BackViews | Suresh Dalal: A poet for cosmopolitan Mumbai
Views | Suresh Dalal: A poet for cosmopolitan Mumbai
PremiumA file photo of renowned Gujarati poet Suresh Dalal
Among the many images shown during a running montage of photographs forming the backdrop at the memorial meeting to mourn the passing of the Gujarati poet Suresh Dalal on Tuesday in Mumbai, one stood out. It showed Dalal looking confidently at the city, standing next to the plaque bearing the city’s name, with the Gateway of India behind him. Dalal’s face looked proud, as if he owned the city, and in many ways, he did.
And Dalal, more than most, ensured that the city’s Gujarati character thrived. You can keep crunching numbers to find out where the city’s population is shifting, or which language is spoken more. But Mumbai is as much a Gujarati city as it is a Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, or English-speaking city. Saying this adds to the city’s richness, and Dalal contributed to it.
He did so by reminding the city’s Gujaratis that they lived in a cosmopolitan city. His language was urbane and urban; his metaphors had Bambaiya phrases and English words where necessary; his images included fans moving listlessly and the ennui of the upper middle class families, with their dependence on air conditioners and refrigerators; and he was besotted by the love stories of Meera and Radha and Krishna:
Mandir sathe parni Meera, raj mahel thi chhuti re
Krishna nam ni chudi paheri Madhav ni anguthi re
(Meera married the temple, and she is liberated from the palace;
Her bangles are called Krishna and the ring has Madhav’s face)
Dalal taught Gujarati literature at Shrimati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey University, and edited a bimonthly journal Kavita (poetry) which I grew up reading. It was a fine magazine, where many Gujarati poets, from Gujarat and Maharashtra but also beyond, had their poems published. He found Gujarati voices from around the world, such as Panna Nayak from Philadelphia and Amita Modi, who wrote in English. He also introduced Gujarati readers to poets writing in other languages—some translations were inevitably translated twice—for example, Amrita Pritam, from Punjabi to Hindi then Gujarati—and some direct like the great Marathi poets, Mangesh Padgaonkar, Vasant Bapat and Vinda Karandikar. For Gujarati readers in Bombay, as the city was then known, it was Dalal who made Marathi poetry accessible. He’d also publish translations of Bengali poets, usually translated by Sukanya Jhaveri, and he always had space for ghazals, by Mareez, Barkat Virani and others. From someone like Niranjan Bhagat, he would get an erudite essay on Eliot.
Dalal’s good friends, Jagdish Joshi, Vipin Parikh and Harindra Dave, like him, captured the city’s urban angst, revealing the ironies of humdrum middle class lives, of lives lived in the suburbs and the long commute to Churney Road and Marine Lines for work, in Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar. And if there was a “movement" of urban poetry in Gujarati in the 70s, this was it.
And above all, he was an excellent impressario: to listen to him when he was in charge of a kavi sammelan (poets’ assembly) was, to use a word familiar with today’s teens, awesome. He had the gift of gab, ready wit, an extraordinary recollection of quotations and anecdotes, and he made each poet special. I know; as a young collegian I took part in one, reading my Gujarati poems, and Dalal picked the one line I was most happy with, and used it while introducing me.
I had the privilege of knowing him and his family—his elder daughter Niyati was at school and college with me—but at the memorial meeting on Tuesday, I saw hundreds of people who had come, because they too felt an intimacy with him. He reminded a mercantile community of the beauty of words; he made sure Gujaratis learnt not only how to count, but also to recall rhyme and rhythm. And he brought this polyglot city to their homes, reminding them they weren’t alone—and he stood at the Gateway of India, reminding others, how incomplete this city would be without Gujaratis.
Phool pankhadi jevi komal mast pavan ni angaliyethi laav, nadi na tat par taru naam lakhi dau
Let me use the wind’s finger,
Soft like a flower’s petal,
And write your name,
On the bed of the river
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You can listen to Dalal reading his poems here
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