FIVE was a 2017 project bringing together five contemporary Indian poets to publish five chapbooks as a collective. The poets spent two years reading and critiquing one another’s work; readers could buy the books together or separately, according to a contemporaneous Scroll.in report. The project asked whether literary magazines could help build a culture of poetry and art outside corporate publishing models.
What was FIVE?
FIVE brought together Arjun Rajendran, Manjiri Indurkar, Mihir Vatsa, Nandini Dhar and Usha Akella for a set of five chapbooks. Urvashi Bahuguna’s December 9, 2017 report for Scroll.in described the project as a first-of-its-kind publication in India. Each chapbook was reported to be 30 to 50 pages long.
The poets worked together for two years, reading and critiquing each other’s poems. Nandini Dhar and Mihir Vatsa, poetry editors at Aainanagar and Vayavya, conceptualised and published the set. FIVE was therefore both a collection of individual books and an experiment in collaborative literary publishing.
Why publish chapbooks collectively?
The project began with a question about the role literary magazines might play in India’s literary landscape: could poetry and art be made beyond corporate publishing models? Dhar put the underlying challenge this way: “Is it possible to build a culture of poetry-writing and art-making that isn’t based on corporate publishing models?”
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FIVE’s format offered readers a choice: buy the set or select individual chapbooks. The report documents that arrangement at the time of publication, but gives no prices, sales figures or readership data. It is best understood as a publishing initiative and an inquiry into collective work—not as proof of a particular business model or of increased poetry readership.
What is in the five chapbooks?
Scroll.in’s feature connects each book to a distinct set of concerns. These are descriptions from that coverage, not exhaustive accounts of the collections.
Manjiri Indurkar, Dental Hygiene is Very Important
Indurkar’s chapbook turns toward domestic space, bodily upkeep, family relationships, anxiety and emotional truth. She described herself as a poet of domesticity and spoke about how ordinary household routines could acquire political meaning.
Mihir Vatsa, Wingman
Vatsa’s poems address absence, loss, friendship and transition, with places including Delhi and Hazaribagh. He said the title’s plainness suited the book’s themes, and hoped readers might return to the title poem and see love as something that can be resurrected.
Arjun Rajendran, Your Baby is Starving
Rajendran draws on the case of Raghunandan Yandamuri, who was sentenced to death in the United States for kidnapping and murdering a baby and her grandmother. The chapbook uses that material to explore fear, profiling and crime. Rajendran also discussed formal shifts as part of the poem’s development.
Usha Akella, Ordinary
Akella’s poems range across everyday life, violence, food, literary influence and contemporary events. She described poetry as moving inward and outward, and discussed food as both a daily necessity and a cultural and political subject.
Nandini Dhar, Occupying My Tongue
Dhar’s chapbook considers domesticity, caretaking, maternity and a daughter’s partial perspective on her mother. She clarified that “my mother” functions as a rhetorical device and that the speaking “I” occupies a specific social position.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the project does—and does not—establish
FIVE’s significance in the 2017 account lies in its combination of shared editorial work and distinct poetic voices. The poets read and critiqued one another, but the five books moved through different subjects and formal approaches. The report called the project first-of-its-kind in India; that is its characterization, not a documented comparison of every earlier chapbook initiative.
The same coverage establishes that the books were offered together or individually at publication time. It does not establish whether they remain in print or currently available, whether the collective or the associated magazines continued, or what impact the project had on sales and readership. Those details should not be inferred from the launch-era report.
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