It’s true that this is an intuitive genre, so that if you don’t fundamentally get nonsense, you will see no point in Sampurna Chattarji’s lines: Idli lost its fiddli/ Dosa lost its crown/ Wada lost its wiolin/ And let the whole band down.

Or: There was a fish who called himself/ THANKYOUBHERYMAACH./ Till the fisherman caught and salted him/ And ate him with boiled starch.

In which case, this book’s not for you. But if you intuitively enjoy nonsense, you will giggle at the so-called Thorn Texts that begins, “On the tip of a thorn were three villages”, and appreciate Kaushik Vishwanathan’s Let Us Alphabetus: Do you feel queasy in easy queues,/ Or clam-like on lam-like seas?/ Do you think Alice with lice has the ace/ Or feel bad in an ad with bees?

The Tenth Rasa is a landmark anthology of Indian nonsense writing from Kabir to the present-day, a sort of stylistic, temporal and geographic sampler of one of India’s most marginalised forms of creativity. Oh, and it’ll make you laugh out loud. ©