Sujata Bhatt was born in 1956 and grew up in Pune but emigrated with her family to the United States in 1968. She studied there and received an MaFA from the University of Iowa and went on to be writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Bremen, Germany. Her first collection of poems, Brunizem, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia). In 1991 she received a Cholmondeley Award. For Bhatt, language is synonymous with the tongue, the physical act of speaking. She has described Gujarati and the Indian childhood it connects her to as “the deepest layer of my identity”. However, English has become the language she speaks every day and which she, largely, chooses to write in. The complex status of English – its beauties and colonial implications – are also conveyed in some of her poems.

1. Nawrin Akhtar
Sujata Bhatt, “Partition”
Sujata Bhatt was born in 1956 and grew up in Pune but emigrated with her family to the United
States in 1968. She studied there and received an MaFA from the University of Iowa and went on
to be writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada. She currently lives with her
husband and daughter in Bremen, Germany. Her first collection of poems, Brunizem, won the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia). In 1991 she received a Cholmondeley Award.
For Bhatt, language is synonymous with the tongue, the physical act of speaking. She has described
Gujarati and the Indian childhood it connects her to as “the deepest layer of my identity”. However,
English has become the language she speaks every day and which she, largely, chooses to write
in. The complex status of English – its beauties and colonial implications – are also conveyed in
some of her poems.
She was nineteen-years-old then
and when she stood in her garden
she could hear the cries of the people
Stranded in the Ahmedabad railway station.
She felt it was endless – their noise –
a new sound added to the city.
Her aunt, her father’s sister,
would go to the station every day

2. Nawrin Akhtar
with food and water –
But she felt afraid,
felt she could not go with her aunt –
So she stood in the garden
listening. Even the birds sounded different –
and the shadows cast by the neem trees
brought no consolation.
And each day she wished
she had the courage to go with her aunt –
And each day passed with her
listening to the cries of the people.
Now, when my mother
tells me this at midnight
in her kitchen – she is
seventy-years old and India
is ‘fifty’. ‘But, of course,
India is older than that,’ she says,
‘India was always there.

3. Nawrin Akhtar
But how I wish I had
gone with my aunt
to the railway station –
I still feel
guilty about that.’
And then she asks me:
‘How could they
have let a man
who knew nothing
about geography
divide a country?’