Any sensitive reader of contemporary Hindi poetry will find it impossible to overlook the eight poems by Deepti Kushwah recently published in Samalochan. This suite—comprising works such as ‘Ekākelī ābha’ (A Solitary Radiance), ‘Praśna mem camaktā huā’ (Glowing in the Question), and ‘Ek ankahī tapis’ (An Unspoken Heat)—constructs a multidimensional collage where colour transcends mere visual experience.
Here, colour emerges not just as an aesthetic element but as an interpreter of social structures, class consciousness, and the profound contradictions of women’s existence. The sociological dimension of Kushwah’s work is robust; she uses colour to articulate the complex interrelationships between power, memory, the body, and society, moving beyond traditional frameworks of aesthetics to engage with contemporary discourses of resistance.
In ‘Ekākelī ābha’, yellow is used to uncover the tragedy of a peasant family crushed between the rural economy and feudal customs. The act of “making the hands yellow” for a wedding is revealed not as a celebration but as a burden of economic debt, forcing a peasant to mortgage his field and a mother her jewellery. This colour exposes the capitalist deception where dreams of gold mask a reality as barren and exhausted as the nights in an orphanage. Kushwah deconstructs the traditional structure of auspiciousness, showing how the same colour swings between joy and the jaundiced reality of poverty.
The poem ‘Apnī tarah kī ek dhvani’ explores purple to examine the interrelationship between popular culture and middle-class aspirations. Here, cinematic images carry the collective memory of a generation, while purple becomes the metaphor for “silent love” between women in a patriarchal society—a love pushed into the purple memories of “rejection.” The poet gives voice to a fluid identity that transgresses social boundaries, forging her own answers like colours, a clear poststructuralist turn where meaning is no longer imposed by tradition but created by the individual.
Kushwah’s relationship with painting is not merely thematic but structural and sensory; words are laid out like layers of colour on a canvas. The entire series functions as a colour palette where each poem is an independent yet interconnected painting. This is particularly evident in ‘Praśna mein chamaktā huā’, where the philosophical and political expanse of blue is examined through the work of Picasso and Van Gogh. The poet lifts blue from its natural state—the sky and sea—and establishes it on the plane of human sensation and artistic rebellion.
Picasso’s Blue Period, born from poverty and sorrow, and the cosmic turmoil of Van Gogh’s Starry Night represent blue as a “free” and “subjective” experience. This artistic past is contrasted with the blue of the modern age: the “splinter of Blu-ray” that burns the eyes and the disciplined blue bound in school uniforms and flags. The references to these masters function as a “memory against forgetting,” showing how a colour that was once the cry of the soul is now controlled by power, technology, and ideology.
The poem ‘Ek dhīmā ujālā’ presents a radical deconstruction of black, traditionally a fixed signifier of death or the inauspicious. Kushwah transforms it into a symbol of warmth and “tactile” memory, calling it “an old sweater of her husband / still hanging in the cupboard.” Here, black is not the inertia of mourning but the heartbeat of time. On a sociological plane, it becomes the colour of labour and folk consciousness, emerging from the coal mine and, in contrast to capitalist glitter, symbolising foundational energy.
The folk invocation “kāle meghā pānī de” gives voice to the primal connection between nature and humanity, positioning black not as scarcity but as the carrier of life-giving rain. Furthermore, the poem challenges the European Enlightenment discourse that equates light with knowledge; instead, it proposes darkness as an alternative epistemology, an inner vision that can read the world in its totality.
In ‘Dekhne se bāhar’, Kushwah critiques the post-truth era through the metaphor of green, specifically the “chroma” technique used in filmmaking. Chroma becomes a symbol of political deception, where powers make their “most intimate truth / disappear.” This green shines on slogans and banners but its shadow does not reach the “ridge of the field,” unmasking an illusion of development that exists in symbols but is absent on the ground.
The poem engages in an intertextual dialogue with Agyeya’s famous poem, creating a moral gulf between the past’s natural connection to the earth and the present’s “bribe-green,” where nature itself has been turned into a commodity. Through an eco-feminist lens, the poet chooses the language of the soil’s moisture over the hardness of borders, asking a crucial question about the politics of the gaze: “which direction we look / whom we make absent.”
The poem ‘Bīc kā tāp’ transforms the dualities of structuralism into a new synthesis through orange, presenting it as a meeting point between the red of rebellion and the saffron of surrender. Here, the heat of struggle and the peace of sadhana create a “balanced heat.”
The image of the parijat flower—its white body bound by an orange filament—connects the physical existence of colours with their spiritual and olfactory qualities. In a moment of sublime tenderness, the last orange ray of the sun falls on “the son who has returned after losing his father,” symbolising a vast compassion that turns grief into acceptance. This orange is neither wholly fire nor wholly sunset; it is the human “space” between the two where emotion achieves balance.
White, in ‘Ek anupasthiti kī upasthiti’, is explored as a poststructuralist “void.” It is not merely the cold lifelessness of hospital sheets but is present in the subtle interval “which the breath could not return.” The poet gives white a new historical consciousness through the “thread of the charkha,” which resonates not as cloth-making but as “the rhythm of resistance.” This is an extension of Gandhian purity, where white becomes an active moral intervention against power.
From a deconstructive perspective, white is an “open text,” a blank slate that everyone fills with their own meaning, encompassing the entire human journey from the first garment of birth to the final covering of death. The final poem, ‘Ek ankahī tapis’, explores the interrelationship between history and desire through red. This colour transcends its traditional boundaries of blood or erotic love to become an “inner heat” that flows unnamed in the arteries.
From a feminist perspective, the image of “the subtle line of the parting” is revolutionary; it reveals a bitter reality where love remains immortal but its symbols are snatched away by conventions. Red becomes a symbol of repressed desire, freed from the political roar of slogans to become “the unspoken tones of rebellion”—a subtle resistance within the consciousness of the individual.
Ultimately, Kushwah’s poems construct a discourse in which aesthetics is necessarily linked with politics and ethics. Her poetic vision is a deep inquiry into invisible human perceptions through the visible elements of the physical world. The philosophy of life expressed is one of “acceptance” and “transgression,” where scarcity and beauty walk together. The poet gives suffering a creative dignity, turning pain into “ink” and “letters.” A woman’s gaze permeates the work, grasping the “invisible” of domestic objects and memories, finding the heartbeat of time in a husband’s old sweater or indignation in the symbols of marriage.
There is a rare humility in her language, a “cosmic humility” where the pinnacle of beauty frees man from ego. In her creativity, silence is not mere quietude but a resistant power, and colours are “trembling like a vow” or “burning instead of sleep.” Deepti Kushwah’s “discourse on colour” is a profound critical reading of our time, seeking a world that is egalitarian and sensitive, where colours can be freed from the prison of flags and slogans and returned to the natural plane of human sensation, memory, and thirst.
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*Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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