Magadh by Shrikant Verma, trans. Rahul Soni
And Other Stories
Published 7th October 2025.
First UK publication of a key work of Hindi late modernist poetry, this elusive, dreamlike and prophetic epic walks us through the ruins of history to question the future. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award Magadh, Shrikant Verma’s masterpiece, was first published in Hindi in 1984 and is widely regarded as one of the most important works of modern Indian poetry. A chorus of narrators – commoners, statesmen, nameless wanderers – pieces together the histories of ancient cities and kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent, their rise to splendour, their decline and eventual fall. In poems that are stark and urgent yet arch and richly allusive, Verma lays bare their tales of corruption, guilt, ignorance and arrogance. Rahul Soni’s landmark translation stays faithful to the spare, haunting, incantatory cadences of the original, revealing how startlingly prescient and relevant Magadh remains today. ‘Shrikant Verma brought to everything he did, whether poetry or journalism, a coruscating insight into the modes and styles of political supremacy. In Magadh, his collection of verse, excellently translated, we can see, eerily prefigured, our own present: the grand illusions, the raucous vanity, the chronic self-doubt and ultimate fragility of power.’ Pankaj Mishra ‘Forty years after, these poems are more relevant than ever, telling of power’s hollow victories, the peculiar burden of joy, how sorrow finds us wherever we may hide. This luminous translation renders Verma’s classic into timeless English prose. One of its many questions – “Whose corpse is this?†– has been answered by our own ongoing hollow moment: yours and mine.’ Jeet Thayil ‘The poems in Shrikant Verma’s Magadh remind us that power in the kingdom is always decadent, whatever the name of the kingdom. Words spring from the ruins of cities that rise and fall, and Verma’s poems act as interruptions, gadflies, shaking us into altered states. Rahul Soni’s translations render the original Hindi cadences into English deftly, retaining the philosophical and hypnotic quality of the original, setting up a kind of call and response between poet and reader. In an age where there are significant threats to the republics of our imaginations, Verma returns us to the powers of poetry, which is to find ‘a third way’ – reaching to name that which is not easily named.’ Tishani Doshi ‘Magadh. Kashi. Kosambi. Hastinapur. Kapilvastu. Ujjaini. Avanti. Shrikant Verma’s Magadh is about the great cities of the past, imperial or otherwise, that now exist ‘only in name’. Allegorically, Magadh is also about present-day metropolises, Delhi most of all. In the 1970s and 80s, as a member of Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party, Verma knew its political culture at close quarters and played an active role in it. These shimmering cities, with all their corruption, both moral and economic, will go the way of Magadh. They’ll cease to shimmer, then cease altogether. “Horseman, / where does this road go?†Therein lies Verma’s tragic vision. Twentieth-century Indian poetry has seldom been translated as well as Rahul Soni’s rendering of this Hindi classic.’ Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, poet and translator
First UK publication of a key work of Hindi late modernist poetry, this elusive, dreamlike and prophetic epic walks us through the ruins of history to question the future. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award Magadh, Shrikant Verma’s masterpiece, was first published in Hindi in 1984 and is widely regarded as one of the most important works of modern Indian poetry. A chorus of narrators – commoners, statesmen, nameless wanderers – pieces together the histories of ancient cities and kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent, their rise to splendour, their decline and eventual fall. In poems that are stark and urgent yet arch and richly allusive, Verma lays bare their tales of corruption, guilt, ignorance and arrogance. Rahul Soni’s landmark translation stays faithful to the spare, haunting, incantatory cadences of the original, revealing how startlingly prescient and relevant Magadh remains today. ‘Shrikant Verma brought to everything he did, whether poetry or journalism, a coruscating insight into the modes and styles of political supremacy. In Magadh, his collection of verse, excellently translated, we can see, eerily prefigured, our own present: the grand illusions, the raucous vanity, the chronic self-doubt and ultimate fragility of power.’ Pankaj Mishra ‘Forty years after, these poems are more relevant than ever, telling of power’s hollow victories, the peculiar burden of joy, how sorrow finds us wherever we may hide. This luminous translation renders Verma’s classic into timeless English prose. One of its many questions – “Whose corpse is this?†– has been answered by our own ongoing hollow moment: yours and mine.’ Jeet Thayil ‘The poems in Shrikant Verma’s Magadh remind us that power in the kingdom is always decadent, whatever the name of the kingdom. Words spring from the ruins of cities that rise and fall, and Verma’s poems act as interruptions, gadflies, shaking us into altered states. Rahul Soni’s translations render the original Hindi cadences into English deftly, retaining the philosophical and hypnotic quality of the original, setting up a kind of call and response between poet and reader. In an age where there are significant threats to the republics of our imaginations, Verma returns us to the powers of poetry, which is to find ‘a third way’ – reaching to name that which is not easily named.’ Tishani Doshi ‘Magadh. Kashi. Kosambi. Hastinapur. Kapilvastu. Ujjaini. Avanti. Shrikant Verma’s Magadh is about the great cities of the past, imperial or otherwise, that now exist ‘only in name’. Allegorically, Magadh is also about present-day metropolises, Delhi most of all. In the 1970s and 80s, as a member of Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party, Verma knew its political culture at close quarters and played an active role in it. These shimmering cities, with all their corruption, both moral and economic, will go the way of Magadh. They’ll cease to shimmer, then cease altogether. “Horseman, / where does this road go?†Therein lies Verma’s tragic vision. Twentieth-century Indian poetry has seldom been translated as well as Rahul Soni’s rendering of this Hindi classic.’ Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, poet and translator
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