Madurai, which still stands today. His poem becomes a document of what has survived all this time, even as the city around it has transformed. These kinds of cross-temporal echoes give readers a sense of continuity, rupture, and reinvention in Indian urban life.

 

Our country has a long and rich tradition of urban poetry, but it’s typically emerged in pockets. Think of the Bombay Poets, Calcutta’s Hungry Generation, or the shahr-ashob laments for Delhi. These were dynamic but mostly self-contained. What’s been missing is a way of bringing them into conversation, of seeing Indian city poetry not as scattered or episodic, but as part of a broader, continuous tradition. By placing a seventh-century Tamil poet alongside a contemporary Assamese voice, or Kipling next to Kolatkar, this anthology invites a cross-temporal, cross-linguistic dialogue. It seeks to make the case that Indian city poetry is a tradition in its own right. We just hadn’t named it yet.

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5. Because of India’s linguistic diversity, any kind of categorising of Indian literature comes with its complex challenges. In the words of distinguished literary theorist Aijaz Ahmed, multilingualism and polyglot fluidity are in the very nature of Indian creativity. The languages that appear in translation in this book are Hindi, Urdu, Odia, Khasi, Konkani, Malayalam, Kashmiri, Assamese, Nepali, Braj, Sanskrit, Persian, Old Tamil, and Kannada. Do these poems based (rather, arranged in the anthology) on spatial and temporal boundaries, cross the linguistic boundaries? If so, could you please illustrate this with a few examples?

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Too often, when we speak of ‘Indian poetry,’ it usually refers to work written originally in English or translations from Hindi and Urdu. It includes poems translated from a range of regional languages as well as classical languages like Sanskrit, Old Tamil, Braj, and Persian. There’s even a poem in Polish, written about Delhi. These translations give English speaking readers access to poetic traditions that are rich, textured and too often overlooked.

 

Cities, by nature, are spaces of linguistic flux. They’re where languages collide and mutate. Languages like English, Hindustani, and Sanskrit gained cultural weight in urban centres by bridging communities. At the same time, they often contributed to the erosion or evolution of local dialects. Dialects like Bambaiya emerge from these tensions. You see that hybridity in Nissim Ezekiel’s playful use of pidgin, or in Tenzin Tsundue’s ‘Tibetan in Mumbai / abuses in Bambaya Hindi, / with a slight Tibetan accent.’

 

This linguistic range brings its own challenges, especially in translation. How do you carry over not just meaning, but rhythm, tone, and cultural charge? For example, in K.V. Tirumalesh’s Pesticide Sabi, translated from Kannada by Jayasrinivasa Rao, the poet’s use of the word ‘Sabi’ reflects the rich complexities of Kannada linguistics. ‘Sabi,’ a colloquial abbreviation for ‘Saheb’ in parts of Karnataka, is often used to refer to a Muslim man. While not overtly derogatory, its tone can shift based on context, embedding socio-political undertones.

 

The translator is faced with an uphill task and must navigate these layers, ensuring the English rendering carries the same cultural weight and depth as the original. Take Jagdish Joshi's Someone Please, which is translated from Gujarati by Pradip N. Khandwalla. The poem creates a hilarious and poignant scene where a power blackout leads neighbours to call out using the names of legendary poets and saints: Vyas, Kalidas, Tukaram, Narsinh, Mirabai, and Giridhar. The translation retains these names, trusting the reader to understand (perhaps with the help of the provided footnotes) that these are not just neighbors but cultural archetypes. The Gujarati original's playful sanctification of a mundane moment is preserved by crossing the linguistic boundary while carrying its cultural cargo.

 

One of the defining features of this anthology is its scope: geographically, linguistically, and temporally. I’m proud to say that it’s rare to find an anthology that brings together so many languages–ours has over twenty. The translations are a core strength of the book. Many were done by some of the most respected literary translators and scholars working today, whose versions aim to retain not just the meaning but the spirit of the work. I can speak more about the translation process later, but in short–this is a pan-Indian, multilingual, and deeply archival project. I don’t think anything quite like it exists yet.

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6. In our previous conversation, you mentioned you had been reading poetry from across the country long before the conception of this book. For our readers, do you mind reflecting on how you became a reader?

 

It's a pleasure to reflect on this. I owe an immense debt to my mother and father, who nurtured a book addiction in me from a very young age. I have fond memories of our weekly rituals: trips to the (now long gone) British Library in Mumbai, browsing the boxes at book fairs and Crossword bookstore, and the delicate negotiations with our parents over how many books we could buy. Equally formative were the moments reading with my sister, who shared and sparked so many of my interests in poetry and literature. She was my first literary companion.

 

And then, of course, there are the sanctuaries. I am equally indebted to the librarians and the hallowed spaces where the foundation for a book like this was laid. A few book-laden sanctuaries I’ve had the honour of reading at in the process of editing include the Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke, the Elizabethan Club, the Bodleian, the London Library, and the David Sassoon Library. I’m in awe of spaces that respected the act of reading, preserve the whispers of the past, and offer them freely to anyone with a curious mind.

 

Which brings me to a sobering thought, one I find myself contemplating more and more. In this day and age, as fewer people are reading deeply, fewer are writing with that cultivated depth, and most critically fewer public spaces are preserved to accommodate and encourage readers. I wonder if I would have developed the same all-consuming interest without such spaces. The ecosystem that shaped me as a reader feels increasingly rare and fragile.

 

7. Specific places/spaces/environments tickle the five senses uniquely. Could you direct us to some poems from the book that might awaken the reader’s sense of sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste?

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SIGHT: Ranjit Hoskote's Marine Drive; Latheesh Mohan’s Sivan Kovil Street – A Comprehensive Account (translated by Ra Sh); K. Srilata’s Bionote, Vivek Narayanan’s Ganga: n Views; S. Nisar Ahmed’s At Mysore Zoo (translated by Sumatheendra Nadig), Brian Mendonça’s Last Bus to Vasco, Kandala Singh’s Carrying Rain, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Bharati Bhavan Library, Chowk, Allahabad.​

 

SOUND: Street Cries by Sarojini Naidu, Letters from the Rain by Vilas Sarang (translated from Marathi by the poet), Jamasp Phiroze Dastur’s The Temple of Justice, A River by A.K. Ramanujan, Gieve Patel’s Naryal Purnima, and Thangjam Ibopishak’s Mini India (translated by Robin S. Ngangom).

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SMELL: Banaras: Odors by Riyaz Latif, Bombay Fish Market by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, Deepankar Khiwani’s Life On The Island, Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury’s 12/12, The Rosary Shop.​

 

TOUCH: Mesak Takhelmayum’s Imphal as a Pond, Arundhathi Subramaniam’s 5.46, Andheri Local, R. Raj Rao's Shivaling Swayamwar, Dileep Jhaveri's City of Echoes (translated by Pradip N. Khandwalla), Faisal Mohyuddin’s Ayodhya, and Kabita Sinha’s Calcutta Has Murdered Me (translated by Pritish Nandy).

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TASTE: Uttaran Das Gupta’s Mizo Diner, Tarun Bhartiya’s Tourist Information for Shillong (translated by the poet), Madras by Arundhathi Subramaniam, At the Edge of Park Circus by Zilka Joseph, Sweet Shop by Amit Chaudhury, Shalim M. Hussain’s Udit Narayan, and Namdeo Dhasal’s Kamatipura (translated by Dilip Chitre).

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8. Poetry, all literature for that matter, advances by doing away with what becomes redundant or inadequate. Continued resistance and experimentation give way to rewriting and new laws of poetics. What would you say are some contemporary sensibilities specific to the Indian poet?

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This goes to the very heart of what is animating Indian poetry today. It would be reductive to distil the entire nation's contemporary poetry into a single sensibility—the variation is far too vast. But if there is a unifying spirit, it is one of necessary un-becoming, a conscious shedding of inherited constraints.

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This isn't entirely new, of course. I feel the Indian poet, particularly the city poet, has always been a kind of barbarian at the gates. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti put it, the poet is ‘a subversive barbarian at the city gates, constantly questioning reality and reinventing it.’ We see this defiant stance echoed in our own poets, like Angshuman Kar who declares in Flyover, ‘No, I am not a Naxalite / not a Maoist / not a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba / I am a poet.’ Here, the poet emerges as both an agent of change and a keeper of collective memory, remoulding the city through language, through acts of protest, memorialization, and myth-making. This is a central contemporary sensibility: a fierce, political self-definition that uses poetry as a tool for witness, as seen in poems by Vivek Narayanan and Hamraaz dedicated to victims of state violence and political injustice.

 

One of the most powerful examples of this is Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s When the Prime Minister Visits Shillong the Bamboos Watch in Silence, which speaks to the quiet strength of the city and its people: “When the Prime Minister / planned a visit to the city / bamboo poles sprang up from pavements/ like a welcoming committee.”

 

But this rebellion also manifests in a radical expansion of the very idea of who a poet is and what a poem can be. The contemporary sensibility is fiercely anti canonical. Poets aren’t always ‘Poets.’ This is why the anthology includes lyrics by rock bands Imphal Talkies and Thermal and a Quarter. Their writing and music captured something urgent and raw about life in the contemporary Indian city.

 

However, the poet’s influence is not always tied to grand gestures of protest or sweeping declarations. A crucial sensibility is the embrace of the intimate and the mundane as a form of resistance. Sometimes, it is found in the smallest, most tangible acts of kindness—like the city-poet in Nirupama Dutt’s Laughing Sorrow, who carries both verse and vice in his pockets: ‘I will go to the poet of the city / looking for life without restraint / He will have half a bottle of rum / in one pocket and a freshly written poem in the other.’

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9. In the introduction to the book you write, “One of the most profound revelations in compiling this anthology is the realisation that the city, a living entity, breathes through its poets, who in turn become spectral guardians of its streets. These poets, like restless phantoms, linger in the cities they write about, returning as though fated to endless conversations with the very bricks and shadows that shape their verses.” This is so beautiful. How do you look at the relationship between a city and its readers/reading culture?​

 

It is a relationship of mutual haunting, a séance in which we, the readers, are the willing participants.

 

Simply put, cities shape citizens who write poetry, and poetry, in turn, shapes how we perceive and inhabit our cities. It becomes a cyclical jugalbandi, a call and response across time. A street is never just a street once a poet has named its sorrows; a café is never just a café once it has been consecrated in verse. This is true across the country, but here’s an example from Delhi that I discuss in the introduction: 

 

“In Delhi, Akhil Katyal conjures a magical evening where ‘one doesn’t always have to travel / four hundred thousand kilometres / to reach the moon.’ On another twilight in the same city, Agha Shahid Ali in After Seeing Kozintsev’s King Lear, ‘think(s) of Zafar, poet and Emperor.’ Zafar, the last tragic Mughal emperor, exiled to Burma, also haunts these pages—a poet whose grief for the city he loved is palpable in his Qit’aat: ‘Not worth narrating is Delhi’s tale.’ Over a century later, Maaz Bin Bilal retraces Zafar’s ethereal footsteps down Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, the emperor’s eponymous road, plagued by the same exilic sorrow. And on another Delhi evening, Humraaz writes a poem titled I Fall Asleep Reading a Poem by Akhil Katyal, closing the circle of poets whose voices echo endlessly through the capital’s tree-lined avenues. . .It is as if the city were an ouroboros, eternally swallowing and birthing its own stories. Poetry becomes a séance—a communion of voices that refuse to fade, irrevocably tethered to the streets they once walked and the words they left behind. The city and the poet become one, and they will haunt us still.”

 

10. Can you talk about the archival resources you used in putting together the book?

 

The archival work for this anthology was less like traditional research and more like a form of literary archaeology. It was a process of sifting through layers of neglect to recover voices that the mainstream canon had largely forgotten.

 

The resources were often fragile and elusive. I spent countless hours parsing the entire runs of journals like Indian Literature from the Sahitya Akademi and the prolific but often un-catalogued outputs of the Writers Workshop in Kolkata. For instance, Sivaprasad Samaddar’s excellent Calcutta in Other Tongues was a revelation, linguistically expansive yet so obscure that many of its translators go uncredited and its poems are found nowhere else. Similarly, the 1987 special issue of the now-defunct journal Literary Endeavour, edited by R. Raj Rao, offered a vital, early gathering of English-language Bombay poets. These works were themselves foundational, yet they had faded from collective memory, becoming elusive treasures that I felt compelled to honour and build upon.

 

The archives also helped in spotlighting overlooked or forgotten voices with poets who’ve largely disappeared from the mainstream record. The anthology includes nearly a hundred pages of biographies, many compiled through archival work. Several poems were sourced from journals long out of print or books held by only a handful of libraries. Among the rediscoveries is Abd-ul Hayy ‘Rashid’ Banarsi, a highly regarded but little-read Urdu poet from Banaras. His vivid, unpublished poems were brought into English through Christopher Lee’s remarkable translations. Another is Dina Nath Walli, also known by his pen name Almast Kashmiri, a Kashmiri watercolour artist and poet whose translated verses on Srinagar had fallen so far out of circulation that even his family was unaware of their existence when I reached out to them. Another example is Cowasji Nowrosji Vesuvala, a Parsi poet who lived in early twentieth-century Bombay. Very little is known about his life—most of his poetry is lost—but his sonnet to Bombay survives and finds a place here.​

 

11. Is there a poem you read over and over again?

 

It’s hard to pick just one! There’s a different poem for every evening, every emotion, and every experience. A few that I keep returning to are Dhoomil’s The City, Evening, and an Old Man: Me (translated by Vinay Dharwadker), Joy Deshmukh Ranadive’s Part-time Pujari, Eunice de Souza’s Outside Jaisalmer, Siddharth Dasgupta’s I See God in the Strangest Places, and Atmanam’s A Place to Sit (Translated by C.S. Lakshmi and Arundhathi Subramaniam).

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