Silver Years: Poetry from 50 Senior Indian Women
Silver Years, an immersive poetry anthology, offers a rare honesty from 50 senior Indian women poets. Their verses, filled with memory and resilience, distill legacies and challenge perceptions of aging with grace and grit.
A careful reading of this immersive anthology of poems, Silver Years, feels less like leafing through pages of ordinary poetry and more like sitting at the feet of elders whose every word is laced with memory, resistance, and hard-earned grace. There’s a rare kind of honesty in these poems, the kind that only comes after a lifetime of living completely, working hard, and seeing the world change around you. These poets aren’t just writing poems; they’re distilling legacies. These are not quiet reflections or mere observations. These are words of resilience and inspiration, mirroring a quiet resolution to stand firm against all odds, from women who have stood their grounds in their lives and careers, choosing poetry as a form of fearless expression. Now here’s an anthology that doesn’t whisper from the bookshelf, it stands up, adjusts its reading glasses, and clears its throat with poise. Silver Years is a luminous gathering of 50 senior Indian women poets (yes, sixty-plus and not remotely slowing down), who are clearly not in the business of clichés. With 163 poems between them, these women write like they’ve lived. From India and across the globe, their voices carry the heft of memory, resilience, and a touch of tenderness.
The introduction to Silver Years: Senior Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry is an eloquent, richly layered preface to a beautifully woven anthology of poems, thoughtfully edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Malashri Lal, and Anita Nahal. It contextualizes the collection not simply as a literary project but as a cultural and generational milestone. This is not an average anthology filled with polite verses about fading flowers. These poems stare back in defiance. They reflect the lives of women who’ve played every role society threw at them, that of – daughters, wives, daughters-in-law, mothers, grandmothers, caregivers, CEOs of domestic chaos, juggling household chores and their professional commitments. What’s delightful is how the “silver” in these silver years doesn’t signal decline, it’s a kind of gleaming rebellion. The tone across the collection is quietly assertive, sometimes cheeky, often profound. These women are done asking for permission. They write with a clarity that comes from having nothing left to prove, only something to say. So, if you thought age meant fading into the background, this anthology is here to politely (or not so politely) correct you. With grace, grit, and chutzpah.
Sunday mornings are usually those sacred pockets of time we guard like a favourite lipstick shade: rare, comforting, and not to be smudged. But in Amita Ray’s “A Sunday Morning”, that illusion is expertly shattered before we’ve even finished our first cup of tea. What begins as a soft portrait of leisure, joggers, birdsong, tea gently tinkling in china, rapidly turns into a quiet horror show, courtesy of the day’s headlines. A rape, a suicide, and that haunting phrase: “The serene Sunday morning disintegrates.” Ray’s strength lies in the swift sabotage of comfort, how she slides the brutal into the beautiful, like a knife hidden in silk.
There is a marked distinction between reading a poem and being viscerally confronted by one. Anita Nahal’s “We are the Kali Women” does not enter gently; it does not arrive adorned in metaphorical silk or perfumed with delicate verse. Rather, it commands attention, like a goddess who walks in with mud on her feet, blood in her throat, and the unflinching presence of someone who has long ceased to seek permission. From its opening lines, the poem introduces a haunting refrain: “There’s nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.” The irony is piercing. The reader is immediately aware, alongside the poet, that everything is, in fact, deeply wrong. This repetition is not reassurance but an accusation. It is a reflection of a world that systematically denies the lived realities of women, gender-nonconforming bodies, and all those marked as “too dark,” “too loud,” or otherwise inconvenient to social norms. With “We Are the Kali Women”, Anita Nahal offers not merely a poem, but a reckoning. It is a confrontation with entrenched systems of oppression, a challenge to the aestheticization of suffering, and above all, a declaration that the time for silence is long past. And then there’s the skin, ‘kali’ skin, dark skin, that becomes its own battleground. The bilingual strain of the poem, aptly punctuated with Hindi words to pack a punch further accentuates the strength of the poem. The poet’s voice moves between pain and irony: “My skin disgusts you. Yet you try to tan yours.” They recoil, then exoticize. They praise Ma Kali, but mock her worshippers. The hypocrisy is thick enough to choke on, but Nahal doesn’t let you look away. Not even for a second.
“Ma Kali. Ma Kali. Ma Kali. Don’t think she’s not watching.”
This poem isn’t just a chant, it’s an indictment. Of patriarchy, of casteism, of colourism, of everything we politely ignore to keep things comfortable. It’s fierce, lyrical, unrelenting, and honest in a way that most writing today is afraid to be.
Anju Makhija’s “Greying Follicles” and Anita Nahal’s “I Am a New Aging Woman” both shine a light on the tricky business of aging, but with flair. Makhija’s verse is laced with gentle humour and surreal snapshots, as if old age were a storybook slightly ajar. Nahal, on the other hand, marches in donning colorful spectacle frames and a firm “no thanks” to eyeliner and small talk. One poem reflects, the other declares, yet both reject invisibility. Age, here, is not a soft fade but a bold stroke of colour and clarity. Forget denial, these poets age with attitude, not apology. Smita Agarwal’s “At Sixty-Three” and Snigdha Agarwal’s “It’s Not the End” echo a shared thread that runs subtly through the entire anthology, a reflection on ageing, resilience, and the quiet courage of carrying on.
Another poem that stirs the heart is “Silent Communication” by Asha Viswas. “Silent Communication” is not just a poem, it’s a quiet, aching vigil. As a daughter-turned-caregiver, she maps the sacred reversal of roles with heartbreaking tenderness. The poem hums with the unsaid: eyes doing the talking, hands remembering, silences filled with a love too vast for grammar. There’s no drama here, just the raw poetry of feeding a mother who once fed you, until even that is taken away. Yet, Viswas captures the fierce grace of presence, of showing up with soul instead of speeches. It’s what caregiving often is: a wordless exchange, an invisible thread, a love that outlasts language.
Basabi Fraser’s poems glide between the intimate and the political with the quiet strength of a woman who knows when to whisper and when to roar. Whether it’s the tender guilt of not offering tea to a proud, passing stranger, or the lyrical defiance of “The Woman Speaks”, Fraser claims space, with grace. Her sunflower-bearing woman stares down violence with seeds of hope, while “Winter Homecoming” celebrates silence and seasonal patience. These are poems of soft rebellion, careful observations, and layered emotions. Fraser doesn’t shout, but her words echo, especially in rooms where women have long been unheard or unseen.
Jharna Sanyal’s poems leave a quiet ache, like the kind that settles in when you return to a place you once called home and realise it no longer fits. “Of Houses and Homes Today” speaks of displacement layered with pandemic anxiety, migration, and the heartbreak of a child cradling a bar of soap like it’s hope itself. In “Bheempalasi”, the sting hits harder, the home is lost not to time, but to history’s cruelty. A sister’s unfinished raga becomes a ghost-note echoing through a post-Partition void. Sanyal doesn’t romanticize loss; she lets it settle like dust on familiar floors. Her tone is calm, but the grief is volcanic. In her world, home isn’t where the heart is, it’s where it once hoped to be. The patio in, “The Backyard Patio in Arlington” brick-layered nostalgia in suburban America, where traditionally spiced “tandooried lobsters” meet mojitos is the place where memories are grilled with the kebabs. Jharna Sanyal’s poem is not just about moving house, it’s about what refuses to move: the laughter, the Baul and Rafi tunes, the “return or not to return” debates marinated over decades. This isn’t a metaphor anymore, it’s lived, lugged, and layered like the suitcases we pretend are light. The poem captures the chaos and comfort of diasporic living, equal parts heart and heartburn. And that patio? Not Craig’s list-worthy, but priceless? It’s the adda-space of a generation that packs homes in carry-ons and still forgets nothing. Jharna Sanyal’s words are woven together with great aplomb and deft-
This patio is another space
we map on to our nomadic life, –
sharing its border with the hopscotch ground
we’ve left behind in the cloud … monsoons ago.
Aging is inevitable, it is like a plot twist no one asked for but everyone has to endure. Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca’s poems feel like opening your mother’s jewelry box and finding receipts, nostalgia, and a bird feather. “Empty Nest” aches with maternal love and abandonment, where even magpies seem to understand more than your grown kids.
They are just birds, they do what birds do
They fly away.
“Insight” is a winter survival manual with mittens, boots, musings, hope and a positive outlook towards growing old. The poem “Once Upon a Time?” is akin to all of us on the local train of life, standing, stumbling, and discussing knee pain over biryani and samosas. Kavita Mendonca dwells upon “old-age” as her father’s optimism seeps into her veins, goading her on to move ahead in this journey of life.
At each stage I remember my father’s words
‘Happiness is a choice’, he said
Ever the endless optimist
His belief cheers the winding track
Hope seeps into my veins by osmosis.
With dry wit and a poet’s gaze, Kavita wraps memory and mortality in warmth, and just a pinch of salt.
Malashri Lal’s poems don’t scream for attention, they stay with you, quietly. Reading her is like unfolding an old silk sari that’s been in the family for years, creases and all, it carries stories you didn’t even know were there. “Book of Doubts” makes me feel oddly guilty about the books I’ve given away over the years. “Jaipur Bazar” sparkles in just a few lines. “Kashmir One Morning” holds a silence that says more than most headlines. And “Krishna’s Flute”, it hums, gently, like something sacred drifting through the soul of a tired city. Her writing doesn’t chase drama. It lingers, like a faint trace of perfume in an old drawer.
Navamalati Chakraborty’s “We Have Our Sky” reads like a steady, assured assertion rather than a loud protest. There’s something quietly firm in her tone, a refusal to bow to outdated norms, paired with a graceful claiming of space that doesn’t ask for approval. Let’s “Wind the Clock Again” is quietly defiant. It speaks of choosing quality over longevity, clarity over convention.
The fact that it grates my entirety to see people
Pity the seat where I am rooted to in life;
Make me show them my comfort and my scars,
Being troubled or unhappy is not my legacy.
Come friends, let’s wind the clock back again.
With grace and steel, Navamalati rejects pity, embraces truth, and reclaims time, not to relive the past, but to live more fully. A wise, moving reminder: it’s never too late to begin again.
Reading Sanjukta Dasgupta’s poems feels like chancing upon an enchanted mirror in a heritage house, an intricately carved, antique mirror that does not lie. Her writing is unsparing, yet kind. With a style as honest and precise as a well-cut diamond, clear, sharp, and impossible to ignore, she makes ageing feel like both a quiet rebellion and a whispered truth we all pretend not to hear.
In the poem “When Winter Comes”, the metaphors land with gentle brutality, knees wobble, minds fog, and time presses on without a pause button-
But the wheels of time
Turn ceaselessly
No reverse gear
In such an intimate Winter
As time spreads its grip, there is “No time to spring back to Spring.
The poem “Fall” reverberates with the rhythm of an impending end, where the words “fall” and “fail” set the tone for a slow, deliberate descent into the hush of finality. With imagery both tangible and sardonic, a tortoise neck with “countless rings of recorded time” where a swan’s once was, arms trembling like marshmallows, “the skin droops from the flesh and joints like an oversized overcoat,” the poem moves with the quiet resignation of someone who’s seen too much to protest. It doesn’t lament; it observes. And in that stillness, in that nonchalant tone, lies the pain of everything quietly slipping away.
“Departure” reads like a last sigh held too long. The poem “Crowning Worry” is uplifting and inspiring for the likes of me dealing with a midlife crisis- the insufferable anxiety of greying roots and the anguish of colouring my hair as soon as I spot the silver streaks that sprout out faster than the spreading of coronavirus. The lines are so relatable:
Silver waved among blackened hair
Like flags of treachery
Flashing grin of metallic strands
‘It is a losing battle’
The silver strands chuckled gleefully
However, Sanjukta Dasgupta’s “Crowning Worry” has miraculously helped me in doing away with my crowning woes and has goaded me on to wear my streaks of silver with pride and love.
Black and blonde tresses howled
In low self-esteem, utter frustration
And massive bi-polar manic depression
As the Grey Gorgeous divas
Grinned and Glowed
That’s the power of poetry that emanate from the pens of stalwarts, women with depth and wisdom, the power to exonerate other women from self-inflicted fears and insecurity.
Sanjukta Dasgupta doesn’t try to soften the blow of ageing. She serves it with dignity, a dry chuckle, and a fierce kind of grace. Her words don’t beg to be remembered, they just refuse to leave. She reminds us that mortality isn’t morbid; it’s inevitable. But yes, if we’re going down, we might as well do it with silver hair, sarcasm intact, and a poem in our pockets.
The poems in this anthology help in reflecting lived truths while lighting the way through the shifting landscape of age, memory, and meaning. The poets write with a clarity sharpened by time and a grace earned through experience. Their voices don’t plead for attention; they command it through silent wisdom, wry humour, and absolute honesty. What emerges is not just a collection of poems, but a chorus of lives well observed and deeply felt, proof that the twilight years can shine with their own fierce, silver light. According to Ingrid Bergman, “Getting old is like climbing a mountain; you get a little out of breath, but the view is much better!” And through the lenses of these phenomenally enlightened women, readers of the 143, lovely poems, will definitely get to enjoy the scenic and dramatic landscape of life.
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