I started planning my nikkah with my mom a few weeks ago. At twenty-three, I never expected to wed so soon, but my mother has had my wedding jewelry picked out for years: a golden and pearled kundan set dotted with blue, pink, purple, green, and orange flowers. She tells me she has pictured me as a bride since picking it out, and I know she is thinking about her own wedding, now nearly three decades ago.
As I prepare for bridehood, I find myself questioning how much of it is truly mine. My grandmother’s heirlooms not just found in the pieces of jewelry but in the expectations they carry, in the silent reconciliations made between mothers and daughters, between past and present. It is these questions that sit at the heart of Kiran Bath’s daring debut Instructions for Banno (Kelsey Street Press, 2024), a diary illuminating the lineages and geographies of the women who came before us, examining the inherited systems and consequences in becoming a South Asian bride.
Growing up, I had mentally divorced my mother from the idea of a traditional banno. She married in her late twenties, immigrated for a molecular biophysics doctorate, and built a career as a research scientist. What I failed to recognize, though, was that her generation of immigrant women has been navigating a double helix of expectation—balancing the role of devoted banno with the demands of generating a second income in western and largely anti-immigrant societies. And at home, like so many of our women, she arrived at an assumption: wife first, woman second.
This strain between tradition and selfhood—so familiar in my own family—anchors Bath’s work, dismantling the myth of the “perfect bride” through a multigenerational chorus of bannos. Her poems are landing strips; it is as if we are falling backward, towards the sky, towards the structural silencing of bannos, and Bath’s words wrap around us like curled balloon string and lead us back toward the ground.
Through persona poems and urgent commands, Bath assembles a chorus of twenty-one bannos—mythic and modern—whose voices collide and coalesce. In the collection, we glean life as told by these women, who rise from myth and history—Mumtaaz Mahal, Jyoti Singh, Lakshmi—as well as from personal life—Biji, Gudi, Deepu, and Nikki. Bath’s polyphonic structure—this nuclear fusion of multiple voices, these women stepping forward to name themselves—recalls Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, a book in which Kapil asks a series of twelve questions to different South Asian women and then allows their voices to shape the narrative. Like Kapil, Bath resists a single answer, instead presenting and protecting her bouquet of bannos. Chandra Mohanty makes a similar argument in her essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in which she critiques the way Western feminism understands non-Western women to be a monolithic “other” subjected to a singular oppression. Mohanty drives against the idea that South Asian women’s histories are reducible to a straightforward progression from oppression to liberation, perpetuating a form of discursive colonialism.
Similarly, the bannos in Bath’s collection do not follow a set path—they carry, reinterpret, and, at times, reject the expectations placed upon them. The nonlinear form of the collection itself, much like Mohanty’s critique, destabilizes any notion of a single feminist trajectory, acknowledging that inheritance is neither fixed nor uniform but shaped by personal circumstance and intergenerational accumulation.
In telling their stories, Bath blurs the line between herself, The Poet, and the other bannos. The Poet is both participant and conductor, raising questions that ripple across the collection: In how many ways can a banno exist? How does one navigate an identity predicated on silence and sacrifice? And perhaps most urgently, what does it mean to subvert and reclaim that identity?
Bath begins her exploration in “How to take root,” told by Deepu, in which we receive our answer and instruction:
“Imagine a non-linear lineage.
Imagine it.”
Lineage, as Bath insists, is not a simple passing of traditions from one generation to the next. It is recursive and filled with accumulated histories—both individual and collective. These two lines remind us that every banno holds in her the lessons from bannos that came before, that the banno line is a sisterhood not connected by blood but by shared experience and consequence. After all, the collection itself is an accumulation of stories told by different bannos. We first encounter this in “The poet interrupts: How to fuck anew”:
“I am taking over for a brief moment. I pull the sky taut.
A black sheet between present and ancestors.
It’s just us now.
A reduction of octaves.”
Bath’s mixture of imperative and persona poems creates a dialogic structure, where bannos speak and the Poet offers interjections of guidance. Yet the Poet only interrupts; she does not erase. She appears to us as moderator and teacher, giving us words to hold onto as we move through so much accumulated experience. In “The Poet interrupts: Notes on ascension,” Bath reminds us that a banno’s accumulation is not always voluntary:
“Assumption two: That selflessness denotes formlessness denotes namelessness.
The shedding of the self gives way to other forms. Peeling yes, but also sudden bursts. Embodiments. Incarnations. A trinity of devis.
A chain letter. A sequence. An accumulation.
Name her to the point of taking on many names. Taking on many faces. Triune goddesses.”
I remember my own mother, bearing a multitude of names—wife, mother, Muslim, educator, scientist, artist (less visible now). Here, I think of Saba Keramati’s poem “Ode to Birthmark,” in which she writes “I am blessed by [my mother’s] losing, as all children are.” To make space for her learned devotion to her husband and child, she sacrificed parts of her self. All her post-instruction selves bottlenecking at the top, their weight eclipsing the self.
Bath asks what happens, though, when the accumulation is not learned, involuntary, or destructive? The Poet reframes this accumulation as both burden and power in the collection’s penultimate poem, “The Poet interrupts: Live from the bathtub”:
“I dry brushed before entering this tub tonight.
Skin ghosting and holy.
New palm lines emerging.
An audacity, the Ganges, a familiar Me.
I do not seek rebirth. I am accumulating.”
The Poet’s body becomes a site of reclamation—not through rebirth, which implies erasure, but through accumulation. The body both archive and prophecy. Bath rejects traditional notions of transformation, instead embracing inheritance as a source of strength and continuity. I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s essay collection A Burst of Light, in which she writes, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
The collection itself is an act of reclamation and preservation for the South Asian collective—of language, of sexuality and the erotic (re: “Have you pondered on the sex lives of our elders?”), and of identity. Take Bath’s refusal to translate Punjabi words or explain cultural references; she writes unapologetically for her community, positioning her poetry as a space where bannos can see themselves without the burden of westernized legibility.
This refusal of translation as an act of resistance reminds me of Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages and Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, where language operates not just as communication but as a site of power. Faizullah, like Bath, allows Bangla to remain unresolved within English, resisting the expectation that poets must make their work fully accessible to Western readers. In Postcolonial Love Poem, Diaz does the same with Mojave and Spanish, embedding untranslated words into her poetry as declarations of presence rather than as invitations for explanation. In both collections, language refuses to be flattened into a singular, digestible form.
Bath’s poetry carries this same assertion: Punjabi phrases exist without glossary, woven into the text as a necessary part of the banno experience. The reader is given no footnote, no linguistic bridge—an insistence that meaning does not have to be handed over. Bath aligns with Faizullah and Diaz, reclaiming spaces where heritage languages are unbowed by the pressures of translation.
I see this reclamation, too, in the final poem of the collection, “Ghazal with the wedding three nights away,” written by The Poet to Kabir, a 15th-century Indian poet who described women as “the pit of hell” and “the refuse of the world”:
“O flames, will you kiss before you sear? O Kabir, will you let us hear
as we burn, cry couplets with a tongue that turns us to goldsoft bellied, air spent, I dare saints to ascend the afterlife scales,
do they hope to balance or exceed the gold?”
Bath does not only critique Kabir’s legacy; she engages with it, the refrain of “gold” becoming a tool for reclamation. She captures gold perfectly in the context of South Asian heritage—both as a site of violence and as a material that, when melted, becomes malleable and metamorphic. This linguistic play destabilizes gold’s traditional associations with beauty and value, reframing it as both a tool of subjugation and a metaphor for resilience. The poem and collection culminate in the Poet’s prayer and pledge:
“Kiran, return as Tropic of Capricorn, join the brides
as a hemisphere of sunlight, let this be all we ever know of gold”
By addressing herself directly, Bath bridges the gap between poet and persona, grounding the poem’s reclamation in her own agency. The rendering of gold into sunlight—warm, expansive, and unburdened—reimagines inheritance as renewal and healing. Take also the structure of the ghazal itself. It departs from traditional constraints, lacking a qafiyah or fixed rhyme, and the radif “gold” is applied fluidly. And while each sher, or couplet, does stand alone, the poem carries its cadence forward through enjambment, allowing each mention of “gold” to fall into the following couplet:
“enter the red-veiled brides in my dreams, they tend their necks,
instruct me to collect my goldlimbs, find cover before the charade begins—
a rain of wedding garlands fall as nooses of gold”
This again evokes gold as inheritance—with each couplet functioning as a generation—and the nonchronological organization of the bannos within the collection. The spill of language across couplets mirrors how inheritance is not neatly divided between past and present, while the shift from “collect my gold” to “nooses of gold” reveals the tension between ritual and restriction, between the promises of these bannos’ marriages and the quiet yieldings it demands.
At the same time, there is a deprogramming of time, of system, of structure, both formally and within the broader framework of South Asian gender politics. As the final poem in the collection, one that is addressed to a rampant misogynist, the ghazal emphasizes the bannos’ nonlinear continuance, how each bride exists at a different point in time yet remains ensnared in the same cycles of entrapment. In this closing moment, the ghazal does not only reflect on inheritance—it insists on its repetition, its weight, and, most importantly, its possibility toward evolution.
Through her interweaving of myth, persona, and instruction, Kiran Bath blurs the boundaries between past and present, self and other, demanding that we confront the consequences of lineage while conceiving its transformation. She asks the questions we didn’t know we needed the answers to and gives words to the experiences we, as a community, need to process. I recognize myself in her pages, not just as a daughter receiving instruction but as a woman navigating the tension between duty and self, between the banno imagined for me and the one I will choose to become.
Instructions for Banno is a cosmic and indispensable collection; it is a map, a kindling, and a passage for dreaming—for us and all of our future bannos.
