On the 25th of January, 2025, as part of the outreach of Sarmaya’s ongoing exhibition High Seas, Open Roads, we hit the town for a Bombay Painters & Poets Crawl. Conceptualised and led by Saranya Subramanian, the crawl kicked off at Flora Fountain. The group wound their way through the alleys and bylanes of Fort, reciting and discussing poetry and artwork by stalwarts such as Gieve Patel, Gulammohammad Sheikh, Bhanu Athaiya, Dilip Chitre, amongst others. Saranya also highlighted the multi-lingual nature of this output, with writers writing in Hindi, Marathi, English, Urdu, Gujarati and Tamil. The crawl concluded with a spirited discussion of the works of the famous artist F.N. Souza.
The group then walked back to Sarmaya, where Pooja Ashokkumar (Research & Curatorial Assistant) took the group on a walk through Sarmaya’s exhibition High Seas, Open Roads.
We ended the evening with some cake, juice and conversation at the archive.
* Saranya Subramanian is the founder of The Bombay Poetry Crawl: an archival research space dedicated to Bombay poets who were writing in and about the city from 1947-1999.