When I chanced upon the recently published anthology of Indian English poetry, The Violet Sun, what first struck me was the care with which it had been curated and crafted. Like any publication by the Writers Workshop, this volume was bound in exquisite Indian handloom sari cloth and had the title regally embossed in gold. In times where poetry is often relegated to the back burners of publication, it felt encouraging to see the amount of effort that had gone into bringing this beautiful book into existence.

The editor of this anthology happens to be Inam Hussain Begg Mullick, an extremely talented poet, a free thinker and an old friend. I have always been in awe of the unstinting effort Inam has been making over the past years to carve out a dedicated space for Indian English poetry, bringing together an inspiring array of poetic voices in well-designed anthologies, and this time is no different.

The Violet Sun is an anthology of poetry that includes a number of poets, each masters of their craft in their own right, and each with a distinctive voice that demands an audience.

The book opens with a poem by Adil Jussawalla, titled “View”. With characteristic precision, using a language that is both stark and evocative, Jussawalla sets the tone for this book of verse, reeling the reader in and inviting them to partake of this strangely magnetic “View”, this window into the mind of the 21st century poet.

The poets whose verse finds a home in these pages hail from different generations and spaces, and the themes and forms they grapple with are many. While Anjana Basu and Daipayan Nair experiment with form and talk of ‘Amour’ or present Haikus and Tankas, CP Surendran and Boudhayan Mukherjee trace ‘Elusive’ trails into a ‘Void’ of unbecoming and bring visceral images to life. Saman Rizvi’s verse echoes the uncertainties of our times where one often has to become less than one is to fit into the system of things, while Sharmila Ray takes the reader on a sepia-tinted trip down memory lane, interlinking the bridges of taste and recollection perfectly.

Hoshang Merchant is, as always, inimitable in his verse, and his piece, “Two Explanatory Poems on Father/Mother Archetypes” is layered with metaphor and allegory, creating strangely multidimensional perspectives as it were.

Naina Dey speaks of the power of poetry in her verse, sowing revolution with ‘Tongue Talk’; Ketaki Datta talks of the inconsistencies of hope and tries to envision a consciousness devoid of any extremities of feeling; Ritamvara Bhattacharya finds in poetry the utterance of intimate divinity; Deeptesh Sen’s ‘Nowhere Girl’ paints a picture of human intimacy with astonishing nuance; and Ashoke Viswanathan’s pieces explore the intricacies of sin and departures. Neera Kashyap chooses to try and untangle the many-headed hydra of wars waged outside and within us all, and Arnab Chatterjee speaks of lovers, longing and self-awareness.

Poets featured in the anthology include Akash Sinha and Biswajit Chatterjee, who talk of kites and ‘Air’, love and madness; Aritrik Dutta Chowdhury, whose piece “I Choose English”, grasps the slipperiness of language; Somolekha, exploring the condition of the not-so-common man; Debolina Dey, who weaves together the threads of desire and the enjoyment of a meal in an interesting tapestry; and Rochelle Potkar, who invites us to witness the creative mind at work in her poem, ‘the poet goes to storyland’.

Inam Hussain Begg Mullick also contributes to the collection; his poems, as always, push the limits of form and take us on stunning imagistic journeys that are bound to leave a mark on the mind of the discerning reader.

The anthology draws to a close with Somrita Urni Ganguly’s poems; they speak of revolution, hope and building new nests in old curio shops, bringing this anthology to a befittingly poignant end.

In my humble opinion, The Violet Sun is in many ways the perfect example of a collage. Each poem that finds a place within its pages is a distinct and separate work of art, yet somehow all of them coalesce to create something more, inspiring and encouraging readers and poets alike to acknowledge the sheer power of poetry.

The reviewer is an independent contributor 

Spotlight

The Violet Sun: An Anthology of 21st-Century Indian English Poetry

Edited by Inam Hussain Begg Mullick

Writers Workshop, 2024

80 pages, Rs 350/-