Mustansir Dalvi Yanchyashi Samwad with Manya Joshi

Abidhanantar, October 2024

The 2024 Diwali Ank of Abhidhanantar features an extensive interview about my poetry, poetic practices and influences, translations and the challenges of translations, and the poetry scene today. I am in conversation with poet and translator Manya Joshi. At around 4000 words, I have never given such an in-depth interview ever, in any language. My gratitude to Manya and editor Hemant Divate.

Mustansir Dalvi on Mumbai’s “Domestic Vernacular” Architectural Language

Mustansir Dalvi, in Conversation with Saranya Subramanian
India Design, August 17, 2024
 
In lieu of India Design ID coming to Mumbai this September, we chat with Mustansir Dalvi about what he defines as the city’s 19th & 20th-century “domestic vernacular” architectural style. He is an author, editor, and urban commentator. He contributes columns regularly to the National Herald, the Hindu, scroll.in, and The Wire, where he examines the many futures of Mumbai as a post-planning city. In this exclusive interview, he shares his insights on what made the domestic vernacular unique, inclusive, innovative, and a trope from which modern architecture can learn greatly.

Architect Sen Kapadia and a tale of 5 cities
Pinkish Shah in Conversation with Mustansir Dalvi
The Hindu, March 23, 2023

I talk to Pinkish Shah, editor of Sen Kapadia’s new book, Sen Kapadia: In Pursuance of Meanings, explores seminal projects and contemporary design, from Bombay to New York. Kapadia, an architect rooted in modernism (while also critical of it), belongs to the generation that left a mark on contemporary Indian architecture. He worked with American architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and in India on buildings for the IIM in Ahmedabad before setting up his architectural practice in 1977. Kapadia’s architecture departs from the normative through a rigorous process of disassembly. He loves the departure from the tangible — his buildings are brought together as places of activity, creating new narratives out of space, light, and context, that are rooted in the experiential.

Three Questions: Amlanjyoti Goswami with Mustansir Dalvi
First published in the journal Urbanisation, 7(2) 225–229, 2022 by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements

Mustansir Dalvi, in Conversation with Amlanjyoti Goswami

There is always a problem when one is interested in everything. An education in architecture has, necessarily, made me a generalist, which is quite in keeping with my sense of things. Place is always contextualized in time, so historicity is always something to explore spatially. And spaces are never empty.

Architect Ramu Katakam on his autobiography ‘Spaces in Time: A Life in Architecture’

Ramu Katakam, in Conversation with Mustansir Dalvi
The Hindu, October 22, 2022

Veteran architect Ramu Katakam’s new memoir goes behind his unusual childhood, his design influences, and his sensitive, sustainable designs. Katakam’s architectural practice mirrors this multivalence as well, both in the variety of sites he has designed in as well as the diversity of projects he has worked on, including such memorable projects as the meditation center at Nagarjunakonda, Andhra Pradesh — built with mud excavated from the site and where the design ‘was evolved in the form of a small village with separate rooms, like houses, along pathways that followed the contours of the land’. His house, Axis Mundi, was shortlisted for the Aga Khan awards in 2007. While he has now deferred practice to pursue research on the traditional architecture of Tamil Nadu, in his memoirs, he treats both the built and the unrealized with equal affection.

Robert Stephens’ book, ‘Bombay Imagined’, documents 200 unrealized urban visions
Robert Stephens, in Conversation with Mustansir Dalvi
The Hindu, 22 July 2022

Perhaps Bombay/Mumbai is the only city that is so obviously the product of circumstance rather than deliberation. That said, it is also the most reshaped. In its more than 300-year history as a rising littoral to mercantile to global city, there have been as many misses as there have been hits. Architect and civic historian Robert Stephens’ (37) compilation of the unrealized projects that could have shaped Mumbai, Bombay Imagined: An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City, is the latest addition to the literature on the city’s development, and perhaps one of the most significant.

“The question was, how to translate them as if a Marathi poet had written them”
Moneycontrol, 6th October 2021
Mustansir Dalvi, Hemant Divate and Udayan Thakkar, in Conversation with Suhit Kelkar

The exodus of migrant workers evoked a writerly response in Navi-Mumbai-based poet Mustansir Dalvi, who wrote a sequence of poems titled Walk. These poems are in English, and most are in the voices of migrant workers, walking to their homes, hungry and hurting in the midst of the pandemic. Dalvi avoids easy sloganeering and sentimentality in the book, but his murmuring yet impassioned voice still gives the reader a sense of the walking workers’ physical sufferings, and their sense of being betrayed, their fears, and their despair. Dalvi’s poems came out last year as an ebook by Yavanika Press. Now, a quadrilingual version of Walk with Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati translations, along with the English originals, is coming out as a paper book. The publisher is Poetrywala Foundation, co-founded by Hemant and Smruti Divate with others. While Dalvi himself translated his English poems into Hindi, Hemant Divate translated them into Marathi, and poet Udayan Thakker translated them into Gujarati.

Bombay: a city as a living entity
Kamu Iyer, In conversation with Mustansir Dalvi

Tekton: Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2021, pp. 66-76

This is an interview I conducted with architect Kamu Iyer shortly before the publication of his now seminal book BoOmbay: from Precincts to Sprawl in 2014. While the book was the occasion for this conversation, I took the opportunity to engage Iyer on several subjects close to his heart, centered on the evolution and urbanity of Bombay, Iyer’s karmabhoomi.

Anchoring Time and History in Verse

Mustansir Dalvi, in conversation with Fahad Zuberi  

On Dalvi’s translations of Urdu poet Muhammed Iqbal’s epics Shikwa and Jawab-e-Shikwa as Taking Issue & Allah’s Answer

First published in Domus India Volume 9/ Issue 1 / November 2019/ Pages 116/ 200, Used with permission

As Dalvi drives Iqbal’s narrative through carefully chosen words, he intercuts Iqbal’s chorus of subjects with verses separated on each page where the relish on each word and prose revels in its own individuality. One reads the book with distinct emphasis on each stanza while also being conscious of the two parts — Taking Issue and Allah’s Answer as a whole — complete with a thought-provoking introduction that sets the epic in its historical context and informs the reader of the many lives that Iqbal and his works have lived through the century. It is not an overt comment or critique; it resides and withdraws only as a translation. 

This interview was published on 30 October 2019 at the Centre for Stories by the Storyteller.

What is the role of poets in shaping the future?
By easing the burden of the times, heavy on the shoulders of readers, by giving them the words that can, to some extent, alleviate those burdens. By subjecting the future to the shock of the familiar, to the joy of the everyday, and to the awe of the cosmic. By this last, I mean new scientific knowledge, not metaphysics. By providing words that others can carry.

The State of the Esplanade Mansion
Vikas Dilawari, in conversation with Mustansir Dalvi
https://asanyfuleknow.blogspot.com/, Saturday, June 1, 2019

In May 2019, with the distinct possibility that the Esplanade Mansion, part of Mumbai’s indelible heritage may have it days numbered, I invited the city’s most sensitive conservation architect Vikas Dilawari for a discussion about the state of the Esplanade Mansion. This conversation is focused only on built heritage conservation, and Dilawari has been most forthcoming with his views.

The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with Mustansir Dalvi
Published in KITAAB: Connecting Asian writers with global readers
Mustansir Dalvi, in Conversation with Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

As a poet I write only in English. In English as an Indian language. My aesthetic, if I should describe it, would be related to the sound of words, the authenticity of the sounds, the comfort of knowing that such words could be enjoined in poetry to be enjoyed. As a translator, the aesthetic emerges from the spirit of the text giving voice. This varies widely depending on whom I am translating – there is the formal but angry Iqbal, the rebellious but deeply lyrical Faiz, the bawdiness and intellectual depth of Kolatkar, the quotidian and experiential angst of Hemant Divate, or Rahim, infused in his Bhakti of Ram and Krishna. Languages bring their own aesthetic to bear, and I usually work with it.

Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien
Sampurna Chattarji, in Conversation with Mustansir Dalvi

https://asanyfuleknow.blogspot.com, July 17, 2016

Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien is Sampurna Chattarji’s 14th published book, out from Harper Collins in July 2015. That she is prolific needs no underlining- she has published, poetry, poetry in translation, novels, short stories and prose in translation amongst other things; and dealing with them all would require more than this one conversation. I sought to indulge her on her latest book of poems and prose poems, the complex but endlessly fascinating study of Space Gulliver, Chattarji’s outworlder Who Fell to Earth. Opening her eyes in this ‘alien’ situation, more than dealing with her Lilliputian/Gaian inhabitants, Gulliver considers her state of being. She speaks to herself in layered verse, and contemplative prose, as her physical being speaks to her too. It is Chattarji’s musing on our own condition, seen through a sensuality not of this world that reflects back on us, we the poor occupants of this lovely planet.

Contradictions and Complexities in Urban Conservation
Vikas Dilawari, in Conversation with Mustansir Dalvi
Tekton, Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2016, pp.72-87

Conservationists like Vikas Dilawari fight an increasingly difficult battle to get their projects realized, to preserve buildings for posterity and memory. There are only a few conservation practices in Mumbai of quality, and Dilawari is amongst the foremost. Dilawari was very forthcoming in participating in this dialogue, unravelling the several complexities and contradictions in the practice of urban conservation, especially in Mumbai.

The State of Architecture in India

Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta in Conversation with Mustansir Dalvi

ArchDaily, February 10, 2016

Today, the rapidly developing country of India is one of the key places in the world where architecture could have the most impact; in spite of this, there has been little critical reflection on the country’s architectural landscape, and architecture has struggled to assert its value to the wider population. Currently, the country’s first major architectural exhibition in 30 years is taking place in Mumbai, curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta and running until March 20th. In this interview, a shortened version of which was first published in Domus India’s December Issue, Mustansir Dalvi sits down with the curators to discuss their exhibition and the past and present of Indian Architecture.