Essays

Indian poetry by marginalised communities came into its own as part of a larger democratic tradition that saw the emergence of progressive modernist and feminist poets.

The democratic tradition of Indian poetry can be traced back to the tribal and oral lore of the ancient past that voiced the perceptions, concerns and dreams of the community in simple, imaginative and sonorous verses informed by a deep respect for the cosmic order, a profound understanding of human suffering and a mythopoeic imagination that infused nature and life with a strange sense of mystery and surrealism. The epics, the Sangam poetry in Tamil, Bhakti and Sufi poetry and the poetry of the Indian Independence struggle have all enriched this tradition by a strong reformist urge and the interrogation of the status quo from diverse points of view.

The New Flowering

From the 1970s onwards, this tradition has flowered like never before with the empowerment by democracy and subsequent emergence of several marginalised sections of society. This poetry has emerged from a series of ‘transversal struggles’ – to use a term used by Michel Foucault – that have been raising the issues of decentralisation, right to cultural difference, caste and gender power, ecological balance and the rights of the tribal people to land, language and culture. These struggles have sought to fight the intrusion of the market in everyday life, the consequent reduction of liberty to mere consumer choice, the forced standardisation of culture sought by capitalist and communal forces, the valorisation of competition, suppression of autonomy, the subtle imperialism of the unipolar world in the wake of globalisation and the cultural amnesia imposed on the Indian people with their glorious intellectual and artistic traditions and their unique ways of knowing and responding to the world. The modernism of the 1960s with its individualistic tendencies began to be interrogated as new collective identities got forged and a new literature of opposition and an aesthetics of resistance began to evolve in almost all the Indian languages. These new collectivities may be referred to as ‘imagined communities’¹ and ‘alternative nationhoods’ as these writers have been trying to evolve their own concepts of community and nation where the voices of the silenced and marginalised would be heard aloud and listened to, and where they will have a decisive say in shaping the national destiny. Each citizen and each community has the right to imagine his/her/its own nation; the moment one tries to define this nation, name it and turn it into a religious, cultural or linguistic monolith, the idea of the nation evaporates and divisions begin to take over. India’s pluralism has always resisted imposed unities like the ones that the champions of the Hindu right or of Hindi as the one ‘national’ language – not merely the ‘official’ language – have sought to do. They are simply enemies of diversity and thus of our democracy. The last 25 years have brought these movements to the mainstream, especially through translations in English and Hindi.

The Progressive Modernists

Poetry reflects these emerging collective identities through diverse idioms and modes of articulation. One such collectivity is formed by the poets who share a deep social concern even while differing in ideological pursuits. There is a wide spectrum of dissenters who are democratic, but find the present system inadequate to reflect the aspirations of the common people. They include Gandhians, the followers of Ram Manohar Lohia and M.N.Roy – unfortunately a fast-vanishing tribe – and Communists of different denominations and liberal humanists of diverse hues. All of them recognise the existence of class inequalities and dream of a more egalitarian society. They differ from the old Progressive writers in their use of the new modes of poetry some of which were introduced by the Modernists - irony, black humour, free verse, prose of varied tones and registers, fresh images, surrealist metaphors, new forms like the sequence poem, poetic cycles, the long poem, the extended lyric and the like. In short, they share the socialist vision of the Progressives and the contemporary sensibility of the Modernists.

Their poetry is also informed by an awareness of the complexities and paradoxes of life in our times as also their urban experience. The poetry of Kunwar Narain, Kedarnath Singh, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Manglesh Dabral, Rajesh Joshi, Arun Kamal, Riruraj, Asad Zaidi and several others of the younger generation can be cited as examples from Hindi alone, not to speak of poets from other languages like Surjit Pather from Punjabi, H. S. Shivaprakash from Kannada, Joy Goswami from Bengali, Kedar Mishra from Oriya, Chandrakant Patil from Marathi, Jayant Parmar from Urdu, K. G. Sankara Pillai from Malayalam, or Varavara Rao and Gaddar from Telugu, to cite just a few familiar examples. Some of these poets have rediscovered the folk idiom with fresh nuances while some of the Maoist poets have created a new symbolism that marks the arrival of a revolutionary romanticism. Many of these poets have fashioned a sharp, unsentimental and concrete language to express their distaste for the system following Dhoomil’s poems like ‘The Cobbler’ and ‘The Night of Language’.

The Rise of Women Poets

Another imagined community is that of the women poets, scores of whom have emerged with strong Feminist inclinations in the last three decades in several Indian languages. Though India has a tradition of women’s poetry extending from the Buddhist nuns of the 6th century BC, a poetry consciously committed to the cause of  women’s emancipation, taking gender as the organising principle of experience and body as central to their language, is a new phenomenon. It began with poets like  Kobita Sinha, Nabaneeta Dev Sen,  Amrita Pritam and Kamala Das, and now has several spokeswomen from Eunice de Souza and Sujata Bhatt of English to Mallika Sengupta and Mandakranta Sen of Bengali, Pravasini Mahakud and Ranjta Nayak of Oriya, Pratibha Nandakumar and Mamta Sagar of Kannada, Tarannum Riaz of Urdu, Manjit Tiwana of Punjabi, A. Jayaprabha or Kondepudi Nirmala of Telugu, Kutty Revathy, Sukirtharani or Salma of Tamil, Anuradha Patil or Aruna Dhere of Marathi, Anamika or Gagan Gill of Hindi or Vijayalakshmy, Savitri Rajeevan, V.M. Girija, Dona Mayoora or Anitha Thampi of Malayalam and several other poets represented in popular anthologies like Arlene Zide’s (Ed.) In Their Own Voice  (Penguin, 1993) and Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s (Ed.) Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present (Two Volumes, Feminist Press, NY, 1991, 1993) besides individual collections and anthologies in different languages. These poets challenge the norms of the phallocentric discourse, interrogate patriarchal canons and try to forge idioms adequate to express the specifically feminine experiences of pain, solitude, desire and pleasure. But women’s poetry is no monolith, it has enough space for regional variations, specific geniuses of languages, diverse traditions, a large variety of forms and different approaches to experience. For example, the poetry of urban Muslim women like Malika Amar Sheikh or Imtiaz Dharker, exiles like Panna Naik or Meena Alexander or Dalits like Jyoti Lanjewar, Pradnya Lokhande or Hira Bansode reflect their specific community experience within the broader framework of women’s poetry.

Look at a Marathi poem by Jyoti Lanjewar:

Their inhuman atrocities have carved caves
in the rock of my heart
I must tread this forest with wary steps
eyes fixed on the changing times
The tables have turned now
Protests spark
now here, now there.
I have been silent all these days
listening to the voice of right and wrong
But now I will fan the flames
for human rights.
How did we ever get to this place
This land which was never mother to us?
Which never gave us even
the life of cats and dogs?
I hold their unpardonable sins as witness
And turn, here and now,
A rebel

(Caves, translated by Shanta Gokhale.) 

References

1. Benedict Anderson’s landmark book Imagined Communities introduced his theory of nationalism and the idea of the nation as a socially constructed community imagined by a group of people.