Verses of Witnessing

The most imaginative chronicles of Mumbai's "spirit" come to us from the city's poets

- Aranya

IT'S been said that poetry has the potential to ferment revolution. Since the Covid pandemic, there has been a lot of conversation about the arts as an essential commodity. "Poetry Pharmacies" exist, and seemingly bridge the gap between art and therapy. In a post-truth universe, where social media has the potential to curate anxiety, and rewire news as an intimate catastrophe, writing, more than ever, is a metaphor for political activity. Nothing is private or personal anymore. The communities that coalesce around art for its potential to liberate the individual from oppressive social realities, show us a way to regulate and diagnose the emotional temperature of a place-a city, perhaps?

Berger’s utterance that reformulates the city as a ‘‘character’’ keeps surfacing on social media once every couple of years or so. It’s become a popular template to think about inhabitants of cities as affective barometers that both make and unmake their burgeoning material infrastructures. The sociologist Louis Wirth, building on Georg Simmel’s notions of the “metropolis”, argued that urbanism embodied a distinct form of ‘‘group life’’, suggesting even that these forms could exist outside of ‘‘cities’’ as we see them in modernity. We are speaking here about a ‘‘spirit’’, a skein of relationality and association that has emerged in modern metropolitan centres, as distinct from other forms of living. Perhaps, the most imaginative documentation and assessment of this ‘‘spirit’’ comes to us, not from the historians or the journalists, but the poets and artists of a city.

The Bombay Poets were a group of writers who embodied novel modes of creative collaboration in the city through their practice. They’ve often been likened to the French Impressionists, who gathered at cafes and created magic with their artwork. Literary critic Anjali Nerlekar argues that they were at their peak during the 60s (