Gambolling Inhabitants of the Poet’s Psyche

The canonical Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma (1907-1987) has to some extent suffered from being too revered. In well-meaning hagiography, she has been cast as overly pious, almost joyless in her asceticism for her art. In this context, Ruth Vanita’s attentive translation of Varma’s collection of sketches, My Family, has revitalized Varma as more spiritually buoyant, as someone deeply invested and in love with wider, larger, more spiralling notions of family and kinship—especially one that includes animal companions.

This is a deeply healing collection, and a fine demonstration of how poets who have died many decades ago may still effortlessly speak to bruising contemporary issues such as our fragile ecological health. Without pontificating, Varma explains her lifelong commitments. As a child, she had evolved a daily routine of counting the five chickens of a hen, ‘picking up each one, wiping it with my handkerchief from beak to claws’, scattering millet for them. One day, one chicken was missing, and she was told that a woman had taken it. Not realizing that the chicken was intended to be eaten, Varma wondered how the woman ‘would manage to look after such a small creature.’