A poet of sound, memory and resistance: Ranjana Mishra’s achievement

By Ravi Ranjan* 

Ranjana Mishra’s poetry collection "Stone Steps of Time" ("Patthar Samay Ki Sidhiyan", 2022) marks a significant moment in contemporary Hindi poetry. Bringing together seventy-six poems of varied textures, the book reveals a poet whose creative universe is shaped by classical music, cultural memory, feminist consciousness, and a deep engagement with the anxieties of our time. Across these poems, Mishra weaves a world where musicality merges with philosophy, where intimate emotions intersect with political realities, and where the individual’s inner life refracts the fractures of society.

One of the most distinctive features of Mishra’s poetic sensibility is her grounding in Indian classical music. This training informs not only the rhythm of her poems but the very structure of her thought. Her seven-part sequence dedicated to Pandit Jasraj — organized around the seven swaras, from Shadja to Nishad — is a rare example of poetry in conversation with classical aesthetics. These poems do not merely describe music; they echo its patience, its depth, and its capacity for transcendence. They suggest that certain truths can be reached only through the disciplined journey of sound. 

The sequence demonstrates the poet’s ability to internalize a musical experience and re-express it through language. One senses that Mishra understands what it means for a note to carry sorrow, for a melody to become a spiritual search, for the voice to rise from ashes like a phoenix. This blend of musical and poetic imagination places her in a lineage of Hindi poets such as Bharatendu, Nirala, Janakivallabh Shastri, and Ashok Vajpeyi, all of whom recognized the inseparable bond between poetry and classical music.

Mishra’s poetry also confronts contemporary political realities without allowing polemic to overshadow craft. Her four-part poem "For Anjum" is an incisive exploration of communal tension, the policing of love, and the fragility of everyday freedoms. Through the gentleness of a love poem, she exposes how majoritarian politics intrudes upon the private spaces of ordinary people. 

Without sloganeering, she shows how love becomes political in a troubled society, and how personal emotions carry the weight of public anxieties. The poem’s ironic warning that “the biggest threat to the country is your love” mocks the absurdity of treating interfaith affection as national danger. Mishra’s political critique emerges through quiet, cutting empathy — an approach reminiscent of Kedarnath Singh or Dhoomil, who often used subtlety rather than noise to pierce the conscience.

Though Arun Kamal has correctly noted that Mishra’s work is not doctrinaire feminist poetry, the woman’s perspective is unmistakably central. Her poems articulate the experiences, constraints, and transformations of women navigating a rapidly changing social world. In "Ageing Woman", she creates one of the most powerful portraits in recent Hindi poetry of middle- and lower-class women seldom given space in earlier literary traditions. The burnt-on-one-side roti becomes an image of a life half-exhausted and half-unfulfilled; a woman prematurely aged by labour yet emotionally alive in subtle, unspoken ways. 

Mishra extends this vision in "Wandering Girls", a celebratory poem that breaks from conventional literary stereotypes of femininity. She embraces girls who laugh loudly, forget their dupattas, drink in hostel rooms, fall in and out of love, and choose their own wandering paths. These are not caged birds yearning for liberation — they are already carving their own survival in a hostile world. 

The contrast with her poem "Cultured Girls", which critiques elite pretenses of propriety, completes the picture of a poet attuned to the contradictions of modern womanhood. In "You Male", she addresses men directly, urging them to evolve alongside women rather than clinging to outdated expectations. The tone is advisory, not confrontational — a recognition that social change requires shared transformation.

A recurring motif across the collection is sorrow — not the sorrow born of material deprivation, but an existential sorrow arising from awareness, reflection, and sensitivity to the world. Mishra’s poems treat sorrow as a source of wisdom. In "Being One’s Own", sorrow becomes a quiet presence inside the self, a medium through which identity is searched and shaped. 

This aligns with the classical “tragic vision” identified by thinkers like Lucien Goldmann — a recognition that artists who perceive reality without compromise naturally encounter tragedy, yet transform it into insight. Her exploration of sorrow is intertwined with memory. She often writes about how personal and collective memories shape human consciousness, suggesting that memory has its own history, its own silent architecture inside us. This philosophical thread runs through many poems, linking the intimate with the historical.

Several poems in "Stone Steps of Time" read like meditations on India’s shifting cultural landscape. In "Hey Ram", Mishra grapples with the transformation of faith into political spectacle. Ram, in her imagination, has left the quiet paths of devotion and now walks along highways of noise, spectacle, and power. The poem laments the loss of spiritual essence in the din of majoritarian politics. 

Similarly, in poems that address casteism, communal fear, and authoritarian culture, Mishra avoids didacticism; instead, she uses metaphor, irony, and internal reflection to reveal how society’s fractures penetrate individual lives. "We Crucified God" speaks to this through its use of Christian allegory — a way of suggesting that humanity repeatedly destroys the very values it claims to uphold.

Mishra’s craft reflects a deep understanding of poetic imagination, especially the ability to create bridges between contrasting elements. She often juxtaposes images from daily life with philosophical abstraction — ants walking in quiet faith, a tree marking the passage of time, clocks revealing the illusions of temporality. Her poems inhabit the space between the real and the possible, the solid and the subtle. 

In "Imprisonment", she turns relationships into mirrors of emotional captivity, suggesting that the cages we assign to others often confine us more than them. In "History, Hesitation and Ants", she acknowledges that words alone may not change history, yet affirms her faith in the quiet persistence of those who continue to create, much like the silent ant holding “the finger of faith.”

Her work also contains a striking tenderness rooted in what critics call “child-imagination.” Poems about motherhood and childhood — especially "You, My Son" — show her ability to find wonder in the smallest gestures of an infant. Here, classical ragas like Yaman and Bhairav transform into lullabies, suggesting that maternal love itself is a form of music, capable of altering the poet’s inner landscape.

What ultimately distinguishes "Stone Steps of Time" is the way Mishra synthesizes diverse influences — classical music, feminist thought, political critique, existential reflection — into a single, coherent poetic vision. Her poetry is rooted in tradition yet unafraid to confront modernity; intimate yet expansive; lyrical yet intellectually rigorous. Arun Kamal’s assessment captures this well: Mishra creates a world “seen from a woman’s eye, with joy, sorrow, tragedy, and faith.” She does not write as an ideological combatant but as a poet whose experiences seek universal resonance. Her language is refined yet accessible, musical yet disciplined, thoughtful yet emotionally alive.

In an era where poetry often oscillates between shrill activism and private introspection, Mishra offers a rare balance. Her poems engage with the crises of the present without sacrificing aesthetic integrity. They preserve the sensibility of classical tradition while opening space for new, emerging voices. Most importantly, they remind us that poetry’s deepest function — like music — is to reveal what remains invisible in ordinary life. "Stone Steps of Time" stands as testimony to a poet who listens carefully to the world, absorbing its sorrows, melodies, fractures, and hopes. In doing so, Ranjana Mishra creates poetry that, like music, outlives the stone of its time.

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*Professor & Former Head, Department of Hindi, School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad