Shikha Malaviya

At the same time, as an Indo-American with experiences of living both in India and the US, it was also a sense of shared history and struggle that helped forge Malaviya’s personal connection with her subject. “It was shocking to me that I could feel this connection [with her] despite us belonging to different centuries. My heart ached with recognition in seeing Anandibai’s tussle between traditional expectations and her own beliefs, which were, in many ways, radical,” notes the poet. She finds echoes of her own experiences in Anandibai’s and mentions how her Indian identity too was reinforced, while she was constantly cautioned about becoming “westernised”. She describes how she embraced tradition in her own life but never, like her ancestor, let go of her dream. “Writing poetry is and always will be my radical act,” Malaviya insists. 
 
Through poems, titled A Different Kind of Arithmetic, where Anandibai even as a child is made acutely aware of the divide that exists between the sexes (‘Before I could count properly on my fingers/Ek don teen char, I learned division/the haveli halved into two sections/the mardana and zenana’) and ‘Loss: An Invocation’ where she resolves to become a doctor (‘…and through your loss I find purpose/my son with no name birthing a dream/and I volunteer myself to my countrywomen/as I take the oath of Hippocrates…’), Malaviya explores Anandibai’s inner thoughts and feelings as it takes readers through the more well-known episodes of her life. 

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Malaviya’s formal structuring of her verse too lends as much meaning as do her usage of words. “[When] you are telling a life story, different forms of poetry can lend more weight to all the twists and turns,” she admits. “Anandibai lived in an age where language was quite formal, measured, and elegant. Forms such as sonnets, pantoums, ghazals and couplets lend to that while providing, in this case, a certain elegiac rhythm. I’m a very visual writer and in poems such as ‘Nāmkaran,’ where Anandibai is named after the Yamuna river, it felt natural for the words to take on the shape of a river,” she explains. Again, a poem called Consumption which underscores the brutality Anandibai faced at the hands of her husband “is shaped like a sickle”. “I wanted the violence of the poem to be conveyed not just through words, but also to foreshadow how consumption, which is another word for tuberculosis, would eventually cut her down,” says Malaviya. “Through the writing of this book, I came to respect the function of form much more and realised that within form itself, there is much room to experiment.”