On the waves of poesy: Ranjit Hoskote talks about his book 'Jonahwhale'

Civilisations, ways of life, trade, colonial designs and ideas of freedom have always crossed over the oceans to transcend boundaries of nation-states and regions. So even without seeming so, the oceans are at the very centre of what happens on land," says poet, art critic and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote while speaking of Jonahwhale, which in three sections of poems weaves a narrative "of the Biblical prophet Jonah, who escapes death by spending three nights in the belly of a whale; Melville's Moby Dick, whose obsessive Captain Ahab chases an eponymous whale that bites off his leg; of migrations, trade, pirates and the ecological and political crises that we ignore at our own peril."

Having lived most of his life in Bombay and for a few years in Goa during childhood, he says the sea has always fascinated him. "It is a repository of so many stories, fragments and episodes from the multiple pasts that we inherit," he points out. "We seem to bother only when it rudely awakens us by flooding the city every monsoon."

Hoskote insists poetry did not enter his life. "It was the other way round. It was already in my family and surrounded me as I grew up. My mother, who studied English Literature and Sanskrit, taught herself to read Urdu, read to me from Ghalib and Keats from an early age. We had Arberry's anthology of translations from Persian poetry. My father introduced me, early on, to that haunting poem, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and to the Augustan and Romantic poets he had read as a student."

Some of Hoskote's early poetic influences also came from music... from bandishes, thumris and chaitis, a glimpse of which can be seen in Jonahwhale. "Let's not forget that some of the music and metaphors travelled from the hinterlands of North India, far from the sea, with indentured labour - taken to far off lands to toil on sugarcane fields and fight a war they had nothing to do with."

While Hoskote has been working on Jonahwhale from late 2015, he admits some poems have been around in the form of scraps and notes since 1991. "But that is my creative process. Whether I'm curating or writing, my work rarely happens in one contiguous flow. I have to set myself apace with how it flows. I can't hurry the process."

At the heart of Hoskote's seminal work is the idea of socio-cultural confluence. "When we talk of slavery we often think of it as something in the distance but do you know that Bombay had African slaves?" he asks. Though ambitious in scope, Hoskote keeps it accessible, even making the reader rejoice in both his choice of words and the beauty of the several stunning connections he makes, underlining once again why he is celebrated as one of our most gifted contemporary poets.