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Sujata Bhatt writes from the space between languages and continents — born in Ahmedabad, raised between India and the United States, long resident in Germany — and her poetry turns that in-between condition into a living question: what happens to the mother tongue when another language takes over the mouth, the page, and the public world? This lesson traces her journey through the major collections (beginning with the prize-winning Brunizem), the central themes of linguistic survival, diasporic identity, and postcolonial history, and two of her most studied poems, “Search for My Tongue” and “A Different History,” so that readers can see how a single poet makes the politics of language feel intimate, bodily, and urgent.
Sujata Bhatt: Language, Identity & the Living Tongue
Diaspora, hybridity, and the postcolonial lyric · Literature · Contemporary Poetry
Learning Objectives
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Locate Sujata Bhatt in the landscape of contemporary Indian-English and diasporic poetry
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Identify her major collections, key awards, and the central place of Brunizem
3
Explain the twin themes of linguistic identity and postcolonial hybridity in “Search for My Tongue” and “A Different History”
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Recognise Bhatt’s free-verse style, sensory imagery, and deliberate mixing of Gujarati and English
5
Discuss why her work remains urgent for questions of mother tongue, migration, and the politics of language
Tip: Bhatt’s poems often feel intimate and confessional, yet they open onto large historical and political questions. Keep both scales in view.
Who is Sujata Bhatt?
Sujata Bhatt was born on 6 May 1956 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and spent her early childhood in Pune. In 1968 her family emigrated to the United States. She studied philosophy and English at Goucher College (B.A. 1980) and earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1986.
She later lived in Canada as a visiting writer, married the German writer and radio producer Michael Augustin in 1988, and has long been based in Bremen, Germany, while continuing to move between cultures and continents.
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Gujarati is her mother tongue — the “deepest layer” of her identity — yet English became the primary language of her daily life and of her poetry.
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She describes herself as both Indian and American, and as someone who feels like an outsider wherever she is — a perspective that sharpens her observations of every culture she inhabits.
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She has translated Gujarati poetry into English and has also worked with German; her poems sometimes interweave languages on the page.
In her own words: “Sometimes I see myself as Indian in the world… or someone floating in the diaspora. I also see myself as American… I think I’m both Indian and American. I wouldn’t like to think of myself as a half-person.”
Indian-English, not Anglo-Indian: Bhatt insists on writing “Indian-English rather than Anglo-Indian poetry.” The distinction matters: her English is shaped by Indian experience and often carries the pressure of other languages inside it.
Major Works & Awards
Bhatt’s debut collection established her reputation at once. Subsequent books deepened her exploration of memory, the body, myth, and the politics of language.
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Brunizem (1988) — First collection. Title refers to a type of soil; the book is rooted in Indian memory while already crossing continents. Contains “Search for My Tongue,” “A Different History,” “Muliebrity,” and “Go to Ahmedabad.”
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Monkey Shadows (1991) — Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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The Stinking Rose (1995) — Shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize.
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Point No Point (1997) — Selected poems.
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Augatora (2000), A Colour for Solitude (2002), Pure Lizard (2008, Forward shortlist), Collected Poems (2013, Poetry Book Society Special Commendation).
Major awards: Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for Brunizem; Cholmondeley Award (1991); Italian Tratti Poetry Prize (2000); German Literature Award Das neue Buch (2008); Mexican International Poetry Prize (2014).
Note: Early poems also addressed subjects then considered taboo in much Indian women’s poetry — pregnancy, childbirth, female desire — with a frankness that felt ahead of its time.
Key Themes
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Language & Mother Tongue — The fear of losing Gujarati, the pressure of English, and the possibility that the mother tongue survives underground and returns in dreams and in poetry.
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Diaspora & Hybrid Identity — Living between India, the United States, and Germany; refusing the idea of being a “half-person”; inventing an identity that is liminal yet complete.
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Postcolonial History — The violence of the “oppressor’s tongue,” the sacredness of books in Indian culture, and the paradox that later generations may come to love the language once used to dominate them.
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Memory & Place — Childhood Ahmedabad and Pune, the sensory intensity of India recalled from abroad, the refusal to turn lived experience into mere exotic metaphor.
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The Female Body & Desire — Poems that speak of pregnancy, childbirth, and erotic experience with clarity and without apology.
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Myth & Cultural Crossing — Greek and Hindu figures placed side by side (Pan emigrating to India), showing that gods and stories also migrate.
Through-line: Bhatt never treats cultural difference as neat irony or easy nostalgia. She stays with the friction — the two tongues in the mouth, the love for a language that once oppressed, the memory that refuses to stay in the past.
Spotlight: “Search for My Tongue”
One of Bhatt’s best-known poems, from Brunizem. It stages the crisis of a speaker who feels she has “lost” her mother tongue under the pressure of a foreign language, only to discover that the mother tongue returns — in dreams, in the body, in the poem itself.
You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue…
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue…
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Form: The poem moves between English and Gujarati (script and/or transliteration). The visual and sonic presence of Gujarati on the page is itself an argument: the mother tongue is not merely remembered; it is enacted.
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Central metaphor: The tongue as both physical organ and language. Losing a tongue is almost a bodily mutilation; regaining it is a kind of rebirth.
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Resolution: The fear of permanent loss proves unfounded. The mother tongue “grows back” — stronger for having been threatened — and the speaker realises she cannot truly forget it.
Why it matters: The poem gives dramatic, bodily form to the experience of many bilingual and diasporic speakers. It refuses the idea that one language must simply replace another; instead it insists on the possibility of living with more than one tongue.
It resists the demand (implicit in many assimilationist cultures) that the “foreign tongue” should erase the mother tongue. By writing the struggle in both languages, Bhatt asserts that English need not be a language of pure loss; it can also be the site where the mother tongue is recovered and defended.
Spotlight: “A Different History”
Also from Brunizem, this poem moves from a celebration of Indian sacredness (books as living beings, gods that still roam) to a sharp confrontation with colonial language and its afterlife.
Great Pan is not dead;
he simply emigrated
to India.
he simply emigrated
to India.
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First movement: In India it is a sin to be rude to a book; paper is treated with reverence. Gods (including a migrated Pan) still walk the land. Culture is alive, continuous, and non-Christian-centric.
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Turn: “Which language / has not been the oppressor’s tongue?” The poem asks whether any language is innocent of violence, then confronts the specific history of colonial English in India.
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The paradox: After the “soul has been cropped / with a long scythe,” the unborn grandchildren nevertheless “grow to love that strange language.” Love and oppression share the same tongue.
Self-reflexive irony: The poem itself is written in English — the “oppressor’s tongue” that Bhatt’s ancestors encountered under the Raj. By using English to question English, Bhatt performs the very hybridity the poem describes.
Key insight: Language is not inherently murderous; it becomes a weapon in particular hands. Yet once imposed, it can also be appropriated, loved, and turned back against the history that forced it into place.
Style, Voice & Legacy
Bhatt’s free verse is often described as fast-moving, urgent with narrative, and softly spoken. She favours clear, conversational diction that can suddenly open into dense sensory or mythic imagery.
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Free verse & urgency — No rigid metre; the line breaks follow the breath and the thought. The effect is intimacy and forward motion.
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Multilingual texture — Gujarati (and occasionally other languages) appears inside English poems, challenging the hegemony of Standard English and making the page itself a site of cultural encounter.
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Sensory precision — Smell, touch, heat, dust, the body in labour or desire: Bhatt’s images are concrete and often drawn from childhood India or from the natural world.
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Confessional yet outward — Personal memory becomes a way of thinking about history, gender, and language politics, not an end in itself.
Legacy: Bhatt is a central figure in late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Indian-English poetry and in the wider literature of the South Asian diaspora. Her work is widely anthologised, translated into more than twenty languages, and taught for its lucid confrontation with the politics of the tongue.
Discussion:
If a language once used to oppress can also become a language of love, art, and critique, what responsibilities does that place on the writer who chooses to write in it?
Try this: Read “Search for My Tongue” aloud, including any Gujarati passages you can. Notice how the sound of the second language changes the emotional temperature of the English that surrounds it.
Knowledge Check
1. Sujata Bhatt’s mother tongue is:
2. Her first collection, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), is titled:
3. In “Search for My Tongue,” the speaker ultimately discovers that:
4. “A Different History” ends by reflecting on the paradox that:
Flashcards
Click a card to flip it.
Sujata Bhatt
Indian-born poet (b. 1956); writes in English with Gujarati layers; lives between cultures
Brunizem
1988 debut collection; won Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) & Alice Hunt Bartlett Award
Mother tongue
For Bhatt: Gujarati — the “deepest layer” of identity, always at risk of being overshadowed
Search for My Tongue
Poem of linguistic crisis and recovery; mother tongue returns after seeming lost
A Different History
Poem on sacred books, colonial language, and the paradox of loving the oppressor’s tongue
Indian-English
Bhatt’s preferred term: poetry in English shaped by Indian experience, not Anglo-Indian imitation
Diasporic identity
Living between places and languages; Bhatt refuses the idea of being a “half-person”
Oppressor’s tongue
Phrase from “A Different History”: language used as a tool of domination that later generations may still come to love
