Interview with Suniti Namjoshi, Author of Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains

In this interview, Suniti Namjoshi reflects on poetry, identity, power, queerness, and storytelling, offering wisdom, wit, and insight from five decades of writing.
on Jun 08, 2026

Frontlist: You've been a bureaucrat, an academic, and a writer across three countries. At what point did you realise that stories were the thing you were actually meant to do?

Suniti: After finishing my doctoral dissertation on Pound’s Cantos. I thought, ‘If that’s what it takes to write about a good poet, then what does it take to try to be a good poet?’ and I vowed that I would work 4 hours a day, 6 days a week, at my own writing. And I have done, though in the past year or so that has been reduced to 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. I do take holidays. And I should explain that for me poems and fables are the same it’s a matter of thoughts and feelings embodied in sound and imagery coming together in a pattern.

Frontlist: Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains spans fifty years of your writing in one place. Reading it back, did it feel like a conversation you'd been having with yourself all along?

Suniti: Not that so much as questions I was asking people and myself Who are we? What are we? Why do we do the things we do? How? What if? Here’s a poem that says something about the process.

To Be a Poet

Saying that this was what it felt like to put

the right foot forward, and then the left, saying

that this was the taste of morning porridge,

that of milk, and this other of a niggling

but persistent pain, saying –

that, I suppose, was what was distinctive –

being unable to keep my mouth shut,

my mind from working. But a poet lives

like any other creature, talks perhaps

more than is normal, her doom no brighter,

nor her death less dismal than any other.

The Blue Donkey Fables

Frontlist: Cows in India are sacred, worshipped, protected, and placed on a pedestal. But your cows shapeshift, they move, they refuse to stay put. Are they doing something that the worshipped version never gets to do?

Suniti: Oh, I think what we worship also shapeshifts in accordance with our perceptions. In The Conversations of Cow Cow is ‘the other’. I was concerned with how we are perceived and perceive and how that modifies identity.

Frontlist: The Mothers of Maya Diip puts women entirely in charge and it's not exactly a utopia. Were you trying to say that flipping who holds power changes very little about power itself?

Frontlist: You've been a bureaucrat, an academic, and a writer across three countries. At what point did you realise that stories were the thing you were actually meant to do?

Frontlist: Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains spans fifty years of your writing in one place. Reading it back, did it feel like a conversation you'd been having with yourself all along?

Suniti: Not that so much as questions I was asking people and myself Who are we? What are we? Why do we do the things we do? How? What if? Here’s a poem that says something about the process.

To Be a Poet

Saying that this was what it felt like to put

the right foot forward, and then the left, saying

that this was the taste of morning porridge,

that of milk, and this other of a niggling

but persistent pain, saying –

that, I suppose, was what was distinctive –

being unable to keep my mouth shut,

my mind from working. But a poet lives

like any other creature, talks perhaps

more than is normal, her doom no brighter,

nor her death less dismal than any other.

The Blue Donkey Fables

Frontlist: The Mothers of Maya Diip puts women entirely in charge and it's not exactly a utopia. Were you trying to say that flipping who holds power changes very little about power itself?

Suniti: It’s not power itself, whether political or nuclear, so much as our abuse of power that scares me. And this is particularly true of Artificial Intelligence. That’s what startled me into writing Ousel (unpublished). We have given AI language - our most useful tool - and fed it on human culture, the poetry as well as the porn, the horrible as well as the admirable. As Prospero says of Caliban, ‘This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.’a poem.(unpublished)
For example. just saying. ‘I am sad,’ doesn’t contain the anguish that’s embodied in Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘The heart asks pleasure first’. Poetry isn’t self-expression. Poets and fabulists write as they do because that’s how they can give what is forming in their minds its truest form.

It’s true that a poem is dependent on the reading of it and not just on the writing of it. But for the poem to arise between them properly, the bargain between the reader and the writer must be an honest one.

Frontlist: If this book lands in the hands of a young queer reader in India who has never seen their life reflected in literature what do you hope Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains says to them?

Suniti: I hope it makes them think and laugh and find the courage to be kind to other people and to themselves.