Essays

‘Compromised Speech’ in the Sydney Review of Books, November 2024.

SRB’s blurb: “With the aid of algorithms, the medium has become the message with a vengeance. In this essay, Prithvi Varatharajan recalls the ways we used to connect online before social media to prefigure a less frenetic future for digital communication. His essay reaches behind the veil of our instantaneous ‘feeds’ and looks forward to an ideal digital space ‘where there is hardly a boundary between language as communication and language as art’.”

‘Divine Dis/connection’ in Griffith Review 82, November 2023.

An exploratory and partly personal essay which thinks about the relationship between humans, animals, and gods in Hinduism. I use scholarship on animals in Hinduism, more general reading, and interviews with family to reflect on my past feeling of distance from animals in India and Australia (and observations of such behaviour in family, and others of Hindu background), especially inside the home.

Translating the World in Meanjin, Spring 2021.

A comparative essay on how two new Australian works of fiction and poetry imagine non-human languages and thoughts, and explore human/non-human relationships; these are Laura Jean McKay’s novel The Animals in That Country (2020) and Stuart Cooke’s poetry collection Lyre (2019). The essay is also framed by my work at an Australian zoo.

Ramanujan’s Bridge: Reflections on Identity, Lived and Imagined in Peril, 2020.

A long-form essay exploring identity. This essay is both personal and impersonal: it is grounded in memoir, and in cultural theory around identity – from structuralism, deconstruction, and intersectionality. The essay makes reference to engagements with fiction and poetry that were formative for me, in works by Harper Lee, Banjo Paterson, Jeet Thayil, Arundhati Roy, A. K. Ramanujan, John Forbes, Anne Carson, and others.

In Situ Poetics in the Sydney Review of Books, 2020.

A long essay reflecting on a soundwalk I led in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, while reading poems along the route by Kevin Brophy, Ella O'Keefe, Bonny Cassidy, Lisa Bellear, Tim Wright, Gig Ryan, and myself. The essay presents the Canadian tradition of soundwalking, as well as related literary histories, and thinks about the transposition of this activity to a city in Australia. It probes the relationships between urban and poetic sound, and between poetry and land (or Country) – especially the colonial and Aboriginal land histories pertinent to the location of the soundwalk.

Sonic Twin? A Poetics of Poetic Radio in Cordite Poetry Review, 2018.

In this essay I offer an aural definition of the 'poetic', and use this to explore poetic sound design in radio and podcast programs. Using this scheme of the poetic I then examine some contemporary poetic radio productions, including 'Mostar' (2010) by Robyn Ravlich and 'Poetry, Tx' (2012) by Pejk Malinovski.