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‘Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock’: Kolkata emerges as a site of psychic inheritance in these poems

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Celebrated as the “Bard on the Banks of Dulung”, Jaydeep Sarangi, the prolific writer and poet from Jhargram, has a reputation that is indeed formidable. A significant portion of his scholarship examines themes within Indian Writing in English, Dalit marginalised literatures, postcolonial studies, and translation studies. Rather than employing the city trope as a glorious spectacle or a site of ruin, Sarangi’s recent poetry collection, Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock treats it as a palimpsest of time, following a fascinating yet distinctly subversive trajectory. As a disavowal of the grand meta-narratives of history, it lends itself to a multilayered civilisational memory, with all its nuances, to cull out a truly personal reflection of individual memory.

Sarangi’s novel poetic expression sustains fragile experiences of subjectivity against the erosions of time and memory. Embedded in culture and mnemonic sites, the poems trace the umpteen historical layers – in the city’s rivers, ghats, myths, and marginalised existences. And yet, above all, it remains a personal archive of recollection. The Kolkata evoked in these poems is animated by liminality, in which one witnesses the convergence of emotion, history, and spirituality.

Addressing silence

Most pointedly, as they chart through the city’s riverine consciousness, the poems unfold with the rhythmic tempo...