Love in the time of ceasefire...
- Independent Ink
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
His poems are known for their restrained yet powerful voice, seeking to bear witness without spectacle—recording pain without exaggeration, and love without sentimentality.
By Nityanand Gayen
Nityanand Gayen is a Hindi poet, writer, journalist, and social activist based in India. Born on 20 August, 1981 in South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, he grew up amid a landscape marked by complex social textures, political histories, and the quiet resilience of everyday life—elements that continue to shape his literary and public engagements.
Working across poetry, prose, and journalism, Gayen’s writing engages with themes of love, memory, injustice, resistance, and the fragile dignity of ordinary human existence. His creative practice is deeply attentive to the intersections between the personal and the political, exploring how intimate emotions are shaped—and often scarred—by larger structures of power and violence.
He is the author of the poetry collections, Apne Hisse Ka Prem, Tumhara Kavi, and Is Tarah Dhah Jaata Hai Ek Desh. His poems are known for their restrained yet powerful voice, seeking to bear witness without spectacle—recording pain without exaggeration, and love without sentimentality.
Rather than offering easy consolations, his work insists on attentiveness, ethical clarity, and emotional honesty. Gayen’s poems and articles have appeared in several literary magazines and journals, and his work has been translated into languages including Nepali and French. Alongside his literary career, he has been actively involved in journalism, teaching, and social activism. These roles inform and deepen his engagement with contemporary cultural and political discourse, grounding his writing in lived realities and collective struggles.
For him, poetry is not merely an aesthetic pursuit but a moral and emotional act—an effort to remain humane in times of noise, erasure, and collapse. Through his writing and activism, he continues to explore how individual lives intersect with history, power, and silence, and how poetry can still speak with urgency and meaning in a fractured world.
Poetry posters: Courtesy Nityanand Gayen.