The sonnet has been the vehicle for many different ideas and agendas. In the 13th century Sicilian court of Frederick II, where it emerged with poet Giacomo da Lentini, it was an expression of courtly love. But as it spread all over Europe in the subsequent centuries, it proved to be a versatile form that could change shape and subject with equal ease. Perhaps this is what allowed it to remain popular even in the 20th century and resist the tyranny of free verse. While many poets around the world have experimented with the sonnet in different languages, Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets (1979) and Vikram Seth’s verse-novel The Golden Gate (1986) are possibly the most ambitious projects of these.

British-Indian writer Farrukh Dhondy’s Grannies, Groins and Growing Up (Bite-Sized Books, UK, 2020) explores the art of autobiography through sonnets. As the sub-title of the book informs us, these are his “early memories”. Dhondy, who was born in Pune, studied at Cambridge, and now lives in London, has had a rather active life. His literary output stretches across genres — fiction (novels and short stories, including adult fiction), nonfiction (which includes besides his journalism a biography of C.L.R. James), translation (most notably of Rumi), and drama. He has also written the screenplays of films, such as Bandit Queen (1994). Besides writing, he has also been an activist for workers’ rights and race equity through his association with the British Black Panthers and Race Today.

Grannies, Groins and Growing Up does not, however, exploit this rich and instead concentrates on his growing-up years in India. It comprises 23 short sonnet cycles, each exploring an episode of his early years. Some of these recollect personal — or borrowed — memories, such as the Partition:

This swarm of poor refugees betrayed
By this tragic carving up of the land
Which had for several centuries displayed
Enmities and cruel hatreds out of hand.

Yes, Hindus, Sikh and Muslims in the past
Had fought and killed and India’s history
Was bloody. But why should this bloodthirst last
Into the modern world and century?

But these are second-hand thoughts I admit –
Contemplation of things I never saw.
My sister who had just turned five said it
Remained an early memory, a raw

Recollection of shouts and women’s screams
Which perhaps came back in untitled dreams.

Even though these are second-hand memories, they reflect how Partition continues to have considerable social and political significance even now. It is an academically researched fact that the Partition continues to haunt generations in the subcontinent that have only inherited memories of it.

Using poetry to recollect memories allows Dhondy to access not only his but also others’ memories. The opening poem of the collection, “A Further Education”, explores how his mother’s teacher convinced his grandfather to allow her to pursue higher education:

Mum graduated from a Parsi school
(Endowed by Parsis) with an English Head
Called Miss Amery whose insistence led
To defiance of my grandfather’s rule.

Miss Amery came riding coach and horses
To the middle-class Parsi neighbourhood
To persuade my granddad that degree courses
In History or Law or English would

Enhance his daughter’s prospects for a good
Match to an educated, well-born boy
Though she really believed women should
Stand on their own feet – this was just a ploy.

Miss Amery’s visit was indiscreet;
No white woman had stepped into our street.

Senior journalist Coomi Kapoor in her recent history of Parsis in India, The Tatas, Freddie Mercury & Other Bawas (Westland, Chennai, 2021), writes: “Progressive Parsi women can take the credit for breaking many glass ceilings for Indian women.” She gives the example of Cornelia Sorabji (the first woman to graduate from Bombay University), Mithan Jamshed Lam (first Indian woman barrister), Freany K.R. Cama and many others. Dhondy’s poem gives us a personal glimpse into this historical moment of the early 20th century when Parsi women were breaking or challenging the glass ceiling.

His own memories are, of course, full of colour and rather funny. In “Records”, a sequence of 12 sonnets, he recollects spending summer holidays in Kanpur with his sister Zareen:

So in the 50s Zareen and I went
To Kanpur for our summer holidays
To our beautiful house on Havelock Way
In the old Raj streets of the cantonment

In Kanpur there were good friends we would meet
In summer, Diwali or Christmas breaks
For friendship, intrigue, trysts and some heartache.
Pop music was the language of the street

Songs from Indian films and from the West
And all our indoor gatherings were spent
Around record players – adolescent
Conceits and rhythms merging in the breast

Of each one of us. My sister Zareen
Was considered our circle’s beauty Queen.

Senior theatre and cinema actor Dolly Thakore recollects spending her summer vacations in Kanpur with Farrukh and Zarine Dhondy in her recent tell-all autobiography, Regrets, None (HarperCollins, 2021): “Our summer distractions were Zarine and Froggy (Farrukh) Dhondy. Their parents were in Kanpur on an army posting, and they’d come every summer from Wadia College in Pune… They were the smart Poona Pack. They knew the good songs, the new ones.”

While Thakore goes on to also recollect Dhondy’s daring elopement with writer and activist Mala Roy several years later, Dhondy himself makes no mention of it — or his illustrious career — in his poems in this volume. This could disappoint his readers. Also, the cycles of sonnets can get monotonous — some of the rhyming, meter, and line breaks can also come across as awkward or requiring a rewrite. For instance, the third sonnet in “Records” begins:

My sister took her selection of hits
On holidays to where our army dad
Was posted at the time. He and mum had
To follow his regiment to where its

Fortunes took it.

These are simply two prose sentences — and not really great ones — broken up into ten-syllable lines. The caesura or pause in the third line of the first stanza has no evident poetic merit. This causes a reader to ask: Why is this a sonnet and not a free-verse poem?

And, finally, while the bite-sized memories in each sonnet can be funny, they don’t really pack in much more. One is hopeful that there will possibly be a sequel with more interesting stories.

Uttaran Das Gupta’s novel Ritual was published last year; he teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. Das Gupta writes a fortnightly column on poetry, ‘Verse Affairs’, for The Wire.

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