Jonahwhale

Jonahwhale is a book of poems by Ranjit Hoskote, arranged in three movements and moving mostly through water. It begins at sea, travels to the river Ganga, and ends on the Marine Drive waterfront in Bombay. The tone is playful even as the subjects are pressing ones.

The collection draws on two famous stories of men and whales: the biblical prophet Jonah, who survives three nights inside a whale, and Melville's Moby Dick, in which Captain Ahab hunts the creature that took his leg. Alongside these, the poems bring back a varied crowd of people who sailed the global trade routes of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hoskote also turns to the present, looking at a city at war with itself and a planet strained by ecological and political crisis.

The idea of cultural confluence sits at the center of the book. Hoskote treats the project as an act of anamnesis, recovering fragments and episodes from the many pasts we inherit. His particular interest is the overlooked legacy of the colonial encounter as it played out at sea rather than on land.

The result is ambitious yet accessible, and it takes evident pleasure in the language and in the surprising links it draws between times and places. It marks Hoskote as one of the most gifted poets writing today.