States of the Body Produced By Love by Nisha Ramayya review – a difficult beginning

By Stephanie Sy-Quia for The Guardian

‘I crouch in definitions, ragging lamps’ … Victorian English dictionaries held by the Lee Library of the British Academy. (Image/Credit: Alamy)

Learning the Sanksrit of her forebears with a colonial English dictionary has inspired the poet to explore some challenging questions

Nisha Ramayya’s collection, States of the Body Produced By Love, is a thorny debut, though containing sustained flashes of brilliance. Fans of Maggie Nelson or Anne Carson may find themselves in familiar territory: there is the same impulse for wide-ranging references, the same desire to crack words open and poke around inside them. Ramayya’s concerns, however, are broader than Nelson and Carson’s sorrows in love: as the title suggests, States of the Body addresses ideas of the nation state, Hindu nationalism, British imperialism – and yes, love too.

The collection opens with a long section of prose, much of which explores the metaphorical possibilities of the 10 Mahāvidyās, goddesses who are manifestations of the greater Hindu goddess Satī. Can they be used to illuminate the caste system, Ramayya wonders? “If I’m not careful, I allow them to mean everything,” she writes. “The Mahāvidyās are metaphors, which is where the difficulty begins.”

(Image/Credit: Amazon)

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States of the Body Produced By Love
by Nisha Ramayya
118 pp.
ISBN13: 978-1999675943

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Source:
The Guardian