Within Her Home and Outside: Essays on Indian English Poetry

We are glad that we can travel well-disguised through words between the abstract and tangible, between home and the world. We have grown with many pillars of Indian wisdom and faith. We can express anything and everything with style that defines our long roots, myths and engagements with words. We arrest ideas from an acre of love to politics of power. With some generations of English on the back, many are composing poetry from different soul spaces and mesmerizing the world with their magical abilities of experimentations with style and themes. Contemporary India is really shining with confident and aesthetically satisfying English poetry. In the busy traffic of poets these days some choose to return again and again. Some are extraordinarily calm, quiet and soothing like music. Some are powerfully tender, honest and contemplative. There are numerous platforms, online spaces, journals and magazines which only focus on poetry and reviews of poetry. Many Indian poets and professors are engaged with guest editing special issues for poetry and poetic ties in very prominent journals abroad. There was a time in early 1900 when we couldn’t write a good poem on the Indian Non Violence Movement or the Freedom struggle in English. We struggled. That anxiety was over in the 1950s. Over a period of seventy five years or so, we are a brand destination for English poetry. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio or Kashiprasad Ghoshto Arundhathi Subramaniam is a long walk to freedom! Let us repeat, “With its quiet glory, I brand my heart.” as Basudhara Roy writes in A Blur of a Woman. A review is all joy held in the aura; a truce with light and knowledge. Indian English Poetry is, currently, going through its healthiest and happiest phases. Each union in life is a poem. Eachbreaking is a season of silence, one note to another. The essays in this book attempt to address, in their own non linear way, the significant gap between what’s on the pages and reviews, creativity and criticism, and indomitable passion. This book explores how poetry writing is meditation, experimentations with truth. The stray images and thoughts that the meditator blows away are the rich suggestive stuff of poems. Every little bit of irrelevancy may turn out to be what the poem is really about. Poetry holds the aura of being ‘pure’ and ‘untouched’, song without a landscape. The sublime premise of contemporary Indian English poetry evokes from the post-independence Indian experiences. The plural and the singular seem to co-exist in contemporary English poetry written from different parts of India. Noted critic V. K. Gokak said, “It has to be Indian because it has to be truly universal and greet its compeers in the domain of world literature.” Going through the various literary (and cultural) movements that have shaped Indian English literature, one can experience as much by their variety yet integrity as their common sources and concerns.

In the cacophony of English poetry in India all poems do not speak to us equally. All poets do not write with equal strength and ease. My love affair with poets began when I was at seventeen/eighteen. My hunger drove me to Keats, Neruda, Jibananda, Seferis, Lorca, Quasimodo, Parra, and some others. English poetry in India has no particular quarter now; good poetry is written from small cities and villages all over the country. Many poetry groups are active in upholding poetry to its apex.