Voices of Indian poetry in English
M. S. NAGARAJAN
REPRESENTATIONS OF A CULTURE IN INDIAN ENGLISH POETRY: Mita Biswas; Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla-171005. Rs. 470.
How long can foreign poets Provide the staple of your lines?
Turn inward. Scrape the bottom of your past.
- R. Parthasarathy, Rough Passage
Invariably Indian poetry in English has received a mixed response from readers and critics alike. The basic question that used to be raised was: can (or how can) an Indian poet have the ‘feel’ of an alien language? Or is it only sometimes Indian and occasionally poetry?
Meeting questions such as these fair and square, Mita Biswas’s book traces the history of Indian poetry in English during the 180 years of its existence and provides us with a picture of its emergence as an academic discipline.
Under three broad heads — ‘The Pioneers,’ who presented the “exclusiveness and self-sufficiency” of the age-old Indian tradition; ‘The Moderns,’ who broke with the past; and ‘The New Voices,’ who, like their western counterparts, the post-modernists, destabilised the beliefs and practices of mainstream writing — she chronologically analyses the poetic compositions of almost every conceivable poet who finds a rightful place in this triadic division. Notable among the poets discussed are Toru Dutt, Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo among the pioneers, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Kamala Das, Keki Daruwallah, Jayantha Mahapatra, Arun Kolatkar, among the moderns, and Vikram Seth, Sudeep sen, Hoshan Merchant, Ranjit Hoskote, and Ali Agha Shahid, among the new voices. Thus we have a rich fare wherein the merits and demerits of the poets are weighed impartially, and evaluated cautiously with suitable citations from their poems.
Myriads of voices
Unlike most other countries — Europe, for instance — India is multilingual and multicultural. Hence we have myriads of voices in Indian English poetry, all of which are of diverse nature. It is none too easy for the poets to imbibe/inherit or create an identity — much less a ‘tradition’ in the Eliotian sense — of their own amidst such a wide-ranging cultural diversity.
Apart from “Gitanjali,” we have not been able to notice even a small body of poems of memorable, lasting, enduring value as we have in the British poetic tradition: “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Windhover,” “Lycidas,” “Dover Beach,” and many others which we carry in our heads all through our lives. This is not to deny the existence of quite a few good poems by poets of any era.
Finest
Pritish Nandy’s political’ poem “Calcutta,” “where despair, death, violence, cruelty, deprivation, torture, defiance, dissolution coalesce as interdependent themes, acquires a startling diction, and shocks the reader of his complacence”; Arun Kolatkar’s “The Butterfly” which stands in comparison with Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-cream” as a metaphor for the epiphanic short-lived moments of realisation; Keki Daruwalla’s “The Leper at the Taj” in which the ugly, visible disease of the old beggar and the moral decadence of the society contrast with and merge into a seamless whole; Aga Shahid Ali’s notable poem “Postcard from Kashmir” showing the discord between the present, war-wrought Kashmir and the past Kashmir of his memory with “the Jhelum waters so clean” are among the finest poems written by anyone in the English language.
Culture in Indian English poetry is the result of sustained, persevering research. No wonder that the reading of the book is a highly rewarding experience. It fulfils a much-needed want in that we have so far only partial studies of Indian poets. We do not yet have a full-length study devoted to a close survey of our poets from the earliest times to the present. In short, the book accomplishes what it seeks to achieve: “to trace the journey of its growth from nostalgia to comtemporaneity.”
Mita Biswas is quite optimistic in her conclusion that “Indian poets who write in English have been able to carve a niche for themselves through their ongoing quest to establish themselves into a stable canon of their own.” It is for the future to decide the truth of such a claim!
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