By: Tom White
Devangana Mishra is a writer and artist and runs a foundation for autism out of Mumbai, India, called Brain Bristle. Her verse novel, 26, Kamala Nehru Ridge, Civil Lines, Delhi, sold widely globally with partition, poetry and art lovers. So, with all the work for her next book based in Mumbai. “May I Mumbai With You?” and the country in state elections shaping Mumbai’s future further, here’s a peek into what she has to say on both.
Thank you for having me do this! I love writing about life in the arts for Artist Weekly.
About my last verse novel, since 26, Kamala Nehru Ridge was politically and artistically bent on verses of partition and my next one is similarly styled, based out of Mumbai. I’m often talked to about poetry, politics or art by strangers and friends from the world over. I’m from Rajasthan, in India.
Actually, my grandparents were from a small part of Rajasthan called Narayanpur, then they mobilized our family to Jaipur, and now most of my aunts, uncles and cousins live in the States. I returned to India after a decade or so away, and just my immediate family and a few of us live here now.
So, I understand Indian politics well from my five years back as an adult. I understand grassroots voice, organizational voice, institutional voice, and individual voice. So yes, I’m engrossed in Indian politics, not in a tribal way, but in an intellectual, embedded, natural way as a citizen of the country, understanding the nuances of how each party or leader’s victory or loss could swerve India’s future for our billion and a half and therefore what we need to do across each section dutifully as citizens or as artists of this nation.
Everything we do is a political act. I’m keen on the how and what of the policies and what acts of voice and movement will shape our country’s people to find their own organized voice, vision, and victory for the future and change. It’s what a democracy should do; India maintains the trappings of a democracy but falters at opposition, attacks and stifles dissent. So, as an artist and as a citizen, I often think of what large and small movements will unite us and take us forward. Meeting the larger echo with semblance, sanity, and sense will unite us systematically at a local level. Maharashtra, where I live, recently hosted elections and keeping in mind BJP’s landslide victory, I hope we continue to maintain the ethos of Mumbai, of Maharashtra, where all communities come together to build an inclusive, aspiring India of tomorrow for global glory and days of gold and grain.
As I’ve written on this platform before, I deeply enjoy the passion for all art forms of politics, art, and culture. It makes me feel thought and understood when a lot of other mass media stuff (other than beauty or fashion blogs!) bore me or leave me scrolling or meandering sideways. So I follow a lot of on-ground work in India but also globally across various sectors vicariously- art, literature, culture, fashion, social and educational work and write passionately about the stuff in my foundation’s monthly newsletters or on my social media handle itself or for others pages or papers when I can’t actually get my hands down and dirty with it all myself.
My next novel is about a Mumbai girl’s journey, Savitri, making her way through a suburb of the city, Wadala, to the city’s high rises; there’s no way it will not be political. Because of its education system, India is much more fractured and fragmented than other countries. Also, it’s a love story, but Savitri will hold a voice through it, and no love story is not political. So, my city’s and my country’s civics will shape Savitri’s journey through the essays. I don’t know yet if she will find her voice as she wills to or envisions it; my work will be meshing the life of the city with Savitri and Sahyog’s journey and meditating on the bounty of each neighbourhood and suburb and nook and the tomb of the city. And it will urge us to ask ourselves when a story like this of journeying across a city ever ends.
Fiction writing is always impacted by the facts of the time. Savitri’s voice in my next verse novel is a local Bombay Wadala voice. So, Savitri’s kismet will be shaped by her democracy, her education, her freedom, the direction she’s permitted, and therefore the way she’s written and known to her readers.
About the style of my next book, most of my writing is sing-song, and even if I don’t try, that’s my writing voice. It’s poetic, dramatic, artistic, drawing, intense, and very present. I believe that when we write someone’s story as an act of activism or feminism, we must do it with all the beauty we can muster up, so I hope to give Savitri my best writing wisdom. There’s a lot of it in poetry, in art, in the invisibility of science, in rolling your letters to sounds readers slurp. I want to give Savitri, my next book’s protagonist, even more beauty than I served Zara in my verse novel.
What I love about Mumbai is, if you’re a Mumbaikar, you want to be seen, heard, known, recognized, felt and followed, and that builds the city across all layers of divide and disparity – I don’t think any other city in the world that does it like Mumbai, New York is a close curtain call of competition. We’re a city of creatives and mavericks; it shapes the country’s way forward, even if Delhi might hold parliament.
I’m always so excited to write about what’s happening in India, and I’m always so grateful for platforms like these! Thank you!
Published by Stephanie M.
