A Blur of a Woman

of a poet, her book, and a podcast

Basudhara and I finished our conversation at 10 pm. One hour forty-three minutes. And my heart was full. We'd started off thinking we should aim for a thirty to forty five minutes talk. I'm just glad it wasn't to be.

There is something reassuring about Basudhara. Because she speaks with conviction, of being completely honest to the moment. Thoughts, images, opinions, all, take shape like a building which is linear, with stark lines, but a place you know is warm and welcoming.

Her latest book 'A Blur of a Woman' is the one I will be gifting the most this year, and possibly beyond. The poems are tender and hard, heartbreaking and life-affirming, as she bleeds her heart to open our souls.

In this fabulous conversation, which I wished hadn't ended, she talks, amongst a million other things, of her provincial life, of how poetry improves on marination, how a poem can be obstinate to change, how illnesses define trajectories, and how Keki Daruwalla showed her why greatness is nothing but grace in ordinary things.

Basudhara says writing is "a struggle to keep affirming life's movement, its open-endedness, its journey of becoming as well as its right and necessity to become".

Basudhara teaches English at Karim City College in Jamshedpur. Creatively and academically drawn to themes of gender, mythology and ecology, her five published books include a monograph and three collections of poems - Moon in My Teacup, Stitching a Home and Inhabiting. Her work has featured widely in anthologies and magazines, including Chandrabhaga, The Punch MAgazine, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing, The Dhaka Tribune, EPW, and Madras Courier, among others. Co-editor of two poetry anthologies and a firm believer in the therapeutic power of verse, she writes, reviews, and sporadically curates adn translates poetry from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India.

Catch her muse, reflect, recite in this first episode of the second season of 'Uncut Poetry presents Red River Sessions'. (In Red River Sessions, I talk to published poets about their poetry, their craft, and what haunts them.)

This is what the prima donna of Indian poetry, Arundhathi Subramaniam, says about Basudhara’s poetry -

‘Basudhara Roy’s poems seek to make their home in the precarious tension between the generic and the particular. There is the fire of rage and resistance here, and yet, the impulse to incline toward broad statement is inflected by detail — the ‘tremor of bones’, ‘the air’s soiled chemise’, the breeze ‘starched with the smell of fish’, diaries where ink elopes with the rain — which return us from proclamation to particularity. These poems explore spaces between the abstract and the tangible, between sea and land, between restless freedom and urgent imperatives of ‘dream, dishwater, book, bread’.

Here are some of Basudhara’s poems I love:

Elegy for a Lost Child

To Home a House

(from Basudhara’s earlier book ‘Stitching a Home’)

(marked and bookended beautifully by a friend)

You can buy Basudhara's books and those of other fabulous poets at ⁠redriverpress.in

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