How to Refuse the Generous Thief

The poet uses all the available arsenal in English to write the most anti-colonial poetry

- Vivekanand Selvaraj

REBOUGHT FASCIMILES

Nandini Dhar | Red River

2024 | Rs 299 | 60 pages

I read Nandini Dhar’s Rebought Fascimiles thrice over the last three months. Every time I was in a different city. While none of the cities resembled the one Dhar wrote about, I was looking at them through the ones I had known or lived in. The first city was Beijing, the second was Chennai and the third was Kuala Lumpur (KL). But what is to preclude these three cities sharing—each of them on their own—certain characteristics with the one she mentioned about. For any city is about the language(s) it embodies. While Beijing hailed redundancies, Chennai celebrated particularities and KL somehow included both of these components and more.

While the Britannia tongue paints Dhar’s city with a privileged shadow, one could say that the cities I lived in could also be described by their dialogue with that very same tongue—Beijing by a certain silence, Chennai by a certain ‘chutneyfication’ and KL by making Britannia a topping over simmering full nations.

At this juncture, I have to add the disclaimer that when it comes to my understanding of the politics of poetry, there is no one else I’d call as a mentor more than Dhar. That, and the bilinguality of both our writing aside, I presume we are really different types of writers from very different worlds, with different points of origin when it comes to poetry.