Maine Gardha Hai Apna Purush

Anupam Singh is a powerful voice of the twenty-first centurys promising womens poetry. Her poems reveal a young girl who is keenly observing everything around her, yet has perhaps been silenced. This silence is revealed in her poems, and she unabashedly tears apart her life, environment, and system. Anupams poems are poems of profound sorrow. Sorrow that has become a mourning song in womens lives; sorrow that every farmer, exploited, backward class person, and woman have accepted as a permanent emotion in their lives. A large part of this map of lifes tragedy is dedicated to women and their cursed lives. Women who work hard, live powerless and joyless lives, and are each time evicted from the family and society in which they have lived. Anupam has seen and experienced many such injustices up close. Society has normalized and accepted numerous chapters of humiliation and disregard, whether its the practice of taunting people based on skin color or the lust of men stroking the backs of girls within their own families. All are embedded within that system. With the skill of saying little and understanding it as much, these poems create a transhistorical narrative. The sharpness of womens poetry lies in the fact that it has altered the lens of the long-sighted telescope. It recognizes history as transhistorical through the small and large narratives around it. A parallel world. In these poems, Anupam Singh has entered another forbidden territory. She has meticulously captured the mysteries of the female body, her desires and aspirations, and her experiences of sexuality. To do so, language also has to be reinvented. Anupam accomplished this difficult task. Her language, moving between folk and classical, preserves the joy and pleasure of sexual experiences in womens lives. The intense imagery of these poems preserves the intensity of the experience. Here, the experience of two women in love is also portrayed with tenderness and respect. In this sense, the question of sexuality is an attempt to redefine female identity, where mind and body are not separate.