She is currently working on her novel, Gypsy Goddess. Meena Kandasamyis a poet and translator who has performed widely in venues across the world. The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counterpoetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy. Ms Militancy, Meena Kandasamys second collection of poetry, begins with a fiery preface wherein she tells the self-appointed arbiters of morality, decency, and. She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by re-appropriating the hegemonic language in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed. She uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socioaesthetic practice. She has participated in several prestigious literary festivals around the globe and has also been associated with leading international educational institutions worldwide. She is currently working on her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess. Kandasamy is that, for sure, by nurture as much as by nature. Meena holds a PhD in Linguistics and has published two poetry collections, namely Touch and Ms Militancy. The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. Kandasamy herself is a ‘Ms Militant’, said the vice-president of the German PEN Centre, which recently awarded her the Hermann Kesten Prize 2022 for being a fearless fighter for democracy and human rights. These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and sting the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society.

She has written books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporary Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, depoliticised, neatly sterilised. Meena Kandasamy is an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist and translator.

Ms militancy by meena kandasamy