I came across 25-year-old Hindi poet Shubham Shree through an article in The Caravan by Daisy Rockwell. Shubham has just won the prestigious Bharat Bhushan Agarwal Prize in August and there was a lot of criticism that her poems faced because the pillars of Hindi literature didn’t think her poems were literary.
Here’s one of my favourite ones. It’s not the one that won the prize (which is called ‘Poetry Management’). This one’s titled ‘My hostel’s cleaning crew has refused to throw away sanitary napkins’.
It makes fun of the fact that if you go to a chemist to buy sanitary napkins, they wrap it in newspapers and hide it from view, even though semen-laden men underwear lie all over the countryside. I loved this poem and some of her others. Continue reading “Poet Shubham Shree’s satire on sanitary napkins”