A Sweeping Canvas
Indian poetry in English takes its place in the global literary arena with a wide range of themes and concerns, notes Menka Shivdasani.
These are exciting times for Indian poetry in English. Even as the number of writers is expanding rapidly, producing work that can compare with some of the finest in the world, senior poets like Keki Daruwalla and Adil Jussawalla continue to publish new books. Jussawalla's third collection of poems, the Sahitya Akademi award-winning Trying to Say Goodbye, was published in 2011, thirty-five years after his Missing Person. Vijay Nambisan, another poet to break a long silence, published First Infinities in 2015, 22 years after his poems first appeared in print. Major anthologies such as Jeet Thayil's The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008), have also appeared in recent years. Vijay Seshadri, the Indian-origin poet who lives in the United States, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2014 and UK-based Imtiaz Dharker, Indian 'by adoption', too received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry that year.
The range of the poets' concerns and themes is broader than it has ever been, and a new generation, wielding English like a mother tongue and writing with a tremendous sense of self-assurance, feels free to experiment and stretch the limits of the language.
“The subject matter of the poems and their poetic concerns are staggeringly large and wide-ranging,” writes Sudeep Sen in The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry (2012), which features 85 poets writing in English. “There is introspection and gregariousness, politics and pedagogy, history and science, illness and fantasy, love and erotica, sex and death – the list is centrifugal, efferent and expansive.” Indian poets, he says, are 'in full flight', writing in free verse and formal verse, triolets and ghazals, lyric narratives and prose poetry, sonnets, rubai, haiku, tanka and much more.
No subject is off limits. In his poem Sind inYaarana: Gay Writing from India 1 (ed. Hoshang Merchant, Penguin India 1999) Merchant writes:
“It was with a Sindhi boy I first found love
He felt love but being a boy he took me from behind
Like the Holy Spirit took St. John one night on the steep stairway to God” Familiar themes of exile and belonging, urban spaces and displacement continue to make their presence felt; in the early post-independence period, Nissim Ezekiel wrote of a 'barbaric city sick with slums' 2 – a space that he was unable to leave because he was 'born (there)’ and ‘belong(ed)'. Arun Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda Poems (Pras Prakashan 2004) took an insightful and sympathetic look at the underbelly of Mumbai's streets – the pi dog, prostitute, leper, beggar, the woman drying her hair with a damp patch on her white underskirt, 'about the size of China'. The city 'creeps up' on Arundhathi Subramaniam just when she is about to 'affirm/ world citizenship' in the poem Madras, from her first collection Where I Live (Allied Publishers 2005). A commuter shells peas in the 8.39 local train to Belapur in Mustansir Dalvi's Peabody (Brouhahas of Cocks, Paperwall 2013).
History intersects upon the modern age; in Anand Thakore's Mughal Sequence (2012) 3, “the poet reconstructs episodes not only in the lives of emperors but of a prophetic begum, a marginalised dancing girl and a gloomy Kohinoor diamond,” as Adil Jussawalla observes. “Contemporary poetry abounds in poems written on historical subjects,” he adds, “but I haven't read anything quite as ambitious and evocative as Babur, after the Victory at Khanua.”
Ranjit Hoskote's “works are acts of retrieving the past,” says Sumana Roy 4 in the article article 'Portrait of a poet as historian', while Hoskote himself tells fellow poet Mustansir Dalvi 5 of how his poetry draws strongly on 'lost, potential or concealed pasts', and of how it is important to 'address history critically, if we are to gain a sustaining energy from it'.
Keki N. Daruwalla's recent poems in Fire Altar (HarperCollins India 2013) also celebrate the 'histories and legends of the Persian Empire with its emphasis on tolerance', in a journey in search of 'roots, meaning and religious and social understanding'.
Personal and autobiographical themes take centre stage. Bruce King speaks of Jeet Thayil's Collected Poems (Aleph 2015) - “Thayil is a powerful lyric poet of discontent and disillusionment. Whereas following A.K. Ramanujan’s translations, Indian poets have often modelled their verse upon the minimalist anonymity of the impersonal, well-wrought anthology piece handed down for centuries by an author of whom little is known or required beyond the conventions of the art, Thayil is revealing, grand and self-dramatic. His language, phrases, cadences sparkle but the themes are loss, pain, dissatisfaction, harmful obsessions; there are recurrent expressions of the need for love and purpose, followed by disappointment, self-mockery, the desire to lose oneself...” 6
In Self-Portrait 7 a reworked version of the original poem, Thayil writes:
“Unhappiness is a kind of yoga, he tells himself
each morning, a breath meditation; besides,
do you want to be happy or do you want to write?”
Writers like Thayil, Nambisan and Hoskote are deeply aware of the debt they owe to poets of the earlier generation. For them, and for all of us who write in English, 2004 was a particularly painful year, when three major poets died – Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar. All three left rich legacies; as King pointed out, “If it were not for the deaths of the three writers 2004 would have been a vintage year with the publication of Moraes' Collected Poems 1954 - 2004, Kolatkar's two volumes - Sarpa Satra and Kala Ghoda Poems - and a new edition of Ezekiel's Collected Poems at the printers.”
Not so long ago, Indians writing in English were asked indignantly as to why they did not write in their mother tongues. Today, as Indian poetry in English takes its well-deserved place in the global literary arena, nobody in their right minds will ask that question any more.
References
- http://www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2005&issid=1&id=26
- http://ashvamegh.net/urban-sensibility-in-nissim-ezekiel-poetry/
- In Anand Thakore's Mughal Sequence (2012), “the poet reconstructs episodes not only in the lives of emperors but of a prophetic begum, a marginalized dancing girl and a gloomy Kohinoor diamond,” as Adil Jussawalla observes...
http://www.anandthakore.com/#!mughal-sequence/ccmg - http://scroll.in/authors/893
- http://asanyfuleknow.blogspot.in/2014/07/central-time-in-conversation-with.html
- http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/FSZ4Vd29tQ6ttwomKDIF4M/Book-Review-Collected-Poems-by-Jeet-Thayil.html
- If it were not for the deaths of the three writers 2004 would have been a vintage year...
http://openspaceindia.org/listen/item/343-bruce-king.html
Menka Shivdasani is the author of three collections of poetry, Nirvana at Ten Rupees, Stet and Safe House. She is co-translator of Freedom and Fissures, an anthology of Sindhi Partition Poetry, and editor of a SPARROW anthology of women's writing. Menka has edited two anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry for the American ezine www.bigbridge.org. She is Mumbai coordinator of the global movement, 100 Thousand Poets for Change. In 1986, she had played a key role in founding the Poetry Circle in Mumbai.
Menka Shivdasani
is the author of three books of poetry, with her most recent being Safe House from Paperwall Media & Publishing
https://paperwall.in/books/55/Safe-House
is the author of three books of poetry, with her most recent being Safe House from Paperwall Media & Publishing
https://paperwall.in/books/55/Safe-House
