In The Gallery of Upside-Down Women, Arundhathi Subramaniam has written poems that map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in the season of change. Fabric tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant and sometimes upside down. Leaping from the past into global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest rollercoaster rides.
Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, ‘how to gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and spiritual traveler. Her books include a volume on contemporary women on sacred journeys, Wild Women, Women Who Wear Only Themselves; the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life; anthologies of Bhakti poetry, Eating God, and of essays on sacred journeys, Pilgrim’s India; the much-reprinted Book of Buddha, among others.
Widely translated and anthologized, she is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020 and the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia award in 2024.
Poet and prose writer, anthologist and translator, this book is an extension of Arundhathi’s primary obsession: women and spiritual poetry.
A hardback, priced at INR 499, it is going to hit the stands by end-July in India.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
‘This book invokes the names of women you may never have heard of. It is not necessary to know them to read these poems. I invoke them because I like naming. And because many of them have stayed unnamed for far too long. Most have been consigned to oblivion, and a few to hagiography. Either way, it felt like they deserved more.’
