Jonahwhale: A Reading by Ranjit Hoskote

About the Book:

Jonahwhale, in three beautiful movements, takes on very current themes in its playful, mostly aquatic scope, moving from the ocean to the river Ganga to Bombay's Marine Drive waterfront. It invokes the narratives of Biblical prophet Jonah, who escapes death by spending three nights in the belly of a whale, and Melville's Moby Dick, whose obsessive Captain Ahab chases the eponymous whale who bit off his leg. These poems resurrect the diverse figures who ran ships along the global trade routes of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hoskote reflects on the city at war with itself, and a planet embattled by ecological and political crisis.

Ranjit Hoskote is a leading Anglophone Indian poet, and is also acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism. His books include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and, most recently, Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012). Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011); co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); and was co-convenor, with Maria Hlavajova, Boris Groys and Kathrin Rhomberg, of Documents, Constellations, Prospects (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013). He has received numerous awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation and the S H Raza Award for Literature.

Dr. Kaiwan Mehta is a theorist and critic in the fields of visual culture, architecture, and city studies. In 2017 he completed his doctoral studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru, under the aegis of Manipal University. He authored Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press. New Delhi, 2009) and The Architecture of I M Kadri (Niyogi. New Delhi, 2016). He has been the Managing Editor of Domus India (Spenta Multimedia) since March 2012 and Professor (adjunct) and coordinator of the Doctoral Programme at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad since 2017. He has set up courses in Architecture Theory as well as Art, Criticism and Theory, the politics around Craft as well as Aesthetics, and teaches across various undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Mumbai.