The anthology spans 37 Indian cities, featuring 375 poems by 264 poets translated by 90 translators across 20 languages. What was the inspiration behind this anthology and what were the challenges of curating poems spanning over 1500 years?
The inspiration really came from a personal place – homesickness, mostly. I was born and raised in Mumbai, and while studying at Yale in the US, I began to miss the city with a kind of quiet ache. That longing naturally found
The anthology spans 37 Indian cities, featuring 375 poems by 264 poets translated by 90 translators across 20 languages. What was the inspiration behind this anthology and what were the challenges of curating poems spanning over 1500 years?
The inspiration really came from a personal place – homesickness, mostly. I was born and raised in Mumbai, and while studying at Yale in the US, 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.
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 pore over an astonishing range of work from across the subcontinent.
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.
Please elaborate on the unique aspects of this anthology in terms of choice of poetry, translations, that sets it apart.
One of the defining features of this anthology is its scope: geographically, linguistically, and temporally. To start with, this is the first anthology to focus specifically on the Indian city as seen through poetry. And not just the usual suspects like Delhi or Bombay. The book includes 37 cities – Chittorgarh and Cuttack, Gangtok and Guwahati, Panaji and Pune, Shillong and Surat – many of which have rich, distinct poetic traditions that are often overlooked in English-language publishing.
Another distinguishing element is its trans-historical range. Most anthologies tend to be confined to a particular period such as modernist or post-independence. Here, the emphasis is on quality and thematic relevance, not chronology. Our oldest poet wrote 1,500 years ago. Our youngest as born in 2003. This breadth allows readers to see how cities like Kashi or Madurai have been imagined across centuries. What emerges is a layered, evolving portrait of urban India: temple towns, imperial capitals, colonial outposts, and post-industrial sprawls all exist side by side.
And then there’s the linguistic breadth. It’s rare to find an anthology that brings together so many languages – ours has over 20. 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. In short, this is a pan-Indian, multilingual, and deeply archival project. I don’t think anything quite like it exists yet.
In what ways do the poems selected for this anthology capture the complexity of the Indian urban experience? You write in the introduction that the poems spanning 1500 years of poetry collectively “form an archive of the literary, temporal and spatial continuum of the Indian cities.” Please elaborate.
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.
We were also deliberate about 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 example is Cowasji Nowrosji Vesuvala, a Parsi poet from early twentieth-century Bombay. Very little is known about his life. Most of his work is lost, but his lone surviving sonnet to Bombay finds a place here.
The anthology embraces this archival function quite deliberately. 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.
You state that “today, for many Indians, the universe is contained within the city.” How does the anthology navigate the binaries between lived experiences of city and village in terms of being the “authentic” repository of Indian culture?
I wouldn’t treat the village and city as rigid binaries. They are better understood points along a continuum of society. But given the scale of urban migration and the reality of our mega cities, one thing is clear: the Indian city is no longer peripheral to culture. It’s central. 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. 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.
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 Namdeo 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 write into the spaces that cities carve for secrecy and desire.
Of course, cities also bring conflict with tensions born of proximity, oppression, and inequality. Even the pastoral 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.
Why are anthologies focused on city-specific poetry rare in India? How does this anthology fill that gap?
While putting this book together, I was struck by how many global cities already have dedicated poetry anthologies. Toorawa’s excellent The City That Never Sleeps is just one among many on New York. In contrast, within India, city-specific poetry anthologies remain rare and fragmented. There are a few exceptions: the splendid Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from North-East India, which is regional but not city-focused; a long-out-of-print anthology on Calcutta; and journal issues on Bombay poets. Even in books that focus on Indian urban literature, the focus tends to remain on the Big Three: Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata. And even there, prose generally takes centre stage, with poetry often sidelined. Why that is, I’m not entirely sure.
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.
The poetry of many prominent Indian poets writing in English (such as Jeet Thayil and others) is missing from this anthology. How did you choose the poems included in the anthology?
That’s a fair question. 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. That opened the door for both established names and newer voices, some of whom had never been published in print before.
We also took an expansive view of what a poem could be. For example, the anthology includes lyrics by two rock bands – Imphal Talkies and Thermal and a Quarter – because their writing captured something urgent and raw about life in the contemporary Indian city. For us, it was always about the spirit and quality of the work, rather than its formal label or the poet’s pedigree.
Naturally, with a project of this scale, some absences are inevitable. Entire cities and many prominent poets are missing. But with 37 cities, 375 poems, and over 260 poets, we were already pushing the limits of what could reasonably fit in a single volume. That said, some of the very poets whose work doesn’t appear in the anthology were instrumental in shaping it. You mention Jeet Thayil – while his poems aren’t in the book, he was one of three key mentors who helped guide the project in its formative stages. In the acknowledgment, I refer to him as a kind of deus ex machina and his influence is very much part of the book’s DNA.
The collection includes, in addition to poems written in Hindi and Urdu, translated works from several regional languages such as Odia, Khasi, Malayalam, Kashmiri, Assamese, etc. What does this diversity of languages and translated poetry bring to the English-speaking audience?
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. As I note in the introduction, 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.’
Of course, this linguistic range brings its own challenges, especially in translation. How do you carry over not just meaning, but rhythm, tone, and cultural charge? A word like sabi in Kannada, for instance, holds a resonance that “sir” or “saheb” can’t quite capture. Translators have to walk a fine line, remaining faithful to the original while ensuring the poem still sings in English.
Were there any poets whose work you wanted to include but couldn’t because quality translations weren’t available or for any other reason?
There wasn’t much we didn’t try to include. As I’ve mentioned before, given the scale of the project, some poets, poems, and even entire cities inevitably couldn’t make it in. Cities like Jhansi, Agartala, and Visakhapatnam have inspired city poems, but there simply wasn’t space. The book is already something of a doorstopper. That said, if someone wants to take up the mantle and build on this work, I’d be delighted to see it.
Some omissions also came down to the lack of accessible translations. Languages like Maithili, Meitei, Kokborok, and Sindhi have rich literary traditions, but finding high-quality, published translations in English proved difficult. India has over a hundred languages spoken by more than 10,000 people – many with vibrant oral and written poetic cultures. I’ll just put this idea out into the ether: if someone were to compile an anthology featuring even one poem translated from each of those languages, it would be extraordinary.
But for me, this book isn’t defined by what’s missing — it’s defined by what’s here. I’m deeply grateful to the poets, translators, and literary estates who so generously supported the project. My role was mainly that of a curator. I just hope readers find as much meaning and joy in these poems as the poets did writing them, the translators did rendering them, and I did bringing them together.
Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist based in Kashmir.
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