Smitha Sehgal’s Brown God’s Child: Divine, Dissonant, and Rooted
Navanita Varadpande explores the evocative verses of Smitha Sehgal’s Brown God’s Child. This review dives into her erbacce-prizewinning poetry, blending Malabar roots with bold explorations of identity, womanhood, and social justice.
Brown God’s Child is an anthology of seventy-four verses written by Smitha Sehgal, a legal professional and poet who chants her way into the hearts of readers. She was deservedly named a ‘Featured Poet’ in the erbacce Poetry Prize 2025. Sehgal weaves poetry with an earthy quill dipped in rain-soaked words that exude the fragrance of petrichor, the briny sea, ripe paddy, salted mackerel, the soul of Malabar, and the mustiness of antiquity, all marinated in a rich gravy of deeply layered metaphors, allegories, and luminous imagery.
Reading Smitha Sehgal is like stepping into a world that smells of rain on laterite soil, ancient and absolutely new at once. Her poems in Brown God’s Child are not well-mannered; they burn slow, hum deep, and wink when you least expect it. In the title poem, “Brown God’s Child,” even the name feels like a rebellion. Sehgal isn’t interested fitting into standard poetic moulds, she’s too busy dragging the divine out of urbanised temples and setting it loose in the wild. “Brown God’s Child” touches a sensitive chord- dark skin, tangled hair, and ancestral language are worn like armour against a world that sneers and mocks. It confronts racism, marginalisation of language, and the everyday torture of being “othered.” Her gods have skin the colour of burnt caramel and hunger for “flame-torched cassava and salted mackerel.” And just when you think you’ve found her rhythm, Sehgal flips it. Her language comes alive, almost ancient and alive, carrying the mixed blood of two worlds, “half Sanskrit, half Dravidian.”
Another poem that hits home is “Perimenopause.” If “Brown God’s Child” is about identity, this one is a ritual, messy, organic, and queerly beautiful. Sehgal opens with, “looping around a poem I became / a pole dancer hoping to turn into a lyric.” You can’t help but grin, then pause, because behind that playful image sits a truth every woman recognizes, we’re all spinning, trying to turn pain into art, chaos into grace. The poem is drenched in storm and memory, full of milk and loss, “my breasts full of milk that would solidify into a white hardness.” In one line, Sehgal folds motherhood, mortality, and metaphor together like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And by the time she writes, “turning my womb into a red marsh,” menopause stops sounding like an ending. It becomes transformation, raw, sacred, alive. Sehgal doesn’t treat the female body as tragedy; she treats it as landscape that is wild, shifting, fertile with meaning. Her poetry is what happens when myth and womanhood sit down together over a strong filter coffee, roll their eyes at the world, and start telling the truth.
In the poem “Sita”, Sehgal doesn’t portray her as a docile forest-wandering goddess waiting for divine rescue, “Each day you feed your failures with fire…” and Sita is seen to “harness the betrayals and turn them into sunlight” and “dip a finger in the wounds of time, struggling not to die. A mimosa flower.” The imagery is deep, Sita is not just from the Earth, she is the Earth, volcanic, unbothered, and too luminous to be anyone else. In “Drumstick Flowers” Vasanthi expresses the terror that women harbour in their hearts, their fear of dark nights when “she talks of the drunk cop gambling in the courtyard, she’s afraid of nights…” The poem opens with something mundane and gentle, “Drumstick flowers, sautéed o’er high flame, here,” a line that puts us in a woman’s world of daily ritual, resilience, pedestrian talk. But beneath that surface of ordinary life runs a world of exhaustion, fear, and anguish, “she’s afraid of nights”. Sehgal writes down another saga of how “a goddess drowns.” The agony and the trauma of a woman being desecrated, yet again seeps into us, when fear lurks in the form of a person of law who is supposed to protect us.
Another poem, that nudged me into introspection, leaving a sweet ache in my heart is Smitha Sehgal’s invocation to Kamala Das, the fearless and honest poet, who turned female desire and loneliness into art. In the first line of “For Kamala Das” Smitha pays homage to her and confesses, “Kamala, I too want to feed a lover by hand, drift into sleep by the river.” It’s a yearning for love that’s spontaneous, tactile and unashamed. The image that Sehgal creates with the words, “in the secret knowledge being light, a bird or a fish” is breathtaking! The poet wants to immerse herself in love that dissolves boundaries between the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. It’s like an epistle to Kamala Das, filled with the desire to love but the poem closes in self-doubt, “Alas, I do not know to love or be the beloved.” Yet again Sehgal’s style of writing is reflected here, lyrical yet restrained, sensual yet spiritual.
With the celebration of Durga Puja just gone by, the poem called “Durga’s Homecoming” touches a raw nerve, that as women we have always felt but is often hushed. In our world of shameful contradictions, the same culture that revers the divine feminine also builds silence around the suffering of women. The poem opens with piety, “In the soft eyes of prayers/ the oil lamps wake till dawn/Goddess arrives to the beat of dhak/ clang of cymbals and war cry/of the conch shells” but gradually the tone changes, devastatingly. By the final stanza divinity is dissolved into mortal reality, “Count grass and rice grains/in 108 numbers, as many names/of women gone missing.” We offer ‘pushpanjali’ with one hand while scrolling past news of sexual assault with the other. Sehgal’s poem forces us to sit in that hypocrisy. The goddess arrives to the beat of ‘dhak’, but the war cry of the conch shell also echoes another war the one waged daily against women’s bodies. In Sehgal’s world, Durga isn’t just the ten-armed warrior on a lion; she’s also the woman with cracked heels walking home from work, the girl who never made it back from the sugarcane fields. Through her poems in Brown God’s Child, Sehgal keeps dragging the sacred down to earth not to defile it, but to remind us it was always human.
The title of the poem “No Singing” immediately sets the tone for what is to be expected in the forthcoming stanzas- suggesting an imposed silence after perhaps violence or grief. The poet crafts a poem rich in layers, that moves between memory, silence and trauma. Smitha speaks of violation of a child’s body that is often hushed due to societal pressure. “His thick fat fingers grazed/my waist once, / before I broke away abrupt/ to play hopscotch,” here ‘hopscotch’ is a symbol of childhood innocence, a coping mechanism as the child leaps away from trauma into her simple, unadulterated world of play and games. Smitha’s specialty lies in the unsaid words that reach the readers, as they fill in the horror. She turns an everyday Indian home into a space of suppressed violence, childhood abuse and inherited trauma. The transition of the poem from sound to silence, childhood to withdrawal, a living entity to a dead soul, is sadly so relatable.
“A Poem for Delhi” isn’t your usual touristy ode to the capital- Sehgal tows you through the lanes of Chandni Chowk, where the poet Mirza Ghalib once lived- the poem smells of old blood, bread and heartbreak; she drags you through the alleys of old Delhi, “On the filigreed alcoves of Jama Masjid where inconceivable stars descend for the night,” makes you sit by Humayun’s tomb, and leaves you staring at the black sky over Nizamuddin- an elegy written as a tribute to a city layered with history, grief, and splendour. Its closing line, “All this moon we spilled in silence” lingers like an afterthought of love and loss, bearing the inexpressible intimacy between the poet and the city.
Smitha Sehgal’s poetry doesn’t politely knock, it kicks off its slippers, walks right in smelling of salt, jasmine, and that first monsoon rain that leaves you overwhelmed, as your eyes well up with tears of awe. Brown God’s Child isn’t her trying out her voice, it’s her turning the mic up and saying, “Listen.” Her words rise from the deep well of memory and the strength of women who’ve weathered more storms than they deserved, yet they pause to marvel at the sea. In the poem “Between My Country and Theirs”, she writes, “we sow poems on the skin of dead earth, hoping for tulips to rise again.” That’s exactly what she does, writes about agony, waters it with honesty, and grows something that makes you feel the words to the core, all at once.
Book Details:
- Title: Brown God’s Child
- Author: Smitha Sehgal
- Publisher: Erbacce Press
- Release Date: 2025
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9781912455539
- Pages: 100 pages
- Price: 639INR
- Where to buy: https://midlandthebookshop.com/product/brown-gods-child
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