Book Review: Bitter Gourd, Poems By Anupama Raju
Copper Coin, 2023
Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

‘Bitter Gourd’ is one of those rare books of poetry where poems grow on you through re-reading. Freed of the framework of the thematic (like her previous collection Nine, which was not bad at all) Anupama Raju’s poems here hold together lightly, bringing her verse to the reader, but allowing the reader to inhabit her everyday with their own.

‘Jali: Lattice of Divine Light in Mughal Architecture’ by Navina Najat Haidar

Mapin, 2024

Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

It is only appropriate that the first double spread in this sumptuous exploration of the jali is the carved arch from the Sidi Sayyid Mosque in Ahmedabad. This swirling emanation, crafted stone brought to vegetal life as a kalpavriksha or a Blessed Tree in Paradise is metonymic of the syncretism at the confluence of Islamic and Indic art practices.

Speak, Woman!

Smita Agarwal

Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

“Speak, Woman! is a significant work. Agarwal calls on women, but her poems don’t speak only to women. This reviewer isn’t one, but is moved by her forthrightness and fortitude as each bastion of patriarchy is taken out.

This is a necessary enterprise. It may not be immediately obvious, but in this environment of rolling majoritarian aggression, once the perpetrators of rage and bigotry are done with (or bored of) minorities to oppress, their gaze will inevitably turn on women, the ‘other’ in waiting.

Agarwal’s words may then prove to be the harbingers that we should all heed today.”

Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings

by Saumya Roy

Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

“Saumya Roy tells us the story of this garbage mountain in her book Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings. There is an implicit critique in her choice of sub-title, placing Municipality and Castaway side by side. Her narrative follows two parallel tracks, as she writes about these ‘castaways’, the ones who make their livelihood here, in a matter-of-fact way, without being judgmental, but never holding back on their hard, frequently cruel existence. On the other hand, she also documents the ongoing story of the mountain of trash, a ‘belonging’ of the Mumbai Municipality in detail, of the many attempts to find a solution to the problem of this discarded part of the city that is now in the middle of it. In a sense, the life of the mountain bookends the two great pandemics of Mumbai’s urban history: its beginning as an acquired swamp-land around the time of the great plague in the 1890s when the Kachra Train was established, to the present day, as the city wallows in the COVID-19 pandemic, while plans are still being made to alleviate the predicament of Deonar, with no end in sight.”

Portrait of a House, Conversations with B.V. Doshi by Dayanita Singh
Spontaneous Books, 2021
Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

Are architects building spaces with the photograph in mind? That would be a dangerous trend if that were so,” muses Dayanita Singh, as she tells Balkrishna Doshi that the relationship between architecture and photography is ‘tricky’. This eminent photographer/ artist’s conversations with India’s only Pritzker Prize Laureate and most loved architect stay within this liminal ‘tricky’ space, giving us a book quite unlike either one on photography or on architecture.

House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898-1964

by Nikhil Rao,

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

It is ironical that, despite being the sum of many histories, Mumbai chooses resolutely to live in the present. The city, such as it is, is perceived on an as-is-where-is basis by both, its inhabitants and those entrusted with making urban policies, making few concessions to how it came to be. The erstwhile islands, the earlier Koli and Agari settlements, the landownings from the 17th century, the migration leading to the Fort and Native Town and the spurt in planned suburbanisation at the turn of the 20th century all palimpsest today into a new tabula rasa, ready for overwriting future change. Author Nikhil Rao describes “…the rise and proliferation of apartment living as the distinctive feature of the growth of Bombay from about 1918 to 1960,” is a knowledge honoured more in the breach than the observance.

In his book House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964, Rao, who teaches history at Wellesley College in the US, traces suburbanisation in Bombay to its genesis in the setting up of the Bombay City Improvement Trust (BIT).

Bombay/Mumbai: Immersions by Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Christopher Taylor
Niyogi Books, 2013
Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

On a slightly nativist note, I think any new book on Mumbai should pass muster with Mumbaikars first. Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Christopher Taylor’s immersive account – history, travelogue, ethnography, picture book and prose-poem does so, giving us a sense of Mumbai as it is today. Poet and photographer, both accepting the version of Indian time as a kaalchakra, retread and retrace the city to reclaim it: “What one saw at noon must be seen again in starlight; that which was seen in summer reveals another aspect in the monsoon.” This appreciation of multi-dimensionality, both in time and in space, articulates what Chabria calls the hard and the soft city – the city of data and materiality and of imagining and desire. 

Crossing Black Waters by Athena Kashyap
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2012
Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

Kashyap writes of sundering, separations, crossings, reunions, and uncertain reconciliations. The break with an imagined home is never forever; return is always a possibility yet remains unsatisfying whenever it occurs. Crossing Black Waters is a many-layered book about the simultaneity of multiple existence that is becoming more frequent in our modern world, where all our online networks are no substitute for being “there,” and being there is no longer an end in itself.

– First Published in Jaggery Lit, Issue 1, Fall 2013

Meena Kumari: The Poet, A Life Beyond Cinema by Noorul Hasan
Roli Books, 2014
Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

Noorul Hasan, a former professor of English with interests from Thomas Hardy to Firaq Gorakhpuri, has brought together several of Meena Kumari’s verses, published in English translation for the first time. Most of her poems share the themes commonly found in Urdu ghazals and nazms—loss, solitude, the contemplation of death, the futility of words.

Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets

by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade

Penguin India, 2011

Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi

“There is an entire semantic of respectability she must construct each time she leaves her home. She must be (or appear to be) neutrally middle-class- ‘not-lower-class, not-Dalit, not-Muslim, not-lesbian, not-disabled’. On Mumbai’s streets, every woman must dress modestly and preferably be escorted by (an equally respectable looking) man. She must be healthy, freely mobile, sexually inert and, most importantly, have a good reason for being out of doors. She must never loiter.

This is the crux of the book. The authors question the assertion that a woman may not remain in the public realm without purpose. If spotted as such, she would be perceived as having a dubious provenance or would be putting herself at risk and the city would need to exert itself to keep her safe. Her risks are twofold: the first is from assault (to her modesty or respectability), the second (perhaps more insidious) that she may herself do something disreputable or immodest. Every woman (and every man) enters public spaces in Mumbai with this knowledge.”