Hi. I’m Saranya, and I started The Bombay Poetry Crawl because of my fascination with the 20th century Bombay poets. In 2018, I was pursuing my undergraduate thesis at Ashoka University on Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems, under the guidance of my advisor, Dr Johannes Burgers. Mine was a digital humanities project; using QGIS mapping technology, I spatially located all of the characters (alive and inanimate) from this collection of poetry, which exposed the farce of globalisation and proved Neil Smith’s theory of uneven development in Mumbai.
While this was an academically enriching experience, my favourite part about this 2 year journey was conducting my primary research: walking in Bombay through Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems. There was something deeply enjoyable about this sensory experience, charged by this burning desire I had to find his characters: the drunken man, the ogress, the little pinwheel, the blind cat, Mr Crow, Pi-dog, Parameshwari, the rat poisoned man, the lawyer, Ambedkar, piles of rubbish, Yudhishthira’s dog - so many of whom exist in the city’s multifarious entities. Add to this all the valuable information written by Anjali Nerlekar and Laetitia Zecchini, and the entire concept of city walking through poetry became astonishingly interactive.
I decided that other people absolutely need to have this experience. So why not have them join me? The Bombay Poetry Crawl began with this hope in February 2020. And when the pandemic broke out, I was grateful for technology uniting us all. It’s what allowed me to host panel discussions on the Bombay poets, apart from readings, lectures, and all of which are archived here on YouTube.
April 2023 was when I resumed my IRL poetry crawls, dedicated to discovering cityscapes and literary cultures. For eg, Sion & Versova Koliwada, Sassoon Docks through Adil Jussawalla’s Shorelines, Kala Ghoda through Arun Kolatkar, Santacruz through Eunice de Souza’s Fix, Bandra West through Meena Kumari’s shayari, abandoned Parel & Byculla mills through Narayan Surve, Keshav Meshram, Kamathipura through Namdeo Dhasal & Mallika Amar Sheikh, the local train ladies’ compartment through Arundhathi Subramaniam, Soyarabai…to name a few!
So this is The Bombay Poetry Crawl: an archival research space dedicated to Bombay poets who were writing in and about the city, from 1947-1999, in Hindi, Marathi, English, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, and every other recorded language. There’s a lot to uncover, learn and unlearn. The term “Bombay”, the city as a character, a space, an economic and social entity, what constitutes as poetry, who can be defined as a poet, a “bombay” poet, how to archive the un-archivable, the forgotten, the erased, the censored, the politically ostracised, the genderless, formless, faceless figures that make up our city. Through research, active walking, and expansive conversations, I aim to understand what is The Poet’s City. And how this map looks, when connected with poets & poetic movements around the world.
The aim, ultimately, is to build a world map of 20th century poetry, akin to Arun Kolatkar’s Pi-dog from Kala Ghoda Poems who orchestrates a whole world to life: “As I play, / the city slowly reconstructs itself, / stone by numbered stone.”