Four female poets and illustrators explore life in local trains as a common denominator between the two cities, for an upcoming book slated to release in April
Joelle Jolivet (left) and Sampurna Chattarji on board a Mumbai local
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Last year, during the Kala Ghoda festival, Metro Lands set off on its journey. At that time it was to be an endeavour in poetry alone, where Paris-Indian poet, Karthika Nair and Mumbai-based poet Sampurna Chattarji would be speaking to each other through their verses. The train, as a subject, had been previously explored by both - Nair in her first collection, Bearings, and Chattarji in her first poetry book, in a poem titled Dogs, mobs and rock concerts.
When the two met, both were in search of a new subject. Chattarji had just finished her book of Mumbai stories, Dirty Love. "I was beginning to feel that my beloved muse had nothing more to offer. Metro Lands offered an opportunity to look at my city again," she adds. Nair, on the other hand, was looking to move as far as she could from her most recent work - Until The Lions, a feminist retelling of the Mahabharata. "I had just finished five years of research and writing around the Mahabharata. There was a strong inner need to move away from giant canvases of war and mortality to something every day, intimate and immediate. The Metro was a subject I had always intended to return to," she writes from Paris over an email interview.
Illustration by Joelle Jolivet
The next question was how. "Karthika suggested we use the Renga format in which the last line of her poem would become the first line of mine and so on. That is how we began; we exchanged poems every three weeks, and began to build up what eventually turned into a book that's expected to release in April," Chattarji says. For the first year, it was purely for the love of writing. Then, Nair showed the series to members of the Book Office at the French Embassy, which at that time was selecting collaborative projects for Bonjour India, a biannual exchange platform. "They loved the sound of Metro Lands and asked us if we'd like to do anything more with it. We suggested the visual art element," she says. Thus, French visual artist Joelle Jolivet and Gond artist Roshni Vyam were roped in. The gaze of the illustrators, however, were reversed - while Jolivet painted the Mumbai experience, Vyom took on the Paris metro.
Both artists were visiting their muses for the first time. Roshni says, "Paris and its Metro as a foreigner sees it, is the theme of my art. The style is Gond, but the soul is Paris. Karthika's poems put in words what I felt riding the Metro there. I spent 15 days there, and it was a spectrum of emotions. From total awe, to a little fear, to confusion, and love, I felt it all. People would follow unspoken rules, for instance no eye-contact with strangers. I remember smiling at a baby sitting on her mother's lap, who returned the smile too. We both were equally new to those rules…"
Jolivet, on the other hand, specialises in live sketches. "Taking the Paris Metro is my way of killing time - to observe people and sketch them. I draw very quickly, on the spot. Strangely, I have no visual memory, I need to see what I draw," says the 52-year-old. During her 12 days in Mumbai, she would board the local every day from a terminal station. "I would sit in one corner and draw the people around me. The only difference from Paris was that here, people were observing me too and were happy to see the drawings."
Both Chattarji and Nair have interwoven public and personal memories in their verses. From the immigrant's dream of home, to real accidents and fatalities, like the Elphinstone stampede and the 2006 serial blasts are among the subjects Chattarji has explored. Nair too follows a similar path, covering the 2015 Paris massacres to everyday events, big and small like rush hour moods.
"In both cases - Paris and India - local trains form the arterial network that cuts across divides. We sit and stand in the same enclosed, often unkempt, area," Nair says. "They are both lifelines for daily commuters, and both could be seen as symbolic of 'unity in diversity', something that is so under threat these days," adds Chattarji.
Churchgate to Charni road
By Sampurna Chattarji (An excerpt) another kind of unbeing occurs when he gets off the train at Charni Road onto the tracks in the middle of the afternoon and begins to walk back to where he came from not Churchgate where he got on but all the way back to Azamgarh Muzaffarnagar...
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