Reviewer: Navamalati Neog Chakraborty
Published by Penprints- Price Rs 499/ January 2026
Umberto Eco had once said, ‘To survive you must tell stories.’ Thus, since eternity, Grandmothers have always beautifully picked up this role, and it was thus that Mao Jedong in 1960 held the notion that, Women hold up half of the sky. This is a tall claim and Sanjukta Dasgupta has proved its deep inner meaningfulness. Dinosaur Granny’s Story-Poems holds a special dedication to her grand-daughter Ivaana Ubuntu and all kids of the Home and the World, as she, as the granny, steps into the world of grandmas with 71 poems in this collection. Her poems will, (as she knew) resonate with the elders too…Voila! However, she doesn’t speak here of fairies, elves, goblins or even of witches. The twenty-first century children are far more sensibly drawn and technologically far ahead. They will rather have AI.
Thus, Sanjukta would rather speak about Papa walking in to the kitchen with a wry face to find Mom busy with her hand-phone or laptop on the corner table instead of a ladle in hand, where lunch or dinner awaits to be gulped down at a straight go, with none of the relaxed relishes of umpteen number of warm dishes. The world has turned to be a techno-centric hub. Now a 50-year-old is a young thing like Alice to go down a rabbit hole. It is thus that our Granny caught her readers the other way round with tales of Mithu the hen, and Zimbo the red and black cockerel, and if there is the white barn owl there is also Bulbuli the little birdie, or a totally scientifically presented… The chrysalis enclosing the caterpillar/ Burst one morning and out came/ Wonder of wonders/ A glorious yellow butterfly. Aaaah and there the English teacher in her goes ahead to speak of Kafka’s Gregor! A different granny though, a dinosaur!
She, with her dinosaur height, does get dolls and rounds of cafes for Ivaana but books too. And although a granny can never be without the monkeys, baboons, cuckoos, tigers, lions, leopards, there is also a mention of the distant penguins of Antarctica and Butterfly Park. The home never leaves and granny clings on to the guava tree planted by her Baba, the esraj of her own granny, and the Rabindra sangeet sung by her Maa. That’s freedom. The freedom to hold on as easily as one does to rain showers, dewdrops and flying birds. Ubuntu comparing her granny in her UK home to a brown teddy who sits and sits and sits and how belief becomes a criterion for human comfort is all about story time.
And voila! That was what William Faulkner had said. You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. Thus, granny here lost sight of old-story-poems and swam away to the shore of modern-day-poems. She spoke of emojis not being a big draw for vocabulary shrinks even as technology leaps. However, the more we are thus connected the more do we grow isolated. Granny had herself taken some 10,000 photos of her granddaughter, instead of baking that number of cookies to sit down and have them with the little one! That’s the huge change. Yet she never forgets for a tender second, the girlhood home she grew up in Dumdum with her parents that reminded her of Robert Clive’s sly Anglo tricks.
For all that, the imagery of the ‘cage’ holds in her poems as a pointer. With Orwellian logic of ‘Some are more equal’, the poet in her wished verily to let the little ones know that, ‘Some truths in life ring aloud.’ And how can she being a Bong, skip those Bhoots and Harry Potter, or even the Wimpy kid; although in her heart there reigns Nazrul, Netaji, Nehru, Bidhan Roy, Chittaranjan Das and the strong bond with the Jail Museum. That’s actually meant for Granny to tell her grand kids again and again. And that goes for knowing to write a Bijoya letter in Bangla. Nothing dies and the heart alone knows the vibration of Rudra’s tandava. The stray child, the stray dog, Sat side by side on the footpath (from…Hunger in the Metropolis) and as they are a truth, loving grannies too shall always be here as a Thammi who holds on to roots and home and land!
Navamalati Neog Chakraborty
Navamalati Neog Chakraborty has served as a professor of English in Colleges at Kohima, Dimapur and Guwahati. She served as a guest professor at Calcutta University in the Comparative Literature Department. She has translated works of the stalwarts of Assamese Literature – biographies, dramas and novels. She has several anthologies to her name- in English and in Assamese. Navamalati Neog Chakraborty is a bilingual poet, translator, critic and short story writer.