Tag: nostalgia

Review of ‘Nostalgic for A Place Never Seen’ in East India Story

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

Gargi Kalita reviewed my debut poetry collection, NOSTALGIC FOR A PLACE NEVER SEEN in East India Story. Read the review:

Bhaswati Ghosh’s Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen is a debut poetry collection that maps the evocative terrain of belonging. It explores how home is a terrain of the mind, a pulse of longing bridging the intimate and the global. A review by Gargi Kalita.

Nostalgia is never merely a return to the past—it is a tender reimagining, a delicate reconstruction of moments and emotions that memory alone can no longer fully contain. Home, in this sense, is not merely a geographical fixity but a terrain of the mind, a pulse of longing that beats through time, language, and loss. It is within this evocative terrain that Bhaswati Ghosh situated her debut  poetry collection Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen ,a volume that reads like a cartography of belonging drawn from within the self and across shifting geographies. Ghosh, a bilingual writer and translator based in Canada,with roots in New Delhi, belongs to the  lineage of Indian diasporic poets whose work bridges the intimate with the historical, the local with the global.

Some places are etched not in geography, but in remembrance—borne across generations like heirlooms wrapped in stories, scents, and silence. Bhaswati Ghosh’s Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen traces an emotional landscape, where her grandmother’s lost Barisal finds a home in verse.This poetry collection, imbued with reflections on migration, memory, and identity, is organized into eight thematically rich sections— “Dwellings: Temporary and Permanent”, “Places, Faces, Traces”, “Scents, Tastes, Textures”, “Seasons of the Heart”, “Water, Earth, Air, Fire”, “The Humming Octave”, “The Wordsmiths”, and “Movements in and Out of Time”. Across 72 poems of the collection, Ghosh explores personal and historical landscapes of belonging shaped by displacement, capturing the tension between the fleeting and the lasting, and inviting readers to find home in language and memory.

At the heart of Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen is a poignant reflection on memory, identity, displacement, cultural inheritance, and longing that extends beyond personal history. Bhaswati Ghosh’s poetry weaves internal and external landscapes, capturing the emotional geography of diasporic consciousness—a yearning not just for a place, but for the sense of rootedness it once held.

The title poem, “Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen,” which lends its name to the collection, forms the emotional nucleus of the book. Drawing on Ghosh’s inherited memory of her grandmother’s forced migration from Barisal in East Bengal (now Bangladesh)  to post-Partition Delhi, it reflects the vivid presence of places never personally visited but deeply felt through intergenerational storytelling. This aligns with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”—the transmission of trauma and displacement across generations. Ghosh captures this poignantly in both “Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen” and “Native Dialect.”

In a video about Sugandha, I see a mother

combing her daughter’s hair. Before I know it,

the daughter turns into my grandma

and breaks into a song.

‘Why don’t you come anymore?’ she asks.

— Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen

When her little sister visited

and Grandma broke into their

Barisailya patois, I heard songs

of home in the words. Of boat

races and river markets. Of a

home I’d dreamt of in past

lives amid simulated

nostalgia.

— Native Dialect

In the opening section, Dwellings: Temporary and Permanent, poems like “Sleeping at My Mother’s House” and “Displaced Persons’ Colony” do not merely reconstruct domestic spaces; they evoke the invisible sediment of emotion—love, loss, security, fragility, displacement —that inhabits these spaces. These dwellings become mnemonic devices, where physical architecture merges with psychological and ancestral landscapes.

Likewise, in Places, Faces, Traces, the poet functions as a flaneuse of memory, fluidly moving through places like Lajpat Nagar, Buenos Aires, and Mukteshwar—each becoming a site of introspection and remembrance.These locations act less as physical sites and more as emotional landscapes, forming a metaphorical map. Ghosh suggests that memory is borderless, bound more to emotion than to nation, language, or place. The poems wrestle with the impermanence of space and the persistent search for anchorage amidst flux.

Perhaps the most evocative section of the book is Scents, Tastes, Textures, which serves as a visceral archive of cultural identity. In poems like “Cooking Hilsa” and “Cumin,” food becomes a tactile memory, carrying heritage on the tongue and in the body. These sensorial evocations act as gateways to lost homes and forgotten rituals, echoing Roland Barthes’s idea of the “grain” in language—where meaning is felt rather than just stated. For Ghosh, food is not merely sustenance; it is survival, nostalgia, and resistance. As she writes in “Cumin”:

Taste is the original rebel. It resists being caged in

 closed jars or steaming woks.

In the later sections—Seasons of the Heart and Movements In and Out of Time—Ghosh turns inward, tracing the subtle shifts of self and emotion. Poems like “Learning, Unlearning” and “Debts to Pay” reflect on growth and changing roles, offering a sense of becoming rather than just loss or nostalgia. Ghosh shows that belonging is fluid, woven through memory and choice, and this quiet evolution is captured in “Learning, Unlearning”, where she writes:

She learns to pause more on the

page. I unlearn the stiffness of knowing it all.

A central thread in the collection is Ghosh’s nuanced exploration of “home”—Is home a physical dwelling, a landscape of memory, a sound, a scent or even a fleeting feeling? Ghosh’s poems move through Delhi, ancestral villages, and diasporic spaces, revealing home as both grounding and elusive. Echoing Edward Said’s “imagined geographies,”as  she shows that places are shaped more by memory and feeling than by maps. The collection also explores identity and belonging from a female perspective, as Ghosh reclaims her grandmother’s story—giving voice and agency to women often sidelined in Partition narratives.

Stylistically, Ghosh’s poetry is defined by a quiet musicality that emerges not from ornamentation but from emotional authenticity. Yet, within this understated lyricism lies a deft command of literary craft—her metaphors, imagery, and structure deepen each poem’s emotional resonance. In “Fading Colour,” letters losing their hue become haunting emblems of histories dimmed by time and silence. In “Pickling Language,” the simple act of preserving becomes a vessel for memory and identity, where ancestral syntax ferments quietly in jars.

Ghosh’s lyrical minimalism resists excess, favouring the resonance of ordinary moments—stillness, observation, memory—each imbued with metaphorical richness. Subtle threads of Bengali and Hindustani lend her lines a textured intimacy, anchoring the diasporic experience in language. Eschewing nostalgia, she crafts verses of precision and clarity, conjuring cities like Delhi, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires not through maps, but through mood, rhythm, and metaphor. The result is poetry both introspective and worldly—rooted in the particular, yet open to the universal.

In an age where identity is continually redefined by movement and loss, Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen reminds us of the power of poetry to anchor us—to a language, a scent, a home, even if that home exists only in memory. Traversing continents and generations through everyday rituals and stories, Ghosh explores cultural heritage, displacement, and   belonging, evoking empathy and prompting reflection on our own ties to memory and place.

There are certain spaces the soul longs for—not merely to dwell in, but to truly belong. Amid the scattered rhythms of postmodernity, this yearning becomes a search for rootedness not in geography, but in presence—a place deeply felt, where one is the place, and the place is the self. And that is what Bhaswati Ghosh’s Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen ultimately embodies—making it a vital literary contribution to Indian English poetry, diasporic literature, and memory studies.

Book Details:

Review of NOSTALGIC FOR A PLACE NEVER SEEN in Cha

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
Read this review of NOSTALGIC FOR A PLACE NEVER SEEN by Sayan Aich in Cha: An Asian Journal

Nostalgia is humanity’s Janus-faced companion—simultaneously looking back and forward, with someone or something perpetually tugging at us from behind. Yielding to it is not a mere indulgence but, at times, a necessity—offering the wisdom to understand who we are, shaped by the “roots” and “routes” that define our journeys. In a world increasingly fraught with conflict and displacement, it is only natural that narratives exploring these two R’s—roots and routes—should continue to emerge. For the people of the Indian subcontinent, whose shared and traumatic histories of Partition and the Bangladesh Liberation War remain deeply embedded in cultural memory, nostalgia serves as both a fertile and essential motif in the collective psyche and fiction. Stories born from survival and resettlement must be preserved and passed down to new generations of readers and listeners, lest they be erased by the official historiography of the nation. Since time immemorial, the world has progressed and endured through storytelling—the foundational thread of every community, woven through acts of telling and retelling across generations.

Bhaswati Ghosh’s debut poetry collection, Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen, encapsulates all of this—and more. Having grown up in New Delhi and now residing in Canada, Ghosh traverses and inhabits multiple worlds—the cities of her childhood and adulthood, the towns she has visited in her travels, and the villages she has never set foot in but knows intimately through the vivid recollections of her grandmother’s storytelling. In her poetry, time and space coalesce, overlap, and blur, mirroring the way memory itself operates—fluid, unpredictable, and untethered to rules or chronology. The past and the imagined intertwine, shaping a landscape where nostalgia is not merely a longing for what was, but for what could have been.

Read the rest in Cha: An Asian Journal

How I became Nostalgic for a Place (I’d) Never Seen (My debut poetry collection)

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

I wrote a book of poems.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, and it’s taken me a while to write this post. The sharp chill of winter. Work-life imbalance. Laziness. Procrastination. You get the drift.

Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen, my debut poetry collection, came out in November last year from Copper Coin Publishing.

I’ve been writing poetry on a regular basis for only the last four years, so having this collection fills me with both wonder and gratitude. Wonder because of the serendipitous manner in which stray poems flocked together to build a nest. Gratitude for how that nest found its tree — the publisher.

Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen

Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen traverses multiple geographies — temporal and metaphysical. Divided into eight sections: Dwellings — Temporary and Permanent; Places, Faces, Traces; Scents, Tastes, Textures; Seasons of the Heart; Water, Earth, Air, Fire; The Humming Octave; The Wordsmiths; and Movements in and out of Time — the poems in this collection ponder on themes such as migration and displacement, finding home, food, textiles, music, love and nature.

Read a selection of the poems in Scroll.

And in Usawa.

Read a review in The Tribune.

Here it is on Goodreads.

I hope you’ll give this book a read. If you’re in India, you’ll find the book in store (and online) at Midland Books, Full Circle, and Bahrisons.

If you wanted to buy it online, you could do so from:

Copper Coin Publishing (India and international)

Amazon.com

Amazon.in (India)

Flipkart (India)

From the book’s back cover:

 

Thank you so much. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts about the poems.

 

Recovering Lost Threads — The Art of Long Conversations

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
First published in Parcham

I am in Delhi, where without an air conditioner, the house feels like an oven set to a constant, trapping heat and the outside feels like a sweeping field of fire. I came here, in my home city in April 2022, after a gap of three years and three months. It’s an April that feels like June, the peak of Delhi summers. After recovering from jet lag, a trip to the Himalayas and meals with relatives, I step out — braving the 46C furnace, to sit down with a few folks and listen. These interview-conversations are for gathering information for my current work-in-progress — a book on Delhi. But they are a lot more than that.

As I sat down in the drawing rooms of my interviewees’ houses, I noticed something other than their generosity of time. I discovered the comfort, now fast disappearing, of long conversations. Back in my childhood, this was a real thing. The very mention of a relative coming to visit and stay with us from cities like Jamshedpur or Kolkata, put us into dizzy anticipation — of dhaala bichhanas, makeshift floor beds and goppo, a colloquialism for golpo or stories that rolled into the night and continued until the wee hours of morning. This — the unplanned chat hours — were the most delicious part of a relative’s visit. While few of these addas — informal chat sessions — pertained to issues of global significance, they were always about reliving, and sometimes even re-imagining, lost times. We were fortunate to have the gift of unadulterated time back then — time that hadn’t been polluted by the eye’s addiction to screens, time that didn’t require us to update the world with our social or gastronomic status, time that didn’t make us feel guilty about spending hours simply lying on the floor and chatting.

Read the rest in Parcham
Photo by Andreea Ch on Pexels.com

Home is Grandma’s Butterfly Breath in a Guava Tree

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

First published in Plato’s Caves online

Home is a kidnapper who has finally made you submit to its territory, mapped and unmapped.

Home is your first partner in crime who, by introducing you to its hidden corners, gives a toddler you a taste of what manipulating adults with pranks feels like.

Home is the no-nonsense courtroom, where, you, still a toddler, take the gods to task by bashing up their idols at the altar for denying your grandma her own house.

Home is the compassionate table fan that breezes through the room on a hot summer day as Rafi and Geeta Dutt croon aankhon-hi-aankho-mein on the radio and two children – your brother and you – sprawl on the cool cement floor of a government quarter to hurry through your summer holiday homework.

Home is the indulgent playground overlooking that same government quarter where children make friends over hopscotch and their mothers, knitting buddies, on charpaais.

Home is the confused late-entry hero that is finally grandma’s own house. Its dust and half walls hold you in a perplexed daze. Your brother, yet to reach his teens, brings you back to reality as he returns with a pot of rice he’s managed to cook in the half-baked kitchen of this unfinished structure.

Home is the jealous new paara, neighbourhood, who estranges you from old friends and the loving playground with its consolatory offer of a cricket-colonized back street and stock loneliness.

Home is the keen, encouraging listener of your early-morning and late-evening riyaaz that mother helps add melody to with the harmonium she buys you off months of savings.

Home is the generous open terrace that grows in personality as you do in age – as your study-time ally in your yet-to-be-teen, mellow winter afternoons; as the host of a star-draped night sky beckoning you to let go in your ambivalent early 20s; as your gym and fitness partner later, when you do learn to let go.

Home is the comforting pal your grandfather brings you back to from the bus stop every evening after school. It’s where grandma waits with hot food and a listening ear for all your school stories, helping you bridge the interval until mother returns from work.

Home is the trusted ally you make your way back to, having survived an attack by gunmen in a public space, to hug your grandma, sick with worry. In the days to follow, home makes you an accelerated learner of what political revenge means even as your eyes adjust to the sight of blood on the streets you call paara.

Home is the saboteur who smashes that trust and hurtles you into the dark, suffocating dungeon of an empty house after making you witness the deaths of your grandparents for two years in a row.

Home is the traitor who makes you grow up while you’re still an adolescent without allowing you the time or the technique for the messy transition.

Home is the embarrassing hole in the bedsheet you cover with a folded quilt that you desperately hope wouldn’t shift when your university friends come over to your house to plan a trip.

Home is the sterile mate you’ve lost all love for but continue to live with, your days drained of élan vital, your nights a concert hall for sleep-snuffing nightmares.

Home, after years, no, a whole decade, is finally the conciliatory collaborator who invites you to work from home – with your mother, now retired from work, filling up all the hollows your grandparents’ departure had cleaved into its spaces.

Home is the humble plot of land your grandma bought, even if it’s no longer the house she built. Her breath moves through the guava tree she planted, still rooted to the faithful backyard soil and alights on your skin as a butterfly every time you fly back.

Home is a detective plot that can only unravel in back stories. Each flicker of memory is evidence of the scraps that went into constructing this labyrinth. Every solution is wisdom distilled only in hindsight.

Photo by Andreea Ch on Pexels.com