On reading Geography of Tongues, I felt I was looking at a new world, rain-washed and young, yet bi-focal. Shikha Malaviya’s lines ricochet from the suddenness of the reality that seems to encounter her. This is quicksilver, effervescent poetry, borne headlong on a strong impulse.
KEKI N. DARUWALLA
Shikha Malaviya’s poetry initiates a dialogue between countries and cultures and raises many flags—of freedom and love, of prayer and protest. Her morphologist, tracing the curve of continents, and the peacock dancing against the setting sun are metaphors for the poets’ own self in its bewildering search for a less complex and more humane world, where identities are spaces of creativity rather than of contest. Shikha’s poems are fresh and intimate, talking to each one of us in our own different tongues.
K. SATCHIDANANDAN
This is a lambent, heart-wrenching debut collection. Shikha Malaviya plunges through memories as child, lover, wandering bard and witness, in poems intensely alive. Passionately attentive and formally audacious, Malaviya swings between the horrific, the humorous and the humane: she delights with the play of languages. Afloat in her black silver country, on water red-tinted by communal carnage and family festivities, Malaviya never stops searching for the shared canopy of stars that blankets us in tenderness.
PRIYA SARUKKAI CHABRIA
Geography of Tongues, published by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, was launched in December 2013/January 2014 and featured widely throughout India in several literary festivals. Hailed as one of the 11 books of Indian poetry to read this year, Malaviya’s poetry mines personal memory, myth & experience, while deftly traversing continents, cultures, and the greater world. Several poems in Geography of Tongues refer to the ‘tongue’ in different contexts: as a negotiator & communicator, as a taster & holder of experience and as a rebel & teaser, sticking itself out in defiance.
SHIKHA MALAVIYA 