Part 73 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Indira Sant was an influential Marathi poet whose lyric work often explores solitude, nature, memory and the emotional details of everyday life. Her poetry shows how a quiet voice can hold complexity without relying on grand declarations. Small images become meaningful through careful attention. Solitude and self-awareness Soli…
Part 63 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Sarojini Naidu’s “The Bangle Sellers” uses the colourful objects of a marketplace to explore women’s lives and the transitions associated with youth, marriage and maturity. Its musical language and vivid colours create a graceful surface, while the poem also invites readers to examine how women’s identities are represented thro…
Part 51 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Balamani Amma is celebrated for Malayalam poetry that explores motherhood, tenderness, memory and the emotional complexity of family life. Her work is often associated with an intimate lyric voice, yet its domestic settings open onto larger questions about care, identity and the passage of time. Motherhood as lived experience M…
Part 46 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Janabai, the Marathi poet-saint associated with the Varkari devotional tradition, brings the world of domestic labour into poetry. Her songs imagine devotion not as something separate from ordinary responsibilities, but as a presence that can enter sweeping, grinding, cleaning and caring. Her voice also challenges the assumptio…
Part 41 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Akka Mahadevi, a major woman poet of the Kannada vachana tradition, wrote with startling directness about devotion, freedom and the limits imposed by worldly status. Her vachanas are compact poetic utterances rather than elaborate courtly compositions. Their force often comes from the tension between an inner spiritual commitme…
Part 32 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Andal, the Tamil poet-saint associated with the Vaishnava bhakti tradition, is remembered for devotional poems in which the desire for the divine becomes vivid, personal and embodied. Her works, especially the Tiruppavai and Nachiyar Tirumoli, unite ritual, song, longing and communal practice. This essay explores key ideas and …
Part 29 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Bahinabai Chaudhari’s Marathi poetry is treasured for the way it draws philosophical insight from ordinary work, family life, farming and the natural world. Her voice is associated with an oral, spoken idiom rather than an ornamental literary style. The result is poetry that feels close to lived experience while asking large qu…
Part 27 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Mahadevi Varma, a leading voice of Hindi Chhayavad, wrote poetry marked by inwardness, longing, loneliness and a search for a presence that remains difficult to name. Her lyric world is often quiet rather than dramatic: a lamp, a path, a tear, a cloud or an absent companion can carry the weight of a whole emotional life. Chhaya…
Part 3 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage. Mirabai, the sixteenth-century poet associated with Rajasthan and the Krishna bhakti tradition, composed songs of intense devotion, longing and spiritual independence. Her poems often speak in the voice of a lover who cannot accept a life without the beloved. In this tradition, Krishna is at once a divine presence and …
