Minerva Sarma & Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee: “We wrote this poem as a tribute to the 88-year-old Assamese poet, Nilmani Phookan, who has won the highest literary prize in India, the 56th Jnanpith Award. Phookan is known for his love for the French Symbolists. His poetry is earthy, with surprising turns. He subtly uses his cultural landscape in his poems. You can associate him with the old virtue of what is endearingly called a people’s poet. This poem was written across Guwahati (Minerva’s home) and Delhi (Manash’s home). Each of us wrote two sections. We leave the voices ambiguous, to emphasise the ambiguity of love. The epigraph is taken from Phookan’s poem ‘What Were We Talking About Just Now,’ translated from the Assamese by D.N. Bezbarua.” (web)
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee: “The long night in Delhi, described with poetic precision by Uttaran Das Gupta, refuses to leave the minds and hearts of those who have lost their loved ones. I return to the night that doesn’t leave the city. I take the striking imagery in Das Gupta’s poem to explore what disturbs the still night of paper. This poem is (also) an acknowledgement of, and a response to, Das Gupta’s sombre poem.” (web)
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee: “Kashmir was named ‘paradise’ by the 17th century poet Amir Khusro. History is a blind man with greedy hands. It has been cruel to what it considers beautiful. Between Kashmir and Kashmiris falls a long shadow of history that begun when the Mughal king, Akbar, set his eyes on it in the 16th century. Akbar exiled Kashmir’s ruler and the poet-queen, Habba Khatun’s husband, Yusuf Shah Chak. In his poem, ‘The Blessed Word: A Prologue,’ late Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote, remembering Khatun: ‘Her grief, alive to this day, in her own roused the people into frenzied opposition to Mughal rule. Since then Kashmir has never been free.’ Ali rues how unkind and brutal history has been to Kashmir, and how it imposed an unending saga of grief. But he also considers grief the fuel behind Kashmir’s resilient spirit. Hope the long night in Kashmir ends now, and voices of calm prevail.” (web)
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee: “This poem is in the wake of a disturbing event that took place early this week in Delhi. Two artists, a Christian and a Muslim, were drawing a couplet in Urdu on a wall when they were attacked by members claiming to belong to the Hindu right and told to stop. This was an unprecedented episode of cultural policing in the capital of India, a place which reverberates with a history of brilliant poets during the Mughal era, who wrote in Persian and Urdu, and who were part of the common Indo-Islamic culture that thrived in these parts.” (website)
