Malashri Lal's second poetry collection, 'Signing in the Air,' published by Hawakal Publishers (128 pages, Rs 600), presents 76 poems that explore feminism, nature, memory, and cultural identity. The poems are characterized by a slow, meditative pace and a willingness to interrogate the past for lessons, offering a dense cultural roundedness.
Feminist Mythopoeia and Subversive Voices
The collection prominently features a woman's voice that is acutely aware of both its liminality and strength. Lal reimagines mythological figures to challenge traditional narratives. In 'Blind,' a blind woman trained to chop apples cuts off the nose of a would-be molester, echoing the Shurpanakha story in reverse. Her Ahalya views her transformation from stone to woman not as liberation but as a return to 'a Woman's interrupted servitude.' Holika, in Lal's rendition, subverts history by claiming she protected Prahlad by sacrificing herself. A beggar-woman on Delhi streets becomes Hidimba, whose power lies in street-smartness to wrest a living under police eyes. Every woman's bindi becomes their 'third-eye,' marking 'their enlightenment and supreme knowledge.'
Nature and Cultural Knowledge
Nature occupies a central place, with Lal's descriptive capacity remaining fresh through close observation and layered knowledge. The poems range over flowers, trees, birds, and climate, with Lal's scholarship evident in connecting ideas and attention to detail. However, it is the cultural mode that reigns supreme. The poet's foreword describes these poems as 'a seance with words' that 'participate in the dance of eternity where time is both present and absent.' A section titled 'Installations' examines objects as palimpsests of memory and mnemonic cultural archives.
Linguistic Decoloniality
Lal consciously imbues her poetic vocabulary with cultural borrowings from Indian languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, and Dhundhari. Words such as 'seva,' 'shaiya,' 'palna,' 'diya,' 'pallav,' 'narak,' 'swarga,' and 'thaan' are used not because they are untranslatable, but to preserve their exact cultural place, ideological force, and moral role. In 'Varsha: Cloud Messenger Today,' the ecological lament for the modern monsoon's amnesia finds metaphor in the forgotten 'chhanda' of Kalidasa's Meghduta. In 'Kashi's Kinesis,' the word 'jhulan' connotes the arc of the Ganga over Shiva's head and the fierce discipline of Kaal. 'Naani's Magic Meals' evokes childhood through vernacular domesticity: 'No one uses mud-baked ovens / or grows backyard greens / Rasoi is a concept / that has converted to a branded "Kitchen" / a showpiece of marble and glass where no one cooks.'
Interrogating Tradition and Modernity
Lal's interest in the past stems from a desire to know things historically and understand them inside-out. She is uncomfortable with both tradition and modernity when they stifle humanity, univocally questioning practices to reveal histories of fissure and 'eternal disharmony' (as in 'Vanaprastha'). The collection's autumnal view on life and concern with death loom large, with poems that are epistemologically ripe and serene, siding with life's flows rather than opposing them. The reviewer, Basudhara Roy, who teaches English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, notes that these poems perform cultural brokerage that can save us from civilisational amnesia.
