“the things not in the picture”^*

* From Adil Jussawalla (2015), “View” (50).

: Bombay’s poets and the re-representation of the city

Abstract

This article considers how Bombay’s English-language poets have negotiated and re-imagined this iconic and highly mediated city. It suggests that poetry in general, and the work of Bombay’s poets in particular, is especially able to articulate what Henri Lefebvre characterized as the “lived” dimension of space. Unlike Bombay’s novels, which have been read as an allegory of the city at large, its poems offer an alternative perspective, presenting Bombay as a space of intimate experiences, social interactions and fleeting impressions. Indeed, Bombay’s poets often present the city as an affective space, placing an emphasis on the fleeting impressions and experiences it offers its subjects. This article examines the work of a selection of Bombay’s poets working from the 1950s until the present – among them, Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla, Dilip Chitre, Namdeo Dhasal, Amit Chaudhuri, Arundhathi Subramaniam, R. Raj Rao and Imtiaz Dharker – and who attend to the ephemeral and transient experience of the city. In doing so, their work critiques both the popular image of Bombay as a so-called maximum city of extremes, and demonstrates poetry’s specific spatial dynamic, which enables it to capture the dynamic and transient experience of space itself.

Keywords:

• Bombay
• poetry
• space
• place
• lived space

Notes

* From Adil Jussawalla (2015), “View” (50).

1. Bombay was renamed Mumbai by the Shiv Sena in 1995. However, most of the poetry considered here was written prior to this, and even more recent work refers to it as Bombay. This article will therefore use Bombay throughout.