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Gujarati has some fifty million speakers and a poetic tradition eight centuries deep, running from Narsinh Mehta's fifteenth-century bhajans to Meghani's songs of the independence movement. Very little of it is easy to find. Most of the verse sits in out-of-print anthologies, or in the memory of people who are getting older. A language rarely disappears all at once. It thins, one unrecited poem at a time.

Jharmar is an attempt to hold on to some of it. Every poem here gets its full Gujarati text, an illustration, a few notes, and an essay in English about what the poem is doing and why it mattered. The English is there so a reader who cannot yet manage the script has a way in. It is not a substitute for the poem and is not meant to be.

ઝરમર means the gentle drizzle, the soft monsoon rain that shows up without announcing itself and soaks everything anyway. That is roughly the ambition here: no hurry, a few poems at a time.

I am Ankit Gordhandas. Jharmar is a personal project. I built it because I would rather these poems outlive the generation that still knows them by heart.

I owe the habit to The New Era School in Mumbai, which taught me that a Gujarati poem was not a lesser thing than an English one. We read Narsinh Mehta and Wordsworth in the same week and were expected to know both, and nobody thought this was unusual. It is a strange gift to be handed as a child, and it took me a long time to notice I had been handed it.

The Gujarati texts are transcribed from published sources and cross-checked against more than one wherever I could. The illustrations and the English commentary were made for this archive. If you find an error in a poem's text, a dropped line or a wrong word, please tell me. Getting the verse right is the part that matters. And if you know a poem that belongs here, suggest it — even a half-remembered line helps.