The collection of poems is divided thematically into seven sections. Haunting, elegiac and distinctly feminist in tone, the first four sections explore the pain and trauma of oppression, loss and grief. Her poems are at once evocative, wrenching, and thought provoking. In the opening poem ‘Duhkha’, she contrasts the inability of modern medicine to heal assaults on the soul, a task that can be accomplished only by turning to nature:
Hacker writes more about her fears of stepping out—one of the less-described perspectives during the pandemic is about those who were above a certain age and considered more susceptible to the virus, and as a result, were suddenly homebound. Her poems explore this:
Shrestha’s lament on state sponsored violence intermingles with his inability to fall in love. In ‘Of Some Unidentified Village, Nayantara Barua’, violence is described sans metaphors: ‘The cities are being torched, the villages blazing’ (p. 71); ‘Homes uprooted, villages are torn’ (p. 73); ‘…they find Malati’s raped body left for dead’ (p. 73). The absence of metaphors evokes another sense of loss—the loss of poetry amidst brutality.
Gopal Gandhi’s account of all these changes is embedded throughout in a larger story of India and, to some extent, India’s interface with the world. His candour and even-handed descriptions remain but one misses in these somewhat dense with politics and geopolitics chapters, the eye for the quirks and curiosities of history which had made the earlier parts of this book such a compelling read.
The legacy of Nehru in the economic sphere is being reversed and the poor are no longer on the radar. The rapid privatization of national assets, withdrawal of the state from education and health to benefit the rapacious private sector, the rapid informalization of labour with no trade union rights are pointers to the backslide. In the Global Hunger Index, India is ranked 111 out of 125 countries.
While most of the issues concerning partitions of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been examined extensively, it is the detailed study of the lesser-known separations of Burma and the Arabian Peninsula that makes the present work important. In a lengthy portion, the author outlines not only the socio-political conditions which led to the separation of Burma from the Indian Empire, but also highlights fascinating details pertaining to the inauguration of the new state. The challenges that emerged in the wake of this partition have been examined thoroughly in the present book