"Portrait of a Lady" is a poem by the Indian English poet and art critic
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote (born 1969) is an Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator. He has been honoured by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, with the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award and the Sahitya ...
. The poem won First Prize in the Seventh All India Poetry Competition conducted by
The Poetry Society (India)
The Poetry Society (India) was formed in July 1984 at New Delhi as a voluntary association to promote Indian poetry and to look after the interests of Indian Poets. The founding members included the Indian poets Keshav Malik, J P Das, H K Kaul ...
in 1995. The poem brought the second major literary award for Hoskote, who also won the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996 and the
Sahitya Akademi
The Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, is an organisation dedicated to the promotion of literature in the languages of India. Founded on 12 March 1954, it is supported by, though independent of, the Indian government. Its of ...
''Golden Jubilee'' Award for lifetime achievement in 2005.
Excerpts from the poem
:Objects are lesson: from bowls, hairpins, brooches,
:you learn of forgotten lives. The stories say
:my grandmother was a fever tree:
:two birds sat on her branches, one pecking
:at a grape, the other singing an aria.
::: *****
:What history's bookkeepers do not show
:is the tremor down the spine she felt,
:the tendril of blood that coiled in her nose
:when the whistle of a train announced
:her husband's return from a tour of duty.
::: *****
:In the stories, she's an actor, a pilgrim:
:shadow-boxing with a thunderstorm,
:she slips through brick walls,
:treads a theatre of scrubbed floors
:and ember beds. She leaves me
:a loaf of shortbread in the oven,
:a page of couplets in a script I cannot read
:and wrapped in a peel of green appleskin,
:a tea cup glazed with a Dutch windmill,
:the last one of the set.
::: *****
:The urchin-cut waif in the vignette above
:is the child she was. Voyeur, clairvoyant,
:she stares in at windows, her head a gourd
:hollowed by the age she never reached
:in life, her hair a silver floss.
::: *****
:Objects are lessons: the light seeps
:through the slats, sets off a shimmer
:on her lace. She's crocheted the evening
:and its creatures: the silken thread
:that she pulls from her pattern
:knots tight around my neck.
Comments and criticism
The poem has received critical acclaim since its first publication in 1997 in the book ''Emerging Voices'' and has since been widely anthologised. The poem has been frequently quoted in scholarly analysis of contemporary
Indian English poetry
Indian English poetry is the oldest form of Indian English literature. Indian poets writing in English have succeeded to nativize or indianize English in order to reveal typical Indian situations. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio is considered the first ...
.
See also
*
The Poetry Society (India)
The Poetry Society (India) was formed in July 1984 at New Delhi as a voluntary association to promote Indian poetry and to look after the interests of Indian Poets. The founding members included the Indian poets Keshav Malik, J P Das, H K Kaul ...
Notes
{{reflist
External links
Seventh National Poetry Competition 1997 – Award Winners Hoskote – A Profile by A J Thomas Ranjit Hoskote Poems Biography of Hoskote"Popular Indian Poems"
Indian poems
1997 poems
Works originally published in Indian magazines
Works originally published in literary magazines