Gujarat has become a byword used casually for the way the historical state has slowly been turning into History. The Kandala tornado, the droughts, the earthquake, the Godhra carnage and the subsequent riots, have made ‘Gujarat’ into a political headline that drowns other voices. However, the artist cannot be silenced. The long conspiracy of silence shatters with Saroop Dhruv’s shocking, introspective and sensitive poetry that verbalizes, tales of not-so-long-ago in a voice that identifies with every lesion that the people of Gujarat have been subjected to. Hastakshepa is a volume of poetry that makes you cry, squirm with shame, quiver with righteous anger and shake with passionate indignation, at the condition of the state that was once Gujarat. So changed are the state of Gujarat and the city of Ahmedabad Saroop Dhruv lives in, that they look like it feels stranger, perhaps identifiable only by dead ancestors and the lineage of a holocaust that gripped the nation in the aftermath of a Partition. With a rapier-like pen, she is out for a kill-—to hunt all responsible for what has been.
January 2004, volume 28, No 1