HARPERCOLLINS INDIA, JULY 2023
POETRY/BIOGRAPHY
*ORDER*

LONGLISTED FOR THE KLF POETRY PRIZE
A HINDUSTAN TIMES NEW READS PICK
FEATURED ON HINDUSTAN TIMES’ SMARTCAST PODCAST
FEATURED IN TIMES OF INDIA, INDIAN EXPRESS, SCROLL INDIA & MORE

Anandibai Joshee is impec­cably researched. More importantly, these poems do feel like we’re listening to a time capsule, like Anandibai preserved everything important in her life in a pot that has been unearthed a century later.

—Aditya Mani Jha, OPEN Magazine

Malaviya helps readers re-imagine a remarkable life by presenting the poems as Joshee’s intimate thoughts.

—Vangmayi Parakala, Mint Lounge

Anandibai’s story is compelling, without question, and Malaviya’s poems are an artful mix of inventiveness, unburying, and lyricism.

—Linda Michel-Cassidy, Tupelo Quarterly

Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems is a collection of persona poems (as well as an imagined memoir) of India’s first female medical doctor and the first Indian woman to come to the United States and study medicine in 1883. Anandibai Joshee’s life story (1865-1887) is a brief yet compelling one of struggle, empowerment, and allyship in the 19th century, one of intersectionality that resonates in the 21st century. Challenging gender expectations and crossing waters considered impure/taboo, Anandibai fought her family and society to get an education in India and then against much protest, came to America, alone, to study medicine at a time when orientalism was at its peak in the West. Anandibai dazzled the Western world with her intelligence, grace, and determination, piercing through misconceptions about the East, while opening doors for Indian women who were otherwise confined to domestic duties within the home.

Drawing from extensive research and told in a variety of poetic forms-sonnet, epistolary, prose, pantoum, ghazal, ekphrastic, duplex, etc., the author captures and conveys Anandibai’s voice, culled from her life and letters. Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems isn’t just poetry, but biography and history as well.

SELECTED CONVERSATIONS & REVIEWS

Review in Open Magazine
Review in Mint Lounge
Review in Tupelo Quarterly
Hindustan Times Smartcast Podcast
Atalanta Diaries Podcast
Bangalore International Centre Conversation
San Francisco Public Library Conversation
Process Note in Periodicities
Excerpt featured in Scroll India

PRAISE FOR ANANDIBAI JOSHEE: A LIFE IN POEMS

“In this act of poetic ventriloquism, Shikha Malaviya draws inspiration from a singular woman — one who walked a solitary path with élan. A spirited speaker emerges from these pages: one who sees a stethoscope as precious jewellery, who realizes that ‘all hearts sound the same regardless of intentions’, and when asked what epoch she would like to live in, is able to answer resolutely, ‘The Present.’ This innovative retelling of a remarkable life story is a step towards restoring voice and agency to yet another woman protagonist in history on whom the ‘Mute’ button has too long been pressed.”
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

“I was struck by Shikha Malaviya’s interrogation of voice in these poems, the way she deftly conjured this visionary woman from the past and shape-shifted her towards us, reminding us how kaleidoscopic we are as individuals, how connected.”
TISHANI DOSHI

“Shikha Malaviya’s Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems brings to the fore an often forgotten figure of migration and power. Joshee (1865-1887), the first Indian woman to enter the United States, has become the poet’s daemon—whose deity she honors with devotion. Malaviya’s poems illuminate the affective interior of the first Indian woman doctor through immersion into the poet’s practice: specificity, tension, and release. These are Joshee’s words, just as they are not—a strategy that invites readers to consider the possibility of a South Asian woman’s own representation of herself in the Global North; a metaphor for the poet to consider her own inheritance of Joshee’s legacy. Based on Joshee’s own letters, public records, and photographs, the collage Malaviya uses, shows readers how lyric forms can bend into experimentation and how a complicated life needs poetry to write it. It takes a Dante-like expertise to lead the reader through the chaukat of biography and onto the jhopala of imagination’s courtyard. This is a book I will gift to many, many people, as it is, itself, a gift to all of us.”
RAJIV MOHABIR