Poetic Licence

Playful, inventive and unafraid to tackle weighty themes with irony and precision, Delhi-based bilingual poet Akhil Katyal’s is the fresh new voice on the literary landscape that deserves your attention.

- Annie Zaidi

Behind the Clara Swain Hospital in Bareilly, there used to be an open field. In 1985, when Sunita Katyal gave birth to her second son, a circus had pitched its tents in the field. She tells him now, Akhil Katyal says with a laugh, that that probably explains a lot.

One of the bright new stars on the contemporary poetic landscape in India, Katyal is rare for both a playful turn of phrase and deft handling of themes weighty enough to sink a well-intentioned voice. He is also rare in being so fully bilingual that he is able to write and translate between Hindi and English, both ways, and in rhyme.

He owes this fluidity to a middle-class upbringing in the Hindi heartland. Bareilly, Pilibhit, Shahjahanpur, Dehradun, Lucknow – the Katyal family moved around Uttar Pradesh, wherever his civil engineer father was posted. Of the early years, he has only a handful of memories. A lychee orchard, attending nursery school at St Joseph’s Academy in Dehradun, having to go to speech correction classes. In his poem “Dehradun, 1990”, he writes about his inability to pronounce the letter “r”:

… At age 5, I used to say, “Aam ji ki jai,” “Aam ji ki jai,” – then a teacher taught me how to hold my tongue against the ceiling of my mouth and throw it out quivering, ‘Rrrr,’ ‘Rrrr,’ she wrenched it out of me, over many sessions, ‘Ram.’ Until then, I did not know God was so much effort…

Geography is prominent in Katyal’s work. His first poetry collection, How Many Countries Does The Indus Cross, crisscrosses the Subcontinent with poems about Kashmir, soldiers in Siachen, Dehradun, Pakistan, Wagah, as well as several poems about Delhi, where he went to college and where he now lives, teaching at Ambedkar University.