Alvin Pang interviews Gopika Jadeja
I first met Gopika at a dinner gathering hosted by the late legendary indie bookstore BooksActually in 2013, during her decade in Singapore as an educator and PhD student. Since then, I have had many chances to witness her multidisciplinary energies and broad field knowledge in action: from her translations of Singapore’s migrant workers for their very first dedicated poetry competition, to her leadership at PR&TA journal, for which she was unanimously elected Coordinating Editor by the team.
As a leading translator, curator, editor and scholar of writing from India’s marginalised communities, Gopika’s literary labours have primarily been in the service of others. Her own poetry, spanning some 20 years of writing, has appeared in journals and anthologies both in India and abroad, but had not been collected until the 2025 publication of What Parvati Does Not Say (Red River, India). What Parvati Does Not Say traces the development of her characteristic poetics and politics: unmuting what is silenced in and through language, and giving voice to the unheard and the unsayable, with candid clarity, conviction and compassion.
For years, I have been fascinated by how she interweaves poetry, translation, and research: all grounded in a felt sense of social justice and cultural curiosity. With her long-awaited collection now in circulation, I caught up over Zoom with Gopika, back in her native Gujarat in India, about where her practice is going.
‘Poetry invites readers to experience the event of language uncurling from these attempts to distil and convey. The ‘real’ world is dizzy with maladies, but there is pleasure, beauty, catharsis—power—in poetry’s bold and manifold efforts.’
Poetry for this issue was guest co-edited by Mark Nowak and Angela Costi.
This interview originally appeared in the 2025 Rabbit Annual.
Alvin Pang: Now that What Parvati Does Not Say has been published, surveying two decades of your poetry, what are you working on next?
Gopika Jadeja: I am working on two new poetry collections: one that references colonial perspectives about India, and another about women and reading culture. My current practice, which draws heavily on archives, is both historical and sociological, and at the same time lyrically poetic. I have come to this juncture after many years of translation and scholarship. Writing in my twenties, in English, my poetry was mainly lyrical. That said, there has always been a certain sparseness and minimalism, which came from my reading of AK Ramanujan, as well as other Indian poets—particularly the modern Hindi poets I was reading at the time, such as Gagan Gill and Anamika.
My poetry took a sharp turn in my thirties, when I started also writing in Gujarati. This was a conscious choice after my Master’s degree at SOAS. While there, I studied modern Hindi poetry with Lucy Rosenstein and Rupert Snell, both scholars of Hindi. I worked on some translations with them and translated poetry in workshops with the Poetry Translation Centre. I also translated Leopoldo María Panero with a Spanish colleague at an independent bookshop in London I worked at: perhaps some of the earliest English translations of Panero’s poetry at the time. These experiences shaped my practice of translation as a serious endeavour.
A common thread throughout my work is an interest in the everyday, lived realities of people and communities—especially those in the margins: whether women or communities such as the Dalits (formerly called Untouchable) or Adivasis (India’s indigenous communities). This interest comes from my scholarship and training, but also from my parents. I grew up watching my mother interacting with those around her who were from different backgrounds. I saw my father, a senior police officer, engaging with people from different communities and classes. It made a difference for someone with a privileged childhood to see all this: being interested in people and our common humanity without regarding it as something exotic or external. I came to appreciate relationships and realities that come from different experiences of the world and the different worlds arising from the various differentials of class, caste and economic or social hierarchies—but that reach out beyond these boundaries. My recent work revisits these themes.
AP: How are you engaging with the archives?
GJ: The manuscript I am working on, The Tribes and Castes of Western India, is populated by actual people I have encountered. It is about specific places and communities in time. It is a meditation through my home state of Gujarat, and Western India, on India itself, as well as the idea of India and what makes the nation. To me, it is the people that make the nation. But these people, places and communities have been viewed, and continue to be viewed, through a colonial lens. I show this using archival materials, particularly extracts from the Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Volume VIII (Kathiawar). The Gazetteer is a kind of 19th century encyclopedia that was supposed to give a colonial official all the information they might need to govern a particular region, with sections on the population, production, agriculture, history, land, justice, revenue and finance, states and places.
I take from the archival text, I put it on the page, like a collage. I read, curate and annotate it. This is readerly work: reading history and this expression of colonial knowledge production. I present episodes and narratives, show what is written about people from the communities in the Gazetteer through the colonial gaze, and write against the grain.
Then I offer glimpses of the everyday lives of these people and communities—moving between past and present. I recount their stories. Some are narratives I have heard from someone else, and hence doubly mediated. I interrogate the relationship between past and present, and the social networks and hierarchies that shape people and communities. What are the relations involved? How have they changed over time? What did this mean to my mother and my grandmother or someone else from my community at a point in history, and what does it mean to me now? What remains of the history within us, and what does that mean for the future?
One of the first poems in this collection-in-progress is called ‘Langha’. In the Gazetteer, the entry on the Muslim Langha community consists of literally just three sentences.
To write against the grain of colonial ethnography and history here, I tell the story of a Langha musician named Khatuben who used to come to our house to sing on special occasions. I write about the scene where she sits on the floor and sings to her patron sitting in a chair. I write about her singing, and quote from her song—praising some young princess or young noblewoman. In a not-too-distant feudal past, the young woman in her song would have been me. My poem is a depiction of Khatuben, but I am also writing about a Langha singer and her patron as an example of the less documented historical ties between communities that have been regarded as separate and apart. It is also about power, and about old feudal relationships. Where does the feudal end and the modern begin in India? And what does this relationship between feudalism and modernity mean for us today?
AP: What led you to treat this archival engagement as a poetry project, rather than say a novel or an essay? Do you consider this work nonfiction?
GJ: This project brings together both my scholarship and my sensibility as a poet. I started this project during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was stuck in Singapore; on an island unable to return to India, to return home. With this sense of feeling trapped came a longing for home. How does one relate while isolated? This is when one leans into memory and relations. That this work came to me as poetry has to do with affect, and the necessity of affect in a time of isolation. The necessity of relating, not just to people and a wider community, but also to your own time because in the isolation of the pandemic, time collapsed.
My project is based on lived everyday reality, which to me makes it nonfiction. In poetry, one thinks about form, lineation, how things appear on a page. Metaphor, sound and its relation to meaning. How I use all these elements in poetry relates to how I generate affect to convey a significant experience of reality. In so doing, I evoke a relation between the writing and something untapped in the reader. I engage the emotive aspects of lived experience which other forms of writing, including the colonial archives, often exclude. The affective and relational aspects that reading the Gazetteer leaves out is what the poetry brings in.
What is most important to me is how people relate to the work and the questions it raises. If calling it nonfiction provokes reflection and further interrogation about India, as an idea, and a people, and how this colours our past, present and future, then it does matter that this be regarded as nonfictional; as not ‘made-up’.
AP: Who else do you see taking a similar approach in poetry?
GJ: In poetry, I regard social realism as a nonfiction influence, and South Asia has a strong literary tradition of this. We have medieval poets like Kabir in the Bhakti oral tradition, which has spiritual associations but draws from the everyday lives of working people: weavers, cobblers and those who work with their hands. In the 20th century we have poets like Nagarjun in Hindi, and Zaverchand Meghani in Gujarati, with his ethnographic work and poems based on that work. His poem ‘Beediyon vaalnaari nu geet’, the song of the beedi makers, is an excellent example of making visible the labour of women, both domestic and outside the home. The poem’s details come from Meghani’s observations of the everyday lives of the women whose voice he writes in.
I also think of protest writing and documentary writing, alongside archival poetry, as significant streams of nonfiction. To me, documentary poetry (and to an extent, protest poetry) means naming and telling. Name, place, event—in the journalistic or even historical sense—become part of the poetics, without giving up on the aesthetic and the affective. My poetry touches all these streams and finds its core values in them.
In my broader reading, I have also admired Neruda’s The Heights of Machu Picchu for its use of collective memory in broader social commentary. A fantastic volume of protest poetry I turn to often is Latin American Revolutionary Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Robert Márquez. In the American tradition there is the poetry of Langston Hughes (for example, ‘Johannesburg Mines’, ‘Cultural Exchange’ and ‘Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria’), Mark Nowak (Shut Up Shut Down and Coal Mountain Elementary), and Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 The Book of the Dead, about an industrial tragedy in which migrant mine workers in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia died due to silicosis. Sri Lankan Canadian Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid experimented with the archive and photographs. Phinder Dulai’s dream/arteries weaves in ship records and archival material to uncover the history of the Komagata Maru incident. Recent examples include Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Jay Bernard’s Surge. The work of Grace Yee (Chinese Fish, Joss: A History) from Australia/New Zealand also taps into the archives and memory in ways I relate to.
In the recent South Asian context, I find Mauritian Khal Torabully and Marina Carter’s anthology Coolitude a powerful text about Indian indentured identities. From Bangladesh, there is Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam, based on the testimonies of women who survived sexual violence during the Bangladesh war. Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems is Shikha Malaviya’s poetic biography of India’s first woman to train as a doctor in Western medicine. Other well-known Indian poets like Ranjit Hoskote have also been writing in this vein lately.
Dalit and Adivasi poetry abound with good examples of writing as protest, documentary and social realism. Some Dalit poets I have been translating and researching, such as Neerav Patel and Sahil Parmar from Gujarat, actually call their poetry documentary. Adivasi poet Anuj Lugun, whom I recently translated, writes in an Adivasi idiom: his poems are thus documentary in a linguistic sense, as well as in the way they use the history, collective memory and landscape.
AP: You are a prolific translator of poets and authors from marginalised communities. Translations feature in What Parvati Does Not Say alongside your own poems in English. You have written about translation being part of your creative process. Is translation nonfiction?
GJ: The practice of translation is the practice of nonfiction. For the Dalit and Adivasi literature that I work with, I must bring an understanding of the context and lived reality the poet is writing about to the translation. I cannot translate well unless I approach it as nonfiction.
However, because the languages and lifeworlds are different, this is not an easy negotiation to make—particularly when it comes to the English language. First, as a translator into English, I want to convey a specific lifeworld to an Anglophone readership. How should I convey in translation, for instance, the unspoken cultural nuance a particular food preparation has at a particular time of day? How much ease do I want to create for English readers? How much illegibility should I retain? This is where the tension lies.
CS Lakshmi, the Tamil writer known as Ambai, has written about translation and the compulsion to make it market-friendly:
The second method of turning the writing into a market-friendly product is to give as many footnotes as one can. The writing must be made as transparent as possible. No space must be left for opacity. So idli will become steamed rice cake; dosa, a salty pancake; and murukku, rice dough twisted into round shapes to make a design and deep-fried in oil. Jilebis and other food items will similarly be explained, as if the writer were serving a menu instead of a story.
Clothes are also given such elaborate footnotes. I remember a footnote for the dhoti once: it said it is something similar to a sarong. Will the sarong be further footnoted, I wondered, or was it an image accepted by this market as an exoticism understood? Turning a culture into footnotes is power politics that a writer has to constantly resist.
Another point is that English flattens the linguistic diversity of the original. For example, an Adivasi writer using Hindi (a dominant language) may use vocabulary and turns of phrase or syntax from their own (marginalised and also minoritised) language. How do I translate the complexity of this inflection of Hindi? I grew up speaking English in India: a particularly urban Indian English is my idiom. I do not have other dialects of English at my disposal, whether rural, regional or other community dialects, so I cannot attempt to use them when I translate. I could go out and learn them, but I do not currently have them. This means when I translate, I am using the urban Indian English I was schooled in and brought up to use. What does this do to the translation?
I am currently translating the novel Transformations by Dalit author Umesh Solanki. He uses a very specific rural dialect from Northern Gujarat, and within that he uses the kind of language his specific community would use. Now, how do I convey this in English without creating a complete caricature of it? There are people who have tried different dialects in English to convey this, and to indicate that such and such is a Dalit character. Someone might use an African American idiom, say. I don’t think that is very effective, because it also carries a specific sociopolitical and cultural context that is not readily transferrable. The challenge is to use what is at my disposal. I have the Gujarati language itself. How can I use that to inflect the English translation so that I accurately and effectively convey the sound and sense and politics at play? That is the nonfiction aspect of the work. One must know and understand the sociopolitical context involved in the original text and live it through the translation.
To practise translation as nonfiction, awareness of your own subject position is therefore very important, particularly if you come from a relatively privileged background and are translating writing from the margins. At CADALFEST 2025, film director Jayan Cherian spoke about this in the context of making his new film Rhythm of Dammam, which features a diasporic African community in India. He reflected on the ethics involved in being someone educated abroad and living in the US coming to India to make a film about this community, being immersed in it as part of the process of making the film. Cherian listed the following as part of his practice:
1. Enter as a listener, not an authority,
2. Collaborate, don’t extract,
3. Practice reflexivity,
4. Challenge stereotypes,
5. Share power over the narrative,
6. Make the film’s impact reciprocal,
7. Avoid the saviour complex, and
8. Contextualise with care.
These principles apply as much to the practice of translating from the margins as to filmmaking. Both can be ethnographic practices that necessitate an ethical stance. This contextualisation with care that informs translation makes it a nonfiction practice.
AP: In considering poetry and translation as nonfiction practices, what do people not think about enough?
GJ: People don’t think enough about them being nonfiction in the first place. We regard them more through an intellectual, aesthetic lens that doesn’t allow us to think through the body. Lived experience is also about our bodies in time and space, in our environment, in our everyday realities. When you are translating a Dalit text, are you able to think about the environment this writer is writing from; the body in that space; the body living in particular circumstances: in poverty; in one particular quarter of the village far removed from the rest; the body that is perhaps scavenging for a living?
A work becomes nonfiction when it is grounded in the materiality of the body in different spaces. There is a place for empathetic imagination in fiction, but to me empathy is not enough if it is just going to bring pity. This is not about pity. It is about being in the real world and living in the same world knowing there are different worlds circumscribed by class, caste, other kinds of boundaries. Whereas pity means inaction. It is only when you can put your own body in that space and understand the materiality of the body in that space, that you will be able to act in more constructive ways that can help change that material reality. This is what a translator can do through an ethical practice that allows for a more material experience of a text and its realities.
I think about Gandhi, whose approach to searching for truth was through self-introspection and dialogue among different views. He practised fasting, which also means knowing the reality of the body through fasting. How does this practice change you as a person? What I want to evoke through my work in poetry and translation is reflection (both self-reflection and a collective reflection) that is not just intellectual but through one’s whole being. This, I believe, has transformative power.