Observed annually on 21 February, International Mother Language Day invites renewed reflection on the role of language in shaping memory, identity, and cultural continuity. For poets working across multiple linguistic traditions, it also raises questions about what may be lost when everyday connections to mother tongue begin to fade across generations.
In engaging with the work of Maya Angelou, Amrita Pritam, Dylan Thomas, and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar — poets whose writing often moves between personal memory and collective experience — Sheffield-based South Asian multilingual poet Jasbirr Grover has drawn inspiration from the role of the poet as a witness: one who listens, observes, and records what might otherwise remain unspoken.
Global conversations surrounding the preservation of heritage languages have increasingly highlighted the declining everyday use of several mother tongues within diasporic contexts, including Punjabi. For communities such as Sikhs — who exist as a linguistic minority within a wider multilingual landscape — this gradual distancing from language can extend beyond communication, affecting memory, belonging, and intergenerational continuity.
Grover’s literary work is distinguished by a visual–poetic process in which intuitive hand-drawn doodles often precede the written poem. These visual forms allow tone and emotional rhythm to emerge before being translated into language, shaping the structure of the poem through line as much as through text.
Themes of migration, inheritance, and faith recur throughout her collection Reflection of Life, where Punjabi and Hindi expressions appear alongside English verse and references drawn from Sikh spiritual verses. Rather than serving as translation points, these linguistic elements coexist within the poems, reflecting layered cultural realities shaped by movement and memory.
In this approach, poetry functions not only as a medium of expression but as a reflective record — offering space for personal histories to enter shared cultural conversation.
