The Moplah Speaks of the Rivers by Umar Nizarudeen

Umar’s voice is very distinct, singular, and has dualities in it. He braids the elegance of western aesthetics with the profoundness of an inherited sensibility, appealing both to the heart and the cerebrum.

Chandramohan S (Dalit poet writing in English)

A poetry collection that refuses to look away.

This is a collection that moves through fire without flinching. Spanning themes of gender-based trauma, religious identity, and the fractures of Indian social life, the poet weaves together myth, history, and memoir into verse that is by turns brutal, tender, and defiant.

Drawing on figures as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Agha Shahid Ali, Akka Mahadevi, and the Mahatma himself, the poems traverse continents and centuries — from Karbala to Harappa, from a Nashik currency demonetisation queue to a classroom where a teacher’s casual cruelty lingers over young girls. Rape, motherhood, partition, caste are held up to unsparing light, refusing euphemism at every turn.

The title poem and its companion pieces interrogate what it means to belong — to a faith, a body, a nation — when belonging itself has been weaponised. Elsewhere, domestic memory (a mother’s chaddi, a daughter’s innocent question about a word in the dictionary) sits alongside meditations on history’s violent men and the women who survive them.

Unflinching, erudite, and formally restless, The Moplah Speaks of the Rivers is not an easy read — nor does it want to be. It is a reckoning: with faith, with nationhood, with the body, and with the poet’s own complicity in the stories he tells.