Review of A Thousand Daughters

By Sri Lal

Published by Red River Press, 2026

ISBN: 978-81-996533-3-7 (Paperback)

Price: 349 INR

Language: English, pp. 100

-Vedamini Vikram

There is a word in our language that has almost calcified with use — “daughter.” It arrives pre-loaded with virtue, coddling, “save the girl child” campaigns and education drives, forever synonymous with selflessness and goodness. “Son”, in contrast, still carries the older, harder gendered weight—valor, sons of Poseidon, Dharti ke Lal, patriotism ingrained into the very sound of the word. The critique of this dichotomy has, by now, become almost tiresome in its familiarity. Every generation has explored the same argument in slightly different language. What Sri Lal does in A Thousand Daughters is something rarer: she doesn’t argue with the word at all. She simply widens it until the old argument no longer fits inside it. Here, “daughter” stops being a single fixed identity and becomes something closer to an ancient, elastic term, capable of holding a mystic, prodigious figure and an ordinary girl in the same breath, never settling into one meaning for long. A thousand meanings emerge across the collection, a thousand stories, a thousand daughters rising, not in protest or a power struggle, but quietly, spiritually, often intimately, but powerfully. Sri Lal blends the coastal mystique of ocean and coconut and tree with the hush of a diya’s flame and the ringing of temple bells, moving through the book the way a raga moves through its interludes, each poem a glimpse of an inner and outer being. To read it is a strangely, almost disturbingly calming experience.

In the poem, the smallest most ordinary objects like a coconut, a bangle, a boat, a garland, or a hibiscus petal carry enormous weight.

In the poem “Young Coconut”, the rind of the coconut emptied of its water is “good for nothing, anymore”. It is garbage to some. But at the kalari, the pujari gathers the same discarded shell. It is sanctified and burned to an ash that “a brahmin rubs across his brow”. The poem shows nothing is inherently sacred or inherently waste. The dust is sacred only in the right eye, the eye of the brahmin. All things fit somewhere, the only real question is where.

“At Market” turns the same lens toward desire, setting the real against the illusory. Amurta passes the bangles, the earrings, the “antique junk jewels” totally untempted because her hunger is a deep call from nature which the poem insists, “won't be sated by sweets or trinkets”. Hunger rises from somewhere far deeper than any marketplace can reach, and within an instant, the illusory turns pulseless in the face of the Real. For a hungry body, no market is enticing enough.

“Wanderer” is about a giver in a temple unable to quite see the true need of the vagrant in front of them while performing a sacrifice in the fire. “Smoke veils even the sacred fire”, the altar half obscured by its own offering. And the poem says “each one of us no more or less than wanderers in this world”. It's a poem that makes you question the hypocrisy at your very core, all while the “kokila sings among green mangoes” — unsettling and soothing you in the same instant, the way the coexistence of trivialities and heavy questions of life often tend to do.

In my reading, the poem “Garlands” is the anchor of the collection. The poet reads the daughter making the garland not as a woman but as rising consciousness. Inner spiritual realization has been symbolized in the powerful metaphor of a daughter, something that is unprecedented and strikes a different chord. Her meditative yet disturbed mental state compared to the dual state of soul and mind in a human being, with the hope of liberation:

At the kalari,

Svadha weaves garlands.

Knotting thread to petal,

troubles are forgotten.

Still, a mind dances and flickers

like any sacred blaze

or lone diya in wind.

How many can tell the truth

from a vibrant dream —

this waning life,

lucid by day and night.

Before night falls,

let the temple be lit within.

“Toss the Coconut” strips away praise, fame, and words of their power. It states that the “pains and pleasures of a day are hollow, words of one ilk or another” and sets against them something far more honest: “the dholak Chandresh beats with both hands”. The coconut and the dholak are, in a sense, the same instrument here, both hollow, both empty at their core, and yet it is precisely that emptiness that lets the dholak make music. The poem becomes a small symphony of being and not being at once. The same hollowness that renders praise and fame meaningless is the hollowness that produces sound, rhythm, life. Nothing is wasted. The poem not only dissolves but equates the worries of the day with the percussion of a dholak, an instrument so intimate to life in Indian homes.

The poems look at womanhood as an ensemble of things like thirst for moksha, thirst to dance, being, living, feeling. And that, in the end, is the real accomplishment of the book. Sri Lal names her daughters Amurta, Lajja, Svadha, Bala, Karuna and yet, poem after poem, the names themselves start to matter less. They do not fully register. They get lost to the reader in the larger ensemble of a sea of imagery and experience in the collection. And yet, we have lived through all the characters of the poem, daughters of coastal South India, traversing through the sacred and the discarded, the market and the moksha, the flame and the wind that threatens to put it out.

---

About the Reviewer

Dr. Vedamini Vikram has a PhD from the University of Lucknow, specializing in Indian Mysticism and its cross-cultural dimensions. She has previously worked as an Assistant Professor at Amity University, Lucknow, where she taught English literature and communication across various departments and supervised postgraduate research dissertations. She also served as a Research Associate at IIM Lucknow, contributing to research and writing for the book Narcissus or Machiavelli: Learning Leadership from Indian Prime Ministers (Routledge, 2021) by Nishant Uppal. In addition, Vedamini has taught English to women from underprivileged backgrounds in Tamil Nadu as an English language instructor with The Language Guardian and has contributed as an editor at Pepper Content. She previously served on the editorial board of Rhetorica Quarterly, the departmental journal of the Department of English and Modern European Languages at the University of Lucknow. Her book reviews have appeared in The Book Review, Muse India, Teesta Review, and other platforms.