Delhiwale: Dialogues with a young poet

As it happens, Swapnil did end up writing a poem on his immediate world, although in French, which he learned only this year.

During the peak time of the pandemic, a literature student began writing a ballad. Three years later, this evening in Connaught Place, Swapnil Mayank, a Kirori Mal College alumnus, shows the ballad’s opening stanzas. The conversation with him later continued over WhatsApp — shortened excerpt.

Swapnil Mayank does most of his writing in a library in Lodhi Estate as well as in his room in Karol Bagh. (HT Photo)

Talking of the ballad, Swapnil says, “Swannman is a coming-of-age fiction, a bildungsroman, written in the epic style, a queer epic with a queer hero. It was published last year.”

The first chapter has references to taiga, mistral, elk—stuff foreign to our part of the world. Shouldn’t writers write about places where they live and which they know best?

The writer replies, “A writer should have a liquid mind that liberally flows and outpours in every direction—unshackled by boundaries physical or metaphysical. We carry the tint of our subjectivity wherever we go, so to expect that it should manifestly inform our writing or craft all the time is a bit too much.”

As it happens, Swapnil did end up writing a poem on his immediate world, although in French, which he learned only this year.

“I wrote it as a piece of ekphrasis for a painting I was working on by the same name ‘The Glass Bottom Boat’. Here, I comment on the history, geography and ecology of the city. I see how Delhi is situated on the middle watershed of Potwar ridge on the subcontinent—straddling cultural landscapes of Gangetic and Indus plains. It is equidistant from Lahore and Lucknow, and in a geometric sense, a point on an ogive between the two cities. Hindi and Hindko suggest how the languages and thus cultures have cooperated and coapted in the north of our country creating a bricolage, a melange, a workable modus vivendi of sorts. I mention Yamuna for it is painful to see a river in distress, a seething serpentine spume of sludge with cloudy foams of effluents eclipsing its waters.”

Swapnil agrees to share the poem’s English translation.

Like a glass-bottom-boat,

You, Oh City of Delhi, Oh boat,

You reveal Hindi in Hindko!

I think sometimes that,

You float on the waters,

On Yamuna, much in pain!

It is sorrowful for it has seen,

So many of the ghosts of time

Who push you toward wrongs!

Among his many current pursuits, the writer says, “I am obtaining practical understanding of my aesthetic theory of Rasaism, which unites the visual, the literary and the performative arts.“

Swapnil does most of his writing in a library in Lodhi Estate as well as in his room in Karol Bagh.