Archive

What constitutes "the lyric" when the tradition runs from Sangam poetry through Bhakti verse to contemporary experiment? This essay argues that the Indian lyric has never been a single form but a contested space — a negotiation between the personal and the collective, the spoken and the written, the local language and the imagined nation.

"Translation is not the movement of meaning from one vessel to another. It is the discovery that both vessels were broken to begin with." A Bengali poet speaks about writing, the impossibility and necessity of translation, and what it means to belong to a tradition that crosses borders.

Every language harbours words that resist translation not because they are complex, but because they carry within them a specific geography, a particular way of inhabiting the world. This is a meditation on those words — and on what we lose, and sometimes find, in the attempt to cross over.

A conversation among poets from seven Indian languages about the economics of poetry publishing, the role of literary magazines, the impact of social media, and the paradox of a rich literary culture with a small readership. Recorded at the Kavita India founding meeting, January 2026.

The archive is always already a translation. When we record a Baul song or transcribe a Mappila Pattu, we fix something that was designed to move. This essay examines the ethics and aesthetics of documentation, and asks what the living tradition loses — and gains — when it enters the archive.