Ranjit Hoskote

Cultural Theorist, Poet
India

Ranjit Hoskote

Cultural Theorist, Poet

Ranjit Hoskote (poet, cultural theorist, curator; India) was born in Bombay, 1969. He is the author of more than 25 books, ranging across poetry, art criticism, cultural history and poetry in translation. His collections of poetry include Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006) and, in German translation, Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet’s work.

Referenced Content

Departures

for Ravi Agarwal

What if the white mare dragged down by a flabby bridegroom
and underfed by her hungry syce

had the same name as the child ferrying bricks in her head pan
at the kiln?

What if the bat practising a dive behind the shuttered windows
of the Natural History section

could ask the elephant grazing in the parched scrubland
her name

which would not be one of the brightly painted names of the god
tucking his trunk in as his fans see him off at high tide

a departure viewed from the Towers of Silence by a tribe
of scrawny vultures contemplating their journey’s end?

What if you tried to prise a password out of the stuffed orangutan
the taxidermists have enthroned as a totem at the zoo?

In all these names you’d recognise the lost and forgotten seeds
that a sleepy child dropped on the mossy ghats

as the pilgrims from the stars newly arrived swept past
one full-moon night in vermilion and brocade

Who could have told them they would meet us again
stripped of our gaudy masks our carrying voices muted

as skeletons on display
in a distant planet’s Museum of Cautionary Tales?

(27 June 2021)