Breathe the Poetic Breeze of Bombay

Reading verses of poets who trained the lens on erstwhile Bombay during poetry walks provides a new dimension to understanding their work

- Haima Deshpande

Driven from his bed by troubled sleep In which he dreamt of being lost Upon a hill too high for him (a modest hill whose sides grow steep) He stood where several highways crossed
And saw the city, cold and dim, Where only human hands sell cheap
-Nissim Ezekiel, A Morning Walk

A group of 10 people stand on the rain-dappled street on a Sunday morning with paper sheets clutched in their hands. The assembly point, in front of a very tall luxurious building, is significant for the group. The uber-chic skyscrapers in the background tell the urban tale of development that Mumbai has been witnessing over the past decade. These skyscrapers—located on land that housed mills in a bygone era and fell silent following the 1982 textile strike called by unionist Datta Samant— are a stark contradiction to the low-walled, small tenements or chawls that were once an intrinsic part of the landscape here. In this transition from Bombay to Mumbai, the quaintness of the former is fighting a losing battle against the aggressive rapid growth of the latter.

On that Sunday morning, braving the slight drizzle, the group led by Saranya Subramanian, is trying to revisit the abandoned histories of mills and the chawls that sheltered the mill workers, through a poetry crawl. Walking through a preplanned route, Saranya has chosen the poems carefully. They have to resonate with the theme for that day: From Malls to Mills—the Abandoned Histories Poetry Crawl. Standing in a semi-circle, the group reads a translated version of poet Narayan Surve’s Char Shabd (Four Words). The stillness of that Sunday morning reverberates the words from the poem—“The struggle for the daily bread is an everyday question; At times outside the gate, at times inside; I’m a worker, a flaming sword; Listen you intellectuals, I’m going to commit a crime”.