Reclaiming the void: Savita Singh’s feminist poetics in conversation with Octavio Paz

By Ravi Ranjan*  

Savita Singh, one of contemporary Hindi poetry’s most distinctive voices, has spent decades shaping questions of feminine experience, self-consciousness, body, time, and creation with profound philosophical sensitivity. Her major collections—Apne Jaisa Jivan, Nind Thi aur Rat Thi, Svapna Samay, Prem Bh Ekyatana Hai, and Vasana Ek Nadi ka Nam Hai—reveal a fluidity of language and an abundance of images that emerge from a self-reliant feminine perspective. In her poem Svapna Samaya (Dream Time), Singh presents not merely a poetic experience but an alternative structure of creation, one distinctly different from traditional patriarchal narratives. 

Where conventional imaginings of creation are constructed around a centralised, controlling authority—a power situated “above” that serves as the source of order, meaning, and origin—Singh views creation as being born from the subtle vibration of dreams, consciousness, and bodily sensations. In this process, feminine experience, especially the body, desire, craving, and compassion, not only gains validity but becomes the very foundation of creation.

The poem opens with a radical proposition: “Thus this life began from a dream / As if there was nothing else before it / If there was consciousness, it was only of the dream.” This starting point dismantles the primacy of waking reality that has dominated Western and patriarchal thought. Rather than locating the origin of existence in a divine command or a rational first cause, Singh places it in dream—an ambiguous, fluid, and deeply embodied state. The dream she describes is not merely a psychological phenomenon but the fundamental structure of creation itself. 

Colours appear—blue, white, mottled—but they are not attached to solid objects; they are merely signals of potential forms. There is an expanse that means emptiness, neither colour nor scent, yet within this void arises a movement like rustling wind, and into this movement meaning keeps filling. That is vibration, and from that vibration, dream-time is made.

This void is not passive emptiness but the bedrock of creation, reminiscent of the Buddhist concept of Shunya, which is not negative absence but the very ground from which all things emerge. From this dream-time come rivers and forests, the wind blowing through them, feminine desire, innumerable lives, and their craving. Singh deliberately places feminine desire as a life-producing force, not as something shameful or secondary but as the primitive power that gives birth to life. The expansion of creation, she suggests, is driven by a constant want, an incompleteness, and an aspiration. 

This desire is not merely sexual instinct but the creative energy that propels existence itself. When she writes that “as many times as words moved, as many times as this time watches the shimmering consciousness,” she establishes a deep relationship between language and time. The moving of words is not just an act of speech but a process of meaning-making. Every time words move, consciousness shimmers, meaning a new form of reality emerges.

The poem introduces a strange, almost mythical figure: a being who is neckless yet wearing a necklace, wearing a garment that is incorporeal. This figure embodies incompleteness and symbolises that all forms are merely symbolic, having no solid existence. Creation here becomes a web of symbols and images rather than a hierarchy of fixed entities. The dream eyes, made of clouds and filled with water, cover the rivers and forests with their sheet of compassion. It is from the moment this compassionate gaze begins to watch that creation appears as it does in the mirror. 

The mirror is a philosophical metaphor: reality is not an objective, fixed thing but is constructed by consciousness and vision. In the final lines, Singh arrives at her most profound statement: the dream that we know is a dream that needs neither eyes nor night. Dream has been liberated from any biological or physical process and becomes a universal state active at all times, in all places. Dream becomes synonymous with existence itself.

When placed in conversation with Octavio Paz, particularly his poem Blanco, Singh’s vision resonates deeply while maintaining its distinctive feminine sensibility. Paz writes: “In the blank radiance the word is born, a body opens into the void, time writes itself in its own erasure, what appears persists in disappearing, what is said returns to the unsaid, between breath and pause meaning does not stay—it slips, like an image in water, like an unnamed touch in memory.” Paz’s “blank radiance” is a hollow glow full of possibility, neither entirely dark nor solid light—that initial restlessness or intermediate state of creation that Singh weaves as “expansion, that is emptiness, neither colour nor scent.” 

For both poets, emptiness does not evoke lack but rather shows that first vibration from which something new is born. When Paz says “meaning does not stay—it slips,” Singh speaks of “a movement like rustling wind in which meaning kept filling.” Meaning is not frozen but a continuous process changing every moment.

Paz writes that “a body opens into the void,” and Singh writes “she rises naked in the attempt to rise.” In both, the body is not an inert object but something that opens and emerges. The body is not separate from the void but a part or expansion of it; the void does not negate life but becomes the field for composing it. When Paz captures the nature of time by saying “time writes itself in its own erasure,” Singh reflects this same feeling when she writes that every time this time beholds the shimmering consciousness. The word “shimmering” captures time’s instability and momentariness—time does not move like a straight line but is felt like a shimmering process. 

Paz’s line “what is said returns to the unsaid” brings forward the limitation of language, and when Singh writes “in which the word and its trembling negation are seen,” she gives new expansion to this experience. The trembling negation suggests that within whatever we say, an instability lies hidden; behind every word, that unsaid portion always remains which could not be fully expressed.

Yet a subtle difference between the two poets cannot be ignored. In Paz, the entire experience rests more on philosophical contemplation, where the mutual clash of word and silence is central. In Singh’s poem, the same experience is far more sensory and organic. Images like “rivers and forests,” “woman’s desire, life innumerable,” and “out of her own compassion” bring the dream-world much closer to vibrant, lived, feminine experiences. Svapna Samaya connects with the deep sensibilities of world poetry but fully preserves its originality and the distinct identity of feminine experience. The meeting of the void, time, and meaning transforms into a pulsating and multi-dimensional life-experience.

Singh’s poem does not establish any final truth or fixed meaning. Instead, it installs an open sensory state in which one recognises oneself as being continuously constructed. Its importance is not merely poetic but epistemological: understanding reality is not about defining objects but about connecting sensorially with the process of their becoming. This poem becomes a pure description of experience, where consciousness and the world are joined in a single flow. It does not lead the reader to one certain meaning but enters them into an experience where meanings are constantly being formed and broken. 

Reality, Singh shows us, is not only seen—it is also dreamt. And this dreaming is a revolutionary act, because it liberates one from oppressive patriarchal and authoritarian truths that seek to keep us imprisoned in a limited circle. As long as words move and compassion remains alive, the creation of the universe will continue, and no power will be able to snatch this dream from us.

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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