"...sing of what rushes in your veins": An Assessment of Ghazal as an Expression of Resentment in Basudhara Roy

Basudhara Roy has emerged as a significant voice among the contemporary feminist Indian English poets with her four collections of poems, Moon in my Teacup (2019), Stitching a Home (2021), Inhabiting (2022) and A Blur of a Woman (2024). Her poems are characterised by inimitable healing reflections that counterbalance her keen revelation of the hazy and glazed zones surrounding women. Roy has caught the fancy of poetry lovers in literary circles in India with a refreshing combination of wistful mood, warm emotion, perky tenderness and skilled use of language. Her poems routinely appear in several new and established online and print magazines, journals, and anthologies. Roy’s poetry “bring(s) women to writing” by making them its subject, object, and muse. It explores and speaks for women. It celebrates them as friends, family, colleagues, goddesses, and other mythological figures. It broods over women’s bodies, health, passions, ambition, and socio-cultural conditions, with a subtle and yet explicit red-flagging of patriarchy that hinders the wholesome blossoming of women. Roy’s poetry strives to acknowledge and reinforce the voices and concerns of women. It can be seen as an effort to break free from the male-centric norms and narratives that threaten to silence women. Roy’s “writing (poems) about women” also try to bring women “closer to body” like Hélène Cixuos in “The Laugh of the Medusa” encourages women to write their own stories, to speak their truths, and to laugh in defiance of the forces that seek to silence them. Women’s stories should continue to be told and retold. Roy takes determined steps towards retelling women’s tales by attempting experimentation at several levels of her writing. Apart from using a unique diction, she attempts creative use of the ghazal form. Although many Indian English poets have written ghazals in English, few women poets seem to have ventured in this area. Therefore, the paper attempts to study Basudhara Roy’s poetry in general, and her ghazal “Of Light”, in particular, in the context of “écriture féminine” to highlight that the motto of the poet’s reading and writing strategies is to “resist death and make trouble”. It argues that Roy’s poems and her use of ghazal underscore her conviction to venture into “new ways of writing and interpreting” as a feminist act to “bring women ...to their meaning in history”.