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In Arundhati Subramaniam’s words, Gieve Patel the poet and playwright has been a “quietly enduring presence in the country’s literary scene for five decades” (x). Something along the same lines may be said of Patel the painter and sculptor, whose parallel and complementary career has progressed consistently and enduringly, and whose reputation, in India and abroad, today equals if not exceeds his literary achievement.
Born in 1940 in a Parsi family from southern Gujarat, Patel studied at St. Xavier’s College and Grant Medical College, both in Bombay (now Mumbai). A physician by profession, he practiced in both rural and urban India, gaining the experience, the sensibility, and the insights that would influence and define much of his poetry and art work. Likewise, his family background—small landowners “of rural stock, very devout, orthodox” on his father’s side, and more rationalistic and westernised practising Zoroastrians on his mother’s (including a grandfather and an uncle who were doctors) (De Souza 88). This background was largely responsible for his inquiring attitude towards, and his empathy for, the vulnerable and disadvantaged: the “servants” and the indigenous Warlis working on the family estate, the crippled beggars populating the pavements of Bombay, the elderly, the sick and dying. After his retirement from medical practice in 2006, Patel focused primarily on his art, while poetry occupied him only occasionally, or was put to the service of a long-standing translation project involving the seventeenth-century Gujarati mystic Akho (Akha Bharat).
Like many other Bombay poets, Patel found in Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004) a mentor and a friend who helped him shape and publish his first poems, reviews, and translations in literary periodicals (Quest, Poetry India) and anthologies (Young Commonwealth Poets ’65, Asian P.E.N. Anthology, Writers Workshop Miscellany). Ezekiel also published Patel’s first collection, Poems (1966). This was followed by How Do You Withstand, Body (1976), issued by Clearing House, the poetry publishing collective which Patel had started the same year with fellow poets Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Arun Kolatkar (who was also responsible for the stunning covers and the overall design of the books). The same year Clearing House published Jussawalla’s Missing Person and Mehrotra’s Nine Enclosures, while the Indian branch of Oxford University Press launched its New Poetry in India series, which went on to issue Mirrored, Mirroring (1991), Patel’s third and last collection of poetry. The three books were reprinted in 2017 as Collected Poems, which adds nineteen new poems and a few translations from Akho (but does not include previously uncollected poems, such as “Commerce,” originally published in the quarterly Mahfil in 1972). Patel’s three plays—Princes, Savaska, and Mister Behram—were first performed in Bombay in 1970, 1982 and 1987, respectively, and published in 2008. As for his many pieces on art and theatre, his book reviews, and his interviews—which appeared over the years in various magazines, journals, exhibition catalogs, and art books—have not been anthologised yet.
Compared with most of his Indian contemporaries, Patel’s poetic output is rather limited, which may or may not account for the lack of scholarly and critical attention of the kind that, for example, has been paid to the work of Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan, or Agha Shahid Ali. This may have to do, at least in part, with Patel’s slow and ruminative creative process, which he explained in an interview with fellow Bombay poet Eunice de Souza.
Most often the first draft is just a few lines or a couple of pages. Very rarely do I get a completed poem at first go. The draft is put away and looked at occasionally every few months. This can go on for years. Something keeps hovering between the poem and me, an incomprehension. I keep working towards the point at which the images, the philosophical angle, a certain sequence of words or rhythm come together in a way I want them to. (De Souza 97)
In the same interview, Patel traces the origins of a central theme in his poetry to two concurrent events: the premature death of a cousin and his own puberty.
Knowledge of the death trauma and the awakening of sexuality coming at the same time made me realize that the body is an important vehicle for the understanding of our sojourn through this world. I had seen a very beloved person perishing at the same time that I became aware of my own physical sexual needs. The physical became for me a permanent obsessive focus. There is the body as sexual object, perishing object, subject to unbearable pain, and almost unbearable ecstasy, women’s bodies and the violence done to them, and so on. (De Souza 90)
In the poem that opens his first collection, “On Killing a Tree,” the body is only metaphorically human, but the humiliation and the devastation it suffers are distinctly anthropomorphic, and, like in subsequent poems depicting actual human bodies, hint at the larger bodies of community and society. In Patel’s poetry the anatomical, the physiological, and the pathological are always patently political. The third stanza, in particular, reveals the extent to which the execution of the poem (i.e., the carrying out of its plan) coincides with the execution of the tree (the carrying out of its death sentence):
The root is to be pulled out —
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out — snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.
(Poems 1)
Repetition and detail (pulled out, snapped out, out of, out from) lead to the pivotal line, “And the strength of the tree exposed,” linking the effort (and the frustration) to its final, fatal results. More than the roping, the tying, the snapping and the pulling out of the root, it is the exposure of the strength of the tree, what was “hidden / For years inside the earth,” which represents the ultimate mortification and annihilation of the body, and finds equivalents in the autopsy (“It is startling to see how swiftly / A man may be sliced / From chin to prick” [“Post-Mortem” 21]) and Patel’s future “torture poems.”
Poems is a portrait of the artist as a young man exploring the borderlines of his empathy and sensibility. A landowner’s son and a medical student with an inquiring attraction to liminal, transactional spaces (the servants’ quarters on his family estate, a mendicant leper, a dying child, or a dissected body), he articulates his interest early on in a diptych consisting of a short question (“Grandfather”) followed by a longer answer (“Servants”). “But for what, tell me, do you look in them, / They’ve quite exhausted my wonder,” asks the grandfather to his young, city-educated grandson (“Grandfather” 2). The reply, instead of an explanation, provides a visual (almost voyeuristic) exploration of the point at issue. Prompted by a slant-rhyming closed couplet (“They come of peasant stock, / Truant from an insufficient plot” [“Servants” 3]), it describes the furtive experience of observing the servants as they “sit without thought” and smoke in the dark. When the “Lights are shut off after dinner,” the servants revert to a dim, uncommunicative universe of their own. Like their skin, “The dark around them / Is brown, and links body to body,” suggesting an archaic and mysterious complicity with nature and introducing the punchline comparison to cattle “resting in their stall”—a far cry from the romanticised and glorified depictions of low-caste or tribal subjects that are typical of much Indian poetry, both from before and after the independence. Later on in the book, Patel returns to the scene when, in “The Solution of Servants,” he interrogates his own marginal relation to them.
If I were suddenly to open
The door, switch on the lights,
And break in before them smiling,
There would be a scramble,
Separation, and then
An air of apology, not anger.
Yet on my leaving wouldn’t they
Continue as before?
(Poems 17)
In poems like “Nargol,” “Catholic Mother,” “Cord-Cutting,” “Old Man’s Death,” “Post-Mortem Report,” “In the Open,” and “Pavement,” Patel-the-Poet examines Patel-the-Medical-Student or the-Young-Doctor as he confronts powers “too careless / And sprawling to admit battle,” such as poverty, death, or the simple fragility and vulnerability of the human body. At the same time, by exploring and questioning his empathy with marginality in all its forms (including old age, in “Grandparents at Family Get-Together”), Patel explores his own difference as a member of a dwindling minority (the Parsis), which makes him an outsider in a country dominated by larger cultural and religious groups. This “ambiguous fate” is the subject of “Naryal Purnima,” the longest poem in the collection and one of Patel’s most ambitious attempts to articulate a political self. The pause between the first and second monsoon rains, which the first stanza describes (and the Naryal Purnima: the traditional offer of the Coconut [Nariyal] Full Moon [Purnima] ), acquires a symbolic meaning in the collapsed cameos of the second stanza, tracing the watershed between the time when the “country pushed root, prepared to fling / An arc of branches” that would eventually lead to self-affirmation and independence, and the “ambiguous implications” of the present, when “Only a faded haze remains / Over academic portraits in public buildings.” Sitting on the promenade of Marine Drive, his back “set / To the rich and the less rich as they come / Scrubbed and bathed, carrying a dirty little satchel / With a nut for the gods” the poet reflects on his allegiances “with the others – the driftwood / From the South, poised black and lean / Against a blinking sea – / Their minds profanely focused / On the wave-pitched gifts.” (Poems 24) The underlying question (“Do I sympathize merely with the underdog? / Is it one more halt in search for ‘identity’?”) leads to a much more sensitive topic, namely the preferential treatment received by the Parsis under British rule, which in turn reflects the complexity and the ambiguity at the heart of this “search for ‘identity’”—as an individual as well as a member of a minority and a citizen of the country as a whole.
Our interiors never could remain
Quite English. The local gods hidden in
Cupboards from rational Parsi eyes
Would suddenly turn up on the walls
Garlanded alongside the King and the Queen.
And the rulers who had such praise for our manners
Disappeared one day. So look instead for something else:
Even accept and belong.
(Poems 24)
But accepting and belonging to what, exactly? Confronted with this predicament, the poet finds temporary relief in turning “From these suppliants to the urchins,” and seeing in their “meagre flesh” and their hunger an “indisputable birth-mark / To recognize / Myself and the country by” As the urchins “strip to plunge,” and the “oily ones are startled [and] imperiously order them / Away” while “coconuts are tossed and touch water” (Poems 25), the poet performs a symbolic act of identification with the underdogs. This act allows the poet’s “present identities” to emerge as a more pluralistic and inclusive self, as the concern for the possibility that “Our prayers may go unheard” (Poems 26; emphasis added) clearly suggests. Similarly, in a previous poem, the humiliating defeat of giving in to the persistent requests of a mendicant leper marks the beginning of a possible political consciousness, as “Walking to the sea I carry / A village, a city, the country, / For the moment / On my back” (“Nargol,” Poems 9).
This scrutinising, self-inquiring attitude culminates in the single suggestive stanza of “Evening,” a subtly complex meditation on the promises and pitfalls of decolonisation.
Our English host was gracious
We were soon at ease;
Or almost:
The servants
were watching.
(Poems 28)
This perfectly balanced cinquain consists of two opening lines and two closing lines linked by a conjunction and a conjunctive adverb in the middle. The first two lines make a dual statement (one for each of the parties involved) and convey a relaxed convivial ambience. The authenticity of this (ideal) situation is then questioned by the conjunction-adverb combination suggesting a possible alternative, while the colon introduces the couplet that ends the poem on edge. The reader will notice the similarity, indeed the specular relationship, between the three clauses (“Our English host was gracious / We were soon at ease” and “The servants / were watching” [Poems 28]); but the significant difference between the end-stopping of the first two and the enjambment of the third calls into question the equilibrium—and the nature itself—of such a relationship. What is truly under scrutiny here is neither the silent watchfulness of the servants nor the graciousness of the English host, but the questionable ease and legitimacy—indeed the anxiety—of the Indian guests, as members of the indigenous ruling class confronted with its new roles and responsibilities in the independent country.
How Do You Withstand, Body, published ten years after Poems, has been significantly influenced by the period in which it was written, strife with political violence and armed conflict, . The communal riots in Gujarat (1969), a new military confrontation with Pakistan (1971), and a state of emergency (1975–1977) that result in widespread political repression and the curtailment of civil liberties threaten to dismantle India. A notion of metaphorical and metaphysical “bodiness” permeates the book, starting from the cover picture: a frontal view of a male torso cut out in the shape of a kite, nipples on the lookout and navel nosing downward. The medical student or the fledgling doctor who fathomed the dissecting room, or found a difference in the morgue, has become a seasoned practitioner, self-consciously proud of his achievement. “How soon I’ve acquired it all!” He declares at the beginning of “Public Hospital”; then goes on to describe how
Autocratic poise comes natural now:
Voice sharp, glance impatient,
A busy man’s look of harried preoccupation—
Not embarrassed to appear so.
My fingers deft to manoeuvre bodies,
Pull down clothing, strip the soul.
Give sorrow ear up to a point,
Then snub it shut.
Separate essential from suspect tales.
Weed out malingerers, accept
With patronage a steady stream
Of the underfed, pack flesh in them.
Then pack them away.
(How Do You Withstand 15)
The poem is less a self-mocking portrait than a depiction of professional arrogance based on power and its multiple and seamless applications. Whether it is used to heal, torment, or destroy, the ability to “manoeuvre bodies,” “pull down clothing” and “strip the soul” is a power that legitimizes and justifies itself. Control over the body (to expose the strength and strip the soul) is the faculty of the doctor, the torturer and the executioner, and in “Forensic Medicine Text Book” Patel illustrates all the possible ways in which such a textbook can be used as a torture manual, or a blueprint for all kinds of bodily violence. The anatomical, human body (the poet’s body “constituted of organs”) is also the metaphorical—but no less physical—urban body described in “Public Works” or “City Landscape;” or the battered, exploited, developed natural landscape; or even the Earth as a suffering whole (although Patel does not pursue this thematic approach, leaving it to more environmentally-conscious poets to pursue). Whichever the case, as a seat of reproductive power, the body is always a battlefield, thence Patel’s rhetorical question
How do you withstand, body,
Destruction repeatedly
Aimed at you? Minutes,
Seconds, like gun reports,
Tatoo you with holes.
(How Do You Withstand 12)
Or, if not a full-fledged battlefield, a conflict zone; and whether urban, natural, or planetary, always intrinsically feminine, “target spot / Showered / With kisses, knives” (“What Is It Between” 37). Rather than a boundary between incompatible territories defined by age, health, caste and other socially discriminating conditions, the body is now seen as a tragic territory in its own, perpetually contended, beleaguered and blasted by ferocious and merciless enemies. A “priceless rag soaked in desires,” torn between the blinding opposites of carnality and carnage, and constantly subject to the ravages of time and space, as “Your area of five / By one is not / Room enough for / The fists, the blows” and “All instruments itch / To make a hedgehog / Of your hide” (“How Do You Withstand, Body” 12). The difference is not between the morgue and the dissection hall anymore, but rather between dissection and dismemberment, the forensic pathologist’s scalpel and the savage brutality of the eye-gouging penknife, the tongue-chopping tongs, and the infinite other tools and techniques listed in the “Forensic Medicine” poem mentioned above.
Mirroring the violence against the human body is the constraint man puts upon nature, as represented in two juxtaposed urban landscapes, “Public Works” facing “How Do You Withstand, Body” and “City Landscape” facing “The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel.” In the former case, body-scape and city-scape are linked by such words as “destruction” and “demolition,” “fists” and “blows,” “stab wounds” while all instruments itching to drill the skin are matched by “builders slicing the ocean / Down to blue ribbons”, which in turn, in “The Ambiguous Fate”, find a correspondence in the “milk-bibing, grass-guzzing hypocrite / Who pulled off my mother’s voluminous / Robes and sliced away at her dugs.” (“The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel” 26). Likewise, the human body as a “poor slut” reduced to “Dumb, discoloured, / Battered patches; meat-mouths / For monster’s kisses” finds a parallel in the overturned city bus described as a “wrecked, mangled monster” and also in the child mangled “out of my arms” by a circumcised butcher in “The Ambiguous Fate.” (26) Yet, while both “Public Works” and “City Landscape” begin with an image of urban constraint and imprisonment (“Day after day the sea enchained / Behind granite buildings”, or seen “through / slats of buildings,” “City Landscape” 27), they significantly evolve in different directions. With the “slicing [of] the ocean / Down to blue ribbons,” the former poem takes a somewhat Freudian plunge into childhood territory, where a simple game (“All walls / Against Water”) may turn into a nightmarish “sewage trickle between my legs” and trigger a vision of “the island-city sinking” and “taps in each little household / Bursting in sympathy with the revolt” (“Public Works” 13). Such a revolt is temporarily contained by public works (“Now taming / is here”), but eventually leads to a grown-up version of the previous fantasy, with scenes of urban chaos culminating in the carnage of an overturned bus. Similarly, “City Landscape” portrays a landscape of urban decay, where human debris changes, under the feet of the strolling poet, from “Muck, rags, dogs, / Women bathing squealing / Children in sewer water, / Unexpected chicken” to more visionary “miles of dusty yellow / Gravel straight / From the centre of some planet / Sucked dry by the sun, / And as radio-active as you wish” (“City Landscape” 27). Yet
The sea daily changes
From blue to green, to gray,
And breezes vaguely
Pull at the season. The sea holds
Netfuls of possibility,
Silver fish shining
Under a thin skin of water.
(“City Landscape” 27)
Whereas in the former poem the view of the captive sea led to sadistic childhood fantasies of destruction and disarray, the latter ends with a paean to the healing powers of imagination
… My sight
Like an angler’s rod,
Springs across dust and buildings
To claim a few fish.
They tickle the inside of my chest
As I carry them across the city
Dancing on a scooter.
(“City Landscape” 27)
The image of the poet’s sight springing like an angler’s rod “across dust and buildings / To claim a few fish,” suggests, like a previous poem in the same collection (“The Sight Hires a Boat It Sees”), a projective process that finds a more complex and sophisticated expression in the cinematic techniques deployed in Mirrored, Mirroring. In “Hill Station”, the narrator watches a group of monkeys lice-picking and copulating outside his hotel window. His “vision” is both encumbered and enhanced by the meshed window screens, although his attention is really focused on things he “cannot see,” meaning the couple next door, “hideously / Silent through the flimsy / Hotel partition” (“Hill Station” 94). Having met them earlier, and heard their obnoxious, petty bourgeois complaints about the place (the last straw being “The slim, mysterious tribals you see everywhere / They degrade by talk of ‘servant classes’”), he has developed a visceral aversion that now, confronted by their challengingly suggestive silence, conjures images of metaphysical disgust and sheer physical violence (“Hill Station” 95). Yet, instead of breaking down their door, he simply shrugs and enters his own room, there to notice “the monkeys … have hardly stopped,” and to encounter the “quiet, happy glance” of his wife snugly reading comics in bed. This encompassing vision of “[t]he monkeys, us, / And the lurid couple” brings about an epiphanic acquiescence in which “[e]ach ecstatic thrust is / Freely contaminate [sic] with an appetite for lice, / Comics, and many more such distractions.” (“Hill Station” 95)
Published fifteen years after How Do You Withstand, Body, the collection of poems titled Mirrored, Mirroring (1991) marks a passage to the age of retrospection and reconciliation, partly inspired by Patel’s talks and epistolary exchange with the mystic Madhava Ashish (born Alexander Phipps), head of the Mirtola Ashram in the northern state of Uttarakhand. The first poem is a candid statement, ingeniously parodic and tongue-in-cheek, whose profound implications set the tone for the rest of the book.
In the beginning
it is difficult
even to say,
‘God’,
one is so out of practice.
And embarrassed.
Like lisping in public
about candy.
At fifty!
(“The Difficulty” 79)
Once this admission is made, the difficulty becomes “Simple” in the next poem, which consists of a bold, almost arrogant, confession of faith: “I shall not / be humble before God. // I half suspect / He wouldn’t wish me to be so” (80) This is followed by a clear and very simple (although far from simplistic) explanation of what turned the poet away from God (not “arrogance or / excessive / self-regard,” but the refusal of “having my nose ground / into the dirt”) and what brought him back to Him (“I have been given / cleaner air to breathe // and may look up / to see what’s around” [80]). This explanation marks a point of departure from Patel’s previous thematic concerns, and the new direction is indicated by a change in position as well as by a sensory progress: from prostrate submission (with the “nose ground / into the dirt”) and from smell and taste (the “older” and more “primitive” of the five senses), to stand-up sight and seeing (I “may look up / to see what’s around”) as the expression of a more mature and independent form of spiritual quest (80). What makes this progress particularly interesting—and relevant to the collection as a whole—is the role breathing plays in it. The poet may now “look up / to see what’s around” because he has been “given / cleaner air to breathe” (i.e., he has been purified). The nose, from vulgar organ of smell, “ground into the dirt,” has been upgraded, indeed elevated to a complex and sophisticated process of spiritual development, in which breathing represents a link between man and God (“Simple” 80). While anatomy and physiology may be the same, smell represents the sensual stage of breathing, the Purgatory which one may traverse and overcome in order to attain the higher spheres of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.
References to smell and breathing (as well as to elevation, death and departure) recur throughout the book, adding a physical dimension to its meandering and inquisitive spiritual journey. In “From Bombay Central” (81-82), a poem whose “visual, auditory and olfactory impact” has been noted by railway historian Ian J. Kerr (317), the “odour of human manure” that pervades the railway station, but “does not offend,” anticipates the more substantial “eternal / station odour[s]” permeating the second stanza. “Hitting the nostrils as one singular / Invariable atmospheric thing,” this mixture of odours acts like a “divine cushion,” buffering the poet-passenger as he sinks in his “hard wooden / Third-class seat,” there to begin a “meditation / On the nature of truth and beauty.” This liminal experience finds an equivalent and ultimate complement in the desire, when “Time’s Up” (119), to have “my / soul / carried away … by transport // none other / than / Indian Railways: a / third-class carriage / with open windows / on a day / not / too crowded.” The same window of a train “Speeding” (109) offers the opportunity to “Best enjoy Nature from a distance … So each detail is spared you, / And elation results” (109). Such (or similar) is the “fate of God / … to see His universe so, / In overview” and to “find it good” (109). But good is neither good nor godly enough for God, thence “the temptation to rain Himself down, disguised / As the hundred godlings of mythology, down / From a pristine vision of the Creation, / Vulgarly to mingle with us, to become / Embroiled in detail” (109). The telling, graphic sequence of examples simultaneously links back, to the many previous examples of abuse, assault and violation, and looks forward, in the form of a theological meditation on the truth and tragedy of divine descent, of “God / Rooting into the intoxication of His Dump” (109). What in How Do You Withstand, Body marked the progress from a pathological to a political view of life, Mirrored, Mirroring turns the political into a spiritual, if not a theological, exploration of God’s experience of his own creation.
Past excursions in the dissection hall and the torture chamber provide the reformed anatomist with the material and the experience to argue that
It makes sense not
to have the body
seamless,
hermetically sealed, a
non-orificial
box of incorruptibles.
Better shot through and through!
Interpenetrated
–with the world.
(“It Makes” 107)
A few pages later, Patel uses the same phrasal verb to describe the intimate, violent, and overpowering experience of a (possible) divine revelation: “God or / something like that / shot / through each part of you” (“God or” 117). Both the language and the dubitative element come from the bhakti tradition, while the invasive approach and bodily interpenetration draw upon the anatomical knowledge and experience of doctors (“Sticking their fingers up / Everywhere”) and torturers. For a comparison with other (especially Western) forms of religious devotion, we must turn to “A Variation on St. Teresa” (111), which describes a subjective condition rather than a sudden occurrence:
Whenever You withdraw
only a little way from me I
immediately
fall to the ground.
I wait upon
the strings You hold.
(…)
My limbs
at best may be infused
by an outer force; and so
inconsolably
I await Your storms, etc.
True to its title, Mirrored, Mirroring spreads a net of specular relationships and references, both internal and to poems in the two previous books. Typical Patelian themes, motifs, and “permanent obsessive foci” are reworked, updated, alluded to, or sublimated into more spiritual or philosophical concerns, as the poet is trying to make sense of the possibility and plausibility of God in this world, while simultaneously visualizing his own departure from it.
When he published Mirrored, Mirroring, Patel was fifty-one. Another twenty-six years passed before he added nineteen “new poems” to a collected edition that brings the total to one hundred and five. It is unlikely that more poetry will appear in the form of a posthumous book; or that, if such a book materialized, it would expand or enrich a canon that, while quantitatively modest, represents one of the peaks of Indian poetry in English. But it is not unreasonable to expect, or hope for, a collection of Patel’s translations (of medieval and modern Gujarati poetry), criticism, and prose, to complement and round off his remarkable achievement as a poet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry
Poems. Bombay: Nissim Ezekiel, 1966.
How Do You Withstand, Body. Bombay: Clearing House, 1976.
Mirrored, Mirroring. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Collected Poems. With an introduction by Arundhati Subramaniam. Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2017.
Plays
Mister Behram and Other Plays. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008.
Edited volumes
Poetry with Young People. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007. A collection of poems written by students of the Rishi Valley School, in Andhra Pradesh, where Patel taught an annual poetry workshop for many years.
Prose
“The National School of Drama.” Quest 54,July/September 1967, pp. 63-66.
“Contemporary Indian Painting.” Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4,Fall 1989, pp. 170-205.
“To Pick Up a Brush.” Contemporary Indian Art from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, 1985, pp. 9-16.
Secondary sources
De Souza, Eunice. Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kerr, Ian J. “Representation and Representations of the Railways of Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies, vol.37, no. 2,May 2003, pp. 287-326.
Subramaniam, Arundhati. “Introduction.” Gieve Patel, Collected Poems. Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2017.
