Table Of ContentMarginalized:
Indian Poetry in English
53 DQR STUDIES IN
LITERATURE
Series Editors
C.C. Barfoot - A.J. Hoenselaars
W.M. Verhoeven
Marginalized:
Indian Poetry in English
Edited by
Smita Agarwal
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
Cover image: Saraswati - Goddess of the Arts, photograph by Smita Agarwal.
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3784-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1033-1
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Smita Agarwal
Introduction: Subaltern Discourse? 1
Sheshalatha Reddy
Henry Derozio and the Romance of Rebellion 27
Sonjoy Dutta-Roy
The English Tagore: Restoring a Legacy 43
Goutam Ghosal
Sri Aurobindo’s Poetry: A Critical Study 61
Neela Bhattacharya Saxena
Prodigy, Poet and Freedom Fighter:
Sarojini Naidu – Nightingale of India 75
Nilufer E. Bharucha
Recalling Nissim Ezekiel: A Poet of the Mind and Heart 99
Sachidananda Mohanty
The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra 117
Anjali Nerlekar
Converting Past Time into Present Space:
A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry 127
Vinay Dharwadker
Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination 151
Anisur Rahman
Contextualizing Kamala Das 183
A.J. Thomas
Indian Poetry in English: Dom Moraes, Keki
Daruwalla, Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel 199
Tabish Khair
Language in Indian Poetry in English 245
Select Bibliography 257
Notes on Contributors 273
Index 277
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My heartfelt gratitude: to the contributors – for their patience; to
Cedric Barfoot, for his insights and skilled editing; to Pawan Kumar
for the charcoal sketches of the poets; my colleague, Raju Parghi;
Arun Jaiswal; Sanjay. K. Pant and Amar K. Arya of Advista, Nainital,
for assistance; and to my husband, Tarun Agarwala, for the
photograph of Sarojini Naidu from his family album.
INTRODUCTION: SUBALTERN DISCOURSE?
SMITA AGARWAL
Indian writing in English, especially fiction, continues to capture the
attention of readers all over the English-speaking world. Conversely,
although there is a strong and flourishing tradition of poetry in English
within India, with India’s first Nobel Prize for Literature having been
conferred upon poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, poetry in English
from India has not impacted on the contemporary world in the same
manner as the fiction. While poetry in English in India seems to have
been written from the early nineteenth century, the first novel in
English by an Indian, Rajmohan’s Wife, was serialized in a little-
known journal called The Indian Field in 1894.1 If the provenance of
poetry in English is older than that of the Indian novel in English, its
marginalization is, for the thinking mind, a subject engaging enough
to be explored.
In the Indian philosophical and literary tradition, it is poetry that is
the first form of utterance and address as exemplified by the ancient
Indian texts of the Veda, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Mahabharata and the
Valmiki Ramayana. Over centuries, from Rig Vedic poetry evolved
poetic drama, and, prose, as a medium of literary expression, is a late
entrant. The Mughals may have used it in Persian, to delineate the
history and administrative achievements of a bloodline, but it is really
after the coming of the British that native Indians acquired a penchant
for literary expression in prose.2 By then, Derozio, Toru Dutt, and
later, during the Nationalist movement, Tagore, Aurobindo and
Sarojini Naidu had already captured public attention as poets. The
kind of veneration and fan following these poets could drum up is at
present a distant dream for poetry in English in India.
1 Meenakshi Mukerjee, “The Beginnings of the Indian Novel”, in An Illustrated
History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2006, 92-102.
2 I am referring to works such as the Baburnama and the Akbarnama.
2 Smita Agarwal
The absence of a Great Cause like the World Wars or the Partition
of India may be one of the reasons for poetry having ceased to be a
major mode of expression. The marginalization of poetry in English in
India may be symptomatic of poetry having been “outmoded like the
fletcher’s art”3 with a sharp decline in the taste and publishing of
poetry the world over. But is that really so? Culturally, the world over,
poetry is accorded a place of eminence in the layperson’s imagination.
Consider this line from an aerobatics display brochure that describes
the manoeuvres of an MIG fighter plane as “precision poetry in the
sky”. Likewise, at a Congress Convention in Hyderabad, India, in
December 2005, a banner, in the grip of poetic frenzy, boasts:
GANDHI TO SONIA
PEACE IS IDEA
PRIORITY TO AGRICULTURE
RESPITE TO FARMER
It is well known that after the horror of 9/11, people in New York
expressed their confusion and anxiety in a flurry of poetic activity, as
also, writing poetry kept prisoners of Guantanamo together, holding
on to a sense of self and culture.
Today, one of the reasons for a decline in taste for the writing,
reading and publishing of poetry may be attributed to the change in
lifestyle; our rushed, pressurized existence which makes us prefer
literature that is undemanding of our time. In comparison with good
poetry, popular and even literary fiction is much less demanding and
therefore more engaging than poetry. Read and forgotten, this genre
does not expect us to go back to it again and again asking it existential
questions. This fiction is mere storytelling. Read it, listen to it and
move on. Poetry, on the other hand, for the middle-class reader, is
associated with difficulty; is as feared as mathematics. Its layers of
meaning demand a far greater level of engagement, ask
uncomfortable, unanswerable questions and so is best, shunned. Yet,
as a classical art form, poetry refuses to die. Age upon age, it
somehow barely survives despite failure or a decrease in demand. This
holds true for all classical forms of art perhaps because the classical is
connected to spiritual enrichment and refinement. It may be pertinent
to dwell on this thought that as long as spiritual hunger prevails in
3 Suniti Namjoshi: email conversation with Smita Agarwal, 14 January 2003.
Introduction: Subaltern Discourse? 3
man, poetry will never die even though, in contemporary times, it
makes nothing happen. Like all classical arts, poetry too expresses a
moment of concentration. Once this point of concentration is revealed
to the reader, the poem brings on excitement, enjoyment, equilibrium
and, perhaps, peace, and the same joy that the rasik (“listener”)4
experiences when she hears the musician produce a pure note. By this
definition we may say that the essence of a good poem is that moment
of concentration, revealed – like Toru Dutt’s “Baugmaree”, Hopkins’
“Pied Beauty”, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”. T.S. Eliot called it “the
intensity of the artistic process, the pressure ...”; Sri Aurobindo,
“mantric poetry”.5
Poetry has the power to transform, no matter for how short a while.
When you say a poem has touched you, you are referring to this
transfiguring power of good poetry. In the twentieth century, Gandhi
touched and changed India. By 2013, his charismatic touch has
vanished but while its effect lasted, it brought in its wake, motive,
purpose, joy and focus in our lives. Good poetry functions in a similar
manner.
The free market critique of poetry relegates it into the background
for the selling of poetry is unprofitable for publishers. The power of
market forces on the publishing of poetry in current times in India
cannot be denied or overlooked. Commercial publishing houses will
publish, at the most, two slim volumes of poetry a year. Small presses,
literary journals, e-magazines, blogs, websites are doing their bit but
are publishing a whole load of mediocre poetry in English written by
Indians. Moreover, contemporary poetry in English is also competing
with poetry in the regional languages in India as well as classical and
language poetry translated into English. Small wonder then that young
and impatient contemporary poets are more than willing to use their
intellectual energy to also write fiction, biographies, academic essays
and travelogues. Bhaskar Ghose, in his column in Frontline, says:
… what one is trying to highlight is that poetry is not central to
creative expression now. Partly owing to the advent of technology that
4 Rasik – the term comes from the Indian theoretician Bharata’s Rasa Theory of
Aesthetics (8th century BC-8th century AD) wherein rasik implies the listener, viewer
and reader.
5 For an interpretation of Toru Dutt’s “Baugmaree”, see Smita Agarwal, “Toru Dutt:
A Reappraisal”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXXIX/1 (March 2004),
77-84.
