Joy Goswami: The Cosmopolitan From the Mofussil Sampurna Chattarjiâs translation of Joy Goswamiâs poetry is essential reading for anyone with even a casual interest in Indian poetry. 'Joy Goswami's poetry is like a broad, brown, silt-laden river, with its source in suburban or mofussil spaces such Ranaghat and its distributaries spreading into a global consciousness.' Photo: Samuli Kangaslampi/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Politics11 hours ago Bengali poet Joy Goswami has often recollected in interviews and his writing the moment he decided to pursue poetry. The scene unfolds at a railway station in a mofussil town in West Bengal. (Born in Kolkata in 1954, Goswami grew up and has lived at Ranaghat, a town about 80 km north of the state capital.) While waiting for his friend Subodh Sarkar, Goswami was flipping through the pages of a volume of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilkeâs poetry in translation when he decided to become a poet. Several retellings have rendered a mythical quality to this anecdote, somewhat like other myths of Bengali literature.