My three poems, entitled collectively The Selkie’s Song, bring together (possibly for the first time) the selkie myth and figures from India’s history. The selkie myth is found in Orkney, Shetland, and in various Celtic and Norse cultures. The themes concerning liminality, a lack of belonging, a search for identity and home, all connect with my research interests around postcolonial theory. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘third space’ connects to the selkie’s sense of belonging to both the land and the sea (taking both human and seal form); and an awareness of not belonging wholly to either place or landscape/seascape. Bhabha’s ‘third space’ concerns the migrant’s experience of leaving their homeland, moving to a new place, and taking with them their memories and sense of cultural and/or national identity (from the ‘motherland’); but losing that initial place (e.g., Saidya Hartman’s ‘Lose Your Mother’), having left it physically. Yet the migrant continues to identify with their original homeland in their new place of residence. They do not fully belong to the new country to which they have moved; but instead create something hybrid, which is the ‘third space’: it seeks to attain belonging in both and neither, simultaneously, as something in-between or interstitial. My poems explore this liminality and how it might offer a ‘third space’, with the selkie myth acting as a ‘bridge’ between fixed notions of ‘East’ and ‘West’; land and sea, memories and present-day reality. Powerful female figures from India’s history are evoked as a ‘writing back’ to narratives of victimhood, often prevalent in studies of the colonised ‘other’. These include Jindan, a queen and mother of Maharajah Duleep Singh (whose son is buried at Kenmore Parish Church, Scotland); and Nur Jahan, a powerful medieval empress.

I have been commissioned by the Three Rivers Festival, Scotland, to write three poems (responding loosely to the theme of ‘bridges’), and have written and submitted these on 17th March 2026. They will be set to music as a song cycle, by three composers: Jennifer Barker, Eva Smeddle and Greg May, all based in the UK. The song cycle will be performed by chamber music ensemble The Bubblyjock Collective at the Three Rivers Festival on 17th July 2026 at Blair Drummond House, Perthshire. The Bubblyjock Collective are: Neil Sutcliffe (accordion), Rosie Lavery (soprano) and Anna Michels (piano). The commission came as a result of the festival director, Catherine Duncan, knowing and admiring my work as a poet, and I have taken the opportunity to use the selkie myth as the bridge (noted above), in alignment with my own research interests.